#eflux

Iliana Fokianaki - The Mother is Dead, Long Live (m)Othercare

Ilya Kabakov

During a 1981 stay in Czechoslovakia, his second time outside of the Soviet Union, Kabakov authored the brief essay “On the Subject of ‘The Void.’” In attempting to define Soviet consciousness, Kabakov claimed that Soviet life is lived on two planes: “on the plane of [one’s] relations with other people and nature, and on the plane of [one’s] relations with the void.”10 He continued:

On the level of daily life, this split, this bifurcation, this fatal lack of connection between the first and second planes is experienced as a feeling of general destruction, uselessness; dislocation, and hopelessness in everything, no matter what a person does, whether he is building or performing some other task, he senses in everything a feeling of impermanence, absurdity, and fragility. This life on two planes causes a particular neurosis and psychosis in every inhabitant of the void, without exception. The void creates a particular atmosphere of stress, edginess, debility, apathy, permanent groundless terror: that is the state of the people who live in the place where the void dwells.

Redistribution via Appropriation: White(washing) Marbles - Iliana Fokianaki

Institutions, biennials, and mega-exhibitions attack colonial pasts, but not presents. They are quick to be politically correct and “host” the Other—while often maintaining an all-white staff, and a clearly rigidly Western approach as to how to institute. Before attempting to address what is to be done, one must first understand the limitations of the contemporary art institution and the mega-exhibition. These forms fail to escape the mechanisms of power they wish to condemn, since they cling to a notion of “civilization” with roots in modernism that continues to structure particular modes of discourse.

When examining the European identity myth, which by default encompasses Christian whiteness and the supposed universal of civilization, we need to remember Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s description of “internal colonialisms” in Europe, as well as his distinction between different kinds of colonizers. Santos categorizes colonizers into two groups: core countries of the continent with a colonial past that produced their wealth, but which also sustains this wealth today through internal colonization of weaker EU members; and semi-peripheral countries like his native Portugal, which used to be colonizers but are now financially weak and internally colonized. I add here a third category to his useful schema: the peripheral countries of Greece and most of the Balkans that have no colonial history and sit largely outside the Catholic/Protestant club. Their financial weakness and constant lack of sovereignty (among other factors) blocks them from becoming core countries.

Today, after a failed referendum and many memorandums, after being ridiculed for not yet becoming civilized enough, European enough, orderly enough, financially balanced enough, or in fact white enough, contemporary Greece is counterposed to the image of its “ancient glory.” This ancient glory has proven dangerous not only in the hands of neo-Nazis, but also in the hands of the leftist intelligentsia of the EU, which has reprimanded Brussels not for imposing policies that violate human and citizen rights, but for mistreating the “mother of the European idea.” But Greece’s self-image has gone through the blender of the West and mutated into something alien, to then be redistributed as the ultimate root and example of civilization’s “universal truth.”

Hyper-Semiotization and De-sexualization of Desire: On Felix Guattari

Neoliberal economics has accelerated the pace of labor exploitation, especially cognitive labor; connective digital technology has accelerated the circulation of information and consequently intensified the rhythm of semiotic stimulation which is, at the same time, nervous stimulation. This double acceleration is the origin and the cause of the increase in labor productivity which has in turn allowed an unprecedented increase in the accumulation of capital. But it is also the cause of the hyper-exploitation of the human organism, especially the brain. Today we have the task of determining the effects that this hyper-exploitation has produced on the psychic balance and on the sensitivity of human beings—as individuals, but above all as a collective.

Typically, we associate desire with the flesh, with sexuality, a body approaching another body. But we must emphasize that the sphere of desire cannot be reduced to its sexual dimension, even if this implication is inscribed in history, in anthropology, and in psychoanalysis. Desire is not identified only with sexuality, and moreover one can conceive of a sexuality without desire. The pandemic has completed the process of the de-sexualization of desire that had been underway for a long time, as soon as the communication between conscious and sentient bodies in physical space was replaced by the exchange of semiotic stimuli in the absence of bodies. If this dematerialization of the communicative exchange has not erased desire, it has nonetheless moved it into a purely semiotic (or rather: hyper-semiotic) dimension. Desire then evolved in a de-sexualized, or post-sexualized, direction, which now manifests as a condition of isolation that the pandemic has normalized and almost institutionalized. [...] The phenomenology of contemporary affectivity is increasingly characterized by a dramatic reduction in contact, pleasure, and the psychic relaxation that touch makes possible.

Designs for a New World - McKenzie Wark

To what class then do artists belong? To what many years ago I called the hacker class. The figure of the hacker is perhaps a more compromised one than when I proposed it, but that only shows that there’s something at stake in such a term. Artists belong to that class which makes the new out of the old, which transforms forms. It includes not just artists but also scientists and engineers. It is a class of all those whose efforts are captured by the form of “intellectual property” and made equivalent as such. It is a class which, whatever its “virtuality,” is still obliged to work in conditions not of its making.

Perhaps what we’re dealing with now isn’t actually capitalism any more—but something worse. Companies like Google are in the business of surplus information, not surplus labor power. [W]hat the capitalists did for the production of things, the new ruling class is doing for the production of information. I call them the vectoralist class. They rule through the ownership and control of the vectors of information, its stocks, its flows, its design. The “dematerialization of art” was homologous with this transformation of capitalism into something else, something even more abstracted. Conceptual art is a side effect of the rise of conceptual business.

Both the worker and the hacker are drafted into the production of a world against their will, and in a manner designed to pit them against each other in a war of all against all. Inequality and precarity are built into the infrastructure of labor and the everyday by design. Even the hacker class finds its conditions of existence radically bifurcated by the winner-take-all culture of the start-up. [C]apitalism was about making labor time measurable, breaking it down into pieces and putting a price on each unit of it as time. Hacking is also about effort, but it isn’t so easy to break it down and quantify it, because it’s a kind of effort that makes qualitative differences.

Digital Provenance and the Artwork as Derivative - McKenzie Wark

[L]et’s start with this paradox. Art is about rarity, about things that are unique and special and cannot be duplicated. And yet the technologies of our time are all about duplication, copies, about information that is not really special at all. [F]ar from making the work of art obsolete, the reproducible image gives it a new kind of value. [B]ut it is the case that their relationship can be reversible. The copy can precede the original. The copy not only precedes but authenticates the original.

[T]his is what the Google algorithm, customizing itself for this particular computer used by DIS, thinks is the real thing when it comes to fancy appliances. Yet, when I searched for “high-end shower” I got slightly different results, tailored algorithmically to me, or rather to my computer. The signature is in this case the algorithmically generated search, and can be expected to differ in some way in each instance.

My Collectible Ass - McKenzie Wark

Paradoxically, an object whose image is very widely spread is a rare object, in the sense that few objects have their images spread widely. This can be exploited to create value in art objects that are not in the traditional sense rare and singular. The future of collecting may be less in owning the thing that nobody else has, and more in owning the thing that everybody else has.