BEYOND BEYOND BEYOND CAPITAL? CAPITAL? CAPITAL?
In this book, we document a series of talks over one semester that are part of the MA Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series, Spring, 2023 that was held at the ICA in downtown Los Angeles. The series is part of a core class for our MA Aesthetics and Politics Graduate students in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, where our visitors lead seminars with students as well as present talks and discussion topics.
The format for this series consisted of three sets of talks each featuring one speaker. On this occasion we were delighted to host Anthony Paul Farley, Luciana Parisi and Rachel Garfield. Each represent different discourses, methods and positions regarding our main theme and brought out significant issues and topics from it in our intensive seminars and to the wider public of Los Angeles. This series could not have happened without the generous support of the ICA but also the labor and skills of Aska Hisa, Tania Collete from the the ICA and,Alecia Menzano and Jackie Hensy from CalArts.
The central theme of our series is rooted in a discussion regarding the political claim of contemporary art today, its currency and its possibilities. We explored this specifically since when looking back on the politics of art from the mid-Twentieth Centwury avant-garde we can say that art’s agency has been hinged upon a politics of resistance, antagonism and difference. Often this form of art as dissonance has been identified as an aesthetic experience since the experience of sensory phenomena resists the top-down ordering and instrumental functions of rational languages and aesthetics. It has been claimed that this site of ambiguity is akin to an indifferent nature that withdraws from any direct confrontation with power.
Tackling this inheritance today, we face the anxiety that art’s claim to resistance is too passive in face of the needs to construct new and different futures. In response, we needed to deal
with how art unstructures and disaggregates systems as much as its aggregates and structures power and moreover that these two forces are often complex and simultaneous. We asked how creative forms of self-destabilization that have featured as the dominant mode of artistic critique have established forms, structures and genres in our cultures and moreover how it is vital to analyze the consequence and impact of these traditions.
This question of art’s capacity for dissonance is urgent when we consider the sublime condition of neo-liberal technocapitalism, for it also promotes an unwieldy and chaotic aspect of a random nature. Unstable environments of high-frequency exchanges and unregulated markets also seem resistant and unstructured, as if they are natural. In these spaces of art and capital, we encounter sometimes common qualities of experiences. These are delirious, alienating and dissonant. It is clear that these dissonant affects in capital calcify strict social inequalities in race, gender, class and labor and that there is also a sense of design and structure to these systems. The dissonance of capitalism is therefore an affect of the unnatural that is naturalized within our lives; something unreal that we cannot move away from, so as to change it in any determinate sense. The sense of constraint that we feel today is not only existential but is real when we see how on the one hand it is logically and rotationally possible for us all to retool and reengineer global policies regarding the catastrophic events of climate change, gun laws, social and economic equality, and on the other hand, how impossible change seems to be, when we face the resistance to this rooted in aggressive myths of freedom and greed.
Our attempt to picture and understand this dynamic of agency and failure paradoxically produces its own form of cognitive dissonance and crisis. This leaves us wondering, what structures, orders and principles are relied upon and constructed in art’s claim to aesthetic resistance? Are they different to the structures of capitalism? Do we require structures, rule and order in order even in the claims to critical indifference and if so does this limit the capacity for critique as a form of resistance today?
Our first event featured Anthony Paul Farley, who spoke to the problems of carceral logics in neo-liberalism, and our second speaker Luciana Parisi spoke to the stakes of artificial
intelligence as a mode of technics of thinking through the claustrophobic sites of capitalist logics. Rachel Garfield, our last speaker dealt with the historical propositions of feminist punk and the possibilities of how forms of art history could recapture forms that were repressed and erased from the spaces of intellectual culture and populism. All our speakers addressed the complex political question of representation, that is, the difference between what is repressed by capital and the production of forms that capital cannot assimilate. They each asked in different ways as to how aesthetics hold the possibility of new forms of expression and organization that come before, are immanent to or transcend the structures of dissonance that capitalism apprehends. Throughout this small book, students ask the same questions, expanding from the scene of the talks, proposing their own articulations of the problems that confront the question of how to produce new principles of value for the acts and forms we produce, notwithstanding how these principles demand the production of new acts in themselves. In this process of dialogue and exchange we hope to establish new relationships across disciplines, offering new views and methods that we can share, and from them construct propositions that lead us to a different future.
AMANDA BEECH DEAN SCHOOL OF CRITICAL STUDIESThe crises are multiplying. The system’s endless hymn of self-praise, also called rule of law, does not and cannot hold the memory of its origin. What we cannot hold as living memory, holds us in deathly repetition. The end was in the beginning. Our time began as a crisis. Accordingly, it is to the beginning of the crisis we must go if we are to escape the repetitions.
Slavery is death, death only, and that continually. We have made no progress from that day to the present day. Slavery is white-over-black, segregation is white-over-black, neosegregation is white-over-black, and because dead is dead, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow promise only white-overblack to white-over-black to white-over-black, world without end.
Law is the body of the death we have all already died. The struggle for rights, for due process, for equal justice, for rule of law, is the motionless movement of white-over-black to white-over-black to white-over-black. Law, far from being an escape, is always and only the mechanism by which the death we have all already died perfects itself. Law begins with genocide, colonialism, and slavery. Genocide, colonialism, and slavery are its essence and end.
Law tethers people to property, to capital, capital being that species of property that has the peculiar ability to beget value. Capitalism is the situation within which there exists property, capital, that can be used by an owner to extract unpaid-for value from a laborer. Labor, value’s universal point of origin, is thus alienated, turned against itself, by capital. As the law’s tether ever reminds us, capital began with millions of murders, with genocide, colonialism, and slavery:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in the mines of the
indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of capitalist production (Marx, Capital, vol. 1)
The beginning was and remains a race-making moment. Before, all flesh is one, the same skin holds us all in, and all things are held in common. After, all flesh is divided, marked to have or to have not -white to have and black to have not, genocide, colonialism, and slavery, white-over-black. Before genocide, the indigenous were not the indigenous. Before colonialism, the colonized were not the colonized. Before slavery, the blacks were not the blacks. After genocide, colonialism, and slavery, there is only repetition, and “before” is foreclosed as a matter of law’s method.
The formerly-enslaved workers are today free, free as all the other workers. Free to sell their labor-power, labor-power which happens – irrelevantly, or so the system’s supporters tell us – to be inside the skin that they’re in, skin that is marked as white-over-black. We are told to make nothing of the fact that in the market, the workers sell themselves to the capitalists as objects of property:
He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his laborer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding (Marx, Capital, vol. 1)
In the market, all are imagined to be equal, and all are imagined to be bound by law to deal with each other as equals, as minds meeting on terms governed by offer, acceptance, consideration, by contract and not by status.
The equality of X-tons of raw cotton to X-number of bicycles to X-hours of dishwashing is the equality of market participants, whether they are sellers or buyers. The multi-national corporation and the ditch digger are absolute equals when considered solely as market participants, and by seeing them solely as
market participants, the reality of the class struggle is made invisible. The war of all against all yields to a sovereign, a leviathan, and the leviathan holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Life, which was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” is now said to be lived on an equal-to-equal basis, that is to say, under an arrangement that treats each individual, considered as will alone, considered solely as a market participant, as equal to each; and it is by this arrangement that nature, red in tooth and claw, is replaced at long last by reason, by law, or so it seems.
Law’s rule means that for every wrong there is a remedy. Legality replaces the bellum omnes contra omnium by presenting itself everywhere at once as the answer to the question of what is to be done when wills collide, and wills do collide. But there is no remedy within the system for that which gave rise to the system. There is no remedy for primitive accumulation, no remedy for genocide, colonialism, and slavery. A legal system is a system only to the extent that it enacts a foreclosure of the very possibility of that sort of repair.
