Panel abstract
Imploded action, dissonant affects
Towards a new politics of non-relationality?
Chair: Amanda Beech
Speakers: Amanda Beech, Mikko Canini, Bridget Crone, Pil and Galia Kollectiv,
Matthew Poole
Imploded action dissonant affects, is a discussion panel addressing the relation or
non-relation between space, image and sound as well as our expectations for art’s
effective and affective potential. Central to the discussion is the question of what
would happen if we were to radically rethink the relationship between image and
meaning that is central to the way that we communicate about art, ideas … politics.
How would we communicate, organize ourselves, be in common?
Both Lenin’s and Althusser’s materialist anti-humanism attempted to think through a
politics of society with a strong comprehension of an inorganic world. More recently
this legacy has been worked through the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Quentin
Meillassoux and Ray Brassier, where in particular, the idea that the world is ‘for us’ is
understood as the tired fantasy of an anthropocentric humanism, that fails to move
beyond the status quo of neo-Kantian philosophy, and fixes itself within the
problematic mythology that self-understanding produces emancipation. In opposition
to this, this panel takes this anti-humanism as its ground to ask how speculative
realisms may be in fact proposed by the image and what conception of the social this
operation of the image produces now. This panel includes a series of papers by
practicing artists and curators of art, that respond to these issues by working through a
range of thought that combines continental and analytical traditions. Each thinks
through the conditions of the relation or non-relation between space, image and sound
as well as what might be our expectations for art’s effective and affective potential.
To begin this panel understands that the tradition of relations prevalent to human
centred thought must be interrogated. This is centrally because art has, and still often
does, predicate its ability to generate meaning in its production of causal relations
between image, sound, space, people and objects. Crucially, this pulling together of
elements is as much an issue for art that sees its work as the construction of meaning
as it is for an art that identifies its task to radically disassemble these relations. This is
centrally because both approaches rely upon an understanding that some things have
natural relations that are always already connected, despite the claim that no such
thing exists in the first place.
This paradox has caused various problems for art, and even a crisis of art’s politics. If
these practices only standardize meaning then how can art fulfill its traditional twofold task of producing a critical culture of difference, as well as being the lynchpin by
which we understand and define community?
If we are to pursue a rethinking of action, affect and dissonance then these
organisations of dissonance as well as action need to be understood as limited, but this
leaves further questions for urgent attention: Would a radical re-thinking of the
relation between image and meaning actually prevent the production of communities
of common languages that seem necessary for politics? In other words, how can we
have a collective “politics” or political action without a shared language from which
to express and organize ourselves? What would a radical rethinking of meaning in the
grounds of non-relation, mean for art? And how, if at all, would this lead us to redraw
the thought of democracy that we have standardized both in art and politics?
Paper Abstracts
Amanda Beech
What would we mean by realism?
This paper intends to examine a few key problems of thinking through the
correspondence between the nature of the image, that is the image as part of an
unreconstructed world of the given, and its politics. I approach this problem first from
two sides that seem at first glance to be diametrically opposed in that they describe
two natures of the image; that of autonomy and that of affect. These are opposed in as
much as relativity is despised by autonomy and enjoyed by affect, and mastery is
denied by affect as much as it is crafted in autonomy. Here, I seek to prove that both
approaches to the image share certain traits that condemn the image to idealisms that
are incapable of the realism they seek to articulate as their centre. The result of this
commonality is a conflation of autonomy and affect, and the collapsing of the realms
of a mastery over the image and our being with it. This state of heteronomy leaves us
in a radical zone of cause without reason that unbinds us from a human prepossession
of the image, and unties us from understanding the image as form of knowledge
production. Naturally, this puts us in a difficult position for any dealings with the
image, yet I will argue that it is this that now centralises any discussion of it. This
paper seeks to take up this condition of being without cause, to head towards a realism
of the image where we can comprehend a politics; that is, the image is capable of
producing meaning through the condition of its heteronomy.
