Abstract A
summary of the possible persistence of so-called useless humanistic research
against the diktat of the Edufactory, the essay “No-media – Against the Coming Singularity”
problematizes the complex field of forces and factors currently leading the
life of universities toward the servicing of reduced aspirations for
scholarship in an ultra-monetized society – plus neo-liberal academia’s
penchant for the manufacturing of events and reputations at the expense of
impersonal (confraternal) intellectual inquiry proper. An oblique critique of
“vertical integration” strategies derived from corporate business models,
foremost in media empires, and as applied to the production and management of
knowledge, the essay prefigures a return to forms of scholarly and artistic
production in alliance with universal moral and ethical precepts as preserved
in droit moral – the Enlightenment-era
concept of the Moral Rights of Authors.
Key Words academia, anti-capitalism, cognitive capitalism,
cultural patrimony, digital humanities, moral rights, neo-liberalism
1. Patrimonial
capitalism and academia
The
re-application of top-down regimes of control to academia by neo-liberal
capitalism is a return to pre-1900 forms of patrimonialism, a return that
proceeds on several fronts all at once – yet, notably, from within and from
without. “Within” connotes complicity by universities with what is imposed from
“without,” while complaints against what is imposed from without from within
illustrate the incomprehension and/or apathy of those actors reduced to serfdom
by the new system that constitutes what Max Weber understood, in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
(1922), as the arbitrary measures required to effectively
administrate a “royal household.”[1] Today it is the managerial class from top to middle that
institutes and maintains the various regimes of control with constant
re-branding campaigns plus capital projects covering the tightening of the
immaterial and material means of control and domination. It is the absence of
free or independent agency that constitutes the status of retainers or slaves
who participate in the regimes of power that lead, increasingly, in incipient
“royal households” to the suppression of transformation – either social,
economic, or cultural. The creeping determinism of such systems is palpable,
and the intellectual class (the faculties) is the most malleable or, per Antonio
Gramsci, the most traitorous.
This petite bourgeoisie will go
whichever way the wind is blowing, according to Gramsci, following the perks
and incentives to conform, while it is the peasant class (the students) who
will rebel first, which also explains why universities today pretend to
privilege students over faculties. The obvious attempt to co-opt revolt at the
lowest levels includes converting students to consumers, with the ability of
students to rate their faculties the most blatant inverted marketing device
instituted via faux-democratic auspices that are part of the conversion
process. For this reason, any significant change within the present-day,
neo-liberalized academic system (one that is beginning to resemble a factory
for the production of cultural goods, with students as future serfs and faculty
research as hoped-for marketable commodities) will need to originate in the
lower echelons and proceed to the upper echelons via increasingly Balkanized
faculties. In a rather complex equation that is also not reducible to
conventional revolutionary intervention, the Name of the Father will need to be
replaced with the “Name of the Holy” – the Name of the Holy being, in this
case, roughly equivalent to speculative inquiry proper. Speculative inquiry in
this scenario will also have to have an anti-utilitarian lining that appears,
at first, as anti-capitalistic. The Name of the Holy thus becomes the temporal
address for an incipient anti-capitalist sublimity.
The
abject social-media aspects of academia today (both at the level of marketing
the university and the marketing of scholarship) mirror the abject research and
publication strategies that have overtaken formerly integral processes of
conducting, disseminating, and archiving works – the primary vehicle for
archiving works having been actually existing books in actually existing
libraries (or actually existing books in the hands of actually existing
readers). Mass digitalization is the equivalent of Pandora’s Box for such
“old-world” concerns, permitting the mining of scholarship without the
intermediary prospects of a reader (the presence of a conscious and critical
subject). It is the purview of metrics that drives research today; and it is
metrics and research assessment frameworks that have facilitated the internal
capture of research toward commodifying it beyond academia proper – primarily
as trans-mediatic spectacle. Cognitive Capitalism is a direct result of digital
technologies run amok. Complaints from within academia against the predatory
practices of for-profit publishers (for example, subscription rates for
high-end journals) are hollow insofar as the research assessment regimes
established from within privilege quantitative means for calculating a return
on investment (faculty budgets and faculty salaries)
that trap academics within the corrupted cycles of peer review, digital and
analogue publications via prestigious and preferred journals, and the
subsequent toxic capture of value via citation, replication, and conformity.
The digital humanities, for example, promote the quantitative cannibalization of
works, using the new technologies of data- and text-mining, suggesting that a
larger data set automatically connotes a higher quality for the conclusions of
any such “study.” The result is an inward-spiraling vortex of intellectual
determinism that further distresses any normative definition of an open field –
the first prerequisite for speculative works that might alter the terrain of
cultural production (cultural production as aesthetic field).