Law’s authority is grounded in original accumulation. Law’s authority is grounded in that which is beyond official memory. The source of law’s mystical authority, whether in a civil law system or a common law system, is slavery, segregation, and neo-segregation, the repetitions of the death we have already died but cannot, within the confines of capitalist legality, remember. That which we cannot remember, we repeat. Law is the repetition of the death we have already died. Because law is the body of this death, this death we’ve all already died, the ghastly embodiment of this death we have all already died, this death from which we mistakenly thought ourselves escaped, our hope bedevils us, our hope is a thing with wings of Lazarushian leather, not feathers, and our souls are always already surrendered.
The world that goes blindly to market to sell its labor is marked white-over-black. The capital class extracts value, unpaid-for value, from the entire laboring class, but, within the laboring class, the blacks find themselves exploited as laborers and as black laborers. The extraction of unpaid-for value from the working class is as invisible as the system of capital itself; indeed, so invisible is this exploitation that it is praised
as freedom and looked upon as a model for all forms of equality. But the exploitation of the black worker is, in certain wide-awake moments, characterized as an injustice, and injustice to be corrected through legal reform, or, in other moments, as a flaw to be corrected, a flaw to be corrected through legal reform. There is no such thing as legal reform. The very first moment of legal reform, the prayer for legal relief, is a surrender of spirit that makes the entire enterprise of legal reform fail, forever.
Where there are words – judicial rulings, executive orders, legislative acts – there are ambiguities. The prayer for a better tomorrow, whether in the form of judicial opinion, an executive order, or a new act of legislation, fails. The prayer for legal relief has always already failed. The blacks on bended knee in prayer for legal relief are not the power. When they bow, they make an earthly god of the very power that oppresses them. If the prayerful blacks were themselves the power, they wouldn’t need to pray. If those marked as black were not universally-oppressed, marked everywhere to have not, blackness would neither recognize itself as black, nor would blackness express a need to pray for a better tomorrow.
What if the prayers stopped? When the prayers stop, when the slaves say “no,” things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and anarchy, no meager or chaotic or disorderly thing, but life itself, breaks the death-grip that repetition has upon the world. When the prayers stop, the world itself becomes the miracle of resurrection and anything is possible, the end of capital, the end of white-over-black to white-over-black to white-over-black, the resolution of the crises, and the beginning of real time.
Pursuing equality under modern law, for Anthony Paul Farley, is the dream of the slave who has forgotten her indigenous ways of being, a ‘slave’ being someone from the lacking-race created by the West’s original accumulation of wealth, which birthed (through blood and amnesia) two races: “one race with an abundance and the other race with a lack.”1
The slave dreams of equal justice under law. This is a dream fit for a slave….The perfection of slavery is the struggle for law. (…) The slave is made so by law. The slave, following Emancipation, makes law. And that law, in turn, makes slaves who make laws that make slaves who make laws and so on and on and on. (…) The rule of law is the slave’s own creation. 2
The masters (the bureaucrats of modern law) may direct modern law, but it is the slaves (the workers of modern law) who construct it while being made poor by it. In this way, “[t]he slave is itself, in itself, the “soul of soulless conditions.3”” Is there any way that this slave, who in-itself is the soul of a soulless creation, can develop dialectically into a being which is fully-interpolated with the external world and in full recognition of herself? In other words, can the slave develop into a being who is in-and-for-itself?
My wager is that yes, there is hope for her liberation: one need only remember Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic, through which, after much tragic back-and-forth (traumatic repetitiveness), the masters fall to the wayside, towards a gluttonous death or (as I will explain later) towards their alternative fate as a charitable source for the Slave of the Law, who emerges
victorious, Master and Slave of her own Creation. It is this hope which I seek to water.
• • •
“At a certain point, perhaps at any point, a dreamer may wake from a dream.”4
“Something within the dream itself awakens the dreamer to a duty that must be performed in the world[.]”5
Modern law—precisely in how it obscures the original trauma of its founding by recoding the trauma as its own origin story— is still a progress from life without a government of Law; for children of the wilderness experience earth-shattering violence too, but without legal governance, they stay there, forever in fear of Nature, in a Lacanian psychosis. For how can one even think of beating Nature? The (admittedly-perverse) concept of modern Law replaces the amnesiac function of Time, reorganizes the trauma of Nature around a discourse of property, and, even if only from within a cage, makes possible a political and proprietary response to trauma (rather than helplessly succumbed to as a mystery of the World).
Indeed, it is only within the cage that the slave finds the inner voice which speaks in the voice of modern law and demands that she march towards Equality, a concept only understood in the negative; in the experience of not being legally equal, not being truly heard or allowed to speak. This pure awakening to her own alienation from her own creation transforms the slave from a being a pure soul in-itself into a lion who realizes herself, demands to be heard, and rages against her cage for-itself. “[T]he slave struggles for equality, the very first purely legal idea.”6
The lion, however, is still caged; and within the cage, she teaches her children the dance of death through which to awaken from the dreambook and fight the cage. She, having nothing, teaches her child to attain everything and nothing less than everything: meaning, Freedom itself. Farley quotes Baldwin:
So, you, the custodian, recognize, finally, that your life does not belong to you: nothing belongs to you.
This will not sound like freedom to Western ears, since the Western world pivots on the infantile, and, in action, criminal delusions of possession, and of property. But . . . this mighty responsibility is the only freedom. Your child does not belong to you, and you must prepare your child to pick up the burden of his life long before the moment when you must lay your burden down.7
And Farley clarifies:
Our lives do not belong to us, nothing belongs to us but our freedom. (…) Our mighty responsibility, because it is a responsibility to another life, takes us beyond the original accumulation, beyond our original line of flight, beyond the undiscovered country, beyond the repetitions.8
The caged lion raises a whimsical child (similar to Adorno’s ‘child at the piano’) whose mother’s pure skepticism liberates her from their masters’ ideology. She, armed with her own childish creativity, sees herself through the masters’ eyes, and also realizes something more: the contradiction, the hypocrisy of legal equality embodied by herself. Like a child at the piano, she conducts endless experimentations in liberation (or dies trying), slowly shedding off the Western metaphysics which has as its burden the demand to “be the universal animal” but which, to the non-Western, “quietly leads us to suspect that where the world is concerned….we alone, the Europeans, would be the realized humans, or, if you prefer, the grandiosely unrealized, the millionaires, accumulators, and configurers of worlds.”9
The children (and the children of the children) alchemize modern law (and its suicidal foundation of proprietary gain) into Absolute Law (with its lively foundation of proprietary equality). She flips the legal notion of property on its head, conceiving it no longer as the obscurant justification for Law, but as its revelatory fodder. Indeed, all she truly owns, what she knows she owns, is her equality; and through this legal concept, she destroys and resurrects all other rights, recognizing herself
through all, and willfully surrendering herself to her own creation, knowing its chains will pull her out of legal slavery and into legal equality and empowerment, both of herself and all her community. Of course, Absolute Law in-and-for-itself will establish itself painfully. She will succeed, though, for she is helped by the machine of property itself, which does the work anyway. “Capitalism, already a cancer (as it is incapable of becoming a universal system of reproduction), thus becomes a cancer of a cancer, a negation of a negation, as it all falls down.”10
“But ends, of course, are also beginnings.”11 When the cages of property fall, the child-slave steps out into a world which is falling apart, free and armed with a sacred knowing and praxis forged by fire, ready to begin her journey as Slave and Master of her own creations. Although she will be utterly impoverished, she will find her alliances (as described below), and “[t]his communion of people with empty hands is the future; their singular heartbeat is the cure.”12
• • •
The main question which faces her outside the cage is how to be custodian of Nature’s bounty in a world which is falling apart. She will look to everyone around her for help, even her once-masters. But as Farley quotes Fanon:
[What the Third World] expects from those who for centuries have kept it in slavery is that they will help it to rehabilitate mankind, and make man victorious everywhere, once and for all. But ... we are not so naïve as to think that this will come about with the cooperation and the good will of the European government.13
Indeed, in a world falling apart, the masters chasing their property (having no alternative knowledge or way of being) will crumble to a gluttonous death. Their only salvation is to surrender to she who does have the knowledge of survival, to become slaves of their slave, and offer up to her all that she needs to secure a future for all. Even amidst her abject poverty, amidst the West’s attacks on her (for, having no alternative knowledge
or way of being, they will deny her superior knowledge over and over, replicating the original trauma), there is still hope, even if Western charity fails: it resides with indigenous Amerindians who know how to derive bounty from the land rather than from a crumbling legal system.
