jan jagodzinski
'this fragile, broken time of transition (Übergangszeit)': the ice that supports people today becomes thinner with each passing day, so that 'we ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin 'realities'
(Nietzsche, The Gay Science: section 377).
The pessimism that surrounds critical thought today is more than just an image of a perpetual eclipse of the sun that keeps everything cold, dark—pervaded by imperceptible movement—frozen, immobile, sluggish; it's as if the noosphere has a cancer, which has spread around the world, turning thought so inside itself as to make it cannibalistic, feeding on its own negativity. The conditions for its remission seem impossible—the patient is already dead from exhaustion and bombardment from the heavy doses of chemotherapy; all the seasons are becoming winter.
This chapter concerns itself with the intersection of two concepts—the Anthropocene and an 'avant-garde without authority'—to develop what Deleuze and Guattari called a 'new earth,' which I call a future 'Oekoumenal' (from the Greek root Oikuinene. meaning the inhabited world or better, inhabited universe).1 The trajectory of this chapter struggles with the pervasive question of capitalist economic expansion as it continues to destroy the earth and eventually 'bury' us as a species. The Anthropocene, coined by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist marks a new geological epoch wherein human activity has begun to tip the planet's geological and biological levels that sustain us. Humans have become a 'geological agent' on the planet and they are now able to affect the balance of life on Earth. It is the first time that a global awareness of what we are doing to ourselves as a species has emerged—like fish in water who finally 'get it' that they are in 'hot water' about to boil. They better figure out a way to cool themselves down as the oxygen begins to escape and they suffocate, floating belly up.
The separation between nature and culture that forms the gap of anthropocentric thought is more and more problematic to maintain. 'Natural history' and 'human history' have now merged together. We become one species amongst many. Although we remain the dominant species, we are intimately involved in the parametric condition of our own existence with the 'rest" of them. We have reached a historical point where we are not free to do whatever we like; yet we are like the proverbial Coyote chasing the Roadrunner who has run over the cliff and has not yet realized he is ready for a long fall to his death. We have yet to look 'down,' for our species is already without any planetary ground to stand on. The 'ground' has been gradually clearing away. Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans on August 29, 2005; earthquakes shook the interior of China—the suspicion was that they were caused by the building of the gargantuan Three Georges dams, which resulted in a huge artificial lake that changed the balance of the surrounding landscape; floods and fires in Australia in 2012 and 2013 seem cyclical, as they are in states like California, as well the 'superstorm,' named hurricane Sandy that hit the eastern seaboard of the United States on October 30, 2012. When New York. New Jersey and Staten Island are devastated, even the disbelievers begin to question under their breadth. Typhoon Haiyan that devastated the Republic of the Philippines led Yeb Sano. their chief negotiator, to address the 19th United Nations summit in Warsaw on November 13, 2013 to no avail. The summit ended with little to no agreement amongst the participating nations.
Climate change has become the iconic signifier for the 'impending Apocalypse,' however this is a very small part of the story. Leading climatologists at the Stockholm Resilience Center like James Hansen have identified no less than nine 'planetary boundaries' that are crucial to sustain an environment where our species can continue to exist (Foster, Clark and York 2010). Besides climate change, they keep abreast of ocean acidification, nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, atmospheric aerosol loading, chemical pollution stratospheric ozone depletion global fresh water use. change in land use and the loss of biodiversity. By comparing the statistics of these nine indicators with pre-industrial levels and current industrial outputs, it seems that three of the nine processes have already crossed their planetary boundaries: climate change, the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity loss. The earth's 'carrying capacity,' its global footprint, has surpassed the ability of the planet to regenerate already by a whopping 30 percent (WWF 2008: 2). To this can be added population growth increased consumption of natural resources as well as the potential of a global epidemic. The survival of our species doesn't appear that likely. It also highlights and makes starkly evident that our species has enjoyed its continuous expansion, and use of 'free' natural resources at the expense of other species—not to mention the extraordinary global inequalities between the affluent core industrialized nations with capitalist world economies who use up more of the planet's natural resources and emit more green-house gas emissions than the 'rest' of the globe.2
Capitalism's system of exploitation works on commodity production where everything is treated as if it had a price. Yet, much of what enters the capitalist system is not produced as commodities. Labor-power is a purchased commodity, but it is reproduced within the family and through the educational institutions. This is also true of natural resources such as water and air, which cannot be assigned a market price since they are not strictly 'produced' as commodities. Human and natural resources are wild cards in relation to commodity calculation. They are necessary preconditions for production, but their 'value' is open-ended. The old-fashioned Oedipal family that was sufficient for industrial capital has gone through modification to include both women's labor and increasingly more McJobs for the growing children who can't quite support themselves. Add to this progression the contemporary development of flexible time where work and play no longer are separate categories, and we have capitalist expansion via an increase in labor power. Consumption is calculated in two different ways: the first makes all producers consumers where production is consumption; the entire processes from the extraction of natural resources to their end use are 'counted.' There is an investment by producers involved in this process. In contrast, economic consumption refers only to the purchases of consumers. This economic calculation is based on the demand of consumers and not the investors. The capacity to produce in a capitalist economy requires investment, which is not factored in when consumers are asked to 'cut' consumption and 'save,' thereby also 'saving' the planet. Such rhetoric covers up the obvious claim that capital always converts savings into investment to generate new forms of capital that expand the scale of the economy. Capitalist expansion is therefore the chief worry of environmental health.
Deleuze and Guattari maintain that capitalist commodity-production system lias no intrinsic limit. Any limits are continually displaced in the processes of expanding and intensifying global production and profit taking. Regardless of the catastrophe—war, natural disasters, political crisis—not to mention any form of health issue or human folly, there is some company that will manage to exploit it for profit dollars, or some reality television show that will turn it into entertainment dollars. Even a Marxist intellectual like Ivan Mészáros (2008), who still believes that only a radical mass movement can flip the course of events, is not optimistic when it comes to the ecological limits of capitalism: "The uncomfortable trutii of the matter is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there will be no future for humanity" (149) [because] "the extermination of humanity is the ultimate concomitant of capitalism's destructive course of development" (252, original emphasis).
