Paul David Adkin's Blog, page 46

ECOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY AND THE UROBORIC DRIVE

Is ecology a science or an ideology? It seems to be both, but can it be both? What does ecology as a science gain or lose through its ideological processing? How is the ideology of ecology strengthened or weakened by the science?

Žižek, in his work on ideologies, disassembles ecology into a minimum of six ideological streams: conservative; etatist; socialist; liberal-capitalist; feminist; and anarchic self-management[i]. But he argues that none of these categories is itself “true”, which is not to say that the ecological concern is not a real one, rather that the methodological angle proposed is “not true”. Or, in other words, the ideological process falsifies the attempt at establishing truth that is carried out by the science. Does this perhaps explain why ecology as a political movement, despite all the concern for climate change and the prophecies of an eco-collapse apocalypse, has had only negligible results in the polls?

Žižek is right to point out the fractal nature of the ecological movement, but its stratification also points to a political need of veiling its own nature. By painting itself in different colours, the ecological propagandists are attempting to divert our attention from the inevitably most frightening side of ecology as an ideology: its unavoidable totalitarianism. No matter where we stand, if we accept the ecological discourse we are also accepting its absolute necessity, and it is that absolutism which scares voters away, for any truly Green government would have to be a totalitarian one.

But what is a totalitarianism based on absolute necessity? Is it any different to any other totalitarianism?

How would it differ to the totalitarian regime of the globalised liberal-democracies we currently have? Well, it would not be based on an illusion, like the lie of democracy and the illusion of freedom that our capitalist system offers. The basic ecological-ideology premise is that of the need for a partnership between humanity and the world that ultimately must sustain humanity. This creates a shift of human priorities away from the fantasies of economies and the money grabbing game toward  the most obvious and irrefutable necessities of survival in a world we have become hostile to and which is becoming increasingly hostile towards us. In a sense a return to that which is so obvious that it was forgotten.

Of course the success of capitalism has always been its great inner dialectic, and in this way the stratification of ecological ideology could also be a positive thing: a government of shades of green within the great forest of the world and humanity. But capitalism has always used its dialectic and creative potential unwisely and egotistically, creating an absurdly internecine ideology out of the fantasy of perpetual growth. Ecology, on the other hand, encourages diversity within the “truthful” confines of a holistic world-view, geared toward the maintenance of a human partnership with the world.

Ecology is certainly very different to the capitalist machine we have today, but does that mean it could fall into the same traps as the anti-capitalist, communist totalitarian regimes? How would an ecological holistic differ from a communist one? What would the difference between ecological totalitarianism and communist totalitarianism be? Would the power-hungry forces not also adapt to any such total ideology of truth and take control of it for their own profit as soon as ecology was seen to be the most likely survivor in the political maelstrom? Surely a system driven by the concept of “necessity” would be easy prey for those who would like to legitimise absolute control.

A vicious circle is already unravelling itself, only to take hold of its own tail again in order to swallow itself. But perhaps this most ancient image of the Uroboros, the tail-swallowing serpent, is the final revelation: that our drives are magnetic ones, folding us back toward the Uroboric state of an autarchic relationship with the world which is the perpetual result, if only in a perverted way, of any attempts to revaluate or reinvent our circumstances. Capitalism’s final end is to become a Uroboros, even if this is not its conscious eschatology. the System, whatever form it has, is manipulated subconsciously towards the Uroboric, autarchic paradise which we lost so long ago. But while for capitalism the Uroboric autarchy is a Utopian dream that can only end in a complete annihilation of the tail swallowing serpent, the ecological Uroboros has to be imagined perfectly intact and healthy.

The Uroboric drive is in Eros as much as in Thanatos. It is the ultimate unity, representing where we have come from – the autarchy of the foetus in the womb – and where we are going – our final conversion into dust or gas. At either end of the unity the condition is an ecological one. A return to the Uroboric state of being is the Being of the Great Mother, the planet Earth. As an Eros-driven force, our will to freedom is an autarchic will, as is our will for love; our sex drive; our will for community and our desire for isolation; our will to communicate; our creative drives; our willingness to share; and also our need to be protective and cautious. The essence of all of this is in autarchy.

To use Lacan’s terms, we have an “unredeemed symbolic debt” with the Uroboric. The Uroboros acts on the constant within our reality. It is the unchangeable, ever-real force that drives the unconscious of all human will. To take the lie out of ideology would be to bring the Uroboric drive to the forefront. If art is a recalling and an uncovering then what has to be rediscovered is this Uroboric will. It is a will to necessity and will to potentiality. A will to return (Thanatos) and at the same time a will to moving forward (Eros), but above all it is a desire for the preservation through eternity in the autarchy that lies between the two conflicting drives.

