Simon O’Sullivan: I’ve got a question for Robin, but I think it might be going to Mark as well. Robin, one of the things that strikes me, and it’s a bit like what I was saying to Tom, is that one can have the ‘aestheme’, but it’s kind of an evacuation of the human, and yet, whether it’s a story by Ballard or a Smithson, it’s all human. And so that seems to be a real issue, that while aesthemes evacuate the human from these things, yet the human comes in as the person reading the fiction or the person who wrote it.
If I remember rightly, Friday is a story where Robinson goes through this series of rituals and practices and performances, as you know with the goats in the trees, and he buries himself in the island, doesn’t he? He does all these various practices in order to save the island. And it strikes me that there’s something really interesting about that practice that’s not a million miles away from what you were saying, Mark, in terms of schizoanalysis and counter-engineering. That it’s not so much a practice in the sense of an art practice that’s ‘about’ something, about depicting something; it’s a series of practices or rituals or performances that allow transformations to take place.
There are two questions here really: one is about aesthemes and the way the human comes back in; but the broader question is whether bringing art and speculative realism together is more interesting if we think of it in terms of practices that themselves allow one to become different, to step ‘outside’, etc.
Robin Mackay: Of course art is made by humans for other humans to experience. The notion of the aestheme doesn’t at all try to evacuate the human; that’s why I think it’s interesting. If we take an aestheme, cuteness would be one, the sublime would be one. What are they? They’re relations between certain material objects and certain ideas, and the traditional way in which we think of them is to understand the idea as belonging to a transcendental subject and the aesthetic qualities somehow to exist in a purified form elsewhere, beyond the particular object in which they are presented. What’s interesting for me in what I would call the ‘sideways causality’ at work in Ferenczi is that the relation itself does not constitute the aestheme; the aestheme can be said to exist independently of it. So it’s not really a case of evacuating the human, but it’s a case of conceptualising the aestheme in a different way, in which one’s investment in it shifts and the subject is actually transformed. And this is particularly interesting in relation to the sublime, because as people have always noticed, it’s really difficult to write about the sublime, a sublime painting, say, without writing in a sublime way. It’s difficult not to propagate it, one is indeed ‘prone’—and this propagation is indeed a question of ritual. And I think this kind of blocking procedure is a genuinely interesting way in which to break from this epidemic dimension of art in a new way, by presenting these things in a ‘desufficient’ form. Presenting them in this different way, rather than separating ourselves from them or trying to leap outside of or beyond them—not to try and jump outside again, but to take a perspective in which we are already outside the circle.
Mark Fisher: This is the crucial issue for me, this question of leaping outside; this came up this morning as well, leaping too quickly over the subject, over the human, etc. We can see the CCRU, early Land etc., as being haunted by this problem, I think. It is as if the argument is: If the real isn’t human in some sense, then everything about being a human is total illusion. Okay, that might be true, but then so what? Things would carry on anyway. I think there was a kind of struggle as to what kind of practice would link the two; and I think it ended up in a kind of self-hatred, because it couldn’t be writing, that wasn’t good enough, that was just a relation of transcendence and not what will actually take us out of being a human…. But if we see writing as a practice, which of course it is, things look different.
At the same time, what is called lived experience is a product of ideology, which is fundamentally ritualistic—it is not first of all ideas, but behaviours. Which is just to say that I think the way out of this bind is to do what they say in pedagogical practice and to start where people are, as it were. That we are here now, but whatever it is that constitutes the ‘for us’ is mutable, is subject to change.
So, I think the link then between the philosophical project of eliminativism and actual cultural practice, I think that’s the key. It might well be true that, as Metzinger says, there’s no self, but selves persist, as ritualised performances, and this has a clear aesthetic dimension.
So maybe here the role of the aesthetic would be much stronger than that of theory. And maybe the role of the aesthetic is to culturally propagate things, so as to interrupt the ritualistic reiteration of a subjectivity which may well be pure simulation, but nevertheless is highly effective.
RM: The most amusing thing about the ‘performative’ aspect of Laruelle, and the reason why his writings really annoy people is that they are nonplussed by the fact that he says he’s doing non-philosophy, but then how come his writing isn’t like some kind of crazy beat poetry, how come it still looks like, and uses, philosophy? That’s what really annoys people: that he’s continuing to practice and do something and yet he’s claiming this kind of indifference. Similarly, in conversations I’ve had with people about Pamela’s work, some people find it just impossible to engage with and I believe it has to do also with this kind of blocking, this refusal to mirror. And yet obviously it’s in art galleries, and it’s in the institution, and it is artwork. So yes, it’s more interesting to actually practice rather than get obsessed about this immanentization question; but to think seriously about how to practice otherwise.
Amanda Beech: Because we know that this rhetoric of escape, this desire to escape the paradigm that we know is art, is very much a kind of standard politics of resistance that requires a relation to what is resisted. You know, its negation produces a relation. But Robin, what you’re describing is I think something like a non-relational resistance of some kind, and I find that compelling.