The capitalist exploitation of the environment has now settled into an ecological modernization where a managerial approach spreads over technology, consumption and market-based solutions under the master signifier of 'sustainability.' Green capitalism moves into 'sustainable capitalism.' sadly a position promoted by A1 Gore (2009). Multinational companies and multilateral financial institutions are charged with a new developmental role to initiate sustainable development initiatives in developing countries. The writings of Adrian Parr (2009, 2011), from a Deleuze-Guattarian perspective, captures this newly found fervor extremely well. She shows how the sustainability 'movement,' which promotes principles of equality, stewardship, compassion, renewal and sustenance is hijacked by corporate and state interests through ecobranding tactics (her examples are WalMart and British Petroleum). Hollywood gets a 'piece of this green action' by supporting animal rights and reducing its ecological footprint by spending part of a film's production budget on partnering with 'green industries' that plant trees and recycle material through waste management. On a broader scale, there have been more clever ways of promoting the postmodern 'Nobel Savage' as tied to issues of environmentalism.3 and producing apocalyptic scenarios via the movies. The spectacle and fantasies of our species destruction and environmental catastrophes through this steady stream of films end up. paradoxically 'naturalizing' our extinction. The worst scenarios (be they a global epidemic, a nuclear winter, meteoric impacts, and so on) enable audiences to take in these 'final days' as domesticated fantasies. There is a normative sense about our destruction, as if humans are still around to tell the tales of our own obliteration, making it seem as though the future anterior is still operable by assuring us that 'we' will not be forgotten as a species.4
The commodification of Nature within capitalist expansion is presented in such a way that it avoids all Nature's sublimity; it's as though there will be a technological 'fix' to any forms of disaster that may come our way. The call for the technological increase in energy and carbon 'efficiency' is particularly insidious, as indicated by the rhetoric over fuel-efficient cars. The gains made through fuel-efficient cars are simply lost by the increase of consumption of more such cars. Efficiency and scale are related to economic gains.5 Speculation is now underway regarding how it will be possible and probable to secure new energy resources in the Arctic, which will be available once the ice cap melts away. It is estimated that up to one quarter of the world's oil and gas reserves are just waiting to be harnessed. Territorial borders between Canada. Russia. United States, Norway, and Denmark are already simmering. Capitalism has always disdained 'nature.' Gone are the days where Nature was to be either venerated or conquered in good-old Enlightenment or Romantic fashion.
To sell it, Nature has to become domesticated as much as possible, presented within the fantasies of healthy living and a social life-style though various ecovillage schemes, on the one hand, and gated communities on the other. Both are reactions to a growing deep-seated paranoia that one has to look after oneself in relation to the steady withdrawal of the State (various governmental agencies) for providing the populace police protection, on the one hand, and social welfare programs, on the other. The State's dwindling power in relation to capitalist corporations that privatize health, control the costs of food and housing materials, and so on is yet another source of paranoia and uncertainty. As alternatives to these social and economic contradictions, the ecovillage mentality (forms of New Age communes, religious communities, squatter settlements) presents semi-sufficient, privatized, closed environments where 'sinall-is-beautiful' mles to sustain human-scale cooperation, housing, organic food production and so on; whereas the gated communities (in stark distinction) privatize and 'protect' life-styles via an internalization of the broader social paranoia that is indicative via a surveillance mentality (video technologies, security guards, intercoms) that already pervades the urban landscape. Both negate urban life as having fallen to the dictates of 'lawlessness.' whether this be the inability of the State to stop crime or 'regulate' the price of sustainable living (food and housing) and life style. The extreme example is Masdar City that is being built in Abu Dhabi, billed as an eco city totally controlled for entrepreneurial living. Perhaps more alarming is the 'gated' mentality that is extended to a nation via militarism. The most extreme example is, of course. Israel with its wall that keeps it 'protected' from its enemies so as to 'sustain' and develop its internal resources and attempt to control its economy. Geopolitical military policies and environmentalism are pervasive in every country, making any attempt to grapple with the global reality of environmental degradation (clean water, ozone depletion pollution of the ocean, and so on) fall into a continual stalemate as prioritization and the public commons cannot be reconciled.6
Climate change, as can be seen, has been widely discussed, debated, and while it is a 'no brainer' for scientists who have made the necessary calculations and projections, the gap between knowledge and belief persists. Ecological disaster is inevitable but the symptoms as to its inevitability appear in various paranoid forms. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that under capitalism there are two poles of social psychic libidinal investment: paranoia and schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a free-form of desire in the psyche and refers to deterritorialization as well as decoding. Paranoia, on the other hand, refers to those obstacles that prevent the free-form potential desire. Reterritorialization and artificial recording are imposed by private capital to ensure profit accumulation. Capitalism is basically a system of unsustainable development, a crisis-ridden mode of cyclical economic growth and collapse. We have, in this regard. Slavoj Žižek's (2010) constant championing of Hegel as a theorist of this very dynamic. "[F]or Hegel, every social reconciliation is doomed to fail. [...] no organic social order can effectively contain the force of abstract-universal negativity [...]. This is why social life is condemned to the 'spurious infinity' of the eternal oscillation between stable civic life and wartime perturbation" (336, original italic).7 In contrast. Deleuze and Guattari's 'Marx' is Nietzschean which calls on affirmation rather than Hegelian negation. This does not sit very well for the prophets of negativity.8 In relation to the concept of 'an avant-garde without authority' as it impacts the Anthropocene/capitalism problematic that will be discussed in the next section the tension between these two positions needs some articulation since I come down on the side of Deleuze and Guattari rather than Žižek.
