#bratton

"Art may be preoccupied with the repetitive expression of the artist’s subjectivity, but are the crowds of people who rotate the turnstiles any different? Just like the artist, what they most crave is to see themselves in the work. Or, at least that is what curators and museum boards suppose. How we ended up with selfie museums is not mysterious. It is partially the result of a shift of all art into selfie art, as perceived by those MFA students nervous about going off-brand. After a couple of decades of the mind-numbing narcissism of The Artist Is Present (2010), the twee collective infantilisation of relational aesthetics, the preening condescension of socially-engaged art, garish trauma reenactments, various blinky-blink interactive contraptions, paperweight versions of giant metal cartoon characters, and so on: you get what you ask for."

For design, theory and computation have been intertwined for decades. One might even suspect a direct correlation between the end of theory and the rise of software (software being a form of technology that is linguistic as well as a form of language that is technological). Sometime from 1995 to 1997 or so, especially in academic design programs, software seemed to displace theory as a tool for thought. Many students interested in asking essential questions about how things work turned to software, not just to describe those things but also to make them, and not just to make them, but also to think through them. This shift came with trade-offs. Thinking with tools, and in this case, working with the fixed capital of advanced technologies, is a good thing. It is part of the genesis of our species. It is how we mediate the world and are mediated by it; we become what we are by making that which in turn makes us. This is no less true (or less complex) as software becomes a more ubiquitous feature of the whole world: in your hand, in the building, part of every supply chain, every image, every archive, every query. I am of the opinion, however, that as we quickly learn more precise and higher-resolution processes, it becomes correspondingly harder to see the whole at once. Accomplishments of analysis are paid for with a dissipation of synthesis. As such, software may need theory at least as much as theory needs software

Into the Red Stack

"Fortunately or unfortunately, most people don’t read books of theory. Statistically speaking the majority of those who do are college students, college professors, editors at academic presses, some artists and curators, or the occasional curious civilian intrigued by a provocative title or a glimpse of Žižek on YouTube. One serious but mostly unspoken problem is that the slice of the general population that buys the most philosophy books, college students – in limbo between childhood and adulthood – are preoccupied by the construction of their emerging personal identity. The injustices wrought by their parents’ generation, authority figures who are unamused by their perfectly healthy explorations of selfhood and uninpressed with by how the accumulated weight of history conjures their, say, “overflowing body full of infinite traces”. All this invites interpretation and praxis. The ultimate result, however, is the “audience capture” of philosophy by the special concerns of its readers and their particular neuroses. Audience capture is the feedback loop by which someone is rewarded for telling an audience what they want to hear and comes to believe this increasingly narrow range of ideas, ultimately offering little else, to the audience and themselves. By selection pressure, the kind of philosophy that animates the arts and humanities (far less so academic Philosophy departments to be sure) contains messages that meet the psychological needs of their consumers. There are reasons why every kid knows Foucault, Butler, Debord and Cornel West but not Sellars, Frege, Churchland and Carnap. The distortion by audience capture of philosophy as an intellectual initiative contributes to a severe loss of societal self-comprehension.

"Why do so many exhibitions speak of the artist’s special obligation to speak truth to power and to mobilise their special sensitivity to bear witness to injustice, as if society as a whole depends on them to say what must be said? Climate change? Let’s ask an artist. Gaza? I wonder what the MFAs at Yale think. No one is sure who really believes this, but there is a surfeit of half-hearted commitment, so regularly is it used as heraldry around new work. But art is not for these presumed duties. Art is a precious capacity for creative aesthetic abstraction available to all humans, honed since the Neolithic era. Art exists but “the artist” is a myth, a vestigial position from a more theological time, when the link between aesthetics and mysticism was firmer and when the professional outsider had a more credible claim on deeper truth. That residue is persistent, however, because it confers economic and social value.

"In his essay “Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction” (and his book Google: Words Beyond Grammar), Boris Groys laments the eclipse of anamnesis by software regimes that do the work of memory and memorialization on the User’s behalf. We, the Users of Google, need not exercise our faculties of memory in order to remember anything, it seems, and so the mind is free to wander through a vast flat moment, presented as an endless archive. As Groys tells it, the devout need not consciously perform the work of memorialization, or even really comprehend the work that is done for them, when it is sufficient, for example, to download a portfolio of important texts and carry them along on one’s hard drive. He shakes his head in pity at his wannabe-extremist students for whom it’s enough to possess copies of incendiary, uncompromising (unread) PDFs on their laptops in order for the act of identification to stick, or so they think; radicals not even radicalized, merely fanboy collectors. Groys laments that without the necessary and difficult investment of interpretation and an exacting self-transformation into the position of faith through the physical training of repetition and memorialization, however arbitrary it may be, then the rebinding (and the religion itself) is empty. By this view, today’s Cloud theology without anamnesis is actually a self-dispossession of commitment by which the experience of faith, now without opinion or interpretation, is outsourced to cognitive prostheses. Devout Apps can have devout opinions for you. For Groys, this subcontracting is not just an externalized memorialization of belief into digital artifacts, a sacralization of interfaces with theological distinction; it is, rather, religion evacuated of religio."