The Catasterism
The following epistle is an example of intentional (self-conscious) self-plagiarism; i.e., re-stating remarks and positions posted or published elsewhere, inclusive of lifting Part Two (“Next Revolution”) from the summary section of a recently completed PhD. Such is the beauty of iterative, generative, and aleatory scholarship – and such is a practice much frowned upon and/or prohibited by the publishing industry, the overlords of the art-academic industrial complex, and the self-appointed keepers (curators) of the knowledge commons.
Image – Black Square. Image: Gavin Keeney.
“Communication, too, has to be looked at in a new way. Modern discourse often becomes monolithic and monolingual. The other is missing or becomes secondary. It is particularly clear when we look at minoritarian and marginal discourse. It is in this context that [one] has to understand we need a plural framework of knowledge. Science can no longer hegemonise other knowledge systems. One needs a plurality of knowledges and a way of mediating between them.”
–Shiv Visvanathan
I. THE ZERO DEGREE
Sometimes works must pass through a classic zero degree and into negative-negative territory to emerge – eventually – as a catasterism, high above “it all,” so to speak. But what is this “high above ‘it all’” other than an implicit and highly contingent refusal to play by the rules of the game. There is an inordinate amount of historical examples of such works (such as when Nietzsche switched from Philology to Philosophy, or when Kleist declaimed that his own works would take, perhaps, one hundred years to find readers). Kierkegaard’s own disregard (let us say “negative” regard for the conventions of his day) made him something of a pariah in his own times, with his subsequent re-discovery amounting to anointment as nascent savant. El Greco was forgotten for several hundred years until his own resurrection at the hands of French and German avant-gardists. Works often receive what is called a “seal,” and it is often mistakenly transferred to the author or artist, when it actually belongs to works. “It’s over, it’s completed, it has been paid for.”
This “zero degree” is a case of the negation of rules – a rite of passage. Awe + Dread becomes Awe + Dread. The double negative kicks in when authors and artists engage in re-writing the rules. The catasterism kicks in when works surprisingly “announce” their own agency and rise to the occasion by finding a niche or crack in the edifice of cultural production. Often the author or artist is erased in the process, though this may occur “after the fact” (quite naturally) or en passant (quite preternaturally). Authors and artists cannot choose which will prevail. It is a matter of “Fate + Grace.”
To steal a term from Kierkegaard, the present age is an abomination – for authors and for artists. Everybody knows this. Academics know it, artists (living in a garret or in a mansion) know it, and – critically – the authorities know it. Why it is an abomination has to do with the absolute corruption of the knowledge commons by Capital. Marx certainly knew it, and we should never forget that he predicted, in Capital, a day when the expropriators would be expropriated (or, in contemporary parlance, when the disruptors would be disrupted).
Works have a way of defining their own terms. This is known as works-based agency. They may be said to choose their author, and they may be said to determine where they wish to go. This all implies that the debauched knowledge commons is not as monolithic as it seems at times. There are chinks in the wall through which one might drive a truck. You just have to find them. The great chink at the moment is called Intellectual Property Rights (the capitalized version). The great coming insurrection is the abolition of Intellectual Property Rights, at first elective or a-legal, by artist-scholars, and then categorically and through law. It will not happen overnight. But it is the most powerful concept since the abolition of slavery and it will certainly expropriate the expropriators (and disrupt the disruptors). It is already waiting in the wings of the great theater of digital-everything, where the latest innovations more or less ignore intellectual property rights law while hoping that they may return through a back door to impose a new regime of intellectual property rights law.
The problem of a mostly immaterial and, therefore, spectral civil war being waged to outlaw intellectual property rights to then reclaim the same on the other side of the machinic innovations being launched (e.g., through selling the technology) owes much of its current machinations to the explicit a-morality of technology. Technology is supposedly neutral and merely misused or abused. This has been argued since time immemorial and was only revised via cryptic language by twentieth-century savants such as Heidegger. Underlying the near-endless battles for negating law to impose more severe laws lies the simple truth that in negating useless or pernicious laws, the main event is to never return to such useless or pernicious laws – or, to exit the entire Kafka-esque enterprise and renounce all versions of exploitation and the theft of works under the guise of intellectual property.
The exit ramp is, therefore, works qua works. Works that become catasterism are, indeed, the exception (and have always been so); yet they need not engender yet another “artistic exception” under law. Law as applied to the knowledge commons is a crime. The history is not pretty. The origin of such crimes is, per Marx, also the origin of the capitalist expropriation of labor and the creation and manipulation of surplus value – i.e., the Early Renaissance.
II. NEXT REVOLUTION
“I speak through the stones
In words as whorls and worlds.
I rest in calm, unagitated
By wind, waves, or wandering.
What was has always passed
Into places beyond stones or wood.
What will be is the wildest dream,
The question and answer as One.
Life turns on the slimmest chance
Into an immeasurable quest.