But then I think also, what kind of relations are being formed and grasped here? If we’re not thinking about a relation with what is being resisted, what are we producing in terms of new forms? Is it reengaging its own history, the history of art for example? If so, what is being affirmed in those connections and the interpretations that are going on in a practice? What is being grasped as a relation, and why?
That leads me to pick up on your question of future and past, Ray. This question about the future is really important here, because what is it we are grasping in the non-relation? I am a little anxious that, if we can’t perfect a non-relational resistance, we might end up with some reinvention of autonomy for art and a remystification of the aporia of the aesthetic and those kinds of dynamics.
So this question of islands is interesting in its resistant form, but it also promises something like shamanistic autonomy for the image and that worries me, because that would be to suppose a discrete territory without purpose, if you like. But this seems to me to be the primary mode in which art aids and abets capital and produces it, and that’s the art that we love as capitalists. So while on the one hand it’s claimed as being deeply politicised because of its separateness if you like, its resistant form, that, as we also know, is the very form around which we pivot our relations in terms of capitalist accumulation. So I guess those two figures that I’m identifying here seem to be close but very different in many ways as well.
Peter Wolfendale: I thought I’d try and pick up on what Mark was saying about art after experience. I get what you meant with the relationship between Hume and Kant, and how this figures a lot of stuff. And I thought it’d be interesting just to pick up what seems to be one of Kant’s crucial insights: the fact that for him the experience of beauty and the experience of the sublime, these things that are subjectively universal, they’re cognitive, fundamentally cognitive in a way that, say, having a nice meal, that’s like ‘mmm, tasty’, just isn’t. So that’s the difference between aesthetic judgements of taste and aesthetic judgements of the beautiful and the sublime. And I think this can lead you into an interesting open space for getting past phenomenological conceptions of art. If we start having this more complicated understanding of social cognition, then we have to start talking about cognitive systems, sociocognitive systems like collective agents and other kinds of mechanisms which simply have no phenomenology. In what sense does a group form themselves as a collective agent that has an artistic experience? Well, if there’s cognition, there’s some sense in which there might be some sort of artistic relationship; but it couldn’t possibly be described in any phenomenological terms.
MF: I think my problem here is that it’s still like rushing too quickly out of the human. You have to pass through the phenomenological in a certain way in order to attain the cognitive response. I don’t mean you have to stay at the phenomenological, of course, and I think that there are ways of getting beyond that. One is the extent to which the cognitive is always implicated in the phenomenological anyway, which is already there in Kant; and secondly, what cognitive judgements do particular phenomenological manifestations mandate or call up? But this is much more than the idea that you can just rule out the phenomenological entirely or that we can just leap over it to a purely cognitive account of art or whatever; that seems to me just going nowhere really.
Ray Brassier: I totally agree. Kant transforms the account of experience into one of cognitive experience—it becomes experience as a cognitive accomplishment, because experiences can be structured through judgement and through conceptual synthesis. So I think the point at which they manifest, some phenomenal level, some stratum of phenomenal experience, is indispensable. It’s possible to embrace it as a post-Kantian conception of phenomenology, which is that phenomenal experiences are conceptually mediated and propositionally structured in some complicated sense, as opposed to a more problematic sense of the term, which would say that the world has this predetermined categorical structure. So I completely agree. I mean, you can’t get beyond the empirical; the manifest is indispensable. But the point is a dialectic between the phenomenal and the noumenal such that the possibilities of experience, of perceptual experience, are enlarged through conceptual, through cognitive revolution; so aesthetic experience in that sense is something that is an enlargement, an expansion of the horizon of perception. Aesthetic experience in that sense is indispensable and illuminable because it is perceiving things that transcend any merely sensible synthesis. So I’m just reiterating this point—this is why you cannot leap over the manifest image.
MF: Isn’t that the danger of wanting to go beyond Kant, into transcendental materialism?
RB: The boundary between the phenomenal and the noumenal is constantly renegotiated. And the point is that there are no phenomena without noumena, and the noumenon is the reality of the phenomenon. It’s something that is embedded in the structure of the phenomenon. So, in other words, phenomena are real. This is Kant’s point; they’re not illusions. Phenomena, shadows, are real. But to understand how phenomenal experiences are dimensional projections of a higher-dimensional reality is a cognitive task. And then the point about the cognitive is that you can enlarge it: we perceive things that were imperceptible several centuries ago.
MF: Isn’t that then Kant instead of phenomenology? Schematically, we can divide this post-Kantian account of phenomena from these dominant neo-Humean models of phenomenology and also much of Deleuze, where you’ve got this idea of autonomous sensation. But we can perhaps see the whole schizoanalytic project as much more to do with the former, as a reengagement with Kant over the question of conditions of experience, which are now seen as mutable rather than fixed. But the idea of sensation, accessible without conditions of experience of any kind, isn’t that a kind of Humean temptation in Deleuze’s work?
RB: I think it’s also a legacy of Bergson. Bergson is the real culprit, Phenomenology in the early Husserl and Heidegger is about the inapparent within appearances. It’s not just describing what things seem like, or what they could feel like. But the problematic claim of Bergson is that there is this dimension of absolute individual experience, there’s this absolute dimension you can intuit. There’s a point where thinking and feeling fuse, and what you find in Bergson is the idea of recovering this sub-representational, sub-conceptual stratum of experience, which is always individual.