The Uroboros has to be seen as that which encircles humanity. The human is within the autarchy of the world and must respect the autarchy. Alchemical symbology comes to mind: of the macrocosm and microcosm, a visual image of the Uroboric serpent encircling the Vitruvian  Man. These are our constants:

Firstly, the Uroboric system is the system of all systems; the autarchic state that all macro-psychologies aspire to.

Secondly, the human, which stands above all races and nationalities, beyond all gods and God, and all machismos and feminisms. In this simple harmonic duality, which is a singular image that could be portrayed as infinite regression[1], lies the truth within the complex lies and fantasies of all ideologies.

Ideology can only be correct, therefore, if it is geared towards the constant of Uroboric autarchy in a way that can acknowledge the human above sub-groups of humanity. Ideologies that don’t take the Uroboric into consideration are therefore perverted and Utopic, impossible fantasies that have no logical, ultimate future. The consumer ideology and that of perpetual growth (albeit in its cycles of crises) are non-Uroboric by nature. Any ideology which divides humanity is perverse: all nationalism are non-humanist because they value national interests above human ones. Freedom is likewise a perversion and a Utopic ideology of illusion unless it anchors its liberty in autarchy, for the only true freedom can be an autarchic one.

The only correct ideology as such can be one that can envisage a paradigm of anthropocentric-ecology of a humanity in the Universe-world that encloses it. Green ideology is therefore correct if it is anchored in autarchy and the Uroboros. Or, in other words, to act according to the guidelines of a science rooted in uncovering real necessity. A science dedicated to a belief in humanity, human knowledge, discovery and technology as vital forces rather than negative ones within the world that encloses us and keeps us alive.

[1] This infinite regression could be created in order to show the real partnership between humanity and the world: that the world itself exists in the intelligence of the human mind that the world created, an intelligence that the world depends on for its own Being.

[i] Slatoj Žižek, MAPPING IDEOLOGIES, Verso, London-New York, Introduction

DOXA AND ALETHEIA – TRUTH AND THE ARTIST (PART FOUR)

                                                  (Time saving truth from falsehood – François Lemoyne (1688 – 1737) )

ART AS INTRUSION

“Art should be a disclosure of truth”: an artist’s ideal, perhaps; unnecessary romanticism, perhaps; or a necessary ideal to get art back on the tracks and pull it out of the marshlands of nihilism. In any case art is an intrusion – an invasion of the imaginary into the real. It is this feeling of intrusion which makes us aware that we are perceiving a work of art and not just a copy of reality. It is a ‘positive’ invasion; most of the time a welcome distraction, but, occasionally, when there is intersubjectivity at work between our own inner reality and that of the artist, then the intrusion is a profound, soul shattering experience. We may say it works on a spiritual level, which is one way of calling the profound intersubjective experience. Afterwards we may even ‘seek’ the intrusion again. For many, it is the best and most effective way to draw themselves out of the autistic tendency of the contemplative life experience. In that way we see how art is a welcome experience – it is thrown at us, or placed before us again, but now we accept it, we want it, we need it. Or at least some of us need it. Others reject it. Perhaps there are people who have never had an intersubjective experience through art, although that it is doubtful for now there is pop-art, pop-music, pop-vehicles designed to touch the inner experiences of everyone, no matter how narrow their cultural-memory field is.

 

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN POPULAR ART AND DEEP ART

But the difference between popular art and deep art lies in the kind of intrusion that is made. In popular art the intersubjective connection should be immediate, building on easily recognisable connections that have already been made: formulas or tactics that have been proven effective. And it is precisely this mimicry and copying of the provenly effective product that creates the shallowness of the pop intrusion. Of course more and more of the spectators will eventually start to say: ‘I’ve seen and heard this before,’ and will demand something new. The commercial art industry must then resort to novelty: a new way to present the same old intersubjective slogans that it reworks over and over again. Then each brief explosion of originality that the need for novelty brings is reworked, reinvented and remanufactured in the commercial art factories’ production lines of kitsch…

But isn’t this also a folding and unfolding? (SEE OUR EARLIER ENTRY “The Internet as a Deep Art experience of liberation: http://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/the-internet-as-a-deep-art-experience-of-liberation/)

Does the commercial factory work in the same way we propose in deep art? If this is the case, what is the difference between the shallow and the deep?

