TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

. . . art tries to represent nature. Not necessarily in a direct sense, like you paint a nice field and in that painting, you’ve represented it one to one; embracing that you’re capturing something very fundamental there.. But even in abstract painting and various forms of sculpture or digital art; that what you’re really trying to capture is a representation of the process of representation itself. That’s basically how Schelling discusses art. To say that art represents nature, you’re not saying that art represents a representation of nature in an image, but that an image is actually pointing to the processes within nature that creates not only what we would call natural objects – plants or animals – but also thought. So art in a sense, is thought’s attempt to capture itself as a creation of nature, as creation.

The art world shows how the engine of capitalism rather than running on notions of production and labor, or the concept of supply and demand, is actually fueled by capitalization, or how much one is prepared, or rather has been prepared, to pay the price today in order to receive a profit tomorrow. What guarantees future profits in the financial markets as well as the art world is not the logical algorithm of growth but the social power that can be systematically mobilized in both environments to enforce today’s prices and to guarantee a higher return in the future.

The Supercommunity Agency, a formal moniker for the millions of intricately networked, constantly mutating social constellations that composed the Government of Earth, transmitted its deliberations over a period of a few months, finally drafting a conclusive decision: humanity would mobilize itself towards the TOTALwork, the voluntary commitment to see through the extinction of the human species altogether. Everyone was to renounce biological reproduction – no more new generations, no more strife against the future, no more investment of desire to find itself better fulfilled in those to come. The species would die out together . . . A concession was made within the Supercommunity: for those who longed for a child, a new birth would be accompanied by the enforced sacrifice of the parents. Soon, even those children who grew up into the Supercommunity once the TOTALwork was well underway would no longer know that it was even possible to reproduce. Sterilization procedures had greatly helped. Sex was just that, sex. Work was creativity, without the anxiety of accumulation and inheritance.

While the genres of the past have been exhausted by the revolutions of modernity, the particular practices and functions of our theoretical knowledge provide normative criteria for judging the intent of artistic gestures. An art which takes seriously the constructive application of its role as a cognitive mediator, and responds to the specific content of the special sciences, may no longer speak to the debased average man, but it might join the chorus of that anonymous anyone who is a vector of liberation.

A portion of these notes were delivered as a guest lecturer for Diann Bauer and Patricia Reed’s “Art and its Reason(s)” class at the New Centre for Research and Practice on June 8th, 2015. I have since added to them and cleaned up the presentation. The intent of this material was to present a broad outline of Wilfrid Sellars philosophy and make suggestions as to how we might think of some of his positions in relation to problems with recent art practice, and in what ways it may help us reconsider certain positions on art. For the most part it remains focused on Sellars’s philosophy with a few suggestive remarks on how it may be applied to art which could surely be expanded. In composing these notes I relied not only upon Sellars’s own texts, but the indispensable commentary of the late Jay Rosenberg, Willem deVries and Tom Triplett’s reading of Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, Steven Levine’s insightful criticism of Sellars’s positions, and Johanna Seibt’s process ontology reading of Sellars.

Mohammad Salemy tells us a story of “a group of men and women . . . meeting to discuss the future. . . [A] gathering of a variety of odd characters [Alfred McCormack, Abby Aldrich, Clement Greenberg, John Foster Dulles, David Rockefeller, George Orwell, Alfred Barr, William Stephenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, James Connan, and William Phillips discuss] the charged intersection of art, money, literature, geopolitics, and counterintelligence.”

“. . . art too only has a capacity for compassion, or empathy, and likewise, it only has a capacity to act as a manual, or a record, to give guidance and so on . . . At present, the only fear computing devices present to me though is not that they are mind-numbingly complex, it is that no matter how complex they seem, each runs by a strict textualism predicated on a very close reading of code and metrics. The real quandary isn’t then what should art and science learn from each other vis-à-vis computing, the question is: are our interlinked machines turning more and more into an association of Prousts and Hugos, or into an army of literal minded Antonin Scalias?”

How can someone account for any group of mobile workers?
To which class of mobility do artists belong?
Is it necessary to depend upon citation to be told who we are?

[T]o echo Zhilyaey, “[p]erhaps uncovering the cosmos [the itch] as a space for restoring—or even inventing—order and the main goal of humankind’s efforts will give us another way to avoid the dark end of everyday contingencies (para. 7).”

With this itch in mind, here are some questions we might consider further:

What is the role of planning in the creation, distribution, and reception of contemporary art?
How might we reformulate processes of planning in contemporary art towards new political and
philosophical demands?
How might technological intervention aid in the recapitulation of processes of planning in contemporary art?

. . . the #Accelerate Manifesto, both in form and content, is also indicative of the limited utility philosophy might have in a crisis situation like that of 2008 and on, hence, the need for a full-fledged turn away from speculative philosophy towards proper political economy. However, it is important to note that this political turn was filtered mostly through speculative realism, on the positive side, because of their shared emphasis on materiality & the place of technology, and on the negative, through SR’s spectacular failure in offering a new epistemology and the accelerationist demand for one. And yet, SR did offer a way out of Continental theory loops, via the works of Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani, mostly through their defense of the idea of Enlightenment and reason or what later was called neorationalism . . . their brand of realism offers a new way of thinking about the political that is not overdetermined and therefore limited by Western anarcho-Marxist cynicism towards government institutions and social planning, or the dominant discursive politics of poststructuralism or the Latourian hegemonic hyper-relativism that insists everything is a network.

All of our ideological systems were built as maps and moral compasses to the vision of a future – some where in the future we were supposed to be moving towards, and those maps gave direction and a sense of purpose to entire generations. Politics became a fight about who had the right set of maps with the best instructions on either how to get there or to avoid going there. Contemporary art as a social system and the linear succession of its avantgardes has also been transformed into an aesthetic guide of cultural footprints which claim to lead us toward the “world to come” . . . The not so new news is that there is no world to come, for the world has no future. This is the void lurking behind the shiny surface of an art world which still pretends to contain all the world’s futures. Shininess is a distraction from the absence of any future . . .
(From Renata’s response)

I think that photography is digital – if you understand photography in the classical sense – and that it has always been digital. Such a position only holds if we accept the previous definition of the digital, which has to do with subscribing to a fundamental rivenness of the world. Photography must reflect on or orient itself toward an object or toward the world. The viewer (or the camera as a ‘viewer proxy’) is already divided, or apart, or opposite from its subject. The viewer is inside the world of course, but the structure of immanence is not in effect. Rather, a structure of distance, difference, relationality predominates. If the dominant structure is distance, difference, relation, etc., it’s digital as far as I’m concerned. But that might not be a very satisfying answer!