Superconversations Day 4: Jason Adams responds to Boris Groys, "Cosmic Anxiety: The Russian Case"

[rmorais]

What would it mean to engage in a further reversal, to affirm total control in the sense of ultrarapid, free-floating control and the control of movement, but such that doing so would be deployed in the service of a left cultural and political project, what Groys anticipates as the victory of the “communist cosmos over the capitalist chaos”?

“In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? … No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique.”
― niklas luhmann, art as a social system

luhmann’s entire theory of social systems is based on autopoiesis, αὐτo (self) + ποίησις (poiesis, creation), a concept designed by chilean biologists humberto maturana and francisco varela. autopoietic systems are beyond control, and yet are about control. autopoiesis brings chaos to cosmos, and cosmos to chaos. from the idea of autopoiesis, to groys’ idea of absolutely superimposing state control to every aspect of life and to jason’s reversal implied in a vision of total control as the victory of the “communist cosmos” i’d like to add yet another possibility of reversal: the chaos of life itself as the only form of control. complexity science is here to show us that groys’ war between cosmos and chaos has always been an illusion. as katherine hayles has already explored in her book chaos bound, henri poincaré has made visible the deterministic order of the edge of chaos. complex systems remind us that there are limits to order, control and predictability, while chaotic systems remind us that the underlying fibre of chaos is mathematics.

art as a system operates according to this same double logic. paradox is our encompassing reality, we can not seem to escape it. groys’ text touches the core of our political potentialities so well expressed by agamben’s paradox of the coming being is whatever being, or the paradox of a singularity that is only singular by being whatever singularity, but it does so using the historical tools of an epoch. it is atemporal in many ways, and it deeply resonates with our present moment by being representative of a certain brand of retrofuture, one which allows a glimpse of atemporality as a cultural manifestation. it is a glimpse because it does not hold against the temporal bias implicit in portraying communism as a form of cosmic order, and the modern ideals of world-building and of control as a dominant force. in that respect, groys’ vision might be seen as dated.

another perspective is that our cosmic anxiety has also been reversed in the anthropocene - it is not so much about what kinds of danger and possibilities of annihilation might come to earth from outer space, but about the annihilation caused by human action itself, and the results of our modernistic attempts to control and bring order to the chaos inherent to nature. global warming represents to earth the revenge of cosmic chaos, which is behind the anxiety which looms over our illusion of social and technological control.

[Volo]

Tantalizing the notion of all things immortal. But, what would the cosmos dictate? a progressive, utopian society or a regressive, self-destructive one?

[gracelightning]

Isn’t it a profound conundrum that, as Groys states at the beginning of his essay, we receive too much solar energy on earth to be ‘good’? He mentions how we’ve burned off some solar excess of ‘badness’/chaos in the past through ritualistic orgies and wars, and (I’m mentioning) today we have free download porn, gratuitously violent video games and global terrorism. Yet so many futurisms rely on the idea that if we create sound moral, economic, political and infrastructural networks, and we involve community, that we will meet all the human needs for comfort, security and happiness, and we will no longer require vices because the ‘bad’ in us will be re-negotiated. Futurisms are almost all atheistic, as if since God died in the secular West after Nietzsche, the volcanic longing of human spirituality died too and will remain dead. Spiritual longing hasn’t died, though, and in the absence of any spiritual container, lost youth of all corners of the world are fleeing to join ISIS. Has the death of God made human sex and death more accessible? Aren’t sex and death our most numinous experiences? I would be very interested to hear more from Groys and all of us responders to Groys, about what happens to this underworld in us that futurist thinkers overlook, try to tidy up, or hope will be looked after by following square ideals. If solar excess is a fact, this longing needs to be officially addressed. In lieu of immortality, which isn’t yet an option, how will we be capable of working with cosmic anxiety otherwise?

[saba_razvi]

This conversation invites an in-depth meditation on a number of alluring ideas, and invites us to do so through some really dynamic language. I’m really interested in the discourse surrounding the Groys piece presented here, in addition to Adams’s perspectives on it. “Cosmic Anxiety: The Russian Case” itself is delightful to read, too; many wonderful turns of phrase, thought, and context.