Past
insurrections (such as Paris in 1968) by which the architecture of patrimonial
closure might be challenged look less and less likely given the tightening
strictures of the processes in play, plus their inherent immaterial agency,
with the slow-university movement or the open-access movements signaling shifts
that will only protect certain forms of scholarship given to an ameliorative
humanistic agenda resembling the failed social-democratic bias of liberal civil
society. In fact, one of neo-liberal capitalism’s prime targets is civil society, or what remains of
open networks that mediate between patrimonial systems and the so-called
people. Yet campaigns for open-access publication are one of the few instances
where the predatory excesses of market fundamentalism may be countered within
the university, even if the entire rebellion proceeds via digital means. The
likelihood of new patrimonial clubs being formed within the open-access
movement is, however, a case for concern insofar as the more pernicious aspects
of de facto censorship will proceed
via re-calibrated forms of peer review and alliances across disciplines that
are serviced by the conference circuit and the social-media practices
associated with academic narcissism. For the latter to collapse, the necessary
correctives include exiting viral networks, excluding certain disciplines from
authorized venues of reproduction and circulation, and the creation of new
walled gardens resembling the confraternal monastic enclaves of the so-called
Dark Ages where the Name of the Holy may once again be acknowledged.[2]
2. Topologies of indifference
There
are topologies of difference (theorized beautifully – here and there – in
philosophical exegesis as caesuras and aporia) and there are topologies of
indifference (theorized – here and there – as alienation, abjection, and
anomie), the latter exemplified by the novels of Hermann Hesse and, to a
degree, Thomas Mann. While both are primarily existential states, experienced
as crises to normative or everyday consciousness, topologies of indifference
have become a professional state within neo-liberal academia as it increasingly
comes under the control of market forces.[3]
What must be noted in terms of topologies of difference, however, is that
crisis is productive of positive change – doubt and reflection induce introspection
and a form of critical-aesthetic revelation that produces rebirth for subjects
without the attendant baggage of ideological or authorized systems. Under such
auspices, rebirth for subjects and citizens proceeds without mediation. This
is, in effect, veneration of the Name of the Holy in an a-theological modality.
Enforced
or elective indifference cuts two ways, thus constituting a chiasmus (arguably,
the first sign of an emergent topological knot). On the one hand, academics are
increasingly begrudging of the assault on academia that is primarily externally
imposed while managed from on high from within academic bureaucracies (the invasion
of management strategies resembling invasive species that colonize and
destabilize entire so-called native ecosystems). The current walled garden of
the academy is thus caught in the double bind of serving two masters: Enlightenment-era
universalist precepts embedded in public universities since at least the
nineteenth century; and late-modern neo-liberalism intent on disciplining and
extracting tribute from what are perceived as publicly funded institutions that
have for too long been indulged under the rubric of “institutions of higher
learning.” Thus the second cut is on the reverse bias: neo-liberal capitalism,
which seeks rent wherever there might be untapped or undervalued resources, is
intolerant of dissent and expects compliance or capitulation. One of the
defining characteristics of neo-liberalism is that it is excessively
non-democratic.[4]
Those who disagree may leave for whatever version of “Canada” they might find,
in whatever corner of the world the functional equivalent of a “socialist
paradise” might yet exist. For similar reasons, plus to simply escape the
overwrought state of their own critical-aesthetic milieux, novelist-critic John
Berger chose rural southeast France in 1974, while filmmaker and
second-generation contrarian Jean-Luc Godard chose the hillsides of Lake Geneva
in 1978.[5]
Yet both fired back from their elective idylls missives aimed at what they
perceived as the injustice and hypocrisy rampant within Western, now-globalized
capitalist society. Will exiled academics engaged in new critical-aesthetic
inquiry (Marxian, anti-capitalist, anarcho-syndicalist, and otherwise) do the
same? And from where?
This
schism suggests that a possible solution to precarity for the many brought on
by the enrichment of the few (the primary symptom of the neo-liberal
catastrophe sweeping the planet, from climate change to mass migrations, as
diagnosed from Paul Krugman to Thomas Piketty) is, after all, new forms of
radical scholarship that are creative and generative versus merely critical and
ponderous. Humanists would claim that such is what precipitates renaissances,
cultural and otherwise, with any attendant paradigm shift long ago established
as proceeding from outside of normative discourse within any field but always
developed in tension with what passes as normative discourse within a field or
discipline.[6]
The
mechanistic and Darwinian nature of what is encroaching within the walled
gardens of academia today would, given most analyses, preempt any such radical
or unforeseen shifts ever occurring from within. The foremost mechanism of
control or conquest, argued for and against from within academia and from
without, and yet another topological knot, is the value of research metrics,
peer review, and allied issues such as the merits of open-access publishing,
the latter but one example of countering the persistence of apparently
ineradicable invasive species, insofar as academia has long been thoroughly
colonized by for-profit publishers earning billions at the expense of those who
pay for, create, and manage the intellectual property expropriated (the
pre-appropriation “value chain” including, in diminishing order of return, the
public university, the research institute, and the author). Yet the proposed antidote
currently on offer is in many ways far worse. Open Access in the arts and humanities is an ideology posing as resistance. It is formulated from the exact
same premises as those models it opposes. The premises switch position based upon
perspective. The invasive species are now doubled through the warring dictates
of the for-profit version of academic publishing and the not entirely benign,
neo-liberalized version of the open-access movement. The mutations in the
rhetoric and construction of the open-access camp are truly frightening given
that the author-pay aspect is spiraling out of control. Authors may soon be
forced to pay up to $10,000 to publish an open-access monograph with a
prestigious academic press. Thus, the neo-liberalization of Open Access creates
the exact same straightjacket for authors as the for-profit and predatory model
it attempts to displace. The same straightjacket also induces suffocating
conformity across disciplines.