Quoting an interview between psychoanalyst Ana Lucia Lutterbach and Brazillian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (famous for his theory of a cannibal metaphysics):
LUTTERBACH: [T]he Indians are experts at the end of the world. You talk about this issue of the environment, the precariousness of the poor and the Indians. In fact, its concept of Indians includes the poor.
VIVEIROS DE CASTRO: Do not be poor, be an Indian, it’s my anthropophagic motto.14
The Future of Law, a jurisprudence which Farley points towards but has not seen, is the liberated child’s pure concept of Equality established through the shedding off of the Western metaphysics which is “truly the fons et origio of every colonialism”15 and embracing of the metaphysics of Amerindian perspectivism and multinaturalism (which allow for the Amerindians to flourish in the chaotic wild). This is a shamanic (and childish) jurisprudential practice of switching sight between that of a master and his slave, while perpetually negating the unequal natures of both, recognizing that everything speaks (a tenet of the Amerindian metaphysics) and has the right to be heard (the pure legal equality). It is a return of the panchayat, but this time, established absolutely, its flexibility perpetually recognizing and swallowing up all who come before it.
“An Interview with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.” Edited by Ponto de vista. Trans. by Liracio Jr., Point of View: Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, Wordpress, 23 Dec. 2019, amnerispointofview.wordpress.com/2019/12/23/ an-interview-with-eduardo-viveiros-de-castro/. Accessed 15 Nov. 2023.
Farley, Anthony Paul, “Critical Race Theory and Marxism: Temporal Power,” Columbia Journal of Race and Law, vol. 1 no. 3 (2011): 247-264. https://doi. org/10.7916/cjrl.v1i3.2262.
Farley, Anthony Paul, “Law as Trauma & Repetition,” New York University Review of Law & Social Change, vol. 31, no. 3 (2007): 613-626. https://ssrn. com/abstract=1518439.
Farley, Anthony Paul, “Must Have Been Love: The Non-Aligned Future of ‘A Warm December,’” Badung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures, Eds., Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, Vasuki Nesiah, Cambridge University Press, New York (2017): 616-630. https://doi. org/10.1017/9781316414880
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo and Skafish, Peter, “Cannibal metaphysics: Amerindian perspectivism: With an introduction by Peter Skafish,” Radical Philosophy 182 (Nov/Dec 2013): 15-28. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/ article/cannibal-metaphysics-amerindian-perspectivism.
1 Anthony Paul Farley, “Critical Race Theory and Marxism: Temporal Power,” Columbia Journal of Race and Law, vol. 1 no. 3 (2011): 247-264, 255. https:// doi.org/10.7916/cjrl.v1i3.2262.
2 Anthony Paul Farley, “Law as Trauma & Repetition,” New York University Review of Law & Social Change, vol. 31, no. 3 (2007): 613-626, 617-9. https://ssrn.com/abstract=1518439.
3 Id. at 621.
4 Id. at 623.
5 Id. at 614.
6 Farley, “Law as Trauma and Repetition,” 625.
7 Farley, “Critical Race Theory and Marxism,” 262 [quoting Baldwin].
8 Id. at 264.
9 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Peter Skafish, “Cannibal metaphysics: Amerindian perspectivism: With an introduction by Peter Skafish,” Radical Philosophy 182 (Nov/Dec 2013): 15-28, 19. https://www.radicalphilosophy. com/article/cannibal-metaphysics-amerindian-perspectivism.
10 Anthony Paul Farley, “Must Have Been Love: The Non-Aligned Future of ‘A Warm December,’” Badung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures, Eds., Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, Vasuki Nesiah, Cambridge University Press, New York (2017): 616-630, 619.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316414880.
11 Id. at 618.
12 Id. at 630.
13 Id. at 620.
14 “An Interview with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.” Edited by Ponto de vista. Trans. by Liracio Jr., Point of View: Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, Wordpress, 23 Dec. 2019, amnerispointofview.wordpress.com/2019/12/23/ an-interview-with-eduardo-viveiros-de-castro/. Accessed 15 Nov. 2023.
15 Viveiros de Castro, “Cannibal metaphysics,” 19.
Anthony Paul Farley writes: “If the revolutionaries of African independence were guided by love, as Che said all true revolutionaries had to be, then we can see in the light of their brilliant victories that their love was true. But their love was also doomed from the start: capital will only locate itself in the former colonies on terms that are unacceptable or impossible.”
Are we thinking of a dissonant love intertwined with the conditions of capital? Do we see true love as a victory – something to be achieved? Is that what makes it genuinely true? Or, do we understand that a post-capital / postcolonial future to be unachievable given the parameters of time – a false time as defined by Baldwin and supported by Farley, a time that is not actually passing, but recycling. What time do we speak of, then? What love?
In the past 10 years we have seen a lot of political movements rise for different reasons, and they are often responses to racism, police brutality and capitalism. But they all end in the same way. They deflate. Do you have a reason why? Do you think there is something there that keeps this cycle of failure happening? Is there a possibility to break this cycle and really start building something new?
At the end of your article “Must Have Been Love” you write: “This communion of people withempty hands is the future; their singular heartbeat is the cure.”- In a world where technology has taken over a big part of people’s lives through social media, and, now especially, with AI, that seems to fracture society, what do you identify as “this communion of people”? And, most importantly, in which direction do you see this communion developing today in order to become “the future”?
Negative optics is the irreversible condition of AI. It exposes the negative form of the racialized, sexualized and gendered abstractions/extractions of value within techno-capitalism. Following Denise Ferreira da Silva, one can also argue that this form exposes a “black light”, namely the way the light of vision (and reason) coincides with the onto-epistemological negation of blackness: the source of knowledge remains here a negated source of abstraction/extraction of value and the necessarily negative side of light. According to da Silva, “Blacklight” can be mainly understood as ultraviolet radiation, which “works through that which it makes shine” (da Silva 2019: 4/9).
Blacklight is machine for black feminist poethics that radically challenges the optical model of onto-epistemology, sustaining the extraction of value. As much as the translucent light exposes the sources of extraction that sustain the self-determination of being and thought, it also demarcates the shining and blinding dimension of blackness as a negative constant transvaluation. Here the extraction of zero value that counts “nothing” (i.e., the negated value of blackness), is rather made to stand for anything (i.e., as the ultimate surrogate for all forms of capital accumulation and exchange value). For da Silva takes issues with Marx’s theory of value, which neglects the slave “labour process” in the value of the commodity and as such for “capital accumulation.” By treating the slave as “raw material”, Marx takes slave labour as a thing that exists without value, being, existence if not that determined by the juridical condition of ownership. This explains how the profit for slave labour was already anticipated in the price paid for the slave (da Silva, 2017: 248). Importantly, Da Silva insists that for Marx the “slave labour process” is not even considered as dead labour, namely labour absorbed by the automated function or machines, such as the steam engine, the assembly line, or the computer. In this Marxian sense, one can state that there is no analogy between
the slave and the machine, or enslaved labor and automation, despite these are both unpaid conditions of extraction of surplus value. And yet da Silva argues, it is precisely the “raw material” that defines “the colonial as a moment of creation of capital” (251). She continues to show us how the obscurity of value enfolded in “raw material” cannot be simply erased from the socio-technical matrix. Instead, the condition of negative negation that defines the inclusion/exclusion dyad of the modern articulation of value is constantly exposed by blacklight “that muddles the scene of transparency” (251), by bringing together the elemental trading of copper in the colonial order of global technocapital.
