TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

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.

See, but don’t be seen, [Tobias] thought, drifting off to sleep while devising half-conscious plans for repurposing technologies such that, rather than surveilling, they could be used as an even more powerful mode of communication.

Plants precede us, and they will continue on after we’ve passed. This is not a denial of the destruction that humans have wrought on the planet, but rather, a speculation of what may come after the Anthropocene. The Otolith Group’s Radiant (2012), presented at dOCUMENTA (13), examines the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The evacuated villages testify to the presence of radiation—toxic to humans but seemingly ignored by plants, which grow unfettered in our absence. They play the long game, one in which neither tortoise nor hare have a chance.

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.”

Issue 000 accentuates and renders visible the divergences and unexpected overlaps between “tachophobia” (fear of speed) and “tachomania” (obsession with speed), in the ongoing debates over accelerationism that have followed the publication of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”.

It is not so much the future that is forecast by DIS editors, but a hyperbole of the present. Forever now for more of the same, only more so: “The future is a season.”, “The future does not exist but in snapshots.”, “The future is layered and inconsistent.”, “The future is widely reproduced and distributed.” As a series of speculative musings, “Styles and Customs of the 2020’s” is as incoherent as HUO’s curated collection of statements about the future in The Future Will Be…, from which the contributors have stridently lifted a generous helping of their sentences (11 to be exact). The case of these “predictions” have only succeeded in creating a dry script art world version of Coffee and Cigarettes. “All we can really hope for is some good designer drugs that actually wake us up from the matrix” is not precisely what Foucault may have had in mind when he wrote that ‘[p]erhaps someday we will no longer know what madness was.’

. . . How could human beings decolonize their minds when neoliberalism radically structures human identities and the seemingly bleak future of organic life on Earth? In the absence of remediation of the geological-agental consequences of the nihilistic cycle of consumption and pollution upon which capitalocentrism utterly depends, how could new worlds emerge? Is it enough to spirit away statues, or is something more radical demanded?

One way of thinking about the word radical is the act of growth, a plant or branch emerging from a root or stem. In this sense being radical is related to slow and evolving development. Childhood prepares us for the absurd, grotesque and perverse situations of adulthood. The coping strategies of the child—free play, open and visceral acknowledgement of emotions, embodied listening, lack of focus, boredom, embracing the random — all present alternative responses to the status quo of adult life.

We all know kids say the darndest things. Engaging the tactics of our younger selves and simultaneously creating space for children’s perspective, experience and ever changing subject positions are core radical and political acts.

In exchange for securing ourselves against the haunting pink mass out there—amassing, overcoming everything into something unknown and unfaithful to our memory of how the world is—we begin to lose the opportunity for novelty to reveal itself. Aberrance is abhorrent.

. . . What kinds of memories are permissible in the city? What practices do we have that enable us to elide our relationships to one another in a place that eludes our initial comprehension? Whose family practices will be tolerated?

The Laboria Cuboniks collective have just released their widely-anticipated “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation”.

Already, it is being lauded by such cultural critics as Mark Fisher for “definitively grasp[ing] feminism back from the… hands of the moralising-spiteful petit-bourgeoisie,” and indicating that “a new counterculture is emerging from the shadows.” Rejecting originary authenticity, affirming technological alienation, and firmly regrounding accelerationism in its cyberfeminist antecedents, the xenofeminist call-to-arms has unleashed an alien storm system from which terrestrial subjectivity will not emerge unaltered.

Now it becomes possible to imagine what can writing and the work of art do after the death of metaphor, and by whose thought, if the works of the gods, the elementals and the philosophers yield nothing more than an arrangement of corpses in a white cube. What is art-working in a situation in which the accumula-tion of the solar as a databank of infinite names is subject, not to the figure of the librarian, the archivist or any other servant of the philosophically sewn or sun, but rather to the figure of the derivatives trader, the uninvited guest, or the parasite? For Serres, in fact acting as a parasite on philosophy, the parasite is like the joker in a deck of cards— the one card that can assume any potential and whose presence alters production, making conditions for new responses— opening up the third space. “The ramification of the network depends on the number of jokers. But I suspect there is a limit to this. When there are too many, we are lost as if in a labyrinth. What would a series be if there were only jokers? What could be said of it?” (Serres) Maybe—nothing?

