Art | Theory | Criticism | Politics

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Ryoung Kim Andy Weir Annabel Frearson Barbara Pfenningstorff Manuel ngel Emily Rosamond Francesco Pedraglio, Anca Rujoiu and Pieternel Vermoortel Title Proposal for a Movement from I to It Infomanticism Sculpture in the Expanded Field Proliferation of Masks Photograph with Eight Descriptions

The Becoming Subject

Spring 2012

editors Francisco Pedraglio Anca Rujoiu Pieternel Vermoortel design Charles Read Manuel ngel

OGTOPLB is published and distributed by FormContent. It stems from a workshop held by FormContent at the doctoral research programme in Fine Art and Curating at Goldsmiths College. It is part of Its moving from I to It, FormContents 15 month programme on visual language, abstraction, disappearance and the object, This programme takes shape through a series of commissioned texts, workshops, a set of public events and exhibitions. QGTOLBP is set in Baskerville 2012 FormContent

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Ryoung Kim Andy Weir Annabel Frearson Barbara Pfenningstorff Manuel ngel Emily Rosamond Francesco Pedraglio, Anca Rujoiu and Pieternel Vermoortel Title Proposal for a Movement from I to It Infomanticism Sculpture in the Expanded Field Proliferation of Masks Photograph with Eight Descriptions The Becoming Subject 5 7 25 33 39 45

Proposal for a Movement from I to It

ANDY WEIR

Start with the terms I, it and moving. Lets assume a binary: I is the subjective viewpoint of the human; it is the inhuman outside of this viewpoint, indifferent to it. Moving from I to It, then, seems a tricky operation. It gets a bit mangled up in paradox. Whenever I think it it turns back into for-I, losing its radical and strange itness. Like Midas, transforming everything he touches into useless gold, we need to find ways of touching without touching, thinking without thinking-directly. This is our movement. Perhaps fictions could be deployed between I and it. They could act as protecting barriers (rubber gloves for Midas) and as honeytraps to catch it, lure it in. If I were a body, this could be coated in sticky germy syrup, transformed to an alluring and contagious surface. I could broadcast calls like a siren Hey it!, draw it in like a bee or a sneeze. When I and it get twisted up in their trajectories, new characters emerge. I builds a machine, calling to it as an experimental choreography. Plug in here: http://deeptimecontagion.tumblr.com/ This site documents and activates an ongoing series of audio field recordings made in deep geological repository sites (for the storage of nuclear waste). Open it to transform your receiving device into a virulent surface for the transmission of sound from indefinitely sealed-off spaces, designed to outlast the human. The deep geological repository is designed to store nuclear waste securely deep underground, sketching an ongoing and incomplete struggle to demarcate humans from contagious materials that would eventually destroy them. At the same time, defined as providing containment without future maintenance, its thinking and construction is fundamentally premised upon imagining conditions not dependent on the human.

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The site and its practice, then, necessarily allude to a deep time span, exterior to and indifferent to that of the human. This work performs the sonic fiction of capture and viral transmission of the affect of deep time through blocks of recorded soundA kind of pyroclastic soaked chrono-dread chewing at the edges of the skin like a Burroughs tape experiment melted into rock. These recordings, entwined in deep time, act as figure for twisting this outside into experience, camouflaged gestures toward an earworm-thought without limit. To brush the ears and then enter them, wraith-like, not with a hook but with stealth. I hope you find this largely indiscernible. In fact it is already open, inaudible to your ears perhaps, it has begun.1

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http://andyweir.info

Infomanticism

ANNABEL FREARSON

In the first volume of October in 1976, founding editor Rosalind Krauss contributes an article describing contemporary video art as an aesthetics of narcissism. Vito Acconcis Centers (1971), in which he holds a pointed finger to the centre of the screen for the 20-minute duration of the work, parodistically disrupts and dispenses with an entire critical tradition in which painting formerly pointed to the centre of the canvas to invoke the internal structure of the picture-object. And yet, by its very mise-en-scne, Centers typifies for Krauss the structural characteristics of video as a psychological medium, with the human body (of the artist or viewer) as its central instrument, held captive in a collapsed present of instant feedback between the parentheses of camera and monitor. This mechanism of auto-reflection creates an external symmetry which brackets out the object in a movement of fusion and appropriation that strives to vanquish separateness between procedures of thought and their objects, in total contradistinction to the reflexiveness of modernist art which creates a radical asymmetry from within, categorically fracturing the subject from the object, the better to be able to see each other. Krauss points to a further outward symmetry between the encapsulated self-object of the video artwork and the mass-media enclosure of the artworld within which it has been both produced and subsumed; she writes, That an artists work be published, reproduced and disseminated through the media has become, for the generation that has matured in the course of the last decade, virtually the only means of verifying its existence as art.1 Infomanticism reflects on and through our mediation with data. We have made of ourselves riparian citizens of the sublime torrent of reflexive data that flows ceaselessly through our midst. Subjectification derives from a contingent and restless circumscription of data, with which we have developed a more or less affective relationship. A relationship, moreover, that is subject to abuse and promiscuity, as well as proprietorial desire. Fragments of data, miserable little pieces of the real, assume sublime agency. They draw us into new, or long forgotten, or simply parallel unknown territories, communities of data, governed by their own internal logic. This is the Romantic. Broadly configured as an escape from concrete, reified, industrialised reality and the correlative re-enchantment of the world through imagination, romanticism ought to find its Paradise Lost through the apparently
1. Rosalind Krauss, The Aesthetics of Narcissism, October: The First Decade 1 (1976): 59.

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democratised, liberal landscape of immaterial, heterogeneous information. And yet within a post-industrial, post-Fordist, databased economy, subjectivity is capital, and capital is data. If romanticism can be thought as anti-capital exile, could infomanticism provide new modalities for reconstituting cultural value and rethinking the action of enclosure, or does it merely provide new instances of subjective occasionalism in support of the new economy?

Vito Acconci. Still from Centers. 1971.

Infomanticism

Henry, a young American tourist in Florence, arrived anxious and alarmed at my consultancy, with a Florentine friend. While visiting the Caravaggio exhibition at Palazzo Pitti he began to feel disturbed by the lighting system that alternatively illuminated the paintings then left them in complete darkness. The fluctuation of light and dark disoriented him, causing him to lose a sense of his own existence as well as the meaning of the images. What upset him above all was a detail of one of the images, the knee of Narcissus. In this painting, a boy is pictured kneeling above a mirror of water in which he can only see a part of that which the viewer of the painting can see of him. The young man depicted seems to be crouching down, almost sitting on one of his legs, with a knee pushed into the foreground: in fact the knee is the physical centre of the image, the brightest object, fully evident, but the boys viewpoint does not allow him to see it reflected in the water. In the eyes of the young tourist the knee was transformed into a thick, knotty stick, projecting out of the image as though to strike him. This threatening object appeared isolated, removed from its context. Afraid that he was going mad, Henry ran away.2 Identified by Italian psychologist Graziella Magherini while working at the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in Florence, the Stendhal Syndrome is an extreme psychosomatic reaction to artworks. In her 1989 study La Sindrome di Stendhal, Magherini details case studies in which patients, usually international tourists, recount traumatic experiences during encounters with specific artworks, often involving a loss of self, figured through a sense of entering or conjoining with an image or, as cited above, a feeling that aspects of the image are invading the viewers own reality. While this condition is known to other contexts, it is prevalent in Florence as home to the greatest concentration of Renaissance art in the world, the conglomerative excess of significant artworks thereby being a key contributory factor to the syndrome.3 Magherini named the condition after French novelist Marie-Henri Beyle who, writing under his pseudonym Stendhal to avoid censorship, recounted that while visiting the basilica di Santa Croce in Florence he experienced a crisis inside the church, forcing him out on to the piazza to escape the vertiginous attraction of accumulated history and memories incised in the secular stone of the basilica and the city. Magherini sees in Stendhal the emergence of the modern tourist, as opposed to the classical traveller. He approaches culture with a certain elasticity that renders the journey precarious, fluid, uncertain, open to all experiences and manifestations, not all of which are decipherable. The journey becomes one of the mind wherein even on the most organised of trips there remains the possibility of an internal adventure, which may take the form of a crisis, an imbalance, or momentary loss of identity. Furthermore Stendhals seemingly benign travelogue is in fact a condensation of his many journeys through Italy that, together with his pseudonym, serve to divert the censors eyes from his political
2. 3. Graziella Magherini, La Sindrome Di Stendhal (Feltrinelli, 1992, my translation). See also Jerusalem syndrome and Paris syndrome.