This is tied to an attack on the sociality of human perceptual experience. The gregarious self is a merely superficial crust hiding this deeper, more profound individual. Whereas Kant’s point is that what makes you a subject of experience is the fact that when you have an experience, you’re having an experience that could be had by any human. This is the difference between Erfahrung and Erlebnis in German philosophy; Erfahrung is cognitive experience which is necessarily social and collective; Erlebnis is lived experience which is supposedly private and intersubjectively effable. And that’s problematic, since it’s that model of experience as Erlebnis that has become potentially capitalist idealogy, the idea that what you feel and what you directly experience is this inalienable fulcrum for everything else.
RM: Very schematically: art has always dealt with images of the real, and at one time maybe there was a belief that there were ‘good’ and ‘bad’ images of the real, and now we’re in this position where it seems (as Amanda was saying) that we worry that there are only ‘bad’ images, since representation itself is somehow inherently ideologically tainted; and yet we still have to go through them. This is the variously tragic, ironic, or self-satisfied predicament. But why does that peculiarly moral judgement have such a hold? I wonder whether we could instead talk about images as being models of the real, or fictions; fictions in the sense in which Laruelle uses the term, Or low-dimensional projections, as Ray was saying. To think about this in terms of models and what they do, what they allow us to do in the real world, is to learn a lesson in Copernicanism. ‘We cannot escape mediation through a form of images, but images are evil’—This is just a form of narcissism, whether you’re bemoaning it or whether you’re celebrating it as a correlationist.
MF: But haven’t you just evacuated aesthetics there, in the sense of what is specifically aesthetic? You could have models that have no aesthetics whatsoever. That would be my problem.
RM: That would be intellectual intuition, surely?
MF: Yes, but the point is that given that you’re thinning down the aesthetic content by doing that.
Alex Williams: Why would you necessarily want to do that to models? Thin down the aesthetic content? I don’t know why you’d want to. Because that aesthetic content may be vital in enabling you to gain traction.
RM: Yes, surely it’s the compelling nature of the aesthetic content that makes a model effective, as well as its purchase on the real or, if you prefer, its capacity to further abstraction and therefore action. It comes back again to the notion of cunning, and methods. And that’s all about being in the middle of models and their powers, and not having an absolute viewpoint; it’s about, very literally, putting yourself in another’s place, not sentimentally but through prosthetic use of ‘aesthetic technologies’; and thus refusing to accept that you’re trapped forever in one reality, one set of rituals, along with their attendant abstractions.
AW: I was thinking about what Amanda was talking about, this question of relations and the potential political content of aesthetic forms. So, there’s this idea that says that resistance is bad because it ends up regenerating the thing you’re trying to get away from; on the other hand we get this sort of subtractive or non-relation which you were pointing towards, Robin, to some extent, with Laruelle. I think that Amanda also raised this idea of the realist engagement with a future, and this is something that I think might provide another kind of way out of this nightmare whereby all left politics get turned into a politics of resistance, which, as Ray was saying, is basically a reactionary politics of fear, with a reactionary imagination. And maybe to move outside of this situation where we’re obsessed with this thing we can’t get away from, where the best we can do is to create a vacuole that is effective temporarily, to reengage the future and therefore generate something on that basis—this would be a speculative aesthetics. With Landian accelerationism there is certainly a suggestion that it is through aesthetics and through aesthetic representations and experiences, through thinking from the standpoint of this future, that you can generate that future.
MF: But the problem with that was that the future had already happened, so all you could do was get on board with it or not; and that produced a kind of self-hating impotence, actually: It doesn’t matter, Kapital, the Terminator, has already happened and we’re just this sad relic waiting around for termination, cheerleading along, and the Terminator will show no more mercy to us than those who decide to sit around campfires, hymning the natural beauty of the earth or whatever. But what’s hinted at sometimes in those texts is that the future will only happen if it’s made to happen now, so that gives you a positive immanence rather than an impotent negative transcendence.
I just want to come back to the broader themes that have come up today, this relationship between purposiveness and non-purposiveness, etc. I think what also relates to this is that the Landian ideology of that moment did fit with neoliberalism in that it was the idea that control and organisation are inherently oppressive. Whereas I think with Alex and Nick’s accelerationism, there can be a role for management and control where, rather than inhibiting a certain kind of acceleration, it can intensify it, raising this question of aims and ends. And I think also the important point about the supererogatory is that there can only be a supererogatory excess when you do have a determined aim. If you don’t have any aim or lure, then you don’t get any excess. And I think this points to a crisis of ‘experimentalTM’ culture, which has no real experiment in it because there’s no concept of success or failure. There’s no real aim, the form is negatively defined in relation to the non-experimental. There’s nothing taking place in these experiments; you’re not finding anything out.
That’s one thing that’s come out for me really strongly today, is that dialectic between aim and a purpose and purposiveness of a certain kind. Genuine experimental practice would have specific determinate aims, that’s how you open up things into an unknown.