Curiously,
this displacement of the author seems to represent the caesura by which one
might locate the ultimate contest for domination from without serviced by
neo-liberal forces from within academia. Notably, the author or scholar today
has virtually no rights, those rights previously conferred by copyright law
generally subsumed by the discordant and fractious processes of academic and
neo-liberal privilege – another topology of enforced indifference or compliance
representing not so much a knot as a tightening noose around the neck of
authors and scholars. The author writes for nothing – or else. The next step,
on its way, care of open-access protocols, is that the author writes for
nothing and pays fees for the right to write for nothing. The justification is
that he/she is seeking prestige and/or patronage, climbing the ladder,
well-paid already, or any number of variations on the theme. Royalties? Only
celebrity academics are likely to ever see royalties for their published works.
Perks? Such come in innumerable forms, and are well known. Yet the first perk
for a scholar today is to merely have a secure job. The argument is circular.
Precarity produces the self-loathing and perpetual anxiety that permits the
non-celebrity scholar to give his/her work away, whether to the corporate
hegemon running the for-profit academic presses or the open-access networks
increasingly being neo-liberalized as the game shifts back toward arguments
about cultural patrimony, public good, and public commons. In the shadows, meanwhile,
lurks the next wave – full-bore text- and data-mining operations that will
securitize knowledge in ways hitherto thought unimaginable. It is possible
under such a scenario that only the arts will escape this next wave, given that
visual media are resistant – thus far – to assimilation as data. Such is also
one reason why the visual arts remain one of the principal venues for
anti-capitalist agitation, while critical inquiry in the arts and humanities is
slowly exterminated.
This
holds true in almost every market in developed countries where academic
publishing and humanistic scholarship produces wave upon wave of
speculative work, foremost in the imperiled arts and humanities, which are
caught in yet another form of colonization known as the "digital humanities," a
stalking horse for practices associated with cognitive capitalism’s thirst for
digitizing everything. It is not difficult to track the money flowing into the digital humanities to see that the dual origin is mostly well-meaning philanthropic
foundations (for example, the Mellon Foundation) and governmental agencies (in
the United States, the National Endowment for the Humanities) attempting to
prop up the failing public domain plus private equity firms looking for last
chances to commandeer intellectual property in the same manner that they buy up
water rights in Third World countries in anticipation of a drought. The drought
in intellectual affairs that is coming, however, seems epochal and likely to
cut off any chance for collective “redemption.” These inordinate games of
brinksmanship now at play in what is being billed in social-science circles as
the Anthropocene, an irreversible geological shift underway based on the
calamities visited upon the natural world by human activity, will play out in a
far more spiritually destructive way once the rich ecologies of difference in
forms of scholarship are exterminated. Willful extinction of species and
enforced extinction of speculative inquiry are the two monumental blunders now
being perpetrated by – and it is impossible not to name it – predatory capital
via its hoped-for coming singularity, the mass digitalization of life.
3. The Name of the Holy
It
is critically important to state that the Name of the Holy (versus the Holy
Name) is an irreligious concept – and that it is only embedded in religion as
religion’s most dynamic feature. All of Giorgio Agamben’s archaeological
excavations of religious practices buried or hidden in secular practices may be
reduced to this fundamental truth. Since Uomo
senza contenuto (1970), Agamben has been flirting with an elective nihilism
that is a mask for the Name of the Holy – bracketing an explicit evocation of
the Holy Name which opens onto Christic themes not permissible in orthodox-secular
scholarship today. Massimo Cacciari investigated the same critical-aesthetic
field with Dallo Steinhof (1980) and Architecture and Nihilism (1993).[7]
Both scholars then went on to study patristics – not so much a coincidence as a
telltale sign of what they were truly in pursuit of. The fact that both circle
back to 1900 is also instructive. The conversion of the Name of the Holy (and
the Holy Name) to modernist ideology proceeds from roughly 1900. Its previous,
main secular-aesthetic incarnations via academia and art academies, while
compromised by the same forces that always command ideology in the name of
patrimony, tend to indicate the post-Hegelian version of ideological
insurrection simply reverted to form, servicing the political, which is not
full justification for dismissing ideology per se but, instead, for dismissing
its complicity with arbitrary regimes of power. For ideology is not
automatically disposed toward this-worldly power, while its corruption
certainly is. Speculative inquiry as ideology (as the Name of the Holy) is
consistently co-equal to the Bachelardian “right to dream” beyond mere
politics.