 

The difference lies in the kind of intrusion that is being made. Popular art is a forced intersubjectivity; deep art is an invitation. Deep art knows that it requires a certain kind of spectator, willing to trust the artist, who is leaving clues for them and putting up obstacles which may deliberately turn certain spectators away. It is for this reason that the deep-art artists are often accused of being elitists. Of course they are certainly demanding: they know that to go deep there has to be a strong will to do so, and those who lack such a will will be incapable of scratching more than the surface. Deep art, in a sense, is a training ground for intersubjectivity. Its goal is to create a space in which the inner reality can be successfully communicated with a conviction that this intersubjective connection is a necessity, an essential element in human development or evolution.

And so we come back to our original premise, (SEE OUR POST: DOXA AND ALETHEIA – TRUTH AND THE ARTIST http://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/doxa-and-aletheia-truth-and-the-artist-part-one/ ) that true art must be a combination of doxa (opinion/perception) and aletheia (truth/disclosure). Commercial art is buried in doxa, while a dedicated artist may lose him or herself in the autistic struggle with aletheia. Real art must use doxa to seduce a favourable opinion which will be the veneer of the work whilst leaving clues to seduce the spectator into the intersubjective realm of aletheia.

IVAN ILLICH VIDEO INTERVIEW

Reblogged from AGENT SWARM:

Thanks to Angela Roothaan for drawing my attention to this:

https://vimeo.com/66948476

Very interesting interview. There is a little mistranslation at the beginning when he talks about the myth of Pandora and repeated a few times. He says that the "words" escape from the box. In fact it is not the "words" (mots) but the evils (maux), as everyone knows. These two words are homophones in French, hence the error, which is quite suggestive anyhow.

I have to reblog this. Ivan Illich is undoubtedly one of humanity's greatest thinkers.

THE INTERNET AS A DEEP ART EXPERIENCE OF LIBERATION

In an art with depth, the object is not really there. In a sense what is given in this kind of art is a specular image reflected into a third mirror (see our earlier essays on Rodrigo Garcia, Luigi Nono and Zabriskie Point). What this does is add distance to any mimicry, and, at the same time, to any complexity. Deep art should be imagined as a kind of maze which first appears as a box or room, but with invisible doors or walls that can be pushed open if one knows how. These doors lead one into more spaces of different sizes, each one with its own exits unto more seemingly enclosed systems. The richness of the experience lies in the fact that each exit can only be discovered if one can know or can discover the symbolic reference to the next space.

Could the Internet be considered an autarchic experience of deep art? In order to do so, one would need to be willing and capable of losing oneself within it, and likewise be capable of stepping away from it in order to analyse the experience from the advantage of distance. What’s more, for a deep art experience to take place, one must be prepared to pause and linger at times, so hard in the Internet which obsessively pushes any audience on to new topics, inviting, tempting, forcing us at times to leave the room we first of all settled in. The Internet experience can get so foggy that we even forget where we started from. For a deep art experience to be meaningful one must have one’s imagination firmly rooted in where one came from in the first place. It is a labyrinth in which one never completely loses touch with the original point of departure. The original room is that which allows us to navigate: forgetting where we are coming from will make it impossible for us to find our way forward or back. It is only by learning how and when to move slowly through the maze that one can dominate it and allow it to become an enriching rather than a frustrating experience.

Or perhaps the Internet is too autistic to be truly satisfying. It has its webcams and its chats, but they don’t belong to the autarchic labyrinth we are interested in here. What we are interested in is its power as a vital museum, come encyclopaedic library, come art gallery, come theatre and cinema and concert hall. But its very immersing quality robs us of the real vital experience we have when we go to these traditional spaces to witness art. It lacks the public. And here we must ask ourselves: how much does the experience of great art depend on it being a public act? Or, should art be classified into the public and private experience? Theatre, for example, is impossible to conceive without an audience (the more the merrier), whilst a novel is a purely private experience (a public reading of a novel is hardly likely to be as enjoyable as the experience of reading to oneself). Could it be said that the richest art-culture experience has to include both possibilities? Does the Internet do this, if only potentially?