Groys’s idea that we “cannot understand the interiority of the Earth without understanding its exteriority, and its fundamental non-isolation and contextualization provided by the cosmos as a whole” is a compelling one. In a world that increasingly feels like a flood of information on which individuals float without much connection at all (except perhaps, indirectly, through that information), the idea that an awareness of some macrocosmic scale might redress the contemporary mode of laterally contained, juxtaposed solitudes that make up society is appealing. It places the individual within some kind of “mystical” whole. Contemporary poetry does seem to be drawing attention to these disjunctive ideas of the role of the individual placed between the macroscopic and microscopic analyses, encouraged by today’s Information Age. Consider Calamari Press’s hypermedia visual poetic text “Ark Codex ± 2.0”, or Frederic Forte’s “Minute Operas”, or Srikanth Reddy’s “Facts for Visitors”, in which the reader’s sense of humanity is contextualized within an understanding of the scraps of cultural refuse or design. At least some of the contemporary poetic readership demonstrates its interest in a response to the placement of a reader within a larger world of ideas, and isn’t that (at least, in part) what Groys is asking us to consider in his representation of the Earth in the Universe? Time stretches on forever before us, and forever after us, but we are not immortal and our finite selves seek ways to empower our mortalities; it isn’t birth or death that compels us, but the existence of the moment and the conscience within that moment. So, the system matters, and within it are various mortal immortalities. These ideas make sense in conjunction with the “post-Deleuzean philosophical milieu of our time: at a minimum, an intensification of the contemporary rejection of anthropocentrism” to which Adams draws our attention in this discourse. I can’t help thinking of Brecht’s “Life of Galileo” and Marx’s attitude about the relationship between technology and progress, leaving me to wonder about the role of the individual consciousness within that progressive gesture, even as I am fixed in a contemporary awareness by this discourse. Adams’s reading of Groys really seems to frame the contemporary zeitgeist in a number of interesting ways, especially by way of its attention to systems and cybernetics and movement.

I’m particularly interested in two of Adams’s questions: the first and the fourth.

In his first question, Adams asks us to consider the choice between two solutions (Federov’s and Groys’s), both of which seek to honor the past in a way, but I wonder about the idea of solutions, in general. A solution implies that things can be resolved, that things can be set aside in order to make way for movement forward, but, what I find most inviting about Groys’s ideas (and even Federov’s, to which Groys is responding) is the sense that instead of resolving a problem, we are diving into the awareness of the problem, exploring it. Stasis instead of progress, maybe. Adams brings our attention to the current situation in our time, and that kind of focused awareness is, itself, a meaningful topic. Adams lyrically presents this situation in his description: “rather than the living exploiting the congealed labor of the dead, the dead would be enabled o enjoy their own fruits, as do the living, however partially”, he tells us. It makes me think of the difference between jam and compost heaps, fruitfulness as nourishing instead of just fueling forward “progress”; I’m being playful with my words, but also sincere. I guess I’m interested in exploring the system, here, as I don’t know that our situation has a solution, at least not outside of our time. Is the piece suggesting that we have escaped systems, by bringing our attention to the cosmic context? That we should aim to do so? It brings to mind Katherine Hayles’s “Wrestling with Transhumanism”. At any rate, the question itself opens up a lot of avenues for exploration.

In his last question, Adams aka us to consider the relationship between “total biopower” and “the immortality of things”. I’m fascinated by this idea of people becoming things among other things and stored as immortal works in museums. As Groys suggests we take from Federov’s ideas: “All of the people living and all the people who have ever lived must rise from the dead as artworks and be preserved in museums. Technology as a whole must become the technology of art. And the state must become the museum of its population……Death’s limits must be overcome by the state. Biopower must become total. This totality is achieved by equating art and politics, life and technology, and state and museum. The overcoming of the boundaries between life and art is not a matter of introducing art into life but is rather a radical museumification of life…” What an interesting assertion. While I love the idea that we can all live forever through the things we make, I am not entirely certain how the artworks can elect a curator, or how the state can be persuaded to seek eternal life for all, equally. At any rate, I’m interested in how the idea of people as things within things fits into concepts like cybernetics, especially where it overlaps with transhumanist and post humanist discourse or the ideas of Katherine Hayles and Donna Harraway.

As an aside, I’m really enjoying the conversations. In addition to raising some interesting questions, I think Adams uses some really compelling language in his discussion, beautiful in itself, particularly “an immortal camp of bodies”, “the congealed labor of the dead”, and others that invite deeper contemplation in the context of museums and life.

[MariahBrennanClegg]

Thanks for this post - in particular “…I am not entirely certain how the artworks can elect a curator, or how the state can be persuaded to seek eternal life for all, equally.” “Equally” being the key term here. Given that museums historically tend to support an imperialist project, how would radical museumification serve existing power structures, in addition to creating new ones?