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reflections on the state of post-Napoleonic Italy. As both a Jacobin and Bonapartist, Stendhal falls into Sayre and Lwys categorisation of Jacobin-democratic Romanticism, rejecting equally the authority of past institutions in the form of monarchy, aristocracy and the Church, as well as the new postrevolutionary bourgeois oppression, as defined in their article on Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism.4Rejecting reductive definitions of the phenomenon of romanticism as being merely a counterpoint to Classicism, or to Enlightenment abstract rationalism, or historically delimited by the French and Industrial Revolutions, or simply a forerunner to fascism and Nazism, or solely the wellspring of a subjectivist occasionalism, or bourgeois imagination, frivolously incoherent (and thereby feminine), reactionary, counterrevolutionary, morally inadequate and devoid of political content or impact, the authors reclaim romanticism as the transhistorical, heterogeneous voice of Anti-Capital. The many faces of the romantic phenomenon defy simple definition and inherent contradictions frequently manifest within the same authors and sometimes even a single text. Romanticism is a labyrinth with no exit5 that traverses class, political persuasion and context, not confining its reach to literature. There are, however, commonalities that can be drawn across the romantic spectrum, presenting a worldview, a collective mental structure, a dispositif, we could say or grid of intelligibility, in Foucaults terms. The principle feature of this romantic worldview is opposition to capitalism in the name of precapitalist values.6 This is voiced through expressions of lost illusions, nostalgia for community, social harmony and natural unity destroyed by industrial civilisation, disenchantment with concrete reified reality, and a heightened sense of alienation in the present often experienced as an exile. In turn these sentiments give rise to the re-enchantment of the world through imagination, poeticizing and aestheticising the present, banal, habitual reality, and utopian visions that draw from an idealised past to enact a new future (or New Order in the case of fascism). 7 Given that romanticism is figured as a symptom of the rise of capitalism, it follows that a neo-romantic dimension should prevail in the late twentieth century and the authors point to this in examples of German literature and cinema, as well as Tolkein, Borges, Return of the Jedi, E.T., and certain large-scale social movements like ecology, pacifism and the anti-nuclear coalitions. Their article notably pre-dates both the fall of the Berlin wall and the internet revolution and it is implications of these that I would like to take forward to consider infomanticism, or more broadly speaking, subjectivity and the confusion of value, democracy and freedom in relation to the rise of electronic information. Let us first return to Henry and the knee of Narcissus.
4. Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism, New German Critique, no. 32 (April 1, 1984): 4292. 5. Ibid., 43. 6. Ibid., 46. 7. Ibid., 55. Within their anti-capital rubric, Sayre & Lwy create different substantiated categories of Romanticist tendencies, such as Restitutionist Romanticism, Conservative Romanticism, Fascist Romanticism, Resigned Romanticism, Liberal Romanticism, and Revolutionary and/or Utopian Romanticism, subsets of which include Marxist, Populist, Libertarian or Anarchistic Romanticisms, Utopian-humanist Socialism and the Jacobin-democratic Romanticism into which falls Stendhal.

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In the same way that Magherini uses Henrys case as allegorical currency for her psychoanalytical craft itself arguably a correlate of sublime romanticism I would like to appropriate this story as a metaphor for our evolving, infomantic relationship with data. Within the framework of Caravaggios painting, installed in a larger collection of his work at the Palazzo Pitti, which in turn houses significant collections of art and artefacts and once home to Napoleon Bonaparte who used it as his power base in Florence, site of the worlds largest concentration of Renaissance art, the knee of Narcissus is a fragment of visual data that has assumed sublime agency. In Henrys case, violent agency, a key feature of the sublime experience according to the first theorist of sublimity, Longinus, who in the first century draws attention to the sublimes element of unexpectedness resulting in violence and turmoil, also evoking ecstasy in the hearer.8 In a more recent discussion of Henrys psychosomatic reaction to the knee of Narcissus, Magherini adds that he experiences combined feelings of tenderness, violence and attraction in confrontation with this knee that appears to him in isolation from the image as a knotty stick about to strike him. Moreover, when he later returned to the painting he felt that this knee was something that belonged to him.9 Magherini attributes the reaction of Henry, the child of divorced parents (depressed mother and mostly absent father), to his unresolved/ unprocessed memories of childhood abuse by his music teacher. This I rakishly correlate to Lyotards description of the Kantian sublime as resulting from the rape of imagination by reason in his recounting of The Family Story of the Sublime: The sublime is the child of an unhappy encounter, that of the Idea with form. ... The law (the father) is so authoritarian, so unconditional, and the regard the law requires so exclusive that he, the father will do nothing to obtain consent, even through a delicious rivalry with the imagination. He requires the imaginations retraction ... He pushes forms aside, or, rather, forms part before his presence, tear themselves apart, extend themselves to inordinate proportions. He fertilizes the virgin who has devoted herself to forms, without regard for her favor. He demands regard only for himself, for the law and its realization. He has no need for a beautiful nature. He desperately needs an imagination that is violated, exceeded, exhausted. She will die in giving birth to the sublime. She will think she is dying...10

8. Joanna Zylinska, On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: The Feminine and the Sublime (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 18. 9. Graziella Magherini, Il Perturbante Estetico. Dalla Sindrome Di Stendhal Ad Un Modello Psicoanalitico Di Fruizione Artistica (presented at the Centro Racker, lHotel Principe, di Venezia, March 30, 2007), 1011. 10. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kants Critique of Judgment, [sections] 23-29, Meridian (Stanford, Calif.) (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1994), 180.

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Narcissus himself presents a sublime figure as the progeny of the rape of a river nymph by a river god.11 And he effectively dies in the exhausted apprehension of his own unconsummatable beauty. Rather than die, however, he transforms into a recurring form of Idea. In his analysis of the sublime, Kant opposes Beauty to Sublimity, presenting the beautiful as a bounded form, external to ourselves that can be held in restful, pleasurable contemplation, whereas the feeling of the sublime is boundless, produced by a movement of the mind combined with the judging of the object, that both attracts and repels, thereby producing a negative pleasure.12 Although Kant refers to Ovids Metamorphoses as grotesqueries,13 Ovids telling therein of the fate of Narcissus offers a poetic allegory for the transition between beauty and sublimity. Hot and weary from his hunting and attracted by the beauty of an isolated, shaded pool, Narcissus lay down to drink whereupon another thirst grew in him ... Spellbound by his own self, he remained there motionless, with fixed gaze, like a statue carved from Parian marble. Narcissus admires himself as a beautiful external object, as others see him, initially ignorant that he desired himself. Ovid points to the transition from the pleasure of beauty to the pain, or negative pleasure, of the sublime by imploring Narcissus to realise the imaginary and transitory nature of his desired object; however, he gazed at the shape that was no true shape with eyes that could never have their fill, and by his own eyes he was undone. Finally creating distance with his object, Narcissus comes to full horrified self-realisation: Alas! I am myself the boy I see. I know it: my own reflection does not deceive me. I am on fire with love for my own self.14 Thereupon reason prevails and the object of Narcissus imagination dies in a sublime transformation. He becomes a perennial flower and, importantly for the eventual concept of infomanticism which ties information to the attention economy, Ovid concludes by saying: When this story became known, it brought well-deserved fame to the seer Tiresias. It was told throughout all the cities of Greece, and his reputation was boundless. Slavoj iek, in his analysis of the Kantian sublime through Hegel, describes Sublimity as failure of representation, succeeding Beauty at the point of its breakdown, of its mediation, of its self-referential negativity.15 And to cut an evocative argument very short, he suggests that Hegel out-Kants Kant by denying any transcendent surplus beyond the field of representation: we must limit ourselves to what is strictly immanent to this
11. As recounted by Ovid within the sprawling, reticular framework of the Metamorphoses, which interlaces the lives, loves and transformations of gods, humans and nature from the creation of the universe out of chaos to the deification of Julius Caesar. And as a connective aside, Ovid was later the subject of exile under Emperor Augustus, and a key inspiration for romantic writers. 12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, Oxford Worlds Classics (Oxford University Press) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7578. 13. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 22. 14. Ovid, Metamorphoses (Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1983), 8586. 15. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, New Ed. (Verso Books, 2009), 228.

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experience, to pure negativity, to the negative self-relationship of the representation. As embodiment of Nothing, the sublime object through Hegel becomes a miserable little piece of the Real, ... radically contingent corporeal leftover, as defined by the Spirit is a bone.16 This brings rather literally back to mind Narcissus knee, as depicted by Caravaggio, which sits in relation to the reflected body on the waters edge as the dividing sign of a zero, formed by the rest of the curved body of Narcissus, illustrated below.

Caravaggio. Narcissus. 1598-1599.

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Ibid., 233234.