Does the Internet disclose any truth? Or even attempt to disclose truth? And, what kind of intersubjectivity is unleashed in its relationship between the artist and the spectator? Only when the Internet is used in its immense folding and unfolding capacity, in a meaningful disclosing way under an artist’s control, will we be able to consider it capable of offering a deeply artistic experience. This is possible. It is certainly a potentially powerful tool for accessing information, and culture is information. What Internet does, by presenting a potential access to universal information and culture universally, is pave the way to a universal culture, which, if it is honestly expressed, must be an authentically human culture. Whilst the Internet is free from manipulation and censorship there is hope for a universal, human cultural development. In fact a free Internet is humanity’s best chance for a free world.

THE ULTIMATE REASON

There is an anecdote, told by Peter Sloterdijk in Neither Sun nor Death, that a rabbi taught that the Creation was attempted twenty-seven times before finally getting it right on the twenty-eighth experiment.

Let us imagine twenty-seven Big Bangs, creating twenty-seven kinds of universes that were all incapable of spawning a life form possessing self-awareness and intellectual perception of the universe that enveloped it. Without such a life form these universes themselves did not really exist and the rabbi would have to trust the Creator’s word that he had actually made these things that were never perceived by anything except Itself. Only the twenty-eighth Creation, this one that we perceive, has been successful, because the primary definition of a successful existence depends quite simply on the existence being perceived.

We are not the end-result of Creation, but the end result may have to come through us, or through us and through other Sapiens species with a similar capacity for sensing, learning, understanding and teaching what is known. The reason behind Creation has to be in its self-discovery – discovered by what Itself has created. This is not a question of intuition of God or of a faith and belief in the dogma of religion, but of a complete and unambiguous understanding of the Universe in which we are.

RODRIGO GARCIA, LUIGI NONO AND ZABRISKIE POINT – PART TWO: HOW TO TRAP A BEAUTY WE NO LONGER FEEL

Rodrigo Garcia’s performance collage (see part one of this series) is an example of artistic autarchy. It creates its depth in an interior way, with inbuilt references: self-references created by its use of the mirror and the fold. Garcia’s own texts mirrored against Luigi Nono’s opera ; the Vietnam War reflected into critical contemporary texts about our consumer society. But where is the connection between war and consumerism? Why is this a mirror? The mirror is not reflecting a specular image, or at least not until we see the images channeled together. The tenuous link that Garcia has found needs something to clarify it. So Garcia introduces a bridge – Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point.

In Garcia’s theatrical work, two scenes from Antonioni’s film are projected. The first, is a scene in which executives of a real estate company are watching a cheesy advert for the desert paradise they are planning to construct at Zabriskie Point. The colours and plasticity of this scene immediately build a bridge between the 60s film and our own 21st century consumer society reflected through Garcia’s own kitsch aesthetics. But what has this to do with Nono’s opera?

On the obvious level: the film is a 60s film, released in 1970, and therefore a near contemporary of Nono’s 1966 work. On the less obvious level, at least to an audience member who has never seen Zabriskie Point, Antonio’s film includes scenes of anti-Vietnam war protests and police brutality. Anti-Vietnam protest becomes an anti-consumerist symbol. Vietnam is a violent projection of the capitalist will for the ultimate power of globalisation and at the same time an area of equally violent resistance to that projected hegemony.

The second scene that Garcia projects is the film’s almost final sequence of the exploding mansion on the cliff face: the violent fantasy of ultimate resistance through annihilation of the enemy. We have an enormous “what if…” or “if only…” raised by the artist to stand against the reality which was the real historical progression of the narrative. In reality capitalism’s advance was not curtailed, despite the Vietcong’s victory; despite the destruction of the mansion in the desert the real estate project at Zabriskie Point would still have gone ahead. And the result of this unstoppable narrative sequence is the kitsch culture of consumerism we have today. A culture in which Nono’s opera seems to have no place, is absolutely ‘out of place’. In the autarchy of Garcia’s creation we also have a tremendous self-criticism: Why represent Nono’s opera in a place and time that could not possibly appreciate it? His answer: it is precisely the demonstration of how disassociated art is from our reality that justifies the representation.

Now Garcia folds back to enfold himself in associations with his own earlier work: an echo of his Golgotha’s Picnic. That piece was about violence and art. In essence the same theme, in which, after hours of hurling violent images at the audience he stages a baroque piano concert, provoking an exodus from the audience who, after stomaching, perhaps even enjoying the excitement of the violence, seem to find the beauty of the music unbearable. Or are our audiences now incapable of appreciating the beauty of the piano piece?

                Garcia’s statement is that it is the saturation of imagery flung at us by the consumer society that is making us impervious to the beautiful in art. We are the products of nihilism and a positive, purposeful concept like beauty is anathema to us now.

