Before Art: the problem of abstraction and its contradiction

Introduction

Scene one:

A man, probably mid thirties sits in front of a set up of computer screens in the offices of a New York stock trading company. He buys and sells the shares of companies from all over the world, sometimes buying a share and selling it within seconds. His average daily earnings are 2000 $ a day. He lives in a nice suburban house with his partner and child, he is into endurance sports, he is convinced that his discipline as a trader is boosted by his passion for physically demanding sports, he's done 30 triathlons. Pictured riding through fancy suburbia on his sports bike he says "I think there are a lot of similarities between high performance sports and trading, when you are out on the race it's you vs. you – your system, your process, and in the same way in trading you're in control of your day, it's really all about putting yourself in a position to succeed in your game plan." [1]

Scene two:

An artist who works extensively with digital imaging recently wrote the following "In a computer-generated universe, metaphor is as if rendered literal – metaphors seem to come true, in a way [...] the apparent liberty of having no proper recourse to reality (appropriation now being something akin to remembering things, for example) has meant that I've felt more able to manipulate images, sounds, and words. And this power has felt increasingly permissible. If a human figure is computer generated, I feel able to treat it with impunity, if only because it can't really exist outside the fantasy of code. Consequence is held in abeyance. Because it was generated – because it came from nothing – it doesn't really cite life, at least not in a pragmatic way. Avatars are [...] ideal understudies of power, violence, and sexuality. It is that characteristic of representational fidelity that is of most importance [...] as it does the job of shifting the image to a point of creative intangibility where the object is sourceless, unauthored, and certainly not revenant or haunted, as nostalgia is so often analogized." [2]

Let's look at some of the key words and terms in the two scenes: High performance, you vs. you, process, control, game plan, literal, to come true, no proper recourse to reality, manipulate, power, impunity, the suspension of consequences, something from nothing, violence, sourceless, unauthored, not haunted by nostalgia.

The question here is does social reality determine the forms of consciousness that are represented in scene 1 and 2 or does human consciousness determine social reality? Which one is first consciousness or socio-political reality? Although this might sound like a chicken and egg problem, let us take it that consciousness is determined by the social reality of its times, and that these forms of consciousness are the expression of human relations in a given time. What constitutes the enabling conditions for scene 1 is the same as for scene 2, both scenes are conceptual abstractions that are determined by abstractions that spring from trade and commodity exchange in its current form, which is becoming increasingly abstract (think the apps on your Smartphone or iPad for example). In fact trading now, buying and selling on the stock market, happens in tiny fractions of seconds using computers programmed with mathematical algorithms that only understand the language of profit, loss and gain; they make auto-decisions devoid of human susceptibility. Writing in 2012, Sven Lütticken, remarks about how philosophers writing in the age of classical industrial capitalism thought of abstraction as that which liquidates the concrete or actual whereas now it is clear that it is that which can "liquefy and transform the concrete from within. [...] from social media to GM (genetically modified) foods, abstraction is not just real and operative but has transformed the nature of concretion itself. This does not mean that the dialectic of abstraction and concretion is abolished; just that it becomes ever more complex and refined." [3]

This brings us to real abstraction, a Marxist notion that theorist Alberto Toscano (through his study of the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Žižek and many others) has argued manifests itself as a contradiction to the tradition of philosophical thought itself that cannot be reconciled because: "The reason for this irreconcilable contradiction is that for Marx, to put it bluntly, abstraction precedes thought. More precisely, it is the social activity of abstraction that plays the pivotal role in the analysis of real abstraction. Here is the 'thought previous to and external to the thought'. It lies in the prosaic activity of commodity exchange and its grounding in practically abstract labour, and not (in both the logical and historical sense) in the individual mind of the doer." [4

So, if the social activity of abstraction i.e. commodity exchange is now increasingly managed by lightning fast inhuman computerised algorithms its result is a real abstraction that is just as immune, unhaunted, and disaknowledging of longstanding humanist perspectives and traditions, the absolutism of a new lean mean market machine. And, here begins a whole conundrum played out across theory and art. If as Marx noted abstraction precedes thought, then any thought whether theoretical or artistic that attempts to think abstraction is already saturated with the same abstraction that it is trying to reflect upon. This is exactly what Alfred Sohn-Rethel calls the irreconcilable contradiction between thought and abstraction. Let us say, acknowledging this as a generalization, that many art practices function based on a decision whereby the artist or curator says "I am able to think of abstraction or grapple with it because somehow I am outside it" or, to put it another way "the thought I am thinking is not already saturated with abstraction thus it's ok to think of abstraction". The problem with this way of thinking is that it is laden with contradictions to the abstractness that determines it, however it is also host to the traditional philosophic capacity for reflection and critique which is undoubtedly important. There is another way of thinking which is understandably now more popular than ever. This is a thought based on the idea of non-contradiction to abstraction, this is when the artist or curator says "I will speak from within abstraction itself because my thought is already saturated with it", just like the trader in scene 1 and the artist in scene 2 this we can call non-contradictory thought, and it can be found in different political, philosophical, and art genealogies. This thought is susceptible to thinking exactly like capital and thus affirming capital, but there are examples of it that develop methods of critique that are amply sophisticated and avoid, to a certain extent, becoming the affirming mouthpiece of neo-liberal capital. The advantages of this way of thinking or rather of this way of positioning oneself is that you can think of the world as a kind of plastic, a malleable set of materials, in some cases it gives you the opportunity to practice power and a kind of limited ruthlessness, you vs. you if you like, although it is never that simple in art, but through this aesthetic power forms of critique can be forged, but they are forms of critique that might not appear to us in the same form, presence, or vocabulary as standard abstraction-contradictory critique.