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In this light, the knee of Narcissus becomes the point of radical negativity within a purely recursive figure. At which point it would seem wrong to continue to metaphorise the image. But if we were to read this painting as video, which notionally it becomes in Henrys experience of the Caravaggio exhibition in which the paintings are alternately illuminated and plunged into darkness, then through Krauss analysis, Narcissus and his reflected body form the externally symmetrical parentheses which bracket out himself as object in a movement of fusion and appropriation in his striving to vanquish separateness between his thought and its object. In her discussion of the feminine sublime, Joanna Zylinska points to the irony that the excessive discourse on the sublime is itself sublime.17 Zylinska argues, following Peter de Bollas extensive historical study, that this self-reflexive position is in fact key to the formation of modern subjectivity: the discourse of the sublime is not, for de Bolla, confined to the realm of aesthetics. Its theoretical self-reflexivity gives rise to a discursive excess, which is then regulated to produce one of the cornerstones of the modern age: the idea of the rational, self-reflexive subject. 18 In other words, feelings of awe, terror, wonder, etcetera in the face of wild and boundless nature give rise to sublime feelings as the mind contrives to contain and rationalise them; theories around the nature of that sublime mechanism give rise to a discursive excess, which in turn requires rationalisation by theoreticians, and the theorisation of theory produces the rational, self-reflexive subject. The mechanism of reflexivity is defined by N. Katherine Hayles as, the movement whereby that which as been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates.19 Zylinska goes so far as to say that reflexivity is one of the most disturbing and subversive ideas in contemporary critical and cultural theory.20 No less because the traditional characterisation of sublime excess is described through images of disempowered and feeble femininity, or as an unfit woman that needs bringing in line. Zylinska recalls Barbara Claire Freemans definition of the sublime as an allegory of the construction of the patriarchal (but not necessarily male) subject, a self that maintains its borders by subordinating difference and by appropriating rather than identifying with that which represents itself as other.21 Metadata, as information about information, is described by David Weinberger as the second order of data that accrues around first-order collections of content such as cultural objects, things, assets, people, etcetera. He describes the third-order digitisation
17. It should also be noted that Carl Schmitt saw irony, in its suspension of reality, as a key feature of romanticism. 18. Zylinska, On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared, 25. 19. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 89 quoted by Zylinska p.25. 20. Zylinska, On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared, 25. 21. Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Womens Fiction, Reprint. (University of California Press, 1997), 4 quoted by Zylinska, p.29.

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of information as the Trojan horse of the information age,22 capable of considerably influencing a companys margins and customer loyalty in commercial terms, and having significant cultural impact dictating which images, for example, become emblematic currency. To illustrate this point, Weinberger uses the example of two photographic archives in the United States. The Bettman Archive is the most prestigious collection of historic photos in the United States and was acquired by Bill Gates who moved the collection in 2001 from its deteriorating state in the melting heat of Manhattan to deep storage in limestone caves in Pennsylvania. Weinberger describes the vast site as modern in every way, but if you walk far enough youll come to a dead end where a hole in the wall reveals an underground lake illuminated only by the light from the opening through which youre looking.23 The collection houses 11 million photographs and negatives, chronologically ordered and catalogued using a card catalogue system. This physical collection therefore constitutes first-order organisation and the card catalogue system, which separates information about the first-order objects from the objects themselves (meta-data) constitutes the second order of order. The physical constraints of the card catalogue system mean that the information about each photograph is naturally limited, making the search and retrieval of images arduous and time consuming. As Weinberger states, Indeed, a first- and second-order archive the size of the Bettmann literally cannot know everything it has.24 The parent company of the Bettmann Archive is Corbis, which also owns a digital collection of four million images, electronically managed in a converted bank in Seattle. This digitised organisation allows each photograph to be catalogued using any number of search terms, applying, if desired, a label as long as a book, allowing even for the inclusion of synonyms and typing errors in search terms. This third-order organisation can be searched at speed and by non-experts. Although there are a third less images in the Corbis collection than the Bettmann Archive, as productive assets Corbiss images are more readily accessible and commercially more viable: Corbiss approach to information is sprawling and extravagant: The immateriality of bits encourages Corbis to put its images in every place where people might look for them.25 Weinberger even points to the differential of lighting conditions that each collection affords: the physical nature of the Bettmann Archive requires external, reflective illumination, whereas the computerised bits of the Corbis collection radiate out through the computer monitors. This parable of the two archives returns us again to the story of Narcissus. The Bettmann archive, having escaped the heat, now lies in a state of preservation by a cool pool; it is inaccessible and self-contained and, like Narcissus before his transition to selfawareness, does not know itself. Just like the nymph Echo who admires Narcissus at a distance, repeating his last words before her body finally withers away and turns to stone, so must echo the footsteps of the Bettmann archivists who patrol the limestone caves,
22. David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), 23. Ibid., 17. 24. Ibid., 19. 25. Ibid., 21.

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recalling fragments of images to a limited audience. The Corbis collection becomes in this analogy like the self-reflective, aware Narcissus, now separate from its body as pure transmutable idea, the dispersion of which can be boundless. These contrasted states of self-preservation and being-for-otherness were conceived as amour de soi and amour-propre by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who wrote a play called Narcissus (or The Self-Lover) when he was 18 and experienced a Stendhal-syndrome type reaction on his way to visiting his friend Diderot in prison when he read in the Mercure de France the announcement of an essay topic set by the academy of Dijon asking whether the progress of the sciences and arts had had the effect of purifying morals: Rousseau was transfixed when he saw this; so many ideas and speculations crowded in on him that he felt faint and had to stop for a while.26 The first outcome of this life changing illumination was Rousseaus Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, in which he argued that the value of the pursuit of knowledge had become perverted by the desire for esteem and distinction within a superficial, wealth oriented society. There develops a rage of singularity, generating pseudo-excellences through a culture of competition in which denigration is as important as favour in rising to the top of the pecking order. By extension, in this pursuit of glory, ones sense of self is derived entirely from others opinion. Ironically, Rousseau won first prize for his essay. This conception of amour-propre in which social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others27 can be clearly identified with todays attention economy, as elaborated upon by Georg Franck who thus describes the mechanism for todays stock exchange of attentive capital: If the attention due to me is not only credited to me personally but is also registered by others, and if the attention I pay to others is valued in proportion to the amount of attention earned by me, then an accounting system is set in motion which quotes something like the social share prices of individual attention. What is important, then, is not only how much attention one receives from how many people, but also from whom one receives it or, put more simply, with whom one is seen. The reflection of somebodys attentive wealth thus becomes a source of income for oneself. Simple proximity to prominence will make a little prominent.28 Rousseau is seen as the bridge between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and much the same could be said for the founding spirit of the internet.29 The Information age, largely accessed through the internet and databases, has become the naturalised landscape of our time. Influential early settlers of this landscape, Californian digerati such as John
26. N. J. H. Dent, Rousseau, Routledge Philosophers (London: Routledge, 2005), 1112. 27. Rousseau, Second Discourse, quoted in Ibid., 66. 28. Georg. Franck, Okonomie Der Aufmerksamkeit (The Economy of Attention) (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1998), http://www.t0.or.at/franck/gfeconom.htm. 29. Although technically different, I use the word Internet as interchangeable here with the World Wide Web.

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Perry Barlow and Kevin Kelly, et al, evoked utopian romantic analogies with boundless nature to support their technological, connectionist ideologies. Kellys biblical epic, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (1994), for example, espouses the rise of neo-biological civilisation and the power of bottom-up, networked systems, lending technology the working status of a vital force that, like nature, operates outside the reach of social imperatives.30 Similarly, John Perry Barlows Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996) is romantic through and through. With a clear debt to Rousseau, Barlow declares: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. ... Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. ... It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. ... You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. ...We are forming our own Social Contract. ... Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. ... Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. ... In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. .... In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. ... We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.31 Now, a decade on, in the face of a sublime overwhelment of bottom-up, hive generated, dumb (sic) content, Kelly has modified his thinking, suggesting that, the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.32 However, even the most hive minded systems have always already contained some form of structuration which even if open source is, nevertheless, authored. As Malcolm Le Grice observed, attempts by structural film makers in the 1960s and 70s to depersonalise the narratorial point of view and eliminate a sense of hierarchy, for example by introducing mechanised randomisation, mathematical systems or computer editing, simply shifted the terrain and masked the authors subjectivity, and further embedded identification into the falsely objective historical authorisation of technology.33 For Lev Manovich, the computer age introduces the database as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, correlative to the narrative form privileged by the
30. Jamie King, Tea with Kevin Kelly, Mute, 1997, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/tea-kevinkelly. 31. John Perry Barlow, Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996, http://www.darkcarnival. com/DCOLarchive/barlow.html. 32. Kevin Kelly, The Technium: The Bottom Is Not Enough, February 12, 2008, http://www.kk.org/ thetechnium/archives/2008/02/the_bottom_is_n.php. 33. Malcolm Le Grice, Towards Temporal Economy, Screen, Winter 1979.