THE ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIO

The Pentagon Report on climate change carried out by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall in 2003 claimed that “significant global warming will occur during the 21st century” and that this could lead to: “harsher weather conditions, sharply reduced soil moisture, and more intense winds in certain regions that certain regions that currently provide a significant fraction of the world’s food production.” And concluded: “With inadequate preparation, the result could be a significant drop in the human carrying capacity of the Earth’s environment.”

As a result of this lack of the world’s capacity to carry us there would be:

i)                    Food shortages.

ii)                  Decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to shifted precipitation patterns causing more frequent floods and droughts (these phenomena are already apparent).

iii)                Disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess.

iv)                These climatic aberrations would in turn force human migrations from severely affected areas to less affected ones, or ones who, though also severely affected, had a technological development that mitigated the disastrous affects.

v)                  The affect of this would be that nations with the resources would build virtual fortresses around themselves.

vi)                Wars related to food, clean water or energy would take place.

In the Pentagon Report abrupt climate change is elevated beyond scientific debate to a US National Security concern.

Basically they are announcing to the US military that they could come under attack from the climate. And in fact several attacks on the USA have occurred since: Hurricane Katrina; the tremendous tornados of 2011; bitter winters, etc..

The report bases its abrupt climate change scenario on the collapse of Thermohaline Circulation in the Atlantic Ocean. The probability of this taking place is a very real scenario and tests have shown that a certain collapse has already begun in the polar regions.

As the Pentagon Report states:

“Is this merely a blip of little importance or a fundamental change in the Earth’s climate, requiring an urgent massive human response?”[i]

It is hard to imagine an “urgent massive human response” occurring until the disaster hits. Politically the Liberal-Democratic world is divided on this reality between believers, sceptics and non-believers with different levels of extremism in each camp. To generate the human response necessary, to justify the changes that will have to be implemented like population control and energy consumption restrictions, to adjust humanity to a revolutionary re-technologising of our civilisation toward eco-friendly systems before the Apocalypse happens – there will need to be a massive conversion of sceptics and non-believers, and such a conversion would have to take place in record time. In short… we have to pray for a miracle.

And even if the political parties suddenly formed a radical consensus to impose the bullying changes that are required and set about creating a new world, the people would demand a more gentle transition. But, the longer we put it off the more severe the bullying will have to be.

The drastic change that is needed will be painful. Deep down we probably all sense the extremism of the decisions ahead of us, and that if we don’t change, change will be forced upon us, by climate change or the extinction of the resources our complex way of life has grown so dependent on. We are not going to just be redecorating our house, we are ill and will need a visit to the dentist, and the surgeon as well. This is not just an aesthetic question it is our health that is being effected. It is a question of life or death. But even so… How many of us put off painting the house even though it is so obviously necessary? How many have postponed the visit to the dentist until the molar starts to ache? How many cancer patients have perished because they could not be bothered to subject themselves to preventive examinations?

We have to change, but are we capable of making such a truly radical switch? We are creatures of habit, aren’t we?

Creatures of habit: we keep telling ourselves this and yet we are changing our habits continually with each new object we buy. No – it would be more accurate to say that we are creatures of adaptation, adapting to a “surplus” environment. Adapting very often to the novelties of lifestyles we do not need, lifestyles that have been sold to us. But our next adaptation has to be more radical and purposeful if we are to survive. We are talking about NECESSARY ADAPTATION and this is such a radical concept for we who have been adapting to the power of the absolutely unnecessary all our lives.

The will-to-want-more is a will-to-want-that-which-we-do-not-need.

In order to get ourselves on to the track of what we do need to do in order to correct the mess we are making, we have to change the fabric of our perception of the world; to change what the Lacanian  Žižek calls our ‘symbolic fictions’. He says that is in the realm of ‘symbolic fictions’ where we can adapt ourselves to ever new situations, and radically change our self-perception.[ii] And radically change our self-perception is exactly what we NEED to do. The new symbolic fictions we need to create would be subservient to a new Master Signifier opposed to the surplus necessity which is the Will-to-want-more of capitalism. Necessity is now to be defined as: the benevolent enemy of the surplus-waste of capitalist consumerism. Consumerism with all its propaganda and symbolic fictions, and which is itself perpetuated through the Master Signifier of the need to improve my life. Necessity would replace the myth of a “better life” with the uncomfortable truth of the need to create a better-life-in-the-world.

Instead of living in-the-world and against-the-world, we must learn to live in-the-world-and-for-it.