Thus
the highest flights of speculative intellect are always on the side of the
lowliest (the most-humble and often-debased) forms of being – for example, the
“ready-to-hand” of Martin Heidegger or the decrepit “shoes of Van Gogh.”[8]
This contradictory nature of the Name of the Holy works through works both socially and politically, but across ethics and
morals (therefore always transversally, as if to be tested on two planes). It
also serves to reduce the elitist functions of mere intellectual and aesthetic inquiry
(academicism) to shambles, insofar as such are part and parcel of systems of
patrimony and/or pointlessness itself.[9]
The infinite largess of speculative inquiry is to be found in its
re-naturalization, which, in turn, serves as a means for a proper reading of the
ready-to-hand of Heidegger and the shoes of Van Gogh.
There
is another game within academia that is based in other problems, and wholly
practiced from within, but leading to the same crisis. It is called “moving the
goalposts.” This is practiced by scholars and constitutes what passes as the
production of intellectual fashions. Such is also used by the neo-conservative
bureaucratic regimes associated with disciplining faculties to dismiss
disciplines. The humanities have partly been savaged for this reason. Thus did critical inquiry (not quite dead) shrink by a thousand cuts to be displaced by the digital humanities.[10]
These
twin ravages, from within and from without, leave a narrowing gap through which
dissent may be staged. The question remains where such maneuvers might take
speculative inquiry – or, where it may survive and what form it might take to
evade the collapsing premises for revolutionary praxis in the arts and humanities.
The present rebellions are at best symptoms of this collapse versus orchestrated
or true and sustainable confraternal attempts to organize fields of resistance
to capitalist exploitation of knowledge production. It is in the uselessness of
certain fields that the promise survives; that uselessness always defined in
terms of what may not be capitalized (whether because “not wanted” by capital or
“not appropriable” by capital).
Patrimony
of all forms, over the trajectory of modernity, is reducible to escalating
battles for supremacy of one form or another of patrimonial exploitation. The
rent-seeking practices of the more recent neo-liberal assault merely amplifies
trends evident over centuries. Weber’s insight that one system merely replaces
another is applicable to leftist and rightist insurgencies, the latest being an
extreme instance of a rightist ideology serviced by ideologies of markets (with
the left bought off by perks and privileges from within the somewhat monolithic
technical architecture of neo-liberalism). The university as possible marketplace
is under attack because it both represents a last bastion of so-called
liberality, a former aspect of civil society that may be mined and exploited,
and one of the prime addresses for periodic revolt. Yet what served as the
source of past revolts from inside the academies fundamentally transcends the
academies today. In the end, one does not need academia to prepare the way for
the requisite resistance to the campaign to hyper-financialize knowledge
itself. The sublime maneuvers permitted by that narrowing gap seem to lead away
from academia, toward new wildernesses of thought and direct action. “Direct
action,” far from an instance of the further production of mere words, involves
the resurrection of the word in service to the Name of the Holy – paradoxically,
the return of a de-naturalized form of conceptual thought in service to
“nothing.”
4. “No-media”
It
may be argued that the primary means of the exploitation of discursive knowledge is
to convert it to “trans-media” (to digitalize it and mine it). The same is true
for the visual arts. The perverse coming singularity that neo-liberal
capitalism seeks is the conversion of collective cultural property to corporate
private property via mass digitalization. Yet the alt-capitalist projects in
the arts and humanities that pass as critique of capital, claiming to bypass
capitalist exploitation, are most often quietly supporting that coming
capitalist singularity, which will be duly totalitarian in practice. The
intellectual-ecological devastation is easy to foresee. What capital wishes for
all to see is a flowering of entrepreneurial exuberance, across platforms, across
media, and across works that will provide the long-term rent sought. It is, in
fact, a de-flowering... . This returns
to academia in terms of the diminished prospects for what might be serviceable
for capital through academic exuberance. It would seem, then, that the
alternative to this coming singularity is to restore diversity across the
intellectual-ecological systems of exchange through refusing rent to capital, thus
denying the “royal household” its tribute.