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novel and subsequently cinema. The basic manifestation of a database is a collection of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.34 Following the death of God, the end of grand narratives and the arrival of the web, the database represents the logical successive principle of order, and it is the algorithm that creates logic from the databases otherwise open-ended, anti-narrative, and arbitrary content: Together, data structures and algorithms are two halves of the ontology of the world according to a computer.35 This is not a simple passive/active binary, however, for data does not just exist it has to be generated, and since the 1990s we have entered a digitizing craze, a storage mania with millions of people compelled towards data indexing: digitising, cleaning, organising, and indexing every facet of life (and death). The map that Borges story described as being equal in size to the territory it represented, has now become larger, much larger, than its corresponding territory; separated from its interface, the same data can be served up in an infinite variety of contexts and combinations, offering multiple trajectories or hyper-narratives of composite formation. Drawing from Rosalind Krauss analysis of video art as psychological medium, Manovich considers whether we might entertain the notion of a database complex, and calls for an aesthetic or narrative that responds to the database imagination. Over a decade on, this has been more than fully realised, both within art (Christian Marclays The Clock [2010] as paradigmatic example), and within the burdgeoning field of data visualisation.

stock data visualisation; historical stock price data plotted as 3D graphs

34. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Leonardo (Series) (Cambridge, Mass.) (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000), 218. 35. Ibid., 223.

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Data visualisation provides an affective representation of often excessive volumes of textual or statistical data. Frequently interactive and sometimes three-dimensional, it allows users to engage with visualisations that evidence changes of data relationships through time, geography or between other entities. Manovich himself is ahead in this endeavour with his cultural analytics project which aims to reveal temporal patterns in sets of cultural artifacts, such as magazine covers, Van Gogh paintings, one million manga pages, etcetera, suggesting that such visualisation techniques might provide new ways of categorising and theorising culture.36 Data visualisation has many other social applications. The Guardian newspaper and BBC are busy rendering their vast data collections so as to formulate news patterns. Hans Gosling in the Netherlands is persuading us as to the joy of stats through his Gapminder sofware which casts a new light on world demographics, health and development of nations, with the aim of revolutionising sociology in a visually impactful way: Our goal is to replace devastating myths with a fact-based world view.37 It could be argued that through their very appeal and immediacy, data visualisations can simultaneously mask and reinforce the truths that they seeks to reveal. They can become mechanisms of reflexivity, in much the same way that online ranking systems algorithmically manipulate aggregated user generated or other publicly available content to reconstitute cultural value. As a basic example, the ASBOrometer might keep a neighbourhood in social deprivation by deterring potentially more civilising residents. Or the Tomatometer, an aggregative film ranking system, might dictate which films are watched and appreciated, consigning others to invisibility. Or Artfacts.net could arbitrate which artist heroes (sic) are worthy of attention through a quick glance at their Value Artist Ranking System, and thereby alleviate us of the sublime horror afforded by complexity, choice and contingency: Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer variety of contemporary art production? Personally, this is something we have never felt comfortable with, particularly the fact that great art is almost always discovered by accident.38 We are rapidly moving into the fourth order of order, to follow Weinbergers model, with lists of lists, catalogues of catalogues, images of images of images, systems of systems, or a recursive melange of all of these. Through successive phases of expansion and contraction, data moves from the contingent community to the megacorp of sociality, and back through the individual. Sharing information contains the double gesture of proprietorial enclosure. Or affective ringfencing: Beyond simple subjectification through lists of films and books and music and brands and other likes, we map out our being, cookie-cutter like, across fields of data that, although in the public domain, nevertheless feel uniquely constitutive of us. In order to feel uniquely subjective, the data, or its combination needs to be increasingly rare.
36. Cultural analytics has been developed by Manovich under the Software Studies Initiative (www.softwarestudies.com) at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) 37. Hans Gosling, Gapminder: Unveiling the Beauty of Statistics for a Fact Based World View. - Gapminder.org, n.d., http://www.gapminder.org/. 38. Artfacts.Net - Artist Ranking - Introduction, n.d., http://www.artfacts.net/index.php/pageType/ranking.

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The Japanese phenomenon of otaku culture presents a hyperbolic model of affective consumption and subjectification through information. In an extreme form of niche fandom, the otaku trade information on anything from manga to monsters, the military, or tropical fish. However trivial the information, its accuracy and exclusivity to the owner is prime in terms of elevating status. The information becomes fetishistic insofar as the actual object of the information becomes irrelevant. The rise of otaku culture since the 1970s has been attributed to Japans education system which trains children to memorise reams of context-less information for multiple-choice style examinations. It is also associated with a revival of traditional Japanese culture from the Edo period (1603-1867, coinciding with european romanticism), albeit more with the spirit of a theme park, influenced by postwar US imported subculture and high economic growth. Hiroshi Azuma suggests that the hyper Japanese themes and modes of expression created by otaku are imitations and distortions of American made material created through a desire to overturn the overwhelmingly inferior status of postwar Japan with respect to the United States and lay claim to this inferior status as itself the embodiment of superiority.39 By a further twist, the American cultural invasion has now been turned in a gesture of reverse cultural imperialism with the spread of otaku culture back to the United States. Lawrence Eng refers to the alienation of otaku, who are typically middle-class non-minorities, as a form of resistance against the effects of a hegemonic internal colonisation by a system that breeds conformity and rejects individualism. Eng writes: These youth are not excluded. Instead they are included in a regime they would rather not belong to, and as such, I refer to them as reluctant insiders.40 More recently the otaku have been redefined as a new type of person with an evolved vision, responsive to the cultural conditions of advanced consumerism, hyper-consumers who are often more informed about products than their creators.41 As information elites, the otaku create meaning and value from data, actively engaging with and drawing connections between otherwise ignored objects, achieving mastery through depth. Information value is actively generated by the otakus highly personalised, occultist economy which assigns greater value to information about an object than the object itself, enabling the possessor of rare information to become more of an otaku.

39. Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japans Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 13. 40. Lawrence. Eng, Otak-who? Technoculture, Youth, Consumption, and Resistance. American Representations of a Japanese Youth Subculture, 2002, 26. 41. Ibid., 12.

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Digiko of DiGi Charat embodies excessive use of chara-moe

The otaku create derivative works from established narratives and characters, enhancing and parodying their favoured aspects, which are largely eroticised. Although oriented around fiction, narrative consumption in otaku culture is fragmentary, focusing more on individual traits of characters or their settings. Chara-moe describes the affectivity, immersive interest, or desire created by characters in their consumers through their alluring traits. Moe elements are largely visible, such as cats ears, coloured hair or antennae hair, tails, and maid costumes, but they can include a particular way of speaking, personality traits, specific settings for characters, or stereotypical story lines. Products and characters are now strategically generated to enhance moe above and beyond any form of plot or message. TINAMI is an otaku search engine which allows users to search for characteristics of otaku illustrations, according to their favourite moe elements, as Azuma describes: Within the consumer behaviour of feeling moe for a specific character, along with the blind obsession, there is hidden a peculiarly cool, detached dimension one that takes apart the object into moe-elements and objectifies them within a database.42 In this respect, we could say that through moe the otaku are seeking to replicate a form of Stendhal syndrome, whereby they are emotionally overcome by the power and affectivity of specific features within a great number of works, characters and elements in which they are immersed. The otaku are also enacting a form of displaced narcissism or narcissism of recuperation, whereby it is the fragmented, dispersed information generated by the lost object that becomes re-consumed through affective subjectification in order to reclaim a lost identity or sense of self. The former image having been atomised (quite literally in
42. Azuma, Otaku, 53.

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the case of Japan), a single prominent element, such as the knee of Narcissus or cats ears for the otaku, miserable little pieces of the real, assume sublime agency. Sublime both in the emotive impact that the otaku can simultaneously produce and rationalise, and also thereby in its reflexivity. Carl Schmitt suggests that this form of subjective aesthetic reflexivity is the defining characteristic of romanticism which is committed to a metaphysical narcissism in the form of subjective occasionalism, through which God is usurped by the romantic ego. Both mundanity and conflict are poeticised through the romantic imagination, which sees everything as an occasion or opportunity for its romantic productivity.43 Moreover subjective occasionalism requires a liberal state as precondition for the private individual to be not only his own priest but also his own poet, his own philosopher, his own king, and his own master builder in the cathedral of personality.44 And now, through the fulfilment of our neo-liberal state, it is in the cathedral of personality that capital value is produced. As computational subjects we no longer have the luxury of still dark pools of external reflection but instead our every online action, transaction, and thought contributes to the velocity of the data streams which, as David Berry describes, are creating a new kind of public based on a reflexive aggregate which he calls riparian publicity. Berry writes: ... the riparian user is strangely connected, yet simultaneously disconnected, to the data streams that are running past at speeds which are difficult to keep up with. To be a member of the riparian public one must develop the ability to recognise patterns, to discern narratives, and to aggregate the data flows. Or to use cognitive support technologies and software to do so. The riparian citizen is continually watching the flow of data, or delegating the watching to a technical device or agent to do so on their behalf. 45 In a form of displaced, or reflexive narcissism, we risk the scenario wherein our fragmented selves are returned to us by identical computational processes. This places us in much the same position as Rosalind Krauss disappeared self-object of video art, held captive in a collapsed present of instant feedback. The difference being that we no longer see the apparatuses of capture, the algorithms which have dispensed with light reflective objects. The only dark pools on the internet are the so-called dark pools of liquidity wherein stock market trading is nondisplayed and algorithmically generated high-frequency trading (HFTs) exploits market movements in split-second transactions. Romanticism springs from a crisis between quantitative and qualitative values.46 Given that selfhood is now inextricably bound with neo-liberal capital production,47 there is call for radical form(s) of material engagement that are not merely reflexive systems of self43. Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism (MIT Press,, 1986), 17. 44. Ibid., 20. 45. Dr David M. Berry, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 144. 46. Sayre and Lwy, Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism, 58. 47. Michel Feher, Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital, Public Culture 21, no. 1 ( January 1, 2009): 2141.