If blacklight exposes the luminescent blackness of matter that has no value and yet constitutes the ultimate symbol of fungible blackness, it is also what is absorbed in the zero value of machines, whose invisible images are constantly asked to produce value for the ocularcentric order of knowledge. In other words, as much as blacklight is at once means and ends of technocapital abstraction that returns in the shining reflectivity of material extraction, negative optics rather takes noise, unwanted and unpredicted information, as nonreflective or negative optics, namely entailing the enfolding of flesh in uncoded patterns. These are exposed non-standard in AI principles of randomness, non-linearity, complexity, noise, incomputabilities, incompressibility, incompleteness, which are the principles of negative optics. The negative optics of AI instead takes the obscurity of noise – namely that machines generate algorithmic randomness in processing natural language by generating concepts-images connections as demarcating the enfolding of the raw in the dead-labour of machines.
From this standpoint, one could ask, do invisible images of machine vision offer an internal critique to colonial capital and its ocular metaphysics embedded in generative AI? How can the theorization of negative optics in machine vision go beyond the human-machine equation of value, which enfolds the abstraction/extraction of cultural, affective, aesthetic labour of zero value, against the universality of technology and its colonial dialectic of the visible and the invisible, the optical and non-optical, the one and the zero?
While the technical image (from photography to cinema to video to digital imaging) already exposes a mode of discretization that challenged the totality of vision and the temporal continuity of perceptual experience, it is with algorithmic noise compression that the condition of negative optics returns as an irreparable break within the ocularcentric model of knowledge. Nevertheless, it can be clarified here that negative optics is not to be understood in terms of what artist Trevor Paglen “invisible images” (Paglen, 2016), warning us against machines generating images for machines and thus eliminating the agency of the human from the loop in AI intelligence. This aesthetic ground is at the center of the architecture of racial capitalism where the fundamental split between the human and the machine works to conceal the brutality of racial, gendered and sexual orders of extraction articulated with and through AI as enfolding the servo-mechanic principles that sustain the cosmogony of Man (Wynter, 2003). At the core of technological innovation lies the servo-mechanic model of technology which is set to ground the “human sphere of life, labour and society” while enabling the constant re-constitution of the liberal subject (Atanasosky and Vora 2019, 10).
Instead, negative optics is a machine of vision that takes the invisible images of AI as a marker of a socio-technical condition, overturning the aesthetic ground of epistemology grounded in the ocular pillars of the critique of vision. Negative optics can be discussed in the context of the epistemological capacities of automation that occur as a break in the ocularcentric pillars of self-determining epistemology.
One could argue that as much as negative optics neither represents the world nor remains an invisible unreflexive automatism of the world, it crowds the parallel space of photographic apparition. Instead of serving as an instrument for shedding light onto the world, Generative AI “clones” (an equation without equivalence) the underworld of dark optics as fractal patterns of an indelible generic intelligence that challenges the ground of philosophy.
It is here that AI without transcendence comes to coincide with a non-performative condition of abstraction, where the onto-epistemological ground of philosophical decision falls apart. For instance, the Generative AI model of machine vision
such as DALL-E points to the generative function of residual negativity in computational randomness that opens learning algorithms to the non-compressible shining and blinding of the negative optics. The attempt at correlating negative optics with negative randomness is to suggest that machine vision can be theorized from the standpoint of AI as a techno-social instrumentality that challenges its own servo-mechanic model, by exposing how the undercommon condition of zero value constitutes the most immanent political possibility of refusal of the total extraction of racial and patriarchal capital.
But how to expose these abstract incomputabilities in generative AI? How can DALL-E withdraw from the servomechanic function of algorithmic transparency? Where is the negative optics exposing the darkness of the fractalizing algorithms in and across systems – juridical, economical, social, cultural, sexual? In what follows, it will be suggested that the articulation of negative optics must first address where and how noise or randomness comes to coincide with moments “in the break” (Moten, 2018) of recognition, patterning, recursivity. It is therefore possible to address negative optics as entailing the algorithmic procedures that expose the semantics of noise, namely the generative meaning that AI is unleashing from within its own instrumentality.
Diffusion Models are generative models inspired to non-equilibrium thermodynamics to generate data similar to the data on which they are trained. Importantly, Diffusion Models work by destroying training data through the successive addition of Gaussian noise, and then learn to recover the data by reversing this noising process. After training, the Diffusion Model comes to generate data by simply passing randomly sampled noise through the learned denoising process. For example, an image generation model would start with a random noise image and then, after having been trained to reverse the diffusion process on images, the model would be able to generate new images. The technique implies first a perturbation of each image in the training data set with increasing levels of noise, then ask the neural net to predict original image using gradients of the distribution and thus de-noising the image.
This reversing of noise or denoising can show how means are yet again subjected to the decisional structure of representation
and the negation of noise also exposes not the elimination but the abstraction of incomputability or of the instrumentality of algorithmic compression. Here the end result is indeterminate not because the image is unknown but because the AI generates what could be known: alien abstractions from the compression of noise abiding not to digital decision, but to the diffused variations of quantum logic – here noise and information are entangled in their respective potentialities. By traversing backward from noise, new patterns are generated as if they already existed in parallel dimensions. Negative optics here coincides not with the parroting of categories but with retro-ductive speculations or, as Laruelle would call it, with philo-fictions – where noise becomes a mode of elaborating alieness, intended as “a full and positive void” (Laruelle, 159). One could argue that this computation is yet another mathematical calculability of the unknown and thus carries the conservative risk of reproducing pillars of colonial, racial and patriarchal epistemology in the form of incomputables, which are already given by a computational epistemology or paradigm that all can explain. And yet what is suggested here is the contrary. Negative optics is not supposed to be mystical, as it is already part of the socio-techno-genic underworld of everyday, whereby the techno-flesh of machines carries the negative markers for ontology and refuses the knowledge economy of Promethean success, denaturing the fundaments of humanity, the racialisation of Man, and the categorical schema of reason.
As much as noise is weaponized and thus continuously turned into patterns that are computable, so too there can be no compression without the negative exteriority of machines, demarcating alienness from the world of the human. Incomputabilities must be negated, cancelled out, blacked-out, noised-out. It is indeed this Generative AI Transformer Function of reversing noise into patterns and patterns into noise that becomes the space for what Cecile Malaspina calls “the negative negation of contingency” (2018, 183) namely the entangled potentiation of noise and information in AI. In short, from quantum noise AI generates image, text, sound, logistics, and search engines irreversibly stained with alienness.