One
task of late modernity is to return to lost causes; that is, to projects
prematurely evacuated or projects vanquished. An example is how certain
discrete disciplines have been lost to super-disciplines over the course of
time (decades or centuries) – the contemporary terms interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary
quite often translating into meaninglessness, lack of focus, or
anti-intellectualism. Visual Culture is an exemplary instance of a
super-discipline absorbing relatively benign or outmoded disciplines. The
examination of many of these new “schools,” however, shows signs of external
and subtle market forces driving the convergence – as if the super-discipline
was merely in service to a super-market of cultural products that converge
beyond the academy under the rubric media.
Therefore,
“no-media” is one answer, no matter how temporal or circumstantial. Already
post-digital everything is on the way as the latest radical-chic fashion statement.
Under the above auspices, no-media is also no digitalization, which translates
roughly into no capitalization, since the perversity of the prevailing model is
that capitalization proceeds via digitalization. Previously, part of the
post-digital, radical-chic posture was “part-digitalization,” whereas now, with
the prevailing model approaching closure and a new totalitarianism of
market-driven patrimony, the most avant-garde practices will eschew
digitalization for analogue practices antecedent to the hegemony of the
digital. In terms of academic practices and scholarship, the digital humanities
are the venue for the last campaign to subdue intellectual inquiry on behalf of
quantitative-determinist practices operating in the public domain and in
neo-liberal capitalist exploitation of cultural property. The two domains
overlap, and they are competing for the same intellectual property rights, with
the same result for scholars, artists, and whoever else is in the line of fire.
The lost cause in this case is immaterial labor, with the result for the
laborer the same regardless of which side of the battle one’s work falls
within. Extolling the virtues of the public domain, the apparent agenda of
those favoring open-access publishing is to make immaterial labor universally available.
Yet the campaign is no less at the expense of the author of the work made
universally available through mass digitalization.
The
solitary scholar is another lost cause worth revisiting, as is the loose
confederation or confraternal order where the solitary and contemplative soul
might work toward a different model of universally accessible immaterial
capital. Intellectual inquiry as the Name of the Holy (as the mythic rose of medieval romance literature) is the signal gesture of all stirrings toward
renaissance. The Ivory Tower or the Lonely Tower are semaphores in a gathering
storm for the great lost cause – Bachelard’s “right to dream” as the founding right
for speculative inquiry itself. For this reason, the Moral Rights of Authors as
defined by the Berne Convention open onto anti-capitalist sublimity itself.[11]
The battleground vis-à-vis neo-liberal academia is co-equivalent to the right
of the author/artist to determine how his/her works are to be assimilated to
the public domain – privatized, securitized, or otherwise.
With
such a “station” from which to begin a defense of the arts and humanities, a
proverbial crossing of the Alps appears near Giffre River Valley
in the Haute-Savoie, the place of John Berger’s exile south of Geneva and
Lausanne (and Lac Léman, site of Jean-Luc Godard’s
exile), toward Saas-Fee, Switzerland, nominal home of the European Graduate
School, site of a very delicate appropriation of intellectual inquiry as
a stylish modus vivendi and latest
model for the alternative academy insofar as those who attend the annual Summer
Sessions are privy to some of the most astute critiques of the prevailing model
of academicism and the parallel realities subsumed under media and
cross-disciplinary studies, inclusive of the specter of “no-media,” even if it
is not quite acknowledged as such in the exquisite and surreptitious annals of
the EGS’s public relations machine, and even if the latest additions to the
curriculum prop up the visual studies side at the expense of intellectually and
critically focused long-form works.[12]
The
EGS might be exemplary were it not for its celebration of celebrity
intellectual culture, its faculty stacked with the most famous academics
rentable by the School. Its intellectual output is difficult to measure due to
the de-centralized model, with students working independently around the world
toward completion of their degrees.[13]
Here the socially progressive version of the capitalization of knowledge is
achieved by converting apparent speculative inquiry to privileged Cloud-based
“enclave,” Saas-Fee serving merely as base of operations while the EGS mimics a
“university without borders,” an elaboration of an alternative model that is
nonetheless market driven. Since 2015 its market orientation has become
increasingly obvious, with an expansion of bespoke programs and the opening of
a second campus in Malta. The EGS’ market share is the moneyed international
graduate student, able to pay the fees and able to attend the required annual
sessions fronted by the celebrity faculty. The exclusivity is the point,
regardless of denials, and the possible introduction of an authentic anti-elitist
or communitarian ethos is all but impossible.[14]
Clearly such is also not the goal, despite the leftist credentials of its
illustrious faculty.