Žižek's Hegelianism9 works on the topography of 'abstract universality,' which is subverted by a 'concrete exception' or singularity amongst the multiplicity of particulars that the Universal claims to 'cover.' Such an exceptional particular is both part of the Universal set and beyond the set. It is that 'exceptional' element that produces 'concrete universality' (or 'singular Universality'). Within abstract Universality there is an immediate struggle or negation as this 'singular' element—basically the abstract Universale opposite—is engaged with other particulars within the set for hegemony. We have here essentially an open system whose dynamic is forwarded by the negentropy of the 'exceptional element,' which is absent, but then 'negated' via the struggle for inclusion (as lack) or exclusion (as excess), depending on the context. This forms the concrete Universal. Such a perpetual struggle is between the abstract Universal and its own exception (or 'remainder') where the absence of the singular exception is understood as the presence of the Real. The Real is being constantiy confronted by the Symbolic in Lacanian terms. In this typology the Real is only a void by proxy since it can be 'symbolically' identified, yet it is the constant source of traumatic antagonism, which returns again and again as all attempts to 'symbolize' it fail. The Universal is thus paradoxical—it is both necessary and impossible.
The Real remains a paradoxical concept as well—and here's why: if the concrete Universal emerges at the point of exception (as embodied in those who are part of the situation but do not belong to it), we have the ironic situation, in relation to the Anthropoeene. that it is 'we' who are hegemonic, and that the 'rest' of Nature—the Planet, whom we are destroying—is doing precisely what is expected: it is about to 'do' us in not intentionally of course, but through its own machinic existence. It is humanity who is 'out of joint.' a failed experiment of the same machinic process. The Real is not absent. It is very much the 'presence' of machinic Nature as such in the way it functions through creation and destruction.10 Hegel is simply stood on his head for the anthropomorphism inherent in this line of logic. It is not 'human' Universality that is at question, it is the Planet's Universality. We should call what the Real 'is': machinic Nature as such where there is no distinction between it and the human. Žižek's concrete Universal recognizes anthropocentric inequalities within global capitalism via the lumpenproletariat. but offers neither a vision of the future nor a political practice of politics beyond capitalism.11 One is tempted to claim that the 'concrete universal' that is characterized by a fundamental antagonism (or 'minimal distance') is precisely the logic of capitalism as it fluctuates between paranoia (the structure of (false) universalism—the Symbolic Order as a system for 'all.' as Lacan seemed to maintain)12 to schizophrenia (the recognition of the exception) so that it promotes the illusions of freedom and equality by exposing the lack or excess thereby freeing up desire when new profit dollars are needed.
Deleuze and Guattari offer another alternative. Universal history is a history of contingency, not a history of necessity. The past, which includes the inhuman (inorganic) and the non-human (AI), is examined to free up the present, which itself is made up of accidents and encounters of the past. Like Marx's claim that the key to the ape's anatomy is contained in the anatomy of the human, capitalism is given 'universal' status in the way that it is in a privileged position to present a retrospective reading of history. Its coding and overcoding strategies can be found in previous societies, hence there is no definitive separation of social stages that 'progress' as a teleological trajectory. The rhizome of fortuitous connections is more the case. There is no 'one' way that the capitalist formation is established, as is evident with the case of China, where an authoritarian system helped paved the road to establish a modified 'neo-liberal' model of economic growth. The Real in this view of history certainly recognizes ruptures and limits; however, these are not explored antagonistically. From out of the gap or void we have a virtual Real where new forms of creativity emerge that are actualized as well as destroyed via catastrophes. Lives remain fated through accident.
In relation to the Anthropocene, this 'universal history' that Deleuze and Guattari develop, which in machinic terms extends to the geological span of the planet, and to the cosmic time of the universe13 (the Big bang 13,720 billion years ago) via univocity. means that the primaiy ontological question is whether we, as a species, have the right to survive at the expense of the rest of the Planet, which is the 'part that has no say' (to stand Jacques Ranciere's anthropocentric claim on its head).14 It is a question of extinction—15 our death, rather than the sovereignty of our being—the biopower and biopolitics of life16 that pervades the discourses of social and human sciences. Technological-digital-instrumental reason hegemonically defines the post-human where death is to be eliminated and life becomes something created in the lab, manipulated genetically, and extended perhaps indefinitely through the development of synthetic genomics to custom design behavior 011 the part of a life form. Neuropharmacology, AI, cybernetics, and nanotechnologies are the way of the future, as is risk-management, and the 'sustainable' management of resources as discussed above. Technology in this scientific sense is understood as a 'human' product made possible through reason and human capacity to make scientific 'progress' in relation to life/death, the cycle of survival. Techno-science. capital, and biopolitics, as Ziarek (2010), calling on Heidegger, has pointed out. are the 'technics' of enframing (Heidegger's Ge-stell), which reduce life as the exploitable reserve of capital. Added to such exploitation is the 'expediency of culture.' as developed by George Yúdice (2003). where culture becomes yet another resource for both sociopolitical and economic amelioration. By this he means a way of increasing participation in an era of waning political involvement, the rise of symbolic cultural capitalism as ways to smooth out cultural differences via pluralized democracy, and the immaterialization of labor through the creative industries where intellectual property rights are defined by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT] and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The packaging of intellectual property has increased the incidents of spying via Internet and outright espionage.