Infomanticism

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capture and reproduction, that embrace contingency, without being transported by false notions of randomness or the aleatory, and that can embrace non-proprietorially with a sublime other. For this we need to tear ourselves away from the image, or rather the idea of Narcissus and perhaps instead turn to the cadavera nupta, the corpse bride.

Sculpture in the Expanded Field

ROSALIND KRAUSS

Toward the center of the field there is a slight mound, a swelling in the earth, which is the only warning given for the presence of the work. Closer to it, the large square face of the pit can be seen, as can the ends of the ladder that is needed to descend into the excavation. The work itself is thus entirely below grade: half atrium, half tunnel, the boundary between outside and in, a delicate structure of wooden posts and beams. The work, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, 1978, by Mary Miss, is of course a sculpture or, more precisely, an earthwork. Over the last ten years rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture: narrow corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert. Nothing, it would seem, could possibly give to such a motley of effort the right to lay claim to whatever one might mean by the category of sculpture. Unless, that is, the category can be made to become almost infinitely malleable. The critical operations that have accompanied postwar American art have largely worked in the service of this manipulation. In the hands of this criticism categories like sculpture and painting have been kneaded and stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity, a display of the way a cultural term can be extended to include just about anything. And though this pulling and stretching of a term such as sculpture is overtly performed in the name of vanguard aestheticsthe ideology of the newits covert message is that of historicism. The new is made comfortable by being made familiar, since it is seen as having gradually evolved from the forms of the past. Historicism works on the new and different to diminish newness and mitigate difference. It makes a place for change in our experience by evoking the model of evolution, so that the man who now is can be accepted as being different from the child he once was, by simultaneously being seenthrough the unseeable action of the telosas the same. And we are comforted by this perception of sameness, this strategy for reducing anything foreign in either time or space, to what we already know and are.

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Of course, with the passing of time these sweeping operations got a little harder to perform. As the 1960s began to lengthen into the 1970s and sculpture began to be piles of thread waste on the floor, or sawed redwood timbers rolled into the gallery, or tons of earth excavated from the desert, or stockades of logs surrounded by firepits, the word sculpture became harder to pronouncebut not really that much harder. The historian/critic simply performed a more extended sleight-of-hand and began to construct his genealogies out of the data of millenia rather than decades. Stonehenge, the Nazca lines, the Toltec ballcourts, Indian burial mounds-anything at all could be hauled into court to bear witness to this works connection to history and thereby to legitimize its status as sculpture. Of course Stonehenge and the Toltec ballcourts were just exactly not sculpture, and so their role as historicist precedent becomes somewhat suspect in this particular demonstration. But never mind. The trick can still be done by calling upon a variety of primitivizing work from the earlier part of the centuryBrancusis Endless Column will doto mediate between extreme past and present. But in doing all of this, the very term we had thought we were saving sculpturehas begun to be somewhat obscured. We had thought to use a universal category to authenticate a group of particulars, but the category has now been forced to cover such a heterogeneity that it is, itself, in danger of collapsing. And so we stare at the pit in the earth and think we both do and dont know what sculpture is. Yet I would submit that we know very well what sculpture is. And one of the things we know is that it is a historically bounded category and not a universal one. As is true of any other convention, sculpture has its own internal logic, its own set of rules, which, though they can be applied to a variety of situations, are not themselves open to very much change. The logic of sculpture, it would seem, is inseparable from the logic of the monument. By virtue of this logic a sculpture is a commemorative representation. It sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place. The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius is such a monument, set in the center of the Campidoglio to represent by its symbolical presence the relationship between ancient, Imperial Rome and the seat of government of modern, Renaissance Rome. Berninis statue of the Conversion of Constantine, placed at the foot of the Vatican stairway connecting the Basilica of St. Peter to the heart of the papacy is another such monument, a marker at a particular place for a specific meaning/event. Because they thus function in relation to the logic of representation and marking, sculptures are normally figurative and vertical, their pedestals an important part of the structure since they mediate between actual site and representational sign. There is nothing very mysterious about this logic; understood and inhabited, it was the source of a tremendous production of sculpture during centuries of Western art. But the convention is not immutable and there came a time when the logic began to fail. Late in the nineteenth century we witnessed the fading of the logic of

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the monument. It happened rather gradually. But two cases come to mind, both bearing the marks of their own transitional status. Rodins Gates of Hell and his statue of Balzac were both conceived as monuments. The first were commissioned in 1880 as the doors to a projected museum of decorative arts; the second was commissioned in 1891 as a memorial to literary genius to be set up at a specific site in Paris. The failure of these two works as monuments is signaled not only by the fact that multiple versions can be found in a variety of museums in various countries, while no version exists on the original sitesboth commissions having eventually collapsed. Their failure is also encoded onto the very surfaces of these works: the doors having been gouged away and anti-structurally encrusted to the point where they bear their inoperative condition on their face; the Balzac executed with such a degree of subjectivity that not even Rodin believed (as letters by him attest) that the work would ever be accepted. With these two sculptural projects, I would say, one crosses the threshold of the logic of the monument, entering the space of what could be called its negative conditiona kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place. Which is to say one enters modernism, since it is the modernist period of sculptural production that operates in relation to this loss of site, producing the monument as abstraction, the monument as pure marker or base, functionally placeless and largely self-referential. It is these two characteristics of modernist sculpture that declare its status, and therefore its meaning and function, as essentially nomadic. Through its fetishization of the base, the sculpture reaches downward to absorb the pedestal into itself and away from actual place; and through the representation of its own materials or the process of its construction, the sculpture depicts its own autonomy. Brancusis art is an extraordinary instance of the way this happens. The base becomes, in a work like the Cock, the morphological generator of the figurative part of the object; in the Caryatids and Endless Column, the sculpture is all base; while in Adam and Eve, the sculpture is in a reciprocal relation to its base. The base is thus defined as essentially transportable, the marker of the works homelessness integrated into the very fiber of the sculpture. And Brancusis interest in expressing parts of the body as fragments that tend toward radical abstractness also testifies to a loss of site, in this case the site of the rest of the body, the skeletals upport that would give to one of the bronze or marble heads a home. In being the negative condition of the monument, modernist sculpture had a kind of idealist space to explore, a domain cut off from the project of temporal and spatial representation, a vein that was rich and new and could for a while be profitably mined. But it was a limited vein and, having been opened in the early part of the century, it began by about 1950 to be exhausted. It began, that is, to be experienced more and more as pure negativity. At this point modernist sculpture appeared as a kind of black hole in the space of consciousness, something whose positive content was increasingly difficult to define, something that was possible to locate only in terms of what it was not. Sculpture is what you bump into when

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Robert Morris. Green Gallery Installation. 1964. Untitled (Mirrored Boxes). 1965.

you back up to see a painting, Barnett Newman said in the fifties. But it would probably be more accurate to say of the work that one found in the early sixties that sculpture had entered a categorical no-mans-land: it was what was on or in front of a building that was not the building, or what was in the landscape that was not the landscape. The purest examples that come to mind from the early 1960s are both by Robert Morris. One is the work exhibited in 1964 in the Green Galleryquasiarchitectural integers whose status as sculpture reduces almost completely to the simple determination that it is what is in the room that is not really the room; the other is the outdoor exhibition of the mirrored boxesforms which are distinct from the setting only because, though visually continuous with grass and trees, they are not in fact part of the landscape. In this sense sculpture had entered the full condition of its inverse logic and had become pure negativity: the combination of exclusions. Sculpture, it could be said, had ceased being a positivity, and was now the category that resulted from the addition of the not-landscape to the not-architecture. Diagrammatically expressed, the limit of modernist sculpture, the addition of the neither/nor, looks like this: not-landscape not-architecture

sculpture Now, if sculpture itself had become a kind of ontological absence, the combination of exclusions, the sum of the neither/nor, that does not mean that the terms themselves from which it was builtthe not-landscape and the not-

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architecturedid not have a certain interest. This is because these terms express a strict opposition between the built and the not-built, the cultural and the natural, between which the production of sculptural art appeared to be suspended. And what began to happen in the career of one sculptor after another, beginning at the end of the 1960s, is that attention began to focus on the outer limits of those terms of exclusion. For, if those terms are the expression of a logical opposition stated as