Brown:
‘From Politics to Metapolitics’
In his ‘Challenge of Islam’
Brown, the Hellenist, the professor of classics, favouring Hellenism over Hebraism, though living far away,
a few months before Iraq attacked Iran in the first week of Autumn
He had become interested in the compilation of footnotes,
in the Spring,
before those bloody years.
He realized he had missed out on one third of the classics,
1979 reminded him of that fact

“. . . 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?”

Years after the 2008 crisis, and no-one in the banks has been held accountable. Not even for negligence! It is difficult to disentangle guilty ingredients from the hot financial stew, but much more so without an organized political will. Without better institutions (nomos) our deepening knowledge of the world (cosmos) will continue to fall flat . . . The problem of better institutions, it so happens, is linked to that of better models, since these models provide impetus and fodder. Quantitative models don’t just measure but also create phenomena: in Donald McKenzie’s words, they are engines and not cameras. A digression into the models of finance and their philosophical grounds is, I hope, useful here. Elie Ayache in Blank Swan has put forward a thorough rebuttal of not just the possibility of prediction, but possibility in general.

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Time & Televisual Intersubjectivity, McLuhan’s idea of globalized presence as the prehistory of telecomputation. The 1960s was the decade in which satellite technology was introduced to the television world via a series of live broadcasts. However, with the active participation of 46 stations, BBC’s Our World (1967) was undoubtedly the most globally far reaching of them all. Conceived around Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the communicative global village, the special program took full advantage of satellites to both reach a truly global audience and use the occasion to announce the dawn of globalization and what living in a small and thoroughly connected world would mean for its inhabitants. Prominent in the broadcast was the program’s Canadian segment, which aired right after the introduction and included Marshal McLuhan interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and broadcast from their studio in Toronto.

That ineradicable contemporary desire to be an individual, to obtain full happiness, to succeed, to live as though one were a project to be endlessly worked on, as though this were the telos of existence, that desire is the motor of capitalism. As a corrective to this, commonality demands we construct and reform institutions, consolidate common desires, and sediment the political. As Peirce affirms, commonality asserts collective capacity for reform and the continual renewal of the political within the institution. To be a citizen is to be understood through the frame of the co-construction of the common.

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 New Centre for Research & Practice is very pleased to announce the the first book release by &&& Publishing. What is Grounding? is Gilles Deleuze’s first seminar, and is distinguished in that, rather than “taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his offspring, yet monstrous”, the work focuses… Read More »

No animal—and least of all a human—can be considered individual because of its reliance on and mutual exchange of symbiotic microrganisms. Our most fundamental existence is codependent . . . One way of attempting to philosophize ourselves out of the Anthropocene has been to try to consider ourselves objects and others. These turns in realism represent a capitulation to all of that which will survive us—our inert creations, our archives, our infrastructures, our garbage. It is a resignation to the inability of humanity to survive, and a validation of the object as the sole locus of value—especially of lasting value.

. . . 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)

Is it an ethnographic film? Possibly, it doesn’t really matter, better that it just be a film, albeit in an improvisational realist register, as she says. The Karrabing team combines its skills and starts to throw things into the composition: Kevin and Gavin ‘wanted to tell a story about finding two cartons of beer’ then corrupt police, corrupt miners… Corruption and pollution are the twin dystopic figures that organise this improvisation put together by people simply alert to what is going on around them—thus the realism of the text. ‘…corruption is irrevocably a geontology, says Povinelli, ‘the matter that forms as entities struggle to maintain or enhance their milieu in late liberalism.’

“These expanding [technological] systems and networks are the building blocks for what many perceive as simple constructions or operations like web surfing, text messaging, and social media use. More often than not, the tasks completed within these systems are, to at least some extent, automated and would take longer to explain than most people can pay attention for. This in turn has been slowly subjecting the human mechanism to radical and often rapid changes through immersion, leaving most people with the illusion that ‘having all knowledge at our fingertips’ has made humanity actually smarter.” (from Zac’s response)

Abstract. Beneath the churning apocalyptic surface of Planet Accelerate is there an unexplored reformist core? In this paper I argue the answer is “yes.” Focusing on Robert Rauschenberg’s printed works of the 1960’s, I explore that core, asking what a politically engaged aesthetic project premised on reform might look like. Making the most of Accelerationism’s permission to speak using capitalism’s own terms while troubling the movement’s more determinist tendencies, I show how accidents of capitalism can be seized interpretively to generate what I call “surplus values” which can then be leveraged in other areas of social and political life.

