Stephen Wright's blog

Wednesday 25 November, 6-8 pm
University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Bachelard Amphitheatre

On the one-year anniversary of the attribution of the first prize in the Competition of Ideas – organized by Jacques Serrano and the Forum européen de l’essai sur l’art – to the n.e.w.s. collective, for our now upcoming book Arbitrating Attention, a critical discussion of the research to date will be held at the Sorbonne in Paris, co-organized by the Forum européen de l’essai sur l’art and the CERAP.

In the course of researching my end of our upcoming book on shadow practices, I have been grappling with the ethics and politics of trying to detect and draw even modest attention to initiatives that have deliberately sought to impair their coefficient of specific visibility. More on that to come. But I guess the most radical way for an artist to get off – and stay off – artworld radar screens is simply to quit the artworld. To bail, but to do so as an – ultimate – artistic gesture. Berlin-based theorist Alexander Koch has initiated and carried out some fascinating research on this unwritten chapter of contemporary art history – the history and conditions of possibility of what he calls the Kunstausstieg (http://www.kunst-verlassen.de/). Here’s an excerpt from our recent exchange.

One of the things we at n.e.w.s. are most attentive to is the agency of the invisible-yet-undeniable, that is, the imperceptible yet sometimes incontrovertibly active presence of what, for lack of better words, we are prone to call angels, spirits or ghosts. Understandably, we’re not sure how to measure this agency, though we are convinced it is somehow graspable and that in many cases its conditions of possibility are linked to developments in art. We’re not even sure how to detect it, or what to do with it if we did. Radar and sonar were developed during World War Two in order to thwart the lethal agency of the invisible yet undeniable submarines and long-range bombers. But whatever the interest of radar aesthetics, the radar metaphor has played itself out and we now find ourselves seeking entities and energies so stealthy as to elude even radar detection. Our methodology for detecting and measuring their agency is cobbled together from a variety of sources: counter-espionage manuals, angelology, lie-detection technique, natural-language search engines, conceptual litmus testing and just basic walking around sniffing in the shadows. We call that “research” in our grant applications, presumably to give them some semblance of seriousness. The real comedy in all this is the extent to which things can be mistaken for what they actually are… In this realm, more clearly than in others, error is our guide – and in the following instance, our very example.

The pursuit of truth seems to have been pretty much a constant in the official history of all human endeavor: science, ethics, politics, education, even aesthetics and romance all take their bearings from the implicit and apparently self-evident horizon of Truth. Even liars adhere to the supremacy of the truth they strive to travesty or conceal. Yet, ensconced as it may be in common sense, that apparent self-evidence is somewhat troubling. For the paradox, of course, is that if we need truth as our guiding beacon then it can only be because we are errant bodies in a world replete with error. And being in denial about that paradox has led our verists to some massive hypocrisy and not much verism of any substance at all. But what if it were the other way round? What if truth was not an earthly principle at all? Where would that leave us? Not in the hands of the relativists, to be sure, because they too have their shifting horizon of explanatory truth, which they call relativism. What if the ordering principle of reality were error itself? What would that mean? How could we face up responsibly and honestly to something so apparently irresponsible? By denying it even as errors continue to accumulate daily? Or playing with it, to tease out… not its truth but its potential?

vivre sa vie

Errorism, in both theory and practice, is based on the manifestly warped idea that error is the ordering principle of reality. In other words, errorism is, philosophically speaking, a self-consciously erroneous position. (Whereas other philosophical positions may have the dubious epistemological privilege of being unselfconsciously erroneous.) This raises some abyssal conceptual quandaries… International Errorism is also a worldwide – indeed universal! – movement, started in Buenos Aires, international capital of error, in 2006, or thereabouts, which has done much to promote understanding and acceptance of errorism. Only error keeps mankind alive!

Though this may be a thorough error in judgment, this forum will consist of posting a number of theoretical and philosophical and political texts – Errorist Manifestos, videos and images and odd and sundry, and then engaging a conversation in no particular direction with everyone and all error involved. The Forum is thus a place to concoct, theorize on, commit, and to contaminate the world with error. Error is its constituent principle.

+error

This online forum paves the way for next year’s International Congress of Error and Errorism to be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on the occasion of the bicentennial of South American independence – or two hundred years of error in Latin America. The point is to deepen our level of error in anticipation of the Congress. It is not clear to the organizers who in their right mind yet, with enough money to fund such an endeavor, would agree to part with it for such a carnival of gleeful and erroneous folly! But be that as it may, International Errorists shall convene in Buenos Aires in early 2010 to consider the abyssal philosophical subtleties, political substance, scientific ramifications and aesthetic emancipatory potential of the idea according to which errare humanum est and above all that somos todos erroristas.

So to get the ball rolling (in the wrong direction of course, and with as many balls as required) let this online forum acknowledge that it has already begun.