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: , :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: , ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::v:::::::::::::::::::::::::::: , , ...,-~, FormContent ,-"::,/ It's moving from I to IT , , ...,-, ._,,,_ ,~"::,,-" Scene8 ,-, |\.._,/:/_/|_...,,~"::,,--~" _,,~"::::,-" While Im writing this outline, , /::|_,,_,--,,,__,/:'/::::::::::::"~--,~"___,,-~":::::::,~"../|..,-, the idea , .._,,/ ,~":::::"~,,:::::::::,-"::,-~~-,,_:::::::::::::::::::__,,-"_,,/_|,/:: entangles with the process of writing .. ...,~":::,/::::::::::::::::"~-,-",_:"~~----~"::::::::::::::::::"::::::::::::::::,/ , ..,-, and the materiality of the signs. I loose the abstract image .|::::o:/:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::,-":|.|::|._ in my mind for the sake of the written text. , ./:::::/:::::::___::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::,,-"|:::|..|::|:|:| What is written here no longer corresponds exactly \::::::,,-~"|. |;/"~,,::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::,,_"_~~--,,-"-_/_,/--'~"..|:| ,/'| to the initial concept in my head. I lose myself , " . ..|:::,.|.|\. |\,.||. ./;\"~,,__:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|~"--~-,~~~--~"'~'_||:\ ../::/ " " , .|"\ in the words written down and the image I had vanishe ' .."-,:|. |"-';";;'-';\. \;;\|;;\|;"-"~-,_:::::::::::::::::::::"-,_:~---"-"_~--,,_:::::"-,:::|... /:::|..|::|..., through the process of writing. But now the ."\. |_;;;;;;;;;;\. \;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;"-,:::::::::::::::::::|"~-"-,,:::::::"'~~-,_-,,::"~'/::::|../::|..|: , present without the need of me being here. The , " , , , \.|.."-,;;;;;;;;'-';;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;\::::::::::::::::::"-,--,,_"'~-,,_::::::/::"~-"-,_:"~',_|,_|.|:: is autonomous material. It presents rather .. . ." ."~,;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;|::::::::::::::,~":::::"~,,::::"-,::|:::::::.:"~,-,,::::"-':: then represents. The moment you are " , " .., ... '\ ...,-~__"`"~-',_;;;____;;;;;;;;;;;;|:::::::::::::::|-,,::"~-,:::::"~-,,:"-, , \::::::::::::"~-"::::::::: reading this paragraph, its material is set agai , " , " .."-,,___"~--~"-~" "'~--,,,_"'___,,,~~-;;;;;|::::::::::::::/."~-,:"~,::::::::"-,:"-,:::::::::::::::::::::::: your personal background ."~-----~~"`"' .|;;;;;;;;"-,:::::;;;;;;;/::::::::::::,/."~,:"-,::::::,-"-,:"-,::::::::::::::::::::, and its material state , .. . ..|\"~,;;;;::::/|/\:;;,-":::::::::_,:\..."-,:"-,::|."-,:\:::::::::::::::::::: is transformed ..|:::::::::::/\"::,~":::::::,,~". , \:|.."-,:\:|. '\\-,:::::::::::::::: by the act of you reading it. " \::\. \."-,::::::::::::: You are now generating .,--,_\::::::/\::::,-":::::::,,-" ."-,.. .."-,,/:::::'--'::/:::::::,-"\\ .."~-,_. , \::\.."-,::::::::: a new image. \::\...."-,,:::: It becomes , |-,,___,,-"::::,-,:\...|| ."-,.. '~-,,___,,-,::\.. \::|..| ."~-,. \:\."~- a thought , ."-,-,\,:\. " \:| "-,. \:| that , " \,|. \| "~,,\|...solely "-,-,.. "~' ..| .."-,.exists , ..."-,.in , .."-,.you, , , ."-,.in "-,.the , , "-,.mind , \,...of .. \,the .. '\,beholder. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::

neuter axis and are designated by the solid arrows (see diagram); 2) there are two relationships of contradiction, expressed as involution, which are called schemas and are designated by the double arrows; and 3) there are two relationships of implication which are called deixes and are designated by the broken arrows. For a discussion of the Klein group, see Marc Barbut, On the Meaning of the Word Structure in Mathematics, in Michael Lane, ed., Introduction to Structuralism New York, Basic Books, 1970; for an application of the Piaget group, see A.-J. Greimas and F. Rastier, The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints, Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968),86105.

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Another way of saying this is that even though sculpture may be reduced to what is in the Klein group the neuter term of the not-landscape plus the notarchitecture, there is no reason not to imagine an opposite termone that would be both landscape and architecturewhich within this schema is called the complex. But to think the complex is to admit into the realm of art two terms that had formerly been prohibited from it: landscape and architectureterms that

, , ::::::::v:::::::::::::::::::::::::::: , , , , , , , , this outline, , es with the process of writing and the materiality of the signs. I loose the abstract image , , :|._ in my mind for the sake of the written text. , :|:|:| What is written here no longer corresponds exactly , | ,/'| to the initial concept in my head. I lose myself , ../::/ .|"\ in the words written down and the image I had vanishes :"-,:::|... /:::|..|::|..., through the process of writing. But now the words are here ' :"~'/::::|../::|..|: , present without the need of me being here. The paragraph , "-,_:"~',_|,_|.|:: is autonomous material. It presents rather , ,, , , ,-,,::::"-':: then represents. The moment you are , " :::::::"~-"::::::::: reading this paragraph, its material is set against :::::::::::::::: your personal background ::::::::::::::::, and its material state , , , :::::::::: is transformed by the act of you reading it. ou are now generating , new image. comes , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , :::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Proliferation of Masks

MANUEL NGEL

This is a case for an uttering mask. Of a subject impersonating another, of something speaking for something else. The unfolding that is present in the connector to, as in the passage from I to it. A mask as in mascara, stemming from a previous useetymology which denoted mockery and an ambiguous covert gesture. Later turned to prosopon: in front of a face; the moment marking the birth of a character. The mask, later Persona in Greek theatre, which literally means per sonare; to sound through. A device for amplifying sound. The relation to the stage is useful: persona is irreducibly linked to the mask that enables it to become a character. The mask amplifies the uttering and sets up the stage from which a person articulates a meaningful speech, a voice. The mask frames the quality of that voice, it marks the instance of enunciation.1 Personae become openings for the connections that are possible with the alibi of the mask. The mask is the device through which a subject impersonates (more aptly, personates) a character, a mode in which something speaks through something else. This relation can be reversed: The character personates the subject. The subject personates the character. The quality of the voice in question is the quality of a mediation. Mask is just a name or the figure that enables a subject to speak in a certain way, what helps it become a conceptual node, a sort of quasi-body in which thought is articulated. The mask is another name for the gap or the interval in which this instance of enunciation is possible. Here is the birth of the fictitious haunting of the grammatical persona, of which the kinds I and it are part of. A few unstable relations are arranged here: person as a word derives from persona, after a theatrical grasping for a stage of enunciation. This is made
1. The logic of this text follows only one linguistic suggestion, it only chases one among multiple possible paths; it could have argued for a dispersion based on the figure of hypostasis on the tradition of the Christian holy trinity, where god is made up by three different personae. The text is nevertheless inspired by an essay on the etymological set ups of the word design by Vilm Flusser and as such, recognises that etymologieseven false onestell us something about the networks of meaning in which they are embedded in. It is attentive to cracks in translations and indifferent towards their claim to veracity. See Vilm Flusser. About the Word Design. The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. (London: Reaktion Books. 1993). Hence, it takes more from the unstable movement of concepts.

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possible with the role of fiction articulating the becoming of a character or a subject. This process of this becoming can be renderable otherwise, through the figure of the conceptual persona.2 Here the possibilities of the I, the subject who speaks, are arranged through the function of the it. Masks will here be equivalent to the conceptual personae, as embodiments of thought and nodes for connections and invention: the impersonators through which thoughts speak. Elias Canetti has elaborated the concept of the acoustic mask in order to account for the non-immediate traits of his characters, as a writing device for recalling that which does not appear by the mere invocation of a name. In other words, the mask is the production of a thought that never grasps an essence but nevertheless constitutes the dispersal of an unstable character in all of its contradictory complexities. It is worth adding that he indifferently used the term both to describe the characters in his works but also to characterise his friends and relatives. The invention of acoustic masks becomes the production of excessive characters, of impossible personae that become strange figures of speech. The sprawling alterities in his book Ear Witness: Fifty Characters,3 to take an example, form a registry of names and personae, but also of acoustic masks. It elaborates an archive of potential instances of enunciation: The Archeocrat, The Name-licker, The Fame-tester, The Misspeaker, The Stature-explorer, The Invented Woman, The Bequeathed man. There is always a relation at play between the mask and conceptual personae. * Subjectivization then, is impossible without the mediation of fiction. It always accounts for an impossible identification, an interval or an in-between state. The concept of the acoustic mask becomes a broader figure of thought, since it speaks of fictions but also blurs the barriers of the limited territories where fiction is supposed to operate. Subjectivization is indivisible from the fictions that arrange its capacities. To investigate the passage from I to it4 from the perspective of the mask, it is necessary to look for the I as a voice of an author, of an author as an impersonator.5 But what is this I that is so elusive? Does the obfuscation of the mask not precisely problematise the passage from I to it / I to he? Camille the philosophy professor in Jean-Luc Godards film Forever Mozart adds another twist to this grammatical problem, noting a further analogous confusion:
2. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari have compiled a wide range of moving definitions for this concept: Conceptual personae are the philosophers heteronyms, and the philosophers name is the simple pseudonym of his personae. I am no longer myself but thoughts aptitude for finding itself and spreading across a plane that passes through me at several places. The philosopher is the idiosyncrasy of his conceptual personae. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari What is Philosophy? (Verso Books. 1994) 64. 3. Elias Canetti. Earwitness: Fifty Characters. (New York : Seabury Press, 1979) 4. Le passage de je au il, is a function of grammatical personation. See the discussion on Kafka and Literature in Maurice Blanchot. The Work of Fire. (Stanford University Press; Reprint edition) 21. From Ich to Er / Je to Il / I to He / (and finally) I to it. 5. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari investigate the function of the I in the invention of the conceptual persona: Conceptual personae are also the true agents of enunciation Who is I? It is always a third person Ibid., 65.