Human existence could thus be distracted from its irrational fixation on the great Master Signifier of surplus-improvement[iii] and learn through a new symbolic mythology to take its common interests into the common hands of everyone concerned – for the optimistic side of this disaster is that, as in the case of all disasters, the tragedy effects us all. At last we can say to the rest of mankind, without exclusion, we are all in the same leaking boat. And the only way we are going to get home alive is if we all pull our weight and row together.

THE PENTAGON REPORT SOLUTIONS

To combat the effects of climate change the Pentagon Report on “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario” suggested these steps:

1)      Improve predictive climate models to estimate better how and where climate change would occur….

Climate of course is a far too abstract enemy for the military, and here it really is being treated as the enemy. As if we must predict when an attack will occur. What they should be asking is: How can we predict when and how our actions will screw things up enough to bring about an abrupt climate change so that we won’t screw things up? But the screwing up is taken for granted. Should we assume that perhaps it’s even desired. Isn’t there a longing for an enemy in any military institution? If not, what would be there reason for being?

2)      Improve projections of how climate could influence food, water and energy.

Here they are saying: we know the climate change that we are causing can affect food, water and energy – but we want to know in exactly what way.

Again, what they are failing to see is what really matters: that we are influencing climate in a negative and dangerous way and we should stop.

3)      Create measures to anticipate which countries are most vulnerable, and therefore could contribute materially to an increasingly disorderly and potentially violent world.

Does this mean that countries will be monitored carefully and even brought to their knees just because they are vulnerable to climate change? Locate the enemy even before they know they are our enemy.

4)      Identify no-regrets strategies such as enhancing capabilities for water management.

5)      Rehearse adaptive responses.

Does this mean rehearsing how to adapt to the Apocalypse?

The feeling is one of surrender. We cannot fight this enemy, the best thing to do is lie down and let the survival of the fittest do its work to create a new race of men.

6)      Explore local implications.

Perhaps it won’t be so bad at all for us.  

7)      Explore geo-engineering options that control climate.

Scientific positivism: we can always invent a machine to clean up the mess caused by all the other machines we have invented.

Never underestimate the military’s capability of turning science fiction into reality.           Nevertheless what would Hollywood sci-fi do with the idea of a weather controlling machine? They have already touched on a similar issue in the film The Core. That deals with a so called Project Destiny: a military weapon that creates earthquakes to defeat its enemies. In the core the military experiments cause the Earth’s core to stop rotating. This in turn threatens the destruction of all life on Earth. Other scenarios are easily imagined. The idea of playing God and getting it all so wrong. Chaos mathematics – the Butterfly Effect.

This optimistic idea may well be more dangerous than what it hopes to remedy.

[i] Schwartz and Randall, An abrupt Climate Change Scenario and its Implications for the United States National Security, October, 2003. http://www.edf.org/documents/3566_AbruptClimateChange.pdf  

[ii] Slavoj Žižec, THE PLAGUE OF FANTASIES p. 119

[iii] “What characterises human existente is thus the irrational fixation on some symbolic cause, materialised in a Master-Signifier to whom we stick regardless of the consequences, disregarding even our most elementary interests, survival itself…” Ibid, p. 120

RODRIGO GARCIA, LUIGI NONO AND ZABRISKIE POINT – PART ONE: IS THIS ALL WE CAN DO?

1. IS THIS ALL WE CAN DO?

Luigi Nono’s operetta “A Floreta é jovem y Cheja de Visa” (1966) concludes with the text in English: “Is this all we can do?”

In April 2012, Rodrigo Garcia presented a version of Nono’s work in Madrid. Garcia stretched the piece out from the forty minutes of musical performance time by adding an hour of text. The text was read by actors, almost always sitting comfortably in low chairs with microphones. The text, which was a barrage of pop culture imagery, was accompanied by life-streaming video montages of small objects that were dipped into a large tub of chocolate.

Nono’s opera, which could be translated as “The forest is young, and full of life” is supposed to deal with the Vietnam war. It is slow, strident at times, tonally rich, but also messy and often uncomfortable. The text, which is mainly illegible and layered, is apparently a collage of revolutionary slogans.

The version by Garcia seems at first to be two separate works with little connection, but he inserts a conduit: Michaelangelo Antonioni’s film: Zabrinskie Point.

In effect we have a double mirroring between Garcia and Nono and Antonioni, or a triple mirroring because Garcia’s work reflects back on the other two. The connections seem tenuous at first, but that very looseness makes it more powerful: the artistic power of ambiguity.