In this article I initially diagram a genealogy of the generic in order to reconsider long-held philosophical suppositions of difference and similarity, representation and abstraction and immanence and transcendence, as set forth in contemporary continental philosophy by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Deleuze. Next I discuss what exactly is Laruelle’s position in relation to these dialectics of difference and what constitutes his radical intentions in his Non-Philosophy and Non-Standard Aesthetics? Finally, I develop and apply possible categories of the generic through specific examples in historical and contemporary art. By ending in this way, with discrete examples of an underdetermined aesthetics, I hope to derive possible working proofs of the generic even beyond Laruelle’s theories of The Generic Orientation of Non-Standard Aesthetics.

The New Centre for Research & Practice look forward to the unfolding of such a Supercommunity over the course of the next 100 days. What united us in purpose with e-flux is that we both have taken advantage of precarious media to build impactful institutions in the realm of culture at the threshold of the 21st century. e-flux’s model serves as an inspiration for our own projects arriving more recently, both with respect to the seriousness with which we engage the qualities of our medium – the Internet and its associated platforms – and with respect to our commitment to inventing a future.

So, how do we move beyond the past? How do we move past the phallocratic traditions and its subjective invariants? In the aftermath of emancipatory politics and within a current age of media deliriums, where we are all allowed to scream and cry our outrage and become the users and producers of media and the illusions and dreams of detournements of Debord have been given to us all within the virtual-actual spaces of social networks; or at least, keeps us chained to a Freudian unconscious (a Freudian Robot). The question, Ex Machina then brings to the forefront, is more than a simple question of Feminist emancipatory politics, it’s a position outside of striving perhaps to take on the compulsion of consumption today: the consumption and compulsion to Identify, to share Identification, and to consume Identity. Then, how can we begin to grasp a capacity to think within the ever-changing landscape today in a manner where we take up a mode of consumption that would be akin to a capacity and novel mode of thinking within our current landscape of post-digital culture?

The philosopher Gilbert Simondon states in his work that the machine or robot in relation to its human creator, takes on a position that in the past was granted to the slave or foreigner or stranger. That is, the machine takes on a position whereby humans try to not identify completely with it, and seek a distancing from technologies they have created. Simondon, however also thinks that monikers and conceptions of technology that refer to machines as separate from human, that is, as autonomous robots and the like, are an erroneous way to envision them. For Simondon, machines are extensions of the human. If Ex Machina had another chapter, perhaps Ava, if she followed the hopes Simondon strives to set forth in his book, On the Modes of Existence of Technical Objects (see part one or this in-progress translation for English versions), would recognize her position as an extension of the human, as a care-giving machine and a negentropic, stabilizing part of humanity.

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!

The drone appears as the weapon of choice of the coward, he who refuses to show himself. It requires no courage; it deactivates combat. This provokes deep crises in terms of military values. But the military needs justifications.

Welcome to &&&, a peer-reviewed, academic journal focused upon new thinking in the arts & sciences. For our initial Spring 2015 offering, we are launching Issue 000, which will consist of a continuous roll-out of articles and blog posts, exclusively.

It’s very simple to grasp accelerationism. Accelerationism refers to the engagement with forms and forces of technology and abstraction that must, selectively, be accelerated to punch through the limits of a stagnant and inertial capitalism. It’s very difficult to grasp accelerationism. There are multiple forms and types of accelerationism, if that’s even the right name for it. Maybe it would be better called ‘redesigning’, for example, or ‘extrapolation’ . We don’t know yet what accelerationism could do, or be? It may be we need ‘create two, three, many accelerationisms’.

Were the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists reckless? Yes, but this word has two meanings, that are more or less easy to disentangle (and, of course, some subjectivity on my part enters the picture here). Contempt for danger, hunger for risk, some would say heroism. But also indifferent to the potentially disastrous consequences of a healthy provocation – in this case the humiliation of millions of people who are already stigmatized, making them vulnerable to the manipulation of organized fanatics.

A healthy, vibrant movement is one that invites external critique and operates in dialog with those holding different or opposing views. In short, everything must be open to revision, as long as responding to criticisms does not consume excessive time, leaving those in the movement no time to actually formulate that movement’s positions. Another sign of a credible movement is a solid grounding in the work of the past. If any new concept or movement embodies a kind of synthesis of a long dialog with those who have come before, then movements that proclaim to completely revolutionise thought and give no proper due to previous ideas are to be viewed with great suspicion.