It
is the neo-liberal destruction of public and private universities that makes
the EGS tenable, while it is all but impossible to expect the EGS to offer
anything critically sustainable from
within to counter the worst trends in the reduction of intellectual inquiry
to either a support mechanism for quasi-criminal capitalist activity (the
capture of intellectual property) or the conversion of immaterial labor to
commodity status and the elimination or marginalization of anything incapable
of servicing capitalist ideology. Indeed, the EGS rents the bulk of its esteemed
faculty from the same prestigious public and private universities that are
slowly succumbing to market ideology, the same cadre hedging their bets and
banking their last privileges. As a high-end version of the Gramscian petite
bourgeoisie, such an elite faculty is caught between two winds blowing in
opposite directions: a rightist wind, which fills their sails in terms of
propping up their radical-chic credentials; and an anti-capitalist wind, which
will topple their glamorous clipper ships as they tack between Saas-Fee and
Valletta, all intellectual goods sinking to the bottom of the sea.
Somewhere
between the modernist (not post-modernist, neo-liberal) ivory tower and the
lonely tower of the solitary scholar (Yeatsian or Hölderlinian) the answer to
this strange chiasmus is to be found – yet only where a true communitarian
spirit dwells on behalf of the required rebellion against the coming
singularity of capitalist capture of immaterial labor. The discussion of rights
of authors is only of use insofar as those responsible for laws governing intellectual property rights are listening. It is more than apparent that they
are not – at least as of early 2016.[15]
The author has been abandoned for the twin forces of capitalist appropriation
and the well-meaning but utterly flawed premises for assimilation of works to
open-access or public-domain repositories to bypass or subvert corporate
piracy.
5. Lifeworks
It
is how works are editioned, disseminated, and archived that illustrates how the
capitalization of works might be managed by authors toward what in exemplary
cases may only be called the lifework – a transcendentalist affair. This is
especially prominent as a cardinal concern with authors and artists who have a
natural inclination to overturn the prevailing conventions of their own times
in pursuit of a re-calibration of existing norms for assimilation, plus a
progressive versus regressive view of forms of cultural patrimony. If this is
often utopian-romantic, that is simply the outcome of the confrontation with
conventions and not a sign, as such, of blissful naiveté or ignorance.
Since
the advent of the artist’s book, from Stéphane Mallarmé forward, both speculative-critical
and speculative-literary works, combined with speculative-visual works, have
sought to condition reception and assimilation. In most cases this involved
collectors and patrons, but also colleagues (the confraternal side). The fact
that these editions have since been hyper-financialized in the secondary market
(in the same manner that artworks have been hyper-financialized by auction
houses) simply illustrates the fact that the author and artist often have
little control over the ultimate fate of the lifework.
Yet
it is the work of Chris Marker, the French author-artist, that best exemplifies
the circuitous and often-virtuous maneuvers an artist or author might take to
secure their fundamental moral rights against expropriation by increasingly monolithic
market forces, foremost when their artistic identity includes an ideological
position that is essentially anti-capitalistic, communitarian, or
socialistic. Marker, as author and artist (and it is a mistake to reduce him to
filmmaker), left behind what only appears to be a casually constructed archive
– and it is the current disposition of his posthumous bequest at the
Cinémathèque Française in Paris that underscores incipient and subsequent forms
of both subtle and overt forms of capitalization of lifeworks via State fiat in
collusion with market ideology.[16]
Marker’s
posthumous bequest went to the Cinémathèque Française after State intervention
in 2013. He died at the age of 91 in July 2012. The bequest is said to have
been the result of a concession by Marker to Costa-Gavras (president of the Cinémathèque),
yet a concession never formalized in writing, with the outcome subsequently contested
by Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC), an
archive established in 1988 to receive literary and artistic estates for
preservation and long-term, slow-form study by scholars. Suffice to say, by
most estimates, Marker’s legacy might better be served by IMEC, where he
previously donated materials, than by the quasi-governmental and
quasi-commercial auspices of the Cinémathèque Française, which is most
likely to drip feed the public “discoveries” and slowly canonize Marker in the
process under the fashionable singularity known as “trans-media.”[17]
Suffice to say as well, that Marker’s concession to the Cinémathèque may have
been provisional and/or circumstantial, since it is rumored (sotto voce) that at the time of the
verbal bequest he was living out his last years through the good graces of Costa-Gavras
and other friends, plus any royalties on the few works he had bothered to
monetize. If nearly dirt broke, and no one is quite willing to say so out of
respect for this highly elusive and principled soul, Marker’s laissez-faire
approach to capitalizing his works may then be said to have come, honorably,
full circle.