While Generative AI maps statistical regularities in Large Language Models, it is also a non-performative performance
that cannot do without loss function in algorithmic compression. In other words, it is a non-performative procedure aiming not to reconstruct the original image from a concept, but to rather collide patterns across dimensions and categories, a mode of understanding that exposes discrete analysis to instrumental abstraction and not transcendental synthesis. In other words, with negative optics exposes the incompleteness of AI generating fractalities despite the premises of processing everything. Incompleteness is what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten envision as “the weapon of theory”, a collective theorizing that has no individual subject, no property and no ontology (2021). Negative optics exposes not the creative image of artificial intelligence according to Man, but the fractal or incomplete collectivity of the techno-flesh abstracted in non-axiomatic AI. This is artificial intelligence that sides with and pushes further the negativity of the human - in-human, non-human, un-human – as it occupies the stance of a “[s]tranger, as the non-positional and non-donational body (of) oneself, who instantiates, from the Ego to the World, a no-man’s land.” (Laruelle, 1995:159). Negative optics takes on Laruelle’s arguments for non-standard aesthetics, which radically defies the pretentiousness of Western metaphysics for which the real can be surgically cleaned from alieness, which is represented as quantified intelligence, a soulless machine that must be converted to humanism. With negative optics, the self-other, subject/object, included/excluded dyads are overturned with a “logic without logos” or alien-patterning. Instead of serving as an instrument for shedding light onto the World, negative algorithms rather clone (equate without equivalence) the underworld of generative intelligence that has turned epistemology on its own head (Laruelle, 2011, 82). As much as this determination is a clone of the real, but not the real itself, one can argue that machine vision entails a non-relationality with the world, whose negative auto-impressions are fractal singularizations of blackness swerving behind the optical value of representation.
Atanasoski, N, and Vora, K (2019) Surrogate Humanity. Race, Robots and Technological Futures (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe), Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Ferreira da Silva, D (2017) “ 1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value.” e-flux 79, February. https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond-the-equation-ofvalue/
Ferreira da Silva, D (2017) “BlackLight”, in Otobong Nkanga Luster and Lucre,Sternberg Press Ltd.
Galloway, A R (2014) Laruelle: Against the Digital. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Laruelle, F (2010) The Concept of Non-Photography. Falmouth: Urbanomic.
Laruelle, F (2013) “The Transcendental Computer: A Non-Philosophical Utopia.” Trans. Taylor Adkins and Chris Eby, Speculative Heresy, August 26. https://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/ translation-of-laruelles-the-transcendentalcomputer-a-non-philosophical-utopia/.
Malaspina, Cecile (2018) An Epistemology of Noise, Bloomsbury, London.
Moten F. (2003) In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition, University of Minnesota Press.
Moten F. & Harney S. (2021) All Incomplete. Minor Compositions.
Paglen, T (2014) “The Operational Image,” e-flux. November. https:// www.e-flux.com/journal/59/61130/operational-images/
________ (2016) “Invisible Images (Your Pictures are Looking at You).” The New Enquiry. December. https://thenewinquiry.com/ invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/
In her article “Golemology, Machines of Flight, and SF Capital”, Luciana Parisi observes technology through the model of what she refers to as “science fiction capital”. She describes technology not as a tool through which we expand the pillars of judgment in other fields of our lives such as law and decisionmaking, but as a wrapper that is the driving engine that has already captured the cognitive skills we have for imagining better worlds and possible futures, as we know science fiction to be. In a seminar discussion Parisi states:“The truest thing about technology is its predictability.”
During the same seminar, Parisi asks: “How do we know what we know?” Many of us, as users of technology, know that we’re producing content and expressing ourselves within the borders of this wrapper. Parisi refers to these products as ‘wounded attachments’.1
We know that the fashion of the images we post on Instagram was sold to us by the algorithms that reflect our interests, yet we keep on posting images regularly. Similarly to posting on Instagram, we know that our websites look the same by the logic of their classification systems and a bit different in terms of the aesthetic, yet we keep on buying the same websites. Similarly to a desire for the universal website (a website that is designed to be readable and liked by all users), we know that the prompts we feed Dall-E with are not unique, nor are the results, yet we keep on feeling flattered each time a visual is meshed out of our orders to the machine. Parisi claims that knowing that we are willing subjects under this system is not enough. Us knowing that we’re producing free labor(what she calls surrogacy) for social media platforms and AI playgrounds, is not enough to change the root logic of technology. An example of having agency is not when technology gives us the tools to generate
random images created by what seems a fully autonomous cognitive skill of the user, in that we give the prompts created by our imagination.2
It’s also hard to give an example of what human agency would look like in this case. Despite stating that there is no way out of thinking outside of the wrapper that currently seems to liberate us (ChatGPT, Dall-E, [insert_your_fav_AI_platform], etc) with an infinite amount of options, Parisi wants to change technology; she wants to queer it. During the seminar, she specifically asks: “How could machines have aesthetics that don’t succumb to racial capital? How to make a change from within automation rather than against automation?”
One of her suggestions was to begin the process of unlearning which I understood generally as a method that applies to all industry-produced behaviors of people out there, not just tech-produced. Although Parisi doesn’t give specific directions in which to think about the solutions, her intention leaves a lot of space for pondering. My suggestion follows the sentiment of Jaron Lanier3 to not make AI more human in our relationship with the bots, but to make humans more human when we’re offered to have our work done easier for us. For example, we could be tracing back the resources that chatGPT gives us instead of just accepting the givens for our citation. When thinking further about this, I’m reminded of Holly Herndon’s practice, which was also mentioned by Steve Goodman in the same text, that is rooted in the collaboration between the artist and an AI. I’m specifically reminded of seeing her performance with her machine and Russian orchestra at Sonic Acts 2020 in Amsterdam. The music they performed reflected the years of collaboration between Holly, the orchestra, and Holly’s AI baby called Spawn, aka what the baby learned so far, what it was fed with, and how its collaborators respond to its output. For Holly, AI will cut costs to make generic music which will open up a space that facilitates artistic growth — a confidence that can be traced in her music production.
1 “The ocular centric nexus of knowledge and power is constantly being reprogrammed into automated patterns of navigation: the algorithmic paths that connect platforms and the neural networks that create our everyday ‘wounded attachments’ to the electro-informatics matrix” - page 1/12
2 “Randomness here enfolded within patterns as algorithmic agents interact and learn from each other in continuous composition and decomposition of concepts and objects that do not exist: a sort of productive imagination assembling sheer receptivity within existing patterns, bringing forward supplemental information from not-yet-compressed noise.” - page 4/12
3 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/23/tech-guru-jaronlanier-the-danger-isnt-that-ai-destroys-us-its-that-it-drives-us-insane
Luciana Parisi’s project situates itself in controversial relation to traditional forms of post-capitalist thought. It proceeds from the premise that the negative critique of capitalism only manages to install itself as a regulative and reformative apparatus that aids production in the machine of capital. Accordingly, Parisi’s intervention attempts to think a new transcendent “outside” to the system of capital—a site which is unassimilable to capital’s universalizing code of binary oppositions.
Parisi’s discourse on the “flesh” in Jordan Peele’s Get Out extends from this theoretical perspective of the “outside.”
The “surrogacy of flesh” (Parisi & Goodman 2) refers to the process by which capital recuperates difference and establishes symbolic homeostasis under the sign of universalized exchange value. This surrogacy is allegorized in Get Out by the Order of the Coagula’s cult practice of installing black bodies with white subjectivity: racial difference becomes insubstantial when its representatives become apologists for the dominant system. The allegory suggests that black inclusion within ruling class white society functions as a body-snatching maneuver in which blackness forfeits its “difference” and its innate power of critique. In Get Out, this process plays out in a literal sense, creating the optics of difference without any concrete investment in the politics of difference. For example… XXXXXX an optics of difference is seen in XXXX and a politics of difference which would be XXXX is denied by XXXXX.
To Parisi, this loss of difference is synonymous with a loss of the authority of critique. In this sense, the surrogacy of flesh refers to the erosion of flesh’s ability to signify difference under capital. Capital is capable of emptying blackness of ontological essence and replacing it with a symbolic common denominator that upholds a legacy of white supremacist and colonial values.