Proliferation of Masks

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In I think therefore I am, the I of I think is not the same as the I of I am. Why? The relation between body and spirit has yet to be shown. Between thought and existence The sensation of existence is not yet a me. Its an unreflected sensation. Its born within me, but without me.6 It can be argued that the main conceptual node in Descartes is the cogito, but the beautiful egalitarian gesture of translating his works from Latin to Frenchfrom the language of scholarly expertise to the modern vernacular of the massesmultiplies the subjects in question. This small fracture opens an unwarranted explosion of possibilities.7 If we follow this line of thought, I might proliferate as more than one Cartesian conceptual persona in the serendipitous mistake of translation. Here we find the minimum function of enunciation: the foundations of modern philosophy initiate the grammatical instance of enunciation of the I as a conceptual persona. A mask proves the consistency of an image of thought. I write from the position of something which is not entirely an I then. We now know that Descartes had to invent the I in order to test the consistency of his theory, but this inaugurated a theatre of reduplications. It is not a coincidence that the paradox and aporia of Descartes thought is the figure of the Cartesian theatre, which brings us back to the old arrangements of personification: to the realm of fiction. I is the precursor of that figure of impersonation that is the author; it makes its point of enunciation coherent, it sets up the consistency of this stage of articulation. We should look for it in the problem in the author (the I who speaks): does the author existpreciselyas a conceptual persona? Roland Barthes anti-conceptual personae par excellenceif only because it is diametrically opposed to his other heteronyms, We the mother and the reader? (These fantastic excessive characters and acoustic masks). I as an autonomous author is the Cartesian conceptual persona that Roland Barthes secretly wants to bury;8 the unity of the enunciative function that wants to keep a stance which allows no disruptions, no further proliferation of masks. Barthes seems to cancel this necromancy when, in the famous finishing lines of The Death of the Author, he states: We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.9
6. Jean-Luc Godard. Forever Mozart. 1996. 7. See the first part of Conceptual Personae by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari for an interesting detour of the I and the role of the function of the idiot in Cartesian thought. Ibid., 62. 8. Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a subject, not a person, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language hold together, suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it. Roland Barthes. The Death of the Author. Image Music Text. (Fontana Press; Reissue edition 1993). 145. 9. It is interesting to note that the death of the author comes with the birth of the reader: a maternal metaphor is always enacted. It is also interesting to note the function of myth, which seems to need here a reversal and not a removal. Roland Barthes. The Death of the Author. Image Music Text. 1993 (reissue).

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The reader is clearly Barthes paradigmatic conceptual personathe thinkers heteronym. It is this reader, as opposed to the author that weights the case for the future of writing. Barthes takes care to deny the fact that the antiphrases of the author dupe and trick us into something else; the reader has become a sort of forbidden impersonator of writing itself. I speaks for something else, as if it were not evidently just language speaking, as if it were not just that it in its purest impersonal mode. Here we can grasp the blocking of a mediation in the passage from I to it. We, language, the reader become the figures that replace it: The Death of the Author installs a series of conceptual personae but, in the same gesture, it closes the possibility of the dead author being an I, reserving for her the stability of the it. Here lies its aporia. The question that still haunts us will be: What if that it is still is able to speakand to further complicate the mattersprecisely as an author?. The figure of the mask, the fiction of another persona is what would allow for the possibility of a dead I that is both an author and an it. The unfolding in the connector to. The dead author speaking. Paradoxically and interestingly, this sort of non-passage, was articulated, eighty-six years earlier than Barthes, in a gesture by a minor figure of an unlikely literary province in a collusion of I and it. Brs Cubas, in his posthumous memoirs, starts the tale of his own death in The Authors demise: For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in first place. Since common usage would call for beginning with birth, two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly a writer who is dead but a dead man who is a writer, for whom the grave was a second cradle; the second is that the writing would be more distinctive and novel in that way. [...]10 Machado de Assis wrote a novel from the perspective of a dead authoran antiBarthes that completely distorts the figure of the I, enabling a conceptual persona that is able to speak precisely from this interval, from the aporia of this passage (turning back to etymologies, aporia is equivalent to non-passage a-poros).11 One might ask, just a step further from the point where Barthes and his followers come to a halt: What is the figure of the dead author?, How can a dead writer speak? Here the figure of impersonation, of sounding, might amplify that death, and mediate the it and the I; in Brs Cubas dead author, I and it become ambiguous secret sharers. If it is possible to rupture the passage, it is only by articulating another that seems odd yet strangely jollier: the potential conceptual persona of the dead author with all the unpredictable gesticulations of a new acoustic mask. Even if there is no one speaking here, the generic utterance of this excessive character can still bring a singular force of enunciation from the grave.
10. Joaquim Mara Machado de Assis. The Posthumous memoirs of Brs Cubas. (Oxford University Press 1997) 7. First published in Brazil as Memrias Pstumas de Brs Cubas. 1881. (Italics are mine). 11. For a discussion on the difficulties of translating the word aporia See Sarah Kofman. Beyond Aporia? Poststructuralist Classics. (Routledge 1988).

Sharon Kahanoff (with Dan Siney). Grip Art 1. 2012. (Digital c-print)

Photograph with Eight Descriptions

EMILY ROSAMOND 1. A node, a compound object, a jumble of curls and jitters. A pile of grips, quips and sutures. A prop from a film setor a power-set of props. A film set gone wild. 101 twists and turns on the way to facing a camera. (On the way to facing something else.) * (hot-dog, blanket or beer) (parakeet, dead-world, doldrum) (peep-holes and eyelets) * An image-anchor that magnetizes words. arbor * A scratchy sweater for the anchor. * A spiky care-cloud, generosity brambles. Futurity folded neatly into joints. Synchronized coughing. *

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2. A perceptual technology prefiguring a density of qualities yet to be imagined. Draping-ness + dragging-ness + spreading-ness + tautness + fanning-ness + hailing-ness + propping-ness + rolling-ness + cupping-ness... equals what? Their airy density, their spindly legs, prefigure a covalence of feeling (perhaps a phantasm, score or lens) yet to come. * Umbrella crosses sides, joins ranks with grips and levers. It has evening to spill good thing Teacup will catch it. 3. (Study for a Praxis-o-Meter) Dear Panes and Jabs of Infinite, Ineffable Usefulness: Im feeling down. Un-forgiven, unheard, diminished. Im not sure where to turn my head. Im not sure what to offer whom. Im not sure which sides of mewhich apertures for actionto bring out at any given moment. (The parcels of professional and personal, intimate and distant, crying and fibrous.) Im not sure what Ive done. Im not sure Ive done anything. Im not sure what to do. Except to love and care for things and people. But thats so hard. Because love is condemned to construct its own objects. (tortoise shell apples) Im not sure Ive sutured the streams. I hope you dont mind me talking to you like this. I figured well, theres no one else around, and I can enter the folds of that space just fine, and theres a green screen, and youre certainly not going anywhere. Youre just kind of therevoil!yet you keep waiting. Youve got time to kill (probably with a screen saver or machete)the kind of time that sits between that of the film still and that of the moving image. Striking a nonchalant or an effervescent pose till you begin to wince a little, imperceptibly. (The stiff joints of a still-life.) The tempos of your affects clamp up and rebuild more slowly, in an altogether different rhythm. A perfectly indifferent witness, you have nonetheless (according to a magical, incantatory logic) prefigured everything I now confess.

Photograph with Eight Descriptions

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* * * (Why are you trying so hard?) 3a). We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. William James1 wit. You test the literacy of our conjunctive sentiments, the sharpness of our qualitative

4. (rabbit, broccoli) Everything (Everything under an umbrellas sun) 5. what I want to do is give you an ever-so-gentle shake take you by the arms and jostle coloured-pencil rainbows, horizons and Hokusai waves from your atmospheres tonal force-fields I want to say to you (exactly as long as youre in your own limelight) youve been sidelined so long! observing yourself taking such measured, reflexive steps slowing down your impulses so much, they are like tepid bathwater with a bit of butter and dirt. Wont you dance with me?