Moreover,
Marker’s pre-1960s’ non-filmic, literary-critical work (from the mid-1940s
through the late-1950s) remains an extensive and important submerged continent,
to be studied carefully, primarily because he refused to discuss anything prior
to his seminal film, La jetée (1962),
and the lyrical relationship between text and image runs like an electrical
current through his lifework. This lifework may only be understood, then, as
operative across diverse forms of media (a de facto “trans-media” bias avant la lettre); and that lifework only
makes sense when his late, somewhat negative estimation of the future of cinema
(c.2000) is taken fully into account. Notably, post-2000, after two decades of new-media
projects, he returned to very-still photography, with only two major new-media commissions
– Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men
(2005), produced for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York, USA, and Ouvroir (2008), a museum created in
hyperspace with Max Moswitzer, for the Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich,
Switzerland, in conjunction with the exhibition Chris Marker: A Farewell to
Movies (Abschied vom Kio).[18]
It might be said that Marker’s last years were spent erasing and/or
re-formatting genres – which means, in this context, simplifying his artistic
agenda and disposing of spent practices that had been co-opted by capitalist,
mediatic spectacle. That is but one reading, of course, of a complex equation
of artistic principles at play, yet it explains the proverbial “fade to black” and
primitive gesturalism of the late works that may only be properly read across
the arc of the lifework.
In
closing this essay on speculative scholarship in the arts and humanities with
Marker, it is highly appropriate to recall the apocryphal words of Belgian novelist-artist
Henri Michaux: “Il faut raser la Sorbonne et mettre Chris Marker à la place.”
Marker surpassed and left behind almost every genre he assisted with
developing, from cinéma verité to
direct cinema. Eventually he effectively left behind cinema itself. Why he did
so is highly applicable to the trends now rolling through academia that are
only trends because they serve the neo-liberal model of expropriation that
permits them – the digital singularity that threatens to engulf everything. In
Marker’s case, he abandoned various genres when there was no hope of saving the
genre for speculative inquiry. For example, as the juggernaut of nouvelle-vague
cinema took off in France, launched by many of his confreres from the 1950s, Marker
produced, in 1962, both Le joli mai
and La jetée. Le joli mai (made with
Pierre Lhomme) more or less closed down his 1950s-style collaborative documentary
work, until it re-appeared in altered form in the late-1960s with the direct-cinema
work created with the radical SLON/ISKRA collective – that is, highly political
films. As surplus affect to Le joli mai,
La jetée, a genre-smashing,
pseudo-sci-fi film, situated halfway between fantasia and film-essay, would
make his name in art-house cinema, forever, despite the fact that the publicly
screened version was a mere 29-minutes long and comprised almost entirely (“99.9%”)
of black-and-white still images.[19]
If
Marker’s methods for editioning and disseminating his works to evade capitalist
capture seem passé today, it is because, with few exceptions, the
aesthetic complexity of such works is also more or less passé today. That
complexity is also a politically inflected complexity, an aesthetic force
field. What needs to transpire, then, is for that dynamis in his lifework to be thoughtfully studied and transferred across
new and multiple regimes of signification, for artworks to become forms of
scholarship and vice versa. For it was that dynamis
that produced the means to ends employed, subjective-speculative means to no
singular end.
Gavin Keeney agencex@gmail.com
Gavin Keeney
is an independent scholar currently engaged in a postdoctoral study entitled Knowledge, Spirit, Law, developed in
association with Punctum Books and the Center for Transformative Media,
Parsons/The New School for Design. His most recent books include: Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image
(CSP, 2012); Not-I/Thou: The Other
Subject of Art and Architecture (CSP, 2014); and Knowledge, Spirit, Law: Book 1: Radical Scholarship (Punctum, 2015).
Published on May 26, 2016.
Endnotes
[1] Max Weber, Economy
and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth, Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al., 3 vols. (New York:
Bedminster Press, 1968). First published Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 2
vols. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr/P. Siebeck, 1922).
[2] See the importance
of writing for the Carthusians in Michael G. Sargent, “The Transmission of the
English Carthusians of Some Late Medieval Spiritual Writings,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27,
No. 3 (July 1976), 225-40. “If the prior has so provided, there is one work to
the performance of which you ought especially to attend; that is either that
you learn to write (if, of course, you can learn), or if you can and know, that
you do write. This work is, as it were, immortal work; work, if one may say so,
not passing but lasting; work certainly, may we say, and yet not work; the
work, finally, which, among all other works is most fitting to literate
religious men …” Adam of Dryburgh, Liber
de Quadripartito Exercitio Cellae (On
the Quadripartite Exercise of the Cell); cited in ibid., with reference to Consuetudines of Guigo I, written
between 1121 and 1128.
[4] “Neoliberal policies aim to reduce wages to the bare minimum
and to maximize the returns to capital and management. They also aim to
demobilise workers’ organisations and reduce workers to carriers of labour
power .... Neoliberalism is about re-shaping society so that there is no input
by workers’ organisations into democratic or economic decision-making.”
Benjamin Selwyn,
“Neoliberalism
is Alive and Well,”
Le monde diplomatique (December 2014), http://mondediplo.com/blogs/neoliberalism-is-alive-and-well. Accessed April 28,
2016.
