Sensoria. Маккензи Уорк
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to understand both the folk and the art, it might help, as Lev Manovich has also counseled, to understand the proprietary software within which the folk thinks it designs the art, but which might actually shape both to its own designs.
Before it’s too late. Steyerl does not hesitate to use the F-word: fascism. Perhaps what we’re looking at now are “derivative fascisms.”195 Fascism is a gap in representation itself. What some call the “neoliberal” moment appeared to be one in which forms of political representation declined in favor of forms of market participation. But then these too receded, leaving economic exclusion, debt overhang, and riots in their wake.
Some inherited forms of cultural and aesthetic politics might not work in this context. As followers of Antonio Gramsci, cultural studies advocated seizing the means of cultural representation.196 This was part of a long march through the institutions meant to secure political representation and state power. But now an inflation of cultural representation correlates more with political disenfranchisement. Everyone can have their cultural proxy, even if, as Yves Citton reminds us, it is a long way down the Google search results. But political representation, political proxies, seem not to function. Fascism happens when political representation collapses; it’s a short circuit, reality by fiat. It appears to do away with mediations, proxies. Fascism blocks reality, it is a “blind spot filled with delusion and death.”197
Maybe it’s time to try different aesthetic tactics.
The Soviet avant-garde tried to counter a socialist realist aesthetic of ideal models with productivism, an art that hewed close to labor, the machine, and their product.198 Perhaps what Mark Fisher calls today’s capitalist realism might be met with what Steyerl calls an aesthetic practice of circulationism, which finds ways to circulate not only images but value.199 Maybe it could short-circuit existing networks. Maybe short circuits are the problem, and it could instead reinstate what Bernard Stiegler calls the long loops of culture, art, and education.200
The figure of circulation might be linked here to a certain reversibility of terms. Duty free art may be the art that circulates through international art fairs or freeports. It might even be a kind of decentralized currency, an analog bitcoin, encrypted in International Art English. But it might also be an art that shucks off the old duties to history, faith, and nation and exploits its own liminality as a radical project.
Speculation may refer to a world in which derivative markets overshadow markets in actual things, trading not just in actual time but every possible forking timeline. “It represents mood swings around derivatives of derivatives.”201 Speculation might also be a philosophical tool, for risky thought with a looser relation to its object, which may find new objects hitherto undetected. In the spirit of Randy Martin, Steyerl senses a world of volatile relations between referents and signs, persons and proxies.
Steyerl: “What is the opposite [of] design, a type of creation that assists pluriform, horizontal forms of life, and that can be comprehended as part of a shared humanity?”202 Against a gamespace that is everywhere and leaves no option but to try to game it from the inside, desirable games might be restricted in time and space, able to be reset, scores erased. They would have rules that are not proprietary secrets and can be modified by the users.
Steyerl is no accelerationist: “Acceleration is yesterday’s delusion.”203 But she might still be interested in an aesthetic of detecting the forms of information that contour the totality of this world as it is experienced from the inside and also what it can contribute to making it otherwise. This might take the form of particular hacks or of the equally challenging task of imagining the totality otherwise.
The Situationist artist Constant Nieuwenhuys is a touch-stone for Steyerl here.204 His central question was how to design an infrastructure where humans could play freely, on top of a gamespace of machine logistics that ordered the world of things. This was Constant’s New Babylon (1956–74), in which his New Babylonians could be world nomads, rather like an international art biennale imagined as a free global party.205
Maybe it was not a realistic plan. In Steyerl’s aesthetics, it’s the gap between New Babylon and the world that is the value of the utopian. The point is not to make the world over into sameness with the model, the ideal, the algorithm, but to think and act in the difference. This is not quite how I read it, but perhaps our approaches can be squared. I treat New Babylon as radically practical. I read Constant as doing what Charles Fourier did, which is to pursue the practical so relentlessly that our actual totality appears by contrast to be fake, made up, impossible. Because it is. It won’t last, and we all know it.
For me the limit to stressing the autonomy of the art work is that it becomes an object of contemplation, of a particular mode of attention. But it’s not a matter of imposing the work on the world and falsifying it. It is rather a matter of pursuing the practical question, the question of the good life, so thoroughly as to show how the commodity form has falsified the world, made it unable either to be beautiful for us or beautiful without us.
Yves Citton: Ecologies of Attention
I once tried to watch Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) for as long as I could. I lasted maybe twenty minutes. The whole eight-hour film is a single shot of the Empire State Building. It got boring, but then a bird flew by and it was like being struck by lightning.
One could think of the subject of all Warhol’s art as the act of paying attention. It is worth having Warhol in mind while reading Yves Citton’s The Ecology of Attention. Warhol is not mentioned in it, but he does cover both ends of the attention problem. On the one hand, Warhol made work that is very demanding of attention; on the other, he got his own image to circulate as an instant attention attractor. He understood the value of attention.
He was not the first, of course. Citton begins with Gabriel Tarde, who starts a line of thinking about an economy of visibility whose currency is fame.206 It became an economy in a double sense, in that fame can be measured, and the attention it garners can be scarce. An increasing wealth of information means a scarcity of something else. Economists treat attention as a commodity, to be hoarded or strategically acquired. Citton wants to put some critical pressure on that view, by paying attention to what it leaves out. Perhaps the design of the attention-gathering apparatus is suboptimal.
Attention is not a new concern. The ancient art of rhetoric was about taking and holding it.207 Among the moderns, attention to innovation in style has long been a way of renewing attention. One might connect this to the way Sianne Ngai thinks about the aesthetics of the zany, interesting, and cute, each of which draws attention to, and also away from, aspects of modern life, to production, circulation, and the commodity, respectively. Warhol pioneered forms of all three as ways of attracting attention.
Citton offers an attention ecology rather than an attention economy. The latter tends to start with individualized attention as if it always existed, whereas an attention ecology takes an interest also in how attention regimes produce individuals in the first place.208 This ecology can be rather noisy, more like the turbulent information soup studied by Tiziana Terranova than the simple sender → receiver of the classic communication diagrams.209
One cannot make causal statements about the media any more than one can about the weather. Neither works like a gun or a hypodermic. Media, like weather, may have material, agential, and formal causes, but not final causes. They don’t tend toward a goal. And it may help to think more about formal causes a little more than agents or materials. This was McLuhan’s innovation, to think of media as not being about objects or subjects, but forms that shape both.210 The form of a given media shapes how things can appear to us and what kinds of subjects we can be in regarding them.
This is not too far from what Karen Barad calls an agential realism, where the agents are produced retrospectively by an apparatus that assigns them their distinctive identities.211 Hence, one can think of media as a matter of attending together, where the attention is shaped