The heart rises with moon and stars,
And clouds drift over inner seas.”
–Anonymous
When Kurt Schwitters declared, “I is Style” (“Ich ist Stil”), if he actually ever did openly state such, was it an egotistical, narcissistic statement? No. (Was it bad grammar? No.) It was, instead, an “elemental” (perhaps apocryphal) aspect of second-wave Dada, in the subcontext of Surrealism, with Dada having been established in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire, in 1916, by an international group of avant-garde, anti-war activists – foremost the redoubtable Hugo Ball, who would later go on to voluntary exile in Switzerland studying Byzantine angelology, in part supported by Hermann Hesse. Schwitters’ posture (or imposture) brings into tension all of the issues of “the voice” of radical works of art. For, “who” is actually speaking through such works? And “who” would dare state such a thing?
If artist-scholars today were to dare to declare, through works, “I is Revolution,” and, in the process, renounce Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), would it be an egotistical, narcissistic statement? No. (Would it be bad grammar? No.) It would be, instead, a form of second-wave Open Access (OA), with OA having been formally established in the 2000s – and then, subsequently, rigorously defended through both Guerilla Open Access (GOA) and the creation of Creative Commons (CC) licensing, with the former (GOA) championed by Aaron Swartz and the latter (CC licensing) by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig et al., in response to the neoliberal, capitalist assault on academic and scholarly publishing. In stating (silently or otherwise), “I is Revolution,” “who” would actually be speaking through such works?
The next step in the OA revolution is, therefore, perhaps, to electively and performatively renounce IPR, such that things that are currently otherwise inaccessible – e.g., due to artists and scholars being obsessed with IPR and abject careerism – become accessible. The irreducible foundation for such a Franciscan-inspired “No Rights” status for works (the “right to have no rights”) is “Prior Art” (a term notably embedded in both copyright and patent law) – or, the acknowledgment that everything is, more or less, “The Gift” or “The Given,” as disclosed in Phenomenology and in Post-phenomenology, through a set of critical measures or engagements established across the arc of the modernist and post-modernist insurrection(s) known as Structuralism and Post-structuralism (from “Saussure to Derrida”). To claim ownership of works based on and/or incorporating Prior Art is, arguably, the equivalent of theft, while the enforcement of IPR (including, ironically, the recent enforcement of OA), by law or by neoliberal academic fiat, is the equivalent of slavery or serfdom for artist-scholars – i.e., enslavement and servitude to Capital and its edicts, and capitulation to Capital’s subtle and openly vulgar mechanisms for the cooptation of works and de facto censorship by marginalization of authors and works. The construction of authorial presences, a 500-to-600-year project of Modernity and Capital, may easily be seen as the construction of a mythos, on behalf of Capital and its apologists. The construction of the artistic ego goes hand-in-glove, and the apparent glorification of celebrity artists and the attendant privileges granted (wealth, influence, immortality, etc.) may be easily equated with the construction of saints. Capital’s semi-secret alliance with theology may, however, also be its downfall. Under the right circumstances, that theological impress, however debased and secularized, may be restored to its principled, existential and essentialist origins. This universalist impress, while out of fashion or out of date, may be re-positioned through works versus through ideology and mere Kafka-esque caprice for Power.
Thus, the (next) revolution will not be sensationalized – and it will certainly not be televised. It will have little or nothing to do with the so-called knowledge commons, at least as it is constructed/consecrated today. It will be, instead, a matter of quietly sidestepping “all of that” – and, in a sense, it will be (or it will resemble) a return to General Intellect, as homage to Karl Marx, who was, after all, quite right about Capital and its incessant assault on Life Itself, through its assault on labor and subjects proper. It will be the equivalent of “Walking away from illness” (walking away from the edicts, biases, and debris of neoliberal academia); and it will be the equivalent of “Picking up thy bed and walking” (walking away from the hyper-commodified, sensationalized art world and its globalized cabals of gatekeepers). This revolution in literary-artistic sentiment(s) will be collectivist and communitarian in spirit; and it will find access to things otherwise buried or banned within and by post-contemporary art and scholarship, through new, radical-democratic works of literary-artistic merit produced under the rubric of “utter uselessness.” In being utterly useless, such works will actually be mysteriously and mischievously useful, countering the prevailing materialist definitions of utility and empiricism. The utilitarian and empirical values will be atemporal, ahistorical, and of no commercial value. They will have no value to/for Capital. They will refuse historicization by academics and art historians. They will be, by default, anti-capitalistic and anti-academic. The ideational-Franciscan, foundational precepts of “itinerancy, poverty, works,” as disclosed through all such avant-garde works of radical-democratic merit, will return by way of the renunciation not of money, per se, but of the worship of money and privilege. Other privileges, other forms of largesse (i.e., not-money), lost across the capitalist onslaught of 500-600 years, may then return. A foundational Spirit for such works is but one example, but established – out of Necessity – through works.
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