Through ambiguity in art we get a lack of cohesiveness, provoking the hungry mind to become actively involved in its own interpretation of the piece. The hunger, of course, has to be fed by an intersubjectivity betwen the artist and the audience – there has to be resonance of feeling in order to stimulate the intellectual side of the subject with a need to locate reasons for the resonance. The audience member not only has to ask “what is going on here?” he or she has to be motivated to search for a reason to want to answer the question themselves.

This reason has to come from the resonance. Once resonance has been felt, ambiguity will turn the audience into an interested detective. We are present, physically present, but epistemologically absent.

Of course, for many- perhaps most – observers this is an unsettling experience to say the least. For the artist, this kind of creation poses two negative possibilities: a) the piece will be totally misinterpreted by the audience, or b) the epistemological alienation will provoke a negative defence mechanism which will shut off the audience’s desire to investigate, rendering the whole piece unbearable and provoke exodus. Likewise, mainstream media has created a predominantly passive relationship between the work and the audience. Art is confused with entertainment. Artists are expected to be entertainers. The atmosphere provoked by such a situation is deadly for the arts as intersubjective communicators of the inward truth/lie. Fear of failure makes artistic pessimistic and in the arts today, pessimism reigns. The artist sinks into the black pool of an interior isolation. But the truth is that this pessimism is also illusory. The need for true art is always there, even if it is not recognised institutionally.

Here we have a metaphor of life in the market-driven world of information: it’s no longer what we know that is important but what we don’t know. What is being lost by being immersed in that which is offered us by the mainstream or by other failure-fearful artists? By having our attention driven towards the juicy fruits of gossip, entertainment, and pornography, we are effectively being rendered unaware of the challenges. This is not just a commercial or political manipulation, with ideological or profit making ends, it is also a creation of spiritual absenteeism. The more deeply intersubjective we are the more difficult it is for us to be manipulated, so intersubjectivity is discouraged by avoiding alienation. The System,  prefers a shallow reality created by the passive immersion of the audience. Herein lies the inherent totalitarianism behind Hollywood. Art as entertainment requires no effort from the spectator. The illusory reality, Hollywood’s virtual-film reality, absorbs the spectator, dictates the reality in which we are immersed and then spits us out. The whole experience is an escape from life, a nihilistic substitution from the mundane reality of the real life experience.

Art as an experience of “truth” however, is centred not in what is revealed, but on what is absent, inviting the audience to search for that absence themselves. An idea anathema to the System which must project a veneer of perfection despite its nihilistic substance. The consumer market-place must tolerate art for art represents the freedom it itself purports to extol, but as a systemic phenomenon the market-place can only tolerate artistic freedom as long as it is capable of invisibly castrating art’s potent intersubjective resonances and transforming art itself into a Disneyland factory of superficial escapism. The orthodoxy of Hollywood is anti-heterodoxical like all orthodoxies, and it is in this orthodoxy that we can discern the repulsion the system has for art, and with its repulsion for art, its repulsion for truth.

1. IS THIS ALL WE CAN DO?Luigi Nono’s operetta “A Floret...

1. IS THIS ALL WE CAN DO?

Luigi Nono’s operetta “A Floreta é jovem y Cheja de Visa” (1966) concludes with the text in English: “Is this all we can do?”

In April 2012, Rodrigo Garcia presented a version of Nono’s work in Madrid. Garcia stretched the piece out from the forty minutes of musical performance time by adding an hour of text. The text was read by actors, almost always sitting comfortably in low chairs with microphones. The text, which was a barrage of pop culture imagery, was accompanied by life-streaming video montages of small objects that were dipped into a large tub of chocolate.

Nono’s opera, which could be translated as “The forest is young, and full of life” is supposed to deal with the Vietnam war. It is slow, strident at times, tonally rich, but also messy and often uncomfortable. The text, which is mainly illegible and layered, is apparently a collage of revolutionary slogans.

The version by Garcia seems at first to be two separate works with little connection, but he inserts a conduit: Michaelangelo Antonioni’s film: Zabrinskie Point.

In effect we have a double mirroring between Garcia and Nono and Antonioni, or a triple mirroring because Garcia’s work reflects back on the other two. The connections seem tenuous at first, but that very looseness makes it more powerful: the artistic power of ambiguity.