Rather than indicating the emergence of a post-racial society, this process lends the capitalist system the alibi of representational (read: ocular/appearance-based) diversity while continuing to inscribe a system of social capital that disadvantages blackness.
Parisi claims that Western “ocularcentric” or vision-based interpretive structures are to blame for a political establishment that boasts of its principles of inclusion while failing to alter the dynamics of racial capital. The very process by which visual data is categorized into meaning is conditioned by a deep logic of colonialism and racism. This provides a rationale for Parisi’s interest in “machine vision”. “Machine vision”, unlike ocular vision, interprets image data according to spatial and geometric calculations, rendering it “blind” by traditional standards of subjective and conscious modes of visual perception. But this reduction of visual phenomena to a flat data set avoids the pitfalls associated with ocular centrically-derived semiotic interpretations that are made by individuals. For Parisi, “machine vision” effectively circumvents our compromised anthropocentric interpretive structures, utilizing an “alien,” extrasensory mode of inference and reason.
Parisi’s views on the revolutionary potential of machines and the automated acts of non-human agencies within the condition of capitalism are a provocation against traditional approaches to capitalist critique. Their ambivalence toward ontological categories of human and machine are cause for suspicion among humanists wary of forfeiting the future to a wayward machinic authority. Parisi’s investment in difference and opacity performs a compelling critique of neoliberal unipolarity and transparency, but the enshrinement of these concepts within a political/social program requires a general divestment of the project of liberal individualism and humanism. Even if the notion of self-determination exists today as an illusion maintained by “SF Capital” (Parisi & Goodman 1), the concrete political implementation of uninterpretable outside epistemologies would represent a renunciation of the human-centered world—not to mention an existential reconciliation with the latent theology underlying our investments in human vs non-human knowledge. While this concession
offers the potential to break the cycle of our self-indoctrination into colonialist subjectivity, because it offers/describes XXXXXXX a materialist critique could accuse Parisi’s posthumanism of ignoring matters immediately relevant to specific vulnerable populations under capitalism. Not only does Parisi’s project sidestep the celebrated work of organization incumbent to Marxist political praxis, but it assails the idea that humanity is, or should be, in charge of organizing its own morality, rationality, and destiny. The renunciation of these transcendent humanist axioms leaves the consequences of Parisi’s theoretical model ambivalent by design. Her project utilizes speculative market- and “rupture”-based tactics that assume the risk of imprinting a hypothetical post-capitalist future with the characteristics of the defective modernity it seeks to escape.
Parisi, Luciana, and Steve Goodman. “Golemology, Machines of Flight, and SFCapital.” Eflux, vol. 123, Dec. 2021.
Science Fiction Capital reconstrues notions of value, and how value is made, in part through advanced computational models, random data aggregation, and bypassing human identity and intuition. Culture absorbs these AI effects through consumption while machine lords capitalize on subjugating bodies and minds. If machines occupy minds and act as surrogates for them, how does SF Capital justify free/slave relations? Is the process self-justifying if it is left to run itself? Or is this feature programmed into algorithms by evil capitalists? What mechanisms, technologies, or laws might we adopt to regulate AI control and data ownership?
The Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen, and Poly Styrene’s Bondage Up Yours! have rung through the decades, not so much as a revolutionary force but more as a Fuck You! gesture against Capitalism that continues to have power. My book Experimental Film and Punk: Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s reflects on what recuperative possibilities punk offersparticularly for women artists. I argue that Punk gave permission for a generation to excise the usual expectations for art, that is the requirement for refinement and virtuosity. Through its elevation of the amateur, the anti-melodic and the DIY, Punk gave permission to go back to basics, to reinvent without pressure of success. It saw itself as producing an epistemological break with the past, to work things out from scratch.
The artists I bring under this rubric, Vivienne Dick, early Betzy Bromberg and Peggy Ahwesh or Abigail Child1 for example, did not depict Punk’s music icons or celebrate Punk per se. They instead transformed film language through a vertiginous rule breaking, using disjuncture, deflation and visual contradiction. Punk aimed to be unassimilable by the mainstream, which these films still are, demonstrated by their continued marginality. They are a link between second wave feminism, contemporary video practice and emergent subjectivities: a pre-history that is missing. If a renewed interest in punk is part of a search for an ‘authentic’ moment outside of the ambitions of Capitalism, these works offer a way of re-thinking the requirements of the art world, to look at what is possible without publicly funded budgets, production teams and fancy galleries. Or is this ‘anarchy’ merely just another consumable gesture? 1970s punk was a tiny subgroup and it can be hard now, at a
time when the unkempt anarchic look of piercings and tattoos are commonplace, to recall the impact and daring as well as the hostility and violent abuse that female punks habitually received. The pressure for femininity on women made it harder to be a punk woman than man: there was a high price to be paid for difference. Viv Albertine of The Slits, talks of the regular attacks on them in the street as they tried to go about their business - because of their look. She describes how Ari Up, when only fourteen, was stabbed twice in the street by strangers (Albertine 2015: 165)
Refusal to play the feminine game was part of a wider non-participation in the perceived expectations of society by punks. Punk was an existential crisis and the women had a range of positions within these three areas of refutation: that of normative sexiness, behaviour and musical virtuosity. As Jack Halberstam states,
From the perspective of feminism, failure has often been a better bet than success. Where feminine success is always measured by male standards and gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal ideals, not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures. (Halberstam 2011: 4)
In the negation of hope that punk represented another kind of hope presented itself: in that feeling of there being nothing to lose we had a different kind of agency that gave us a freedom to invent, to not be perfect. It is urgent again now in a world of the professionalisation of the artist and the requirement of lens-based work to mimic film industry standards. These artists need to be seen within the context of the normative framework of a formalist disinterestedness that continues in much lens-based work as a marker of criticality. It often means a tendency of slowing down the image as part of a Brechtian distanciation mechanism. Often also arising out of the Bazin-ian long look that is assumed to tell more of a truth than an edited work. By contrast, I would argue with Siegfried Kracauer that the long look gave a stable totalizing view of the world and ‘a distance from reality that only the bourgeois can afford’
Obviously, a key element to all this work is the DIY and anti- aesthetic in which there is a long history – Dada, the Underground, New American Cinema. Work that is made with a small coterie of friends, often other artists - but each generation makes it differently. No wave artists made work that was to show in night clubs where the musicians performed. The experimental film venues were too serious, aiming to prove the legitimacy of experimental film and Punk filmmakers had no time for the lofty declarations of the previous generations with the post WWI absurdity or with the post-WW2 optimism. Their endgame was of a different order that rejected the critique of society through theoretical formulations. The Greenbergian imperative of interrogating the material (such as in Structuralist film) was an irrelevance to the crushing reality of the world around them in the 1970s and 1980s. With no belief in the future, this was an endgame that required other strategies of agency.
Kracauer is useful in the way he talks about film bringing to the surface the detritus of life and in the way he saw fragmentation and disintegration as axiomatic of his historical moment. There are parallels to be drawn between the late 1920s, and the late 1970s and now, in terms of the psycho-social moment and the sense of the disintegration of the current order. Unsurprisingly, a focus on the fragmented emerges as a dominant trend for artists at times when modernity discloses its cost – as opposed to its opportunities. The fragmented often emerges as a trope at a time of scarcity rather than plenty.