Ziarek (2012) lias further pointed out that the term Anthropocene is poorly named. It remains based on the traditional anthropological conception of the human being. From the perspective of Planet Earth there is no climate change, biosphere, or environment. To follow Colebrook's (2010) analysis of Deleuze's vitalism, there is a 'passive vitalism' of Nature that is machinc contra to the anthropocentric vitalism of life promoted by bio/power and politics that retains the distinction between the non-living and the living most often thought through as the difference between zoë and bios. This needs to be questioned if our species is to come to terms with its own existence. Not the essence of "who we are as a species," but whether we will "exist" or not. The non-living or the inhuman has received a great deal of attention of late, from Janet Bennett's particular explorations of the vitalism of tilings, to the philosophical movement loosely known as 'object relations theory,' to the 'feminist materialism' of Karen Barad.17 These are perhaps the beginnings of the creation of new concepts that may begin to break-up. disturb and fragment the deep-seated anthropocentrism that pervades the capitalist agenda
With this backdrop in mind I would like to develop what an avant-garde without authority is doing to bring about a transvaluation of values (IJmwertung aller Werte) in Nietzschean terms,18 where the shift towards intensive rather than extensive differences in the way Deleuze19 uses these terms is being developed: rather than the calculations that are extensive in relation to the environment measuring the future of our existence in more or less time, the shift to intensive differences marks speeds and thresholds that initiate a qualitative change or 'phase transition.' Intensive differences have a transcendental status in relation to extensive differences; they are their genetic conditions, which are themselves structured by Ideas that are transcendent and immanent—a different understanding of a concrete Universal than the one Žižek develops.20 It is the Idea of art—the necessary differential elements that attempts to de-anthropomorphize man in relation to the Anthropoeene so as to transvalue the currency of what I call 'designer capitalism' (jagodzinski 2010)—that I would like to develop in the next section when it comes to an avant-garde without authority.
The overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I entreat you, my brethren, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of supraterrestrial hopes!
(Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue section 3).
The avant-garde is dead, wouldn't you know it. yet the concept is continually brought up.21 In a special issue of New Literary History, Jonathan P. Eburne and Rita Felski present a cadre of 13 authors who query the concept. Renato Poggioli's (1968) and Peter Burger's (1974) feature as the two most often cited thesis regarding the 'historical' avant-garde, as is the neo-avant-garde developed by Hal Foster (1996) in his influential Lacanian reading. The question of decentering the concept of its Eurocentric bias via postcolonial critiques, which introduce non-Western avant-garde movements, is also discussed. The question of the "avant-garde without authority" that I wish to explore obviously dismisses the vanguardism and universalism that has plagued its past resurrections, as if someone is 'ahead of their time' and are the carriers of 'truth.' This is only the 'half' of the problematic. Rather, following Deleuze (1988) in his book on Foucault. the best way to put it is that an avant-garde (without authority) is folded over the 'historical avant-garde' of the twentieth century to generate a new subjectification that addresses the Capitalism/Anthropocene problematic of today. This folding takes into account the historical avant-garde's attempt to critique capitalism, and their program of bringing "art into life," thereby asserting a 'utopian' transvaluation of the social order;22 introducing a new sensibility by a pursuit of 'new' forms of life for a life to come, as Jacques Ranciere (2004) is willing to admit, the 'historical' avant-garde "in accordance with Schiller's model, is rooted in the aesthetic anticipation of the future (29)."23 The qualifications of such folding is that 'life' is no longer an anthropocentric vitalism but recognizes the 'passive' vitalism that affirms the mutual immanence of environments and organisms in their striving toward the intensity of Life; this is an affirmative gesture of desire rather than the negation and transgression that pervaded the historical avant-garde. Their negation has, as many have commented, been successfully absorbed by market-forces.24
'Without authority' reconfirms the Nietzschean 'will-to-power' which does away with agency: there is no separation between a will and what is willed. They are one and the same. An act (what is willed) and the subject who wills it are constituted simultaneously. So there is no pre-constituted subject who wills this or that act. A subject is constituted in the act of thinking. Deleuze says a subject is immanent to its expression. An artwork is not an expression of the artist's will. There is no such tiling as an 'artist' who then wills an artwork into existence. The activity of 'arting' itself is an expression of a will to powerthat produces the art and the artist concurrently. The body of work that is produced over the years 'is' the artist. The artistic oeuvre and the artist are the expression of the same force—a will-to-power. The historical avant-garde's 'failed' gesture of 'art into life' (life here meaning the 'everyday') from this perspective, is no longer a contradiction since the 'autonomy of the artist' never existed in the first place; or rather the very notion of 'autonomy' is overturned to mean something quite different.
Added to these clarifications is the close-proximity of Deleuze's appropriation of the Nietzsche's Ubermensch to the notion of an avant-garde without authority when it comes to the transvaluation through art at the minoritarian or micropolitical level that will be developed below. Once more, returning to his book on Foucault (1988), Deleuze follows him by developing resistance as an aesthetics of existence where the fold—taken as the outside drawn (folded) inside—forms a new subjectivation redefining what it means to be autonomous, for it is in the fold that life is created.25 Such a gesture reaches out to the Ubermensch that Deleuze addresses in the 'Appendix: On the Death of Man and Superman' to his book on Foucault. It addresses Nietzsche's concern over the 'sick becoming' of our species, as we 'do' ourselves in: "the overman as the vision of a non-anthropocentric future of the human. This would be to conceive of the 'human/transhuman' [/inhuman] as neither as predicate nor a property that belong uniquely to a ready-made subject (such as 'man')" [...] The transhuman condition is not about the transcendence of the human being, but concerns its non-teleological becoming in an immanent process of 'anthropological deregulation'" (Ansell Pearson 1997: 161-2. 163). Such a subject. Deleuze says (1990), is a "free anonymous, and nomadic singularity which traverses men as well as plants and animals independently of the matter of their individuation and forms of their personality" (107).
In the Appendix, Deleuze presents the Ubermensch as something that can come after the passing of the "God-form" and the "Man-form" as read through Foucault's oeuvre. The God-form of the 'classical historical formation' opens up life to infinity. It represents the idea of the unfold to the infinite outside that is in constant need of explaining.26 Given that man is limited, any encounter with 'his' infinitesimal forces inside with the infinite forces outside only end in producing variations of the God-form. The nineteenth centuiy introduces the Man-form through new finite forces of labour, language and the life science of biology. God becomes hidden or like in deistic thought God creates the world and then leaves, so man must now discover the laws that are in operation. In Foucault's oeuvre. these forces of finitude are characterized by a fold. The fold is a typology of surface and depth as man's internal forces enter into the relations with outside forces that are themselves finite, yet can never be completely understood, so they are subject to an infinite deferral.