[5] See: Richard Brody,
“An Exile in Paradise,” New Yorker (November
20, 2000), http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/11/20/exile-paradise, accessed April 28,
2016; and Philip Maughan, “I Think the Dead Are with Us: John Berger at 88,” New Statesman (June 11, 2015), http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/06/i-think-dead-are-us-john-berger-88, accessed April 28,
2016.
[6] In this regard,
Thomas Kuhn’s “spiritual” or “intellectual” dependence on the work of Gaston
Bachelard is instructive, as is Michel Foucault’s. Indeed, Giorgio Agamben’s
work is indirectly fed from the same “mountain streams.” Alain Badiou
characterizes the main lines of transmission in French philosophy as: “existential
vitalism” (from Bergson to Sartre to Deleuze); and “conceptual formalism” (from
Brunschvicg to Althusser to Lacan). Alain Badiou, “The Adventure of French
Philosophy,” New Left Review 35 (September-October
2005), 67-77.
[7] Massimo Cacciari, Posthumous
People: Vienna at the Turning Point (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1996). First published Dallo Steinhof: Prospettive viennesi del primo
Novecento (Milano: Adelphi, 1980). Massimo Cacciari, Architecture
and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, trans. Stephen
Sartarelli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
[8] A common subject of
Van Gogh’s still-life painting from the Paris period.
[9] Aquinas: “The
speculative intellect by extension becomes practical (De Anima iii, 10). But one power is not changed into another.
Therefore the speculative and practical intellects are not distinct powers.”
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica,
trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 22 vols. (London: Burns,
Oates & Washburne Ltd., 1920-1924), “The Intellectual Powers,” Q. 79, Art.
11.
[10] It is almost
impossible to define the digital humanities. At the rudest or elementary level,
the super-discipline privileges the manipulation of data sets (computational
strategies) to arrive at spurious, pseudo-scientific conclusions at the
intersection of the social sciences and the humanities.
[12] See European
Graduate School, http://www.egs.edu/. The EGS was founded in 1994. The Media
and Communications division has recently been re-branded as Philosophy, Art and
Critical Thought (PACT). The fact that few scholars are ever in residence is
covered by the alt-academic neologism, “low-residency.”
[14] “I have learned that
the EGS has been perceived by some as an ‘elite’ institution because it has
never actively publicized its programs, relying on the renown of its faculty
(communicated via YouTube in filmed lectures) and word of mouth. And the
faculty do constitute a kind of ‘elite,’ though only in the sense that their
quality is globally recognized as exceptional (only distinguished professors
and highly regarded practitioners from the arts are invited to teach courses).
But the fact is that the EGS is an institution that is open to any qualified
student capable of independent work and motivated by the possibility of being
exposed to the highest level of cross-disciplinary teaching in the world.”
Christopher Fynsk, Dean of the PACT Division, “A New Future for the European
Graduate School,” European Graduate
School (October 28, 2015), http://egs.edu/news/a-new-future-for-the-european-graduate-school. Accessed April 28,
2016.
[15] Miraculously, as of late 2016, the
Moral Rights of Authors have appeared on the radar of both the World Intellectual
Property Organization (WIPO), a Geneva-based United Nations agency, and the United
States Copyright Office, but only after making an appearance at the UN Human
Rights Council in 2015, where the industry was duly frightened by possible
linkage of author rights to human rights. See Catherine
Saez, “UN Human
Rights Council Debates Report Criticising Copyright,” Intellectual
Property Watch (March 11, 2015), http://www.ip-watch.org/2015/03/11/human-rights-council-debates-report-criticising-copyright/. Accessed April 28, 2016.
[16] The posthumous
bequest includes the entire contents of Marker’s studio, including two hard
drives from computer workstations that no doubt contain unfinished projects,
plus suppressed and/or apocryphal works prior to La jetée. Marker was constantly cannibalizing and re-digitalizing his
back catalogue.
[17] This manufacturing
of events in the name of trans-media spectacle was already well underway via
the otherwise admirable posthumous Marker retrospective held at Whitechapel
Gallery, London, UK, in 2014, with the re-launching of the re-digitalized
installation “Zapping Zone” (1990-), courtesy of the Pompidou Center, Paris, and
the inclusion of a translation of an early, pre-1962 Marker text in the
exhibition catalogue. Regarding theories of “trans-media,” see: Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media
Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006); and Alessandro
Ludovico, Post-digital Print: The
Mutation of Publishing since 1894 (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2012).
[18] It was also post-2000
that Marker established a relationship with the distinguished New York
gallerist Peter Blum to manage and monetize his late photographic output
through editioned prints and books.
[19] Multiple versions
exist.
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