Shifting focus, Punk DIY relies on the idea of the kitchen table aesthetic that I’d like to retrieve from feminist art histories. It is the opposite of the Romantic notion of the artist – so male defined - and can be used to reflect on class. The kitchen table is not just a symbol of not having access to a studio to finesse capabilities in a prolonged apprenticeship and then consolidate in a sustained full-time focus. It is also symbolic of not requiring access to the Virginia Woolf-ian ‘room of one’s own’. Anyone may have access to the kitchen, while excess money is required for an artist’s studio: as Griselda Pollock stated, ‘the studio and the gallery are not separate. They form interdependent moments in the circuits of production and consumption of culture under capitalism’ (Pollock 2003: 220). Making work on the kitchen table, without money, is a de facto form of resistance to art in
the service of capital as well as a resistance to patriarchal forms and canonizations. In itself, it produces work more akin to the cottage industry than the industrial scale production of post-war European and American art. The bombast of the industrial attitude may be exemplified equally by the fabricating artist of the 1990s, such as Damien Hirst, or the warehouse productions of post-war sculpture, like Donald Judd. The scale in size should not be confused with scale in ambition, which can be epic in anger such as the artwork of the Hackney Flashers or Linder who use collage as the ultimate kitchen table work because of the nature of its cognitive retooling of the sources of its material appropriations.
Collage can be made with no technology, few materials and little time. Collage has built into its condition a lack of seamlessness and heterogeneity, a lack of totalizing vision. Working with collage can be seen as a way of aligning with the idea of the marginalised (and the art historian Kobena Mercer has argued this in relation to Black subjectivity through the artist Romare Bearden ). In film, collage shares some features with montage in the way these artists approach their making.
The fragment and the lo-fi are linked to the sweep of debate that turned away from the cool and coherent art object as a sign of the political potency of art. For Brecht, a re-evaluation of method was imperative for art to illuminate the processes of capitalism, but his programmatic Greek chorus-inspired position that helped form the main paradigm of conceptualist seriality, did not account for the anarchic multi-directional fissure of punk collage. Collage has a particular potency in film: the spatial and temporal leaps can be characterized through parallel editing that opens up an imaginative (as opposed to thinking) space between frames (Doane, 2003: 193). It is a kind of montage that can offer an effect of collage through contingency and simultaneity like no other cinematic form. In this vein we might think of editing not as a cut but ‘as assemblage, a bringing together of parts into unforeseen relations, requires us to think about films’ spatial relations, as a fabric that spreads itself across space linking atomised images and producing new lines of connection’ (Janet Harbord 2007b: 80). In this way it privileges heterogeneity rather than singularity, which flattens out the hierarchies of the temporal. It increases the violence
of the cut because it eschews both the linear seamlessness of Hollywood and the prevalence of the Bazinian long look, forcing us to look deeper between shots rather than at the shot itself.
The seemingly random set of choices á la the de-skilling of Dada - in itself suggests a virtuosity via negative through differing means and a differentiating subject orientation of these women artists than the ‘men’ their predecessors. So rather than reclaim virtuosity which could arguably fall into the same cul-de-sac of depth as the purists, I would posit a kitchen table aesthetic of a purposeful randomization of the collage through parallel editing and what might seem unfinished, unfinessed or disjointed as a strategy for rethinking conceptually and visually. For me the importance of these elements is the deflationary quality that upends the often portentous voiceover narratives (such as Mekas) that brings the importance to the artist rather than the world. So often the artist is the seer, who knows and is there to teach us all what to think and how to look.
These strategies that gives life to incoherence are borne out of the lived experience of exclusion. It is a re-animation of exclusion through a demand to be taken seriously. There is something of the incoherent about being institutionally and structurally excluded: it can make no sense - as sexism and misogyny, indeed racism, are not rational. To be not taken seriously or to be systematically marginalized despite intellect and talent must go against everything that does make sense. Therefore, to make no sense is in fact a way of making sense to those outside of the hegemonic order. It is my proposition that the language of incoherence is an appropriate response to patriarchal capitalism for women under a system that gives language to men to create and command. 2
So what happens when we use outtakes, discontinuities, the bad bits , or to put it in the contemporary parlance of Melody Russell, maybe it aligns with the glitch feminism of today . These are the themes that form the methodology for the artist filmmakers such as Vivienne Dick, Abigail Child, Peggy Ahwesh, Anne Robinson, Sadie Benning and Ruth Novaczek.
This work presents what I would call an Undigested methodology. There is a requirement (and we teach it in art schools in the UK) and maybe a need to make a seamless statement to make work that says “I have worked it out: I know what I’m
saying”. Even the essay film which according to the original reflections on the essay of Montaigne was to be unassimilable and ‘intellectually sensual and sensually intellectual”. Conversely today’s essay film is often merely a poetic approach to delivering a thesis. In my book I discussed the work in terms of hysteria – a way of making work that has no language yet. This is a term that has been both reclaimed and critiqued in feminist theories however the undigested is in process of being broken down and reshaped but still in the midst of its own formation. Maybe that’s where are needs to be now, both a last gasp and a future possibility.
1 The artists I write about are Peggy Ahwesh, Sadie Benning, Lizzie Borden, Abigail Child, Bette Gordon, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Sandra Lahire, Ruth Novaczek, Anne Robinson, Sankofa, Martine Syms, Susan Stein, Leslie Thornton
2 R D Laing’s experiments in the UK that posited schizophrenia and other mental health problems to be a sane response to an insane world was popular reading in art schools in the early 1980s.
“Did you do it for fame? Did you do it in a fit?
Did you do it before you read about it?”
- “Identity” by X-Ray Spex
Like band patches hand-sewn on a jean jacket, Rachel Garfield threads together a punk oeuvre of unsung women filmmakers central to her own practice in the book Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s. She declares this is not a book about the history of punk (which feels familiar to that spirit), rather, Garfield carefully safety-pins forgotten names against the back patch of punk, exhuming the women filmmakers once buried by history.1 There is an assertion of an anti-history – a formal contextualization of Garfield’s influences’ training in art schools, parallel to her own experience. From the rejection of this institutional and formal aesthetic arises the anti-capitalist, feminist, and revolutionary backdrop that these filmmakers work in.
Did you do it for fame? Poly Styrene dips her voice on the word “fame” while singing this line in Identity, almost mockingly. Fame, legacy, notoriety are all desirables within the institutions of creativity. Styrene asks for the intention, and accuses fame as the answer: the common denominator is ego. Garfield guides her readers to consider the same, and answers this question with her own intentions. Detracting this question from a moral standpoint, the author notes that the legacy of punk film thus far negates the very filmmakers embodying this historical period. 2 Garfield understands that although a product of patriarchy is to obsess with legacy and name, one must use it as a pharmakon, the antidote to the very poison.
When I hear the lyrics “did you do it in a fit?” I laugh
because “fit” possesses a double meaning. The outfit on the body is a recognizable signifier of rebellion in the realm of punk. Garfield notes that when women punk artists’ performances were filmed, the cameramen, were unsure of how to capture them (as opposed to their male punk counterparts). The documentation of a woman’s corporeal form when executing a song was considered alien to this hired voyeur. The other kind of “fit” is having a fit, a state of being related to the loaded term “hysteria”.3 To display an outburst of emotion and passion within the context of punk can be read as an embrace of the hysteria, the absolute absurdity of the neglect of women in history. The power of these visual and diagnostic titles relates back to identity, to impetus. Garfield recognizes that more was at stake for these artists and filmmakers than a name in the credits – it was more so about kicking the door down (with a pair of platform Dr. Marten’s, appropriately) and propping it open.
What sort of future does the door open towards, though? Does punk femininity function now for the same purposes, or has it been overly commodified in contemporary capitalist and political contexts? The present moment does not yet exist outside of the dominant patriarchal-centric history, and attempts at reviving this underground can be dubbed nostalgic or insincere. Once a rupture within and against popular value systems, punk was an effective strategy that was multidimensional: it was music, it was clothing, it was an attitude. Does it aid us now? We may now answer Styrene’s questions above with a yes: we are doing it for fame and in a fit, for society has not moved past this inclination forty years on.