The 'birth' of man spells the 'death' of God, but Nietzsche is interested in the 'death' of man. The Ubermensch ends the trilogy by presenting a new relation of inside/outside forces termed the Super/old, which is characterized by a 'unlimited finity.' Unlimited finity is another name for Nietzsche's 'eternal return.' and designates future 'folds': the fold of molecularbiology and microbiology (the DNA genetic code), the fold of silicon and carbon (third-generation cybernetic machines), and the fold of language, where the affect of 'strange language' within language itself explores the 'limits' of grammar. Unlimited finity refers to pure differences in the way "a finite number of components yields a practically unlimited diversity of combinations" (1988, 131). Deleuze is referring to the codings of serializations and the subtle changes that they undergo through their decoding and recoding.
Deleuze is ambivalent about the future in relation to the Ubermensch. Earlier he writes, "Nietzsche said that man imprisoned life, but the superman is what frees life within man himself, to the benefit of another form, and so on" (130, original emphasis). Here there is optimism that continues: "Man tends to free life, labor and language within himself (132, original emphasis). But then an ambivalence regarding this creative capacity is heard for it opens up forms of domination. "The superman [ ...] is the man who is even in charge of the animals (a code that can capture the fragments from other codes [ ...]. It is man in charge of the very rocks, or inorganic matter (the domain of silicon). It is man in charge of the being of language. [... ] it is the advent of a new form that is neither God nor man. and which, it is hoped, will not prove worse than its two previous forms" (132). It has proven worse. Given that climate change is a 'hyperobject' as Timothy Morton (2010) puts it. the forces of the outside are just too overwhelming for a technological fix alone.
Given the state of the planet and the proposed technological possibilities (the first two folds of the Superfold), it seems humanity is not faring any better ... only worse. It is the third fold that might 'stammer' the other two, if we see this as the fold of art (visual, literature, music and so on ... the realm of affects and percepts). This is the closest to what an avant-garde without authority would mean today. Adrian Parr (2009) sees this necessity as a transversal between 'science and art' (162), what she refers to an injection of unimaginableness. "Unimaginableness differs from unimaginable because as an immanent condition it does not aspire to realize what is otherwise impossible—the unimaginable—which would seem to suggest that it merely indulges in the production of imaginary worlds. Rather the operative mode of the unimaginableness is onto-aesthetic" (165 original emphasis). It is the onto-aesthetic that can 'stammer' us into a new subjectivation by identifying the Idea of such an art as a form of 'war machine.'
So, 'without authority'should also be qualified as it refers to an agent that must be resisted, as well as the subjective agent of humanism. The qualifier 'without authority' vigorously applies to the concept of Ubermensch. Nietzsche ceaselessly maintained that this term has nothing to do with a higher kind of man. a half saint or half genius, or someone who is 'emancipated' and/or a 'master of a free will.' Ubermensch in no way designates an ontological state that can be instantiated. What is required is an experimental approach to find the 'way' and the 'way' does not exist. The way has to be created.27 It is closer, I would argue, to becoming imperceptible in Deleuze/Guattarian terms via a line of flight.
Oikuménë, meaning the inhabited world or universe, has the advantage of referring to the whole inhabited planet and avoids the anthropocentrism of 'oikos' (home). Perhaps not as elegant as the 'Gaia hypothesis.' it attempts to convey the paradox of w(holism), emergence from chaos. To develop such a 'Utopian' transvaluation—an art that opens up the universe to becoming-other, I come to a place where an 'affirmative nomadology' (Holland, 2011) might be developed with a particular Idea of art that acts in the capacity as a war machine to further a minoritarian molecular politics in relation to climate change and capitalist commodity culture. Deleuze/Guattari develop no less than six types or levels of war-machines, but war and war machine do not necessarily coincide; the war-machine only has the object of war under certain conditions. It was, indeed the invention of the nomad. In its essence the war machine constitutes 'smooth space' within 'striated space;' it occupies and displaces it and affirmatively establishes alternative social relations within it. An avant-garde (without authority) follow the roadmap of an affirmative nomadology as a positive Utopian force that has three aspects as developed by Eugene Holland: "(1) its capacity to intervene in and transform our habitual modes of thinking, desiring, and acting; (2) its capacity to detect and draw attention to viable and actually existing alternatives to State and capitalist norms; and (3) its capacity to give expression to alternative becomings and social movements in order to strengthen them, broaden them, and even extend them to odier social fields and to connect them with other movements to promote widespread social change" (28).
As I see it. the Idea of an artistic oekoumenal war machine has at least four differentiated components that make up its 'unlimited finity' at the virtual level: the necessity of smooth space, durational time (chronos and Aion), posthuman relations (with inhuman (inorganic or anorganic) and nonhuman (AI)), and the creation of a performative event to further 'anonymity' by 'becoming imperceptible'—autonomously anonymous. This, in a nutshell, is the abstract machine (or processes) that forms the new Kunstwollen for the as yet unthought Oekoumenal.
Smooth Space: by this I mean an intervention into the public/private/common boundaries to occupy space so as to stage an event and form a temporary Outside to capital and state space so as to forward the 'virtue' of imaging a new form of life, and to organize social reproduction differently. This means playing with the reversals of public/private/common boundaries and making them ambivalent, ambiguous, and paradoxical so as to reterritorialize and deterritorize the space. This seems straight forward enough. How can public and/or private spaces be used to affirmative ways that open up the conmions for affective interaction when it comes to climate change via such art? What can such an art affectively do? Answering such a question is to maintain that every art expression that fulfills the virtual differentiations listed above is an actualization (a differentiation) of the Oekoumenal war machine. Each artistic event is therefore singular in its affects as to what it can do.