1.

William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2001), 29.

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6. A List of Things that it Is, Is, Is A diagram of different means of gripping, grazing, holding A pair of smoke signals diverted through various objects A heap rehearsing for Mary Poppins A voice and a rib cage for use-value An atonal symphony of angles Nude Descending a Flat Plane A set in freezer-burned stop motion A Musical Score by Which to Gather the Impulse to Live. A lens through which futurity can be focused. Practicing the ancient art of interpreting the score (always an immensely creative act), the ethical dimensions of being swim out, find themselves alwaysalready out there in the world... If it Were an Album Cover, A List of Things the Album Could Be Called Youll Have to Wait Till I Know what I Feel Quasi-Professional Meltdown Table 19 We Ought to be Out Watching the Stars 7. All of a sudden, it shatters. as if all of the objects it gathered were embedded in a cracking mirror the shards gather gravity swarming in front of a gluttonous green screen. The green screen flickers with all sorts of things. jellyfish canaletto paintings tripe moon landings couples silhouetted on sunsets psychedelia cold war footage cold cuts close-ups of flowers ads for toasters Martha Rosler videos

Photograph with Eight Descriptions

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blockbuster film scenes where vast portions of the earth sink into a vortex a short clip of a hand plugging a plug into the wall mitosis spongebob squarepants. * All of a sudden, it melts. its taut levers quaver its colours bleed toward a soupy pea-green it thickens, and gathers hands like dough kneading, rolling, pinching * what nautical poles what magnetism can be found at the edges! 8. If I were a fly, or an image, or a pole-vaulting sea bass, Id pack my bags and trundle along some kind of smarmy orbit, cutting the swarm of things across my star-studded senses. Wrapping rods and cones, platelets and pixels in flags, feathers and Vancouver-themed coffee mugs. And vice versa. * One day, images become bugs. Flat but folded. Flapping up the aftermath. Hey! they say. Look at this!

The Becoming Subject

A quiet character an I turning into an it. The becoming subject punctuates its discourse with prolonged, unbearable moments of silence that make it impossible to keep a grasp on what was stated before or to anticpate what will follow. With a transient biography and lost origins, The becoming subject tries to leave a subjective trace, but she is constantly survived by language. Nothing that she owns belongs to her. The character at least her subjectivityceases to exist once it emerges. She is in a constant state of restlessness, torn between her desire to stand still and the inevitable moves she undertakes to demonstrate her point. Yet once in a while she dozes fitfully. The character is never reliable; her overt generosity is undermined by her lack of consistence. Any manifestation of her persona irremediably endangers her subjectivity, whenever she speaks (or writes), she suddenly transforms into an object. She becomes so much of a character that she turns into matter.
The FaTher Nowhere1 It is merely to show you that one is born to life in many forms, in many shapes, as tree, or as stone, as water, as butterfly, or as woman. So one may also be born a character in a play The M anager (with feigned comic dismay) So you and these other friends of yours have been born characters? Exactly, and alive as you see! The FaTher

M anager and acTors burst out laughing.

So her constant effort is aimlessly conveyed in maintaining an autonomous subjectivity against the objectifying power of external elements. And yet, through

Tuesday 26 September Dear Dietrich Dear Kay, Do you still hear my voice, do you still hear my laughing? Im still laughing, went swimming this morning, the sea was cold and the air crisp. When I went into the water I could feel every single vein, every hair, the tips of my fingers, ...My skin felt as if it was separate from my body, every layer and element aware of its own constitution and quality. It was a sensation of consciousness and I suddenly understood, in all its complexity, the place and course of things. I t appeared as an image that I knew inside out. But the sensation didnt last for long, the image faded and I couldnt reconstruct it. I gave in to the cold and I drifted with the waves east wards. My senses went numb. I was part of the water and somehow lost awareness of myself. It made me think of you Dietrich von Esterhazy. So maybe Im addressing this letter to you? Maybe I even sent it to you. The way we both have this memory of what life should be about. Anyhow when I was young, I could feel myself and I could see an image of myself projected in front of me. You can dream yourself and you have the ability to live that dream, to make it real. You never dreamt Dietrich, you just expected. And as life proceeds the every-day routine takes over and you surrender. The image crumbles, your senses fade and you become part of the environment. You become society. With every conversation you share and give up your own view, your thoughts become common good. You Dietrich formed the image Im running from. Now I dont need to run any longar. I dont need to play anymore. The image is destroyed by coming to you. You told me it is the only sincere letter you wrote, though it wasnt real. I preved that to you. You are not better than the image you make for yourself and you never made one. I idealised the letters written to me they were for me abstract images with no corresponding bodies. I could project onto them, I could create their figure. But I wasnt able to distinguish their voice from my own. I guess I will never send you this letter because there is no point in sharing any longer with you or with anybody else. I might chango the beginning and write it to myself as if to construct my own persona or to lose myself while in the meantime, become myself.

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language and speech, her 'I' is turning into 'it', she becomes an 'it', an objects in the midst of other objects. If The becoming subject's main goal is to achieve and maintain her subjectivity, and if any relation with other objects or other characters prevent this from happening, the only possible solution for her is to stand still, as immobile as possible. And so she does. She spends most of the time avoiding any movement or contact with anything or anyone
MOMENTUM His room in the slum. This is perhaps naive; distortion occurs in the moment as in mernory; the mind is quick the feelings quicker; but I want the moment live in its dishonesty, minimal affectation: correction in reflection. There is a moment in the life of a man consequently, in the life of men when everything is completed, the books written, the universe silent, beings at rest. There is left only the task of announcing it: this is easy. But as this supplementary word threatens to upset the equilibrium and where to tind the force to say it? Where to tind another place for it?it is not pronounced and the task remains untinished. One writes only what I have just written, tinally that is not written either.

More: constriction of life paralyses of vitality the garotte of the slum, the garret of the mind.

okay here we go i dont want to whisper this i want to hear my natural speaking voice the way it really sounds also i can see myself here in a full-length mirror as i speak theres another mirror too so that i cant really lose sight of myself as i sit down on my bed or lie down or walk around i want to say this is as it comes without premeditation because i want to say it before i lose it or not so much say it as tell it tell it to myself so ill have it down so that i can come back to it again and recapture it so the speed of the tape is my form keep talking as the tape records non stop tuesday it wasnt merely that i had to go up there to find a place for us to live in the summer i had been in a condition of somnolence stupor perhaps more like it going to bed late at night three or four getting ten hours sleep waking up toward noon or past one oclock sometimes and i wanted to break that i got to the bus station no time to buy any thing to bring along to eat just beckett i got on the bus only one other passenger an old lady uneventful through the tunnel the view of the sky line down the turnpike through new jersey some other city newark

Tunnel-skyline: N. Y.s Tight rectumtangles.

else. However, when interrogated or constrained by circumstances, forced to interactto move, to take a positionher solution is to constantly reinvent the rules of the garue. If language and speech define and transform everything into a well-defined, recognizable object, The becoming subject fights back by persistently

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reinventing terminologies, names and expressions, in the attempt to resist and battle against any univocal defining power of language.
The FaTher (irritated) The illusion For Heavens sake, dont say illusion. Please dont use that word, which is particularly painful for us. The M anager (astounded)

And why, if you please?

The FaTher Its painful, cruel, really cruel; and you ought to understand that. The M anager But why? What ought we to say then? The illusion, I tell you, sir, which weve got to create for the audience... The FaTher If your reality can change from one day to another... The M anager But everyone knows it can change. It is always changing, the same as anyone elses The FaTher (with a cry) No, sir, not ours! Look here! That is the very difference! Our reality doesnt change: it cant change! It cant be other than what it is, because it is already fixed for ever. Its terrible. Ours is an immutable reality which should make you shudder when you approach us if you are really conscious of the fact that your reality is a mere transitory and fleeting illusion, taking this form today and tomorrow, according to the conditions, according to your will, your sentiments, which in turn are controlled by an intellect that shows how?... Illusions of reality represented in this fatuous comedy of life that never ends, nor can ever end! Because if tomorrow it were to end... then why, all would be finished.

At bottom he was an enigma to himself as to everyone else. Only he was capable of scrambling codes and genders with a strange, impersonal elegance. Mince, thin, slim, was his favorite word as petitu or menu was Deleuzes (as when he declared: I arn not sick, I simply have a petite health). He found infra-mince even better as a concept. He was convinced that it took us to another space, from the second to the third dimension. He, the thin man, the hunger artist, el hombre invisible. His best performances were disappearing acts. And yet he always left traces of a sort.

FRANCESCO PEDRAGLIO, ANCA RUJOIU AND PIETERNEL VERMOORTEL