Mikko Canini
Montage Space
The critical value of the moving image in visual art is traditionally understood to be
its engagement with the temporal. This privileging of time is no doubt the result of a
longstanding modernist code in which the representation of time indexes the radical,
existentially authentic subject. This short paper suggests that there is another model,
one taken from the field of experimental filmmaking, which has the capacity to think
the social spatially: montage. The potential critical value of montage is twofold: first,
in its spatial representation it is atemporal, and second, it makes place for the nonsubjective. On the first point it should be noted that this a-temporality is not
equivalent to the infinite, but a result of the radical dimension of its acephalus nature
that prevents the identification of a beginning or end. This denial of a straightforward
accounting of causation is, in part, what produces montage's animating non-subjective
force: tension. While the tension produced by montage is always specific to that
montage, exists through the montage, and would evaporate if the elements of the
montage were severed, this tension is at the same time the materialization of an
inconsistency that the montage simply enacts. Insofar as montage is persistent tension,
it owes its existence to the relationship between joined elements, and as such, its body
cannot be defined except as a relation: having no clear boundaries, it eludes a grasp
that would enclose or release it.
Bridget Crone
Image and appearance – fear, speed, force
This paper takes as its starting point the idea of “image” as marked by the speed of its
dissemination, its velocity and pervasive effects: the idea of “image” not marked by
representation or by its representative capacities. Drawing on Brian Massumi’s
demonstration of “affective modulation” in relation to the terror alert system in the
US, I will look at the way in which the image can be a tool for affective control
particular in the invocation (and modulation) of scales of fear.
Underpinning this discussion is a necessary severance of the image from its
representative tradition – its accepted link to a subject, an object, a sign, a thing –
arguing instead that the image has a new “status”, a status which is distinguished by a
new spatio-temporal order: that of digital networks’ speed of dissemination, global
movement etc.. However, suggesting that rather than represent us, our collectivity, our
“being in common”, the image can travel at great speeds and can organize activity
around itself – as the concept of “affective modulation” would suggest – opens up a
larger question of action and agency. Principally, the question – are we bound to the
image only through the exertion of its affect or is there any other future possibilities
for the image?
Pil and Galia Kollectiv
Towards an Anti-Humanist Critique, or How to Negotiate with Vampires
In Capital, Marx asks how the length of the working day can be determined, and on
what grounds the labourer and the capitalist can argue their conflicting positions. The
capitalist’s answer to the question, continues Marx, is decisively straightforward.
Capital relies on the creation of surplus value, or labour. Since labour is a type of
commodity, free time is viewed as a simple act of theft. But what claim can the
labourer make to equal the heartless capitalist’s? For Marx this claim cannot be
grounded in a different, humanist, discourse. The rationale of capital should not be
countered by relying on a moral notion of ‘natural’ or ‘inalienable’ rights. The appeal
to the respectable and charitable side of bourgeois culture is insufficient in resisting
the rational, albeit ruthless, capitalist. Marx’s solution has given rise to an anti
humanist tradition in 20th century philosophy, from Arendt to Althusser. But his
proposal to adopt the discourse of the Capitalist to negotiate the limit of the working
day, points the way towards an anti-humanist critique of the kind that art has been
unable to take up from its assumed position of externality to the system within which
it operates.
Matthew Poole
The Violence of Loyalty and the Instrumentalisation of Justice in Curatorial
Modalities
This paper begins by exploring the unusual powerful friendship of the two main
protagonists of the 2008 Swedish horror film, “Let the Right One In” (Dir. Tomas
Alfredson, EFTI). The story explores the complexities of the tender relationship
between Oskar, an unexceptional bullied 12 year old boy, and Eli an enigmatic 200
year old vampire who inhabits the body of young girl of the same age. As the plot
unfolds we see developing a mutual dependency growing between the characters,
ending in the pact of their friendship and their mutual salvation cemented through
extreme physical violence.
This paper develops its argument through Richard Rorty’s, “Justice as a Larger
Loyalty”, (Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2007), in
which he proposes the dissolution of universal moral obligations towards all members
of our species in favour of a model of trust between ourselves and others that is built
on specific contingent relations, the specificity of their needs and desires, and the
mutual fulfilment of the responsibility of these ties of loyalty.
These examples are used to provoke reconsideration of the relationship between art
works and curatorial practice; two modes of being within the realm of art that are
proposed here as incommensurable yet mutually dependent. This paper will explore
the necessity of the force of violence that is created, and considering this force as the
lifeblood of and the very ontological status of ‘Art’, in the fulfilment of promises of
loyalty and the sharing and exchange of their mutual local needs.