Adrian Parr calls on the artist Spencer Tunick's (along with Greenpeace Switzerland) installation of a living sculpture (hundreds of naked men and women) positioned in the Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland on August 18, 2007 that he photographed. This mass of bodies, all huddled together, symbolize the vulnerability of the glaciers under climate change. The photograph forms the cover of her book, which is then disseminated globally to those who take an interest in sustainability. which her work critiques. Here all the differentiated elements are in play. The site of the smooth space is in the public domain, a domain that is rapidly changing so attention is brought to its state. The element of duration is also brought forth: the disappearing speed of the glacier and the time it takes to take the photo forms a comparison. The element of duration is necessary to illustrate the speeds and intensities of the ecological processes that are being explored. It is one attempt to avoid the commodity structure of capitalism and the forces of its capture. Such art cannot be 'hung' on a wall, easily sold and traded and so forth. It tries its hardest not to be a commodity by 'disappearing.' becoming anonymous and imperceptible once its 'forcework' has been done (see Ziarek 2004). The relations affirmatively change here as well; the relation is with the inhuman in this case (glacier), and the relations between the huddling mass of cold and shivering naked bodies are also affected. One can imagine the exchanges amongst this 'living sculptural mass' in relation to themselves and the 'will' of the project that takes on its own 'will.' The stark contrast of 'exposure' raises many questions. It is therefore an event that can be counter-actualized, in Deleuze's (1990) terms, whereby it can be revisited for its tranvaluational affects on those who wish to engage with it.
There is a multitude of further actualizations to be explored. Niele Azevedo's series called Minimum Monuments is an exemplary Oekoumenal war machine. One such installation "Melting Men," seems like an inspiration from Tunick's work. Teamed with World Wildlife Fund. "Melting Men" is also a sculptural installation, an urban intervention where the 'smooth space' is created in various cities around the globe in sites that are near city monuments and parks, theatres, and plazas. A 1,000 small ice figures. 20 cm. tall, of men and women are cast in molds, wrapped separately in plastic, and then transported to the site via a refrigerated container. The local populace (men, women, children, virtually anyone interested) can take a modular sculpture and place it on the monument or in the designated site. In this way these figurines 'occupy' the site. One of the most effective events was the placing of the ice figures on the steps in Berlin's Gendarmenmarket Square to show the effects of climate change. As these figures melted away, it was timed with the release of the World Wildlife's report on Arctic wanning (mentioned earlier in footnote 2). Again, all the differential elements are in play. The video of the event shows the buzz that took place by the multitude of people who participated in placing the figures where they wished. The series of Minimum Monuments installations of these ice figures plays with the small and the micropolitics of the anonymous. They 'occupy' space without leadership, like a swarm. As interventions into monuments, they are anti-monuments that subvert or question the state's official history that establishes its official record. Yet. this is not graffiti of destruction. It is an affirmation to further counter-actualizations. The relations are once again reorganized and affirmed as the political strength of the small, yet the very solitude of the 'ice men' point to the nihilism that is spreading. It is (after Nietzsche) a way to resist structures only through the structures themselves, through nihilism itself.
Ziarek (2011) attempts to make a case that Heidegger's Dasein can still teach us something about the shift from anthropocentricism to world and event (das Ereignis). The site (Da) of die relation to being (Sein) refers to the clearing or lighting (Lichtung) as the 'opening out.' which human being can span. There would be nothing to offer humans "if it were not for things and the bearing of things and world, lighting [Lichtung] as the site (Da) of relation to being, that is. as Da-sein" (28, added emphasis). I interpret this as being the smooth space of the event. It offers yet another wager of the Oekoumenal war machine to isolate for us das Ding, the "thing's mode of being is its way of 'thinging' the world. [...] What makes things is not simply their materiality, their being a non-living being, but rather their ability to stay, to maintain and to shelter the world" (28). While this discussion can lead us to the recesses and the fine-points of OOO (object-orientated ontology) that relies heavily on Heideggerian foundations as spear-headed by Graham Harman, here I wish only to maintain that an oekuinental war machine can stage the event where an attempt is made to hold our attention to the 'thing' (das Ding) as an event so that we get how "things tiling the world" (28). The relationship between the human and inhuman is amplified as the notion of things as "human resources" that block the experience of a 'tiling' undergo radical change. The 'tiling' has to be lifted 'out of its world' and starkly recontextualized.
I make brief mention of a number of actualizations of Thingness, the last actualization identifies insects as 'inhuman' tilings. There are of course many artists that can be called on. Mark Dion's "Neukoin Vivarium" begun in 2004 and completed in 2006, housed in the Seattle Art Museum lias received wide attention and shows the irony of how to maintain a 'dying' oak tree by putting it on artificial life support systems within the confines of an art gallery. Once again a smooth space is created within a gallery setting and a pedagogical element is also a part of this installation to explore the developing ecosystems. The tree becomes a das Ding. The isolation of a particular tree species, Australia's Goolengook to regions where we see its devastation, has been the passion of Mark Hansen (2004,2006). Hansen marshals in the Deleuze/Guattari paradigm to show how the space of nature is named, traversed and experienced. There are many artists who attempt to 'isolate' the non-human elements of earth, air, water, fire and so on, so us to bring out their 'Thingness' within an event, and thus change our relationships with it. This applies to microbes of all sorts, insects and animals.
One last example as a further actualization of this Thingness is exemplified by the Canadian artist Aganetha Dyck, who works with bees, which are disappearing species in some sectors of the world; she works with all aspects of them, especially their ability to make honeycombs where (again) science and art are traversed via an onto-aisl hetics.28 It is the swarming power of the 'small' that interests her. where questions of interspecies relations and interkingdoms turn into questions of relationships that 'becoming bee' might bring. Her symbiosis with bees shows aspects of mending and detail that bees can 'teach' us. An exchange takes place between her and the honeybee hives via 'broken' or damaged objects that she strategically manipulates by adding wax. honey, propolis or hand-made honeycomb patters. She then puts these objects back into the hives and allows the bees to swarm and 'respond.' The dialogue then begins as the bees tend to these objects. She then responds to the bees by taking the objects out and changing them, and then replacing them in the hives once again. Durational time of the work, the slow process that this takes, and the capacity to gain more insight into a swarming mentality in the way that bees are sculptors and architects, affirms a relationship that seems unimaginable.29 A similar extraordinary symbiotic exploration with caribou is explored by the Canadian wildlife biologist Karsten Heuer and the film maker/environmentalist Leanne (see Chisholm, 2013).