 

Through ambiguity in art we get a lack of cohesiveness, provoking the hungry mind to become actively involved in its own interpretation of the piece. The hunger, of course, has to be fed by an intersubjectivity betwen the artist and the audience – there has to be resonance of feeling in order to stimulate the intellectual side of the subject with a need to locate reasons for the resonance. The audience member not only has to ask “what is going on here?” he or she has to be motivated to search for a reason to want to answer the question themselves.

This reason has to come from the resonance. Once resonance has been felt, ambiguity will turn the audience into an interested detective. We are present, physically present, but epistemologically absent.

Of course, for many- perhaps most – observers this is an unsettling experience to say the least. For the artist, this kind of creation poses two negative possibilities: a) the piece will be totally misinterpreted by the audience, or b) the epistemological alienation will provoke a negative defence mechanism which will shut off the audience’s desire to investigate, rendering the whole piece unbearable and provoke exodus. Likewise, mainstream media has created a predominantly passive relationship between the work and the audience. Art is confused with entertainment. Artists are expected to be entertainers. The atmosphere provoked by such a situation is deadly for the arts as intersubjective communicators of the inward truth/lie. Fear of failure makes artistic pessimistic and in the arts today, pessimism reigns. The artist sinks into the black pool of an interior isolation. But the truth is that this pessimism is also illusory. The need for true art is always there, even if it is not recognised institutionally.

Here we have a metaphor of life in the market-driven world of information: it’s no longer what we know that is important but what we don’t know. What is being lost by being immersed in that which is offered us by the mainstream or by other failure-fearful artists? By having our attention driven towards the juicy fruits of gossip, entertainment, and pornography, we are effectively being rendered unaware of the challenges. This is not just a commercial or political manipulation, with ideological or profit making ends, it is also a creation of spiritual absenteeism. The more deeply intersubjective we are the more difficult it is for us to be manipulated, so intersubjectivity is discouraged by avoiding alienation. The System,  prefers a shallow reality created by the passive immersion of the audience. Herein lies the inherent totalitarianism behind Hollywood. Art as entertainment requires no effort from the spectator. The illusory reality, Hollywood’s virtual-film reality, absorbs the spectator, dictates the reality in which we are immersed and then spits us out. The whole experience is an escape from life, a nihilistic substitution from the mundane reality of the real life experience.

Art as an experience of “truth” however, is centred not in what is revealed, but on what is absent, inviting the audience to search for that absence themselves. An idea anathema to the System which must project a veneer of perfection despite its nihilistic substance. The consumer market-place must tolerate art for art represents the freedom it itself purports to extol, but as a systemic phenomenon the market-place can only tolerate artistic freedom as long as it is capable of invisibly castrating art’s potent intersubjective resonances and transforming art itself into a Disneyland factory of superficial escapism. The orthodoxy of Hollywood is anti-heterodoxical like all orthodoxies, and it is in this orthodoxy that we can discern the repulsion the system has for art, and with its repulsion for art, its repulsion for truth.

WHERE ARE WE?

Where is humanity now? Where have we arrived at? Our thinking has enabled us to know how to manufacture a technological world of our own making, but from this grand achievement it must be asked: if this is a world of our own making, who is it made for?

The truth is that the world made by humanity has not been made for humanity and still a large part of humanity are enslaved or condemned to a life of little hope and much suffering in our man-made world. Nevertheless we still identify with our world, or more correctly, with a certain part of this world, and most people justify their miserable condition through the identifying concept of “this is the way things are,” with the implication that it is also the way things have to be. Thus a metaphysical reduction is made without us even recognising it as metaphysical, that the essence of existence is the way things are, which gives us the Principle of Identity: A=A.

For this reason we believe that the only way to alter the answer to the question of who is the man-made world made for? in order to be able to respond “for humanity”, we must rethink our metaphysical outlook to reality. Firstly, by accepting that there is a metaphysical outlook which is itself inhibiting the possible realisation of a human world made for humanity itself. Secondly, by rooting our new metaphysics primarily in the homo sapiens attribute of knowing rather than the lesser but current principle of having. When to have is given priority over to know as a mere tool for obtaining or having things then the homo sapiens becomes perverted in its essence allowing the Sapiens element to be retarded and enslaved in the process of lack-want-have (or have not), a retardation which even threatens to reduce or maintain most of humanity in an unconscious, automaton reality: fodder for the labour-market and the consumer-game-world of macro-casino-economics.

Rediscovering humanity as the homo sapiens sapiens might be the best chance we have of overcoming the devolution we have suffered into homo economicus, and perhaps the only chance we have of making the world a world made for humanity again.