To conclude with “did you do it / before you read about it”, Garfield paradoxically embodies both of these lines concurrently in Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s. Garfield’s research situates itself within an institutional context, a monolith to be rebelled against in the 70s-80s (and today as well – the irony is not lost upon me as I write this for my own institution). “Doing it” before “reading about it” can be understood as such: did you act on it - the impulse, the intuition – before you intellectualized it? Before you read about how to (correctly) do it? There is a present day tug of war between the focus of hyper-cautious knowledge accumulation and subjective/intuitive creativity. A routine of
over-intellectualizing a spirit catalyzed against injustice forces us to look in the mirror. As a practicing artist and filmmaker herself, Garfield time travels while remaining in the present moment to consider what it means to find the theoretical throughlines of feminism on film within the realm of punk and the sustaining societal implications it has. Rejecting the canonical history, Garfield cracks it wide open to ask us to reconsider who is present and who is not.
“Identity is the crisis.
When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?”
1 Rachel Garfield, Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Bloomsbury 2021, p 6
2 Namely Vivienne Dick, Ruth Novacsek, Bette Gordon, Peggy Ahwesh, Sandra Lahire, Sankofa, Anne Robinson, Betzy Bromberg, Leslie Thornton, Tessa Hughes Freeland, Abigail Child and Susan Stein
3 This medical term was commonly used to diagnose women when they displayed any outburst of emotion and was not removed from the DSM until 1980. Garfield writes within the context of the 1970s and 80s, a time where this term was still associated with this type of definition.
In Garfield’s work, there is a desire for the recognition of minor art and a simultaneous celebration of its marginal “underground” relationship to the canon. How does her method of ascribing value to minor artists navigate this question of canonicity? What are the political stakes of mobilizing minor canons (like punk) in an analysis of contemporary feminist art film?
As we are now roughly fifty years from the emergence of the Punk movement, the term has not lost its prevalence– though maybe some of its original cultural meaning. Given that punk built off of a similar ethos and oppositional stance as the Dada movement, roughly fifty years earlier from then, what is it about punk that has maintained its allure in the popular imagination while Dada had already been turned into a historical movement by the 1970s?
Anthony Paul Farley is the James Campbell Matthews Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Albany Law School. He was the James & Mary Lassiter Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law and the Andrew Jefferson Endowed Chair in Trial Advocacy at Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law in 2014-2015, the Haywood Burns Chair in Civil Rights at CUNY School of Law in 2006, and a tenured professor at Boston College Law School, where he taught for 16 years.
Professor Farley’s work has appeared in chapter form in Bandung Global History and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (Eslava et al. eds., Cambridge University Press: forthcoming); Hip Hop and the Law (Bridgewater et al. eds., Carolina Academic Press: 2015); After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (Troutt ed., The New Press: 2007); Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies & the Law (Sarat & Simon eds., Duke University Press: 2003); Crossroads, Directions & a New Critical Race Theory (Valdes et al. eds., Temple University Press: 2002); Black Men on Race, Gender & Sexuality (Carbado ed., NYU Press: 1999); and Urgent Times: Policing and Rights in Inner-City Communities (Meares & Kahan eds., Beacon: 1999). His writings have appeared in numerous academic journals, including the Yale Journal of Law & Humanities, the NYU Review of Law & Social Change, the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, the Michigan Journal of Race & Law, Law & Literature, UCLA’s Chicano Latino Law Review, the Berkeley Journal of African American Law & Policy, the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, and the Columbia Journal of Race & Law.
Luciana Parisi’s research lays at the intersection of continental philosophy, information sciences, digital media, computational technologies. Her publications address the techno-capitalist investment in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology to explore challenges to conceptions of gender, race and class. She has also written extensively within the fields of media philosophy and computational design in order to investigate metaphysical possibilities of instrumentality. She was a member of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) and currently a co-founding member of CCB (Critical Computation Bureau) through which she co-ideated the Symposium Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence and Speculative Computation (2020) In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire, Her book Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013) explores algorithms in architecture and interaction design as a symptom of global cultural transformation, where algorithmic computation represents a mode of thought that challenges dominant models of human cognition. Her current project, Automating Philosophy (forthcoming) explores the possibilities of a radical thought and critique which starts with inhuman intelligence and cosmocomputations. She is Professor of Literature, Duke University.
Rachel Garfield is an artist and Professor in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. She is author of Experimental Film making and Punk: Feminist Audio Visual Culture of the 1970s and 1980s, Bloomsbury (2022) and co-editor of Dwoskino: The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin, LUX, (2022) and Principle Investigator of a large AHRC funded grant (2019-2021), The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin’s Personal Cinema.
Exhibitions/screenings include, The Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Hatton Gallery, Newcastle; Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, London; Focal Point, London Short Film Festival and Open City Doc Festival and The Babylon Cinema Berlin, Espaciocentre, Tenerife Espacio De Les Artes, CCA Santa Fe, Arizona State University Museum, Aqua Art Fair Miami. Garfield’s work has featured in, “An ‘Other’ History: Feminist Art in Britain Since 1970’ Amelia Jones (eds. John Slyce, Adler, Phoebe), Contemporary Art in the United Kingdom, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015; Steyn, Julia, “In the Hinterlands: Identity, Migration & Memory”, Cross-cultural Identities: Art, Migrants and the Metaphor of Waste, Steyn, Juliet, Stamselberg, Nadja (eds.) I.B.Tauris, pp. 97-122, 2013.
Other Selected published texts by Garfield: “Prescient Intersectionality: Women, Film: Moving Image and Identity Politics in 1980s Britain”, Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image: Contexts and Practices, ed. Lucy Reynolds, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp 99-113 “Between Seeing and Knowing: Stephen Dwoskin’s Behindert and the Camera’s Caress”, Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and British Experimental Film in the 1970s (eds. Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey) Rachel, ‘A Particular Incoherence; Some Films of Vivienne Dick’, Between Truth and Fiction, The Films of Vivienne Dick, (ed Treasa O’Brian).
Discrimination
Resistance
Transcendence
Self-Determination
Islands
Unconscious Value
Productivity
Negation
Performance
0
System-building
Scales
Death
Murder
Automation
Learning
Property
Love
Unlearning
Rest
Hope Liberation
Ideology
Repetition
BOOK DESIGN
STUART SMITH | HONGZHOU WAN
ISBN: 978-0-9916593-8-8
Today, the idea of a comprehensive re-orientation of our world is claimed to be less and less possible, and the notion that there is a visible concentration of power that might be called dominant has been eviscerated by neo-liberal global capital as much as by the disaggregating mechanics of critical theory, which has preferred to speak about horizontal forms of power as opposed to verticality.
In this collection of essays and responses, we address the history of resistance, revolution and power, and the methods of critique that this has manifested in culture and society. If we invest in themes of revolution, we risk trivializing resistance and freedom for the revolution defines our alienation, but without the thought of radical change, are there any hopes for reorientations of our future and how we act upon it?
This collection of essays and responses documents the Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series. Each semester a new theme is developed with a series of invited speakers to tackle contemporary issues across art, politics and society.
ISBN: 978-0-9916593-8-8
CONTRIBUTORS:
AMANDA BEECH
ISHANI CHOKSHI
TATOU DEDE
ANTHONY PAUL FARLEY
RACHEL GARFIELD
JONATHON HORNEDO
MAISA IMAMOVIC
AMORETTE MUZINGO
SAMPSON OHRINGER
LUCIANA PARISI
BRYCE WOODCOCK
A DOCUMENT OF THE AESTHETICS AND POLITICS
LECTURE SERIES
MA AESTHETICS AND POLITICS
CALARTS SCHOOL OF CRITICAL STUDIES