One can continue on by describing other artistic singularities that form this plateau of a minoritarian politics that taps into the onto-aisthetic levels with the inhuman and the anoganic. but I must bring this chapter to an end by simply mentioning Lars van Trier's remarkable film Melancholia, which has been equally remarkably explored by Steven Shaviro (2012) as yet another actualization of an artistic Oekoumenal war machine. The impending disaster of an asteroid, called Melancholia, is about to destroy the earth. How are we to take such an 'end' of our species? The dinosaurs did not fare well. It is the 'universal history' in the Deleuzian sense of our future: the future anterior of the change that will have occurred—from the future that has already past, which is impossible to report. I take this to be an example of the nonhuman relation utilizing the machinic technology of cinema, as an intervention into the Hollywood disaster films. Melancholia, metonymic for the fate of the earth and the psychic state of Justine, one of two sisters featured as the protagonists in the narrative, is precisely the mood, at times, that seemed to overwhelm me when I read the state of the Anthropocene. Justine is also nihilistic in a liberatory way. She does not grieve for the Planet. She tells her sister. Claire "the Earth is evil, we don't need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it." Of course, it is not the Earth that is 'evil.' the deflection is to the species that populates it. She 'bathes' in the light of the asteroid, naked, welcoming its arrival and our destruction. Morton (2007) in his chapter "Imagining Ecology without Nature," suggests that is the ethically appropriate response to the current ecological situation. The destruction of the earth ends with a scene that might be called a 'becoming child.' Justine. Claire and her son Leo are huddled in a makeshift symbolic shelter as the asteroid hits, perhaps an allusion to Kubrick's floating fetus at the end of 2001? But, if there is 'melancholia' there is also the Nietzschean laughter. Here I think of Richard Kelly's film, Southland Tales (2007) where 'The End of Times' is near. Many quotes from the Book of Revelation are heard throughout the narrative. Through the raptures of media immersion, Hollywood quotes and ironies, and the nightmare of 'capitalist realism' (Fisher 2009), the audience is swept in a delirium towards an entropic end via nihilistic purification into a blissful transcendence—schizoanalysis at its best. There you have it: two bookends to the saying 'farewell' to our existence.
Can the Oekoumenal artistic war machine 'stop climate change? I doubt it. Can it start an infectious transvaluation? Well, maybe. It is not a 'Utopian' dream (as long as one feels, politics is possible), it also addresses the growing nihilism and melancholia as the world decays, where the rich become richer, and a point is reached where money cannot buy you an escape from the dying Planet. Even if you are Richard Branson, and you can circle the earth in your private spacecraft, eventually you too, like the Coyote have ran over the cliff and are about to plummet back down.
1 This essay is dedicated to my teacher Harry Garfliikle who first introduced the concept of Oekoumene to me many, many years ago, which has subsequently sparked this chapter.
2 "Overall the richest 20% of the world's population is responsible for over 60% of its current emissions of greenhouse gases. That figure surpasses 80% if our past contributions to the problem are considered" (Roberts 2001: 502).
3 This trope has to be continually rethought by Hollywood to appease the growing Indigenous crisis that persists throughout the world, whether it is in Canada witli the recent 'Idle no More'Movement, and other Northern countries like Finland's Sámi people, or be it New Zealand Maori. Australian Aboriginal populations and so on. In the mid-80s, the Noble Savage trope was high on the Hollywood film list because of the 500-year celebrations that marked Columbus's landing. But this lias now died down. Yet, the outreach to Indigenous peoples as being ecological stewards is more to appease tensions than to take seriously their life-styles and economic ways. Many ecological groups see hunting and fishing as a bye-gone economy that does more harm than good.
4 Two excellent examples are mentioned by Tim Matta and Aidan Tynan (2012): Wall-E presents a robot that acts as a proxy for humanity; having developed a glitch, he rummages through the trash of human history on the deserted planet Earth assuring us that the human archive will persist. In The Age of Stupid, a similar scenario repeats itself. A lone archivist presides over the entire digitalized memory of humanity in a future world of 2055 that lias suffered environmental collapse via climate change. Through a series of narratives of actual news and documentary footage, he reconstructs just how our species destruction came about. In both cases the future anterior is operable to teach us the 'lessons' we need.
5 In economics this is known as the Jevons paradox or effect. In the nineteenth century William Stanley Jevons noted that every increase of efficiency in steam engine design led only to expanding their numbers. The amount of coal burnt increased, not decreased! Efficiency in resource translates as increase in the rate of consumption of that resource.
6 So the ironic example is that of the United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen in 2009, which cost the Danes $122 million to secure the nation's capital so that it would go on. The self-interest amongst the well-off countries, especially China given its economic boom in Shanghai, kept weakening the accord that was 'finally' struck. In contrast the financial meltdown of 2008 was met by 'saving' the planet through government bailouts.
7 I think another irony emerges when it comes to these speculations: the double negative Žižek theorizes as the negativity of Nature as a radical Other which always threatens humanities annihilation, and the negativity of human subjectivity as destructive of Nature itself. This double-negative is, however, a positive, as it is precisely this heterogeneous symbiosis that both harnesses Nature (e.g.. nuclear energy) and contains its potentially excessive threat (nuclear explosion). The symbiosis is machinic and not anthropomorphic; it implies that somehow humanity confronts its own 'essence,' as Žižek (2010: 336) maintains, the 'negative core of its being,' because of the threat of Nature that lias then to be negated. The machinic symbiosis does not indicate an essence, but experimentation with it. Where such experimentation leads is never a foregone conclusion but is more in keeping with the Nietzschean (1998) caveat: "there is a world of difference between the reason for something coming into existence in the first place and the ultimate use to which it is put" (12).