The gentrye are all round, on each side they are found,

Theire wisdom’s so profound, to cheat us of our ground

Stand up now, Diggers all.
The Diggers Song, Gerrard Winstanley & Leon Rosselson
http://www.diggers.org/english_diggers.htm

This post follows up on an exchange initiated on n.e.w.s. a few months back by Branka Curcic under the heading of “The New Economy of Enclosure,” dealing with the pitfalls of the web 2.0 model and mindset, which she nicely summed up as the “private appropriation of community-created value.” http://www.northeastwestsouth.net/site/node/166#comment-37
This issue has gained some currency these past weeks as the French National Assembly has debated a bill entitled “Creation and Internet” – or Hadopi, the name of the proposed governmental organisation which it creates. The intent of the law (which will inevitably pass, despite some left parliamentarians jumping out of the woodwork at the last minute to defeat a second reading) is to severely crack down on the online exchange of audiovisual files, which it defines as “pirating,” by a three-strikes-you’re-off-the-net approach to internet accounts using peer-to-peer platforms to download or upload copyrighted content. Internet becomes a privilege for those who respect private property. Though probably unenforceable, this particularly iniquitous law was drafted by supposedly left-of-centre businessman and author Denis Olivennes, in a book entitled La Gratuité c’est le vol (Free is theft), a revealingly cynical echo of Joseph Proudon’s La Propriété c’est le vol (Property is theft). With any luck, history will look back on this law as the anachronistic convulsion of a senile music and film industry desperately lobbying to create artificial scarcity in the face of unstoppable profusion, using a business model from another century. But what are the intellectual underpinnings for even talking about “intellectual property”? And what kind of historical opposition has been mustered against it over the years?

Hello! I see that some slackers have been more than punctual in taking the initiative and getting this forum under way. Whereas some others, ahem, have waited for the sun to warm the earth before sallying forth. This is just as it should be, for it places us straightaway at the heart of the issues we are to address: the paradoxes of slackerdom.

Three questions are of supreme interest to me with respect to what I take to be our common concern in performing the everlasting Sunday:

- Why is authentic slacking different than mere laziness (if it is)? I choose that phrasing deliberately to underscore the ticklish distinction between the two: I feel it is somehow slacker-incompatible to identify an “authentic” as opposed to an inauthentic mode of slacking, just as it is absurd to suggest that describing laziness as “mere” does anything but upgrade it to some more interestingly corrosive status. Still, it strikes me as useful, even necessary to attempt to conceptualize slacking off as a specific way of being in the world – as opposed to indolence or idleness (and other agreeable states) on the one hand, and languor or what Christians call slothfulness on the other.

- This ontological speculation on slacking’s core definition begs the second question: slacking’s political ontology. By both slacking off from the imperative to work and, symmetrically, deliberately abstaining from leisure and other modes of consumerism, slackers embody a fascinating – and for the productivist majority, infuriating – performative double bind, akin to the famous “I am a liar” that had the Greeks stumped. Slackers don’t “just” slack off; they go at it full-tilt. Clearly, the studied and ostentatious practice of doing not much at all is all-consuming. But is it subversive? Does it have seditious potential within a regime of productivism? Can it obstruct the reifying logic of “creativity” and “artistic research projects” we hear so much about?

I’m very much of two minds about the whole issue of “data-mining,” as Lev Manovich puts it – or “data-recovery” as others might say inasmuch as we have all contributed to that ever-expanding mother-lode – with which Renée Ridgway has invited us to engage in her recent, thought-igniting post. The sheer magnitude of data accumulation is positively diabolical – or at least demonic, to use a more genteel term for the hellish little fellow. Indeed, in a fascinating if somewhat sibylline passage in his deliciously premonitory novel, The Crying of Lot 49, written in the early 1960s, Thomas Pynchon imagines an ambivalent character whom I see as Data’s Demon.

For some time now, I’ve been meaning to respond to Lee Weng Choy’s thoughtful posting on the need for “slowing things down.” There is something intuitively urgent about that appeal for calm, which I felt needed to be fleshed out. Has something happened to time, I found myself wondering, or is it just our overwrought egos and zealous scheduling that need to be put on depressants?

One has to be pretty mean-spirited to find much wrong with dreaming. But what I like best about dreams is that they put the lie to the increasingly prevalent idea that we all live in the same world - the very quintessence of contemporary ideology. Clad in the decidedly dad-reminiscent rhetorical garments of “common sense,” the one-world argument is regularly trotted out by our neoliberal realists to encourage us to fall into line, wake up to reality, singular, and give up our insistence on alternatives to the merely existent. In the name of the efficient governance of the existent order, they trivialise the fictionalising imagination – that is, the imagination that splinters and multiplies the real – as utopian dreaming, claiming that the real is one. But in making such a claim, they let the cat out of the bag – if only because everyone has that extraordinary and yet perfectly ordinary experience of dreaming.

One of the questions I struggle with most regarding art is whether or not to continue using the word at all. On the one hand, it designates an amorphous set of symbolic configurations and activities by and large so at odds with what I refer to when I use the term, I wonder if I would not be well advised to look for a different word. Yet on the other hand, I am loath to yield the monopoly on the use of that term to those whose usage I find so uncongenial.