The course will look at the problem of thought that is contradictory to abstraction and how the tendency over the past few years has been to avoid it or rather circumvent it, gradually developing a kind of partial taboo within the field of art. Although this gradually intensifying taboo is apparent in artistic practice it is considerably more evident in the field of curating since curatorial activity is, among other things, an interface between the art produced and the abstraction of the contemporary. The result within this field at least has not been a grand flight into forms of non-contradictory thought however. This is perhaps because of non-contradictory thought's perceived violence or danger (think of a number of ideas such as accelerationism – the idea that capital should be accelerated to tap into the real potentiality of progress and the future stalled by the current capitalist nexus – or Reza Negrestani's idea of the inhuman which he describes as "the activation of the revisionary program of reason against the self-portrait of humanity" [5], or Ray Brassier's, notion that philosophy should be considered the organ that guides humanity as it is today to its extinction). Although such ideas are increasingly popular within the field, their attempts at an extreme makeover of the enlightenment tradition, to subtract or eliminate humanism from the concept of enlightenment so that enlightenment would be more akin to the notion of an updating, upgrading, or optimization of the human through a determinate focus on reason, has meant that it has not been easy to swallow, with the notion of enlightenment still weighing heavy on our minds as an episode in history responsible for considerable complexities. Thus the predominate result of avoiding abstraction-contradictory critique (the problem of thought contradictory to abstraction) has been a gradual erasure of criticality in contemporary discourse; a shift into what Hal Foster recently dubbed the post-critical [6], whereby because of fear of contradiction to abstraction we are left with a flux of positive affirmations of the current view of world. This has been achieved through either an uncritical wholesale alliance with object oriented ontology, more specifically flat ontologies such as those of Bruno Latour or / and a dismissal of negation and negativity as an important factor in critical thinking. We will look at the spectrum of different positions in what we can call non-contradictory thought and the arguments for and against it; we will also look into its philosophical genealogy and consider its importance in relation to art today, what it says to art and about art. Acknowledging that the least interesting position is that of a weak non-contradiction in the form of affirmative non-critical thought that can be referred to as post-critical, we will consider what the artist gains and what they sacrifice by aligning with non-contradictory thought. Some of the questions underlying this layout of positions and enterprises are: can there be a true criticality that is not in contradiction with our culture of abstraction? Does the price of criticality necessarily have to be contradiction to abstraction? Why are we seeing a return to the theme of enlightenment? We will probably not be able to reach definitive answers to these questions but the hope is that by traversing this territory of thought we can better understand the stakes, territories, and possibilities of critical art practice today within and from abstraction.

With texts by: Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, François Laruelle, Alberto Toscano, Alexander Galloway, Alexander Galloway & Jason LaRiviere, Benjamin Noys, Katerina Kolozova, Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani, and Amanda Beech

Notes
[1] This is Scott Redler who features in the BBC documentary Traders Millions By The Minute, Season 1 Episode 1, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07XwNQrFd50 [accessed: 5.10.2014]
[2] Atkins, Ed. 2014.Digital Reflex, Avery Singer and Ed Atkins respond to Texte zur Kunst. Texte zur Kunst, September (year: 24, issue: 95), Berlin, 68 - 77
[3] Lütticken, Sven. 2012. Inside Abstraction. e-flux journal # 38. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/inside-abstraction/ [accessed: 15 September 2014]
[4] Toscano, Alberto. 2008. The Culture of Abstraction. Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 25(4), SAGE: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore, 57–75.
[5] Negarestani, Reza. 2014. The Labor of the Inhuman. In #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. Mackay, Robin and Avanessian, Armen (eds.). Falmouth: Urbanomic, 428 - 466
[6] Foster, Hal. 2012. Post-Critical. October magazine. Winter 2012, No. 139, MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 3-8