8 For a thorough examination of this development see "Marx Through Deleuze " (Choat 2010: 125-154).
9 Žižek is never consistent in his Universal/Particular/Singular relationships as extracted from Hegel. They change throughout his many books. For various explications on this see Kisner's (2008) "The Concrete Universal in Žižek and Hegel" and McMillan's (2012) clarifying attempt to articulate Žižek's political position based on the 'concrete universal.'Žižek's (1999) defense of Hegel is introduced in a rigorous manner in the second chapter of The Ticklish Subject and his most recent 1000 page Magnus Opus on Hegel, Less than Nothing (2002). Nothing short of impressive! But misguided.
10 So when Žižek says, "Nature doesn't exist," he is referring to the 'domesticated' Nature of neoliberalism. An 'ecology without Nature' follows in the footsteps of Timothy Morton (2007), who exposes this 'Romantic' myth of Nature that capitalism exploits through its fantasy ideologies.
11 I attempt to make this stick in jagodzinski (forthcoming). Jesters, Saints, Nomads: The Public pedagogies of Lacan, Žižek, Deleuze; Between Mathemes and War Machines," In Žižek and Education. Antonio Garcia (editor) (chapter 4). Sense Publishers.
12 As is well known, for Lacan all knowledge is imbued with paranoia: the Imaginary is paranoiac in that knowledge is acquired in relation to the other through primordial misrecogiiition, hence the illusion of self-mastery, autonomy and self-recognition can lead to anxiety and self-alienation; in relation to the Symbolic structures of languages and speech, paranoia emerges through the demand that is fostered on us by the big Other to conform so we may be at odds with our unique inner subjective experiences; finally the process of knowing is paranoiac through the confrontation with the Real (as the unknown and uncanny).
13 We are all made of cosmic stardust. Neil Shubin (2012) shows how this machinic universe can be understood as it composes our species as part of the cosmos who are but a sliver of time comparatively to the Earth in chronological terms.
14 This is the ontological question raised by Derrick in the last writings before he died: Aporias, The Animal That Therefore I Am and The Beast and the Sovereign. Derrida shifts from interhunian to inter-living-beings but does not venture into non-living being.
15 The Deleuzian philosopher Claire Colebrook (2012) has taken up this line of inquiry.
16 Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (2006) extend Foucault's initial developments of biopower and biopolitics in La Volonté du Savoir to examine the three elements that bring together the concept of biopower into the twenty-first century: knowledge of vital life processes, power relations that take humans as living beings as their objects, and the modes of subjectification or the 'technologies of the self' whereby subjects work on themselves as living beings.
17 An array of positions can be read in the edited collections of Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekmen (2008) as well as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010).
18 Deleuze uses the term "transmutation of values." I am also thinking of historical analysis by Karl Jaspers (1953) of the Axial Age (800 to 200 BC) where such a transvaluative shift took place via Confucianism, Taoism (China), Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism (India), Zoroaster (Persia), Judaism (Canaan) and sophism (Greece). So there is a historical precedent.
19 As developed in chapter 4 and 5 in his Difference and Repetition (1994). See also the 'difficult' writings of Roland Faber (2010, 2011) who attempts to think intensity through both Whitehead and Deleuze when it comes to ecology.
20 Here the paradigmatic example (taken from Bergson) is white light where the Idea of color 'perplexes' (or folds in itself) the generic relations and elements of all the colors. White light is the virtual and multiple state of the Idea of color. It is a concrete universal not a genus or a generality.
21 The very fine essay by Evan Mauro (2013) provides much insight. Geralk Keaney (2011) offers yet another revival.
22 Utopian not in any idealist future sense but as the striving for transcendent values, virtues and virtuals as a symbolic transfer as actions, hopes, sympathies, purposes and enjoyments. These are the intensities that help to reconcile and affirm the mutual immanence of all environments and organisms by changing our concepts, percepts and affects toward a new sensibility to non-human differences (Faber 2011).
23 I have explored the 'aesthetic regime' of modernity that Ranciere develops in jagodzinski (2010). This regime is beset by a central antinomy whereby the self-destruction of aesthetic autonomy presents itself as freedom from political determination, and at the same time, the ability to effect political change as the demand for heteronomy is hampered. My argument in the book is that this tension is evident today between art&design. the ampersand standing for the antinomy of 'art into life' and 'life into art.'
24 The standard lament is that art is a commodity, the more spectacular or confrontational it is. the more it amasses an affect that can be packaged and sold. The view is that the inheritors of the historical avant-garde of the late 60s and early 70s, who critiqued industrial capitalism eventually sold out to the popular cultural market place—the culture industry that does away with the spaces of critique and now finds itself utilizing the complaints generated during the Student Revolts to develop 'flexible' or designer capitalism of liberation management based on planning for personal creative Self-fulfillment. Situationism, Minimalism and Fluxus were the 'true' inheritors of the historical avant-garde.
25 I take this development as having parallels with Lacan's notion of the 'extimate' and his development of the sinthome late in his career as an answer to Deleuze/Guattarian developments. The sinthome drives the artist to establish a 'world' that no longer answers to the demand of the Other, which is another way of confirming the qualifier 'without authority.'
26 The 'outside' is a complicated concept in Deleuze that first emerges witliBlanchot. The outside is more of a force that causes us to think. It is difficult not to think of the fold as another way of expressing an encounter with the virtual Real, with the way that it disorientates and produces the unthought.
27 For an account of this see Schrift (2000).
28 I have made the subtle change to aisthetics rather than aesthetics to acknowledge the affective dimension, rather than the spectacularity that is associated with the aesthetic.
29 This dimension of art and the natural world is developed by Deleuze/Guattari in What is Philosophy?, which is their last book together written mostly by Deleuze as Guattari was ill. Elizabeth Grosz (2008) lias developed lias explored this aspect of their work.
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