Gilles Deleuze - Difference and Repetition

Gilles Deleuze - Difference and Repetition

1968, trans. 1994

Jacques Derrida - Differance

Jacques Derrida Differance
1968, published in Margins of Philosophy 1972

Jean-Luc Nancy - Elliptical Sense

Jean-Luc Nancy - Elliptical Sense, Research in Phenomenology, 1988

Michel Foucault - The Four Similitudes

Michel Foucault, The Four Similitudes

Excerpt from The Order of Things 

Chapter 2: The Prose of The World

Foucault's essay examines the role that resemblances of different kinds played in the foundations of enlightenment science.

Full text here: http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/foucault-order_of_things-text.html 

Chapter 2, Part 1: The Four Similitudes

Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing them­selves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man. Painting imitated space. And representa­tion - whether in the service of pleasure or of knowledge - was posited as a form of repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language, its manner of declaring its existence and of formulating its right of speech.

We must pause here for a while, at this moment in time when resem­blance was about to relinquish its relation with knowledge and disappear, in part at least, from the sphere of cognition. How, at the end of the sixteenth century, and even in the early seventeenth century, was simili­tude conceived? How did it organize the figures of knowledge? And if the things that resembled one another were indeed infinite in number, can one, at least, establish the forms according to which they might resemble one another?

The semantic web of resemblance in the sixteenth century is extremely rich: Amicitia, Aequalitas (contractus, consensus, matrimonium, societas, pax, et similia), Consonantia, Concertus, Continuum, Pantos, Proportio, Similitudo, Conjunctio, Copula[1]. And there are a great many other notions that intersect, overlap, reinforce, or limit one another on the surface of thought. It is enough for the moment to indicate the principal figures that deter­mine the knowledge of resemblance with their articulations. There are four of these that are, beyond doubt, essential.

Seth Price - Teen Image

Seth Price Teen Image

version for IMG MGMT blog, Art Fag City, 2009

Liam Gillick - Inside now, we walk into a room with Coca-Cola coloured walls

Liam Gillick Inside now, we walk into a room with Coca-Cola coloured walls

1998

Pierre Levy - Collective Intelligence

Pierre Levy - Collective Intelligence, Mankind's emerging world in cyberspace, 

published 1994

Nicolas Bourriaud - Postproduction

"The artistic question is no longer 'What can we make that is new?' but, 'How can we make do with what we have?' ... Artists today program forms more than they compose them."

Postproduction Nicolas Bourriaud 

Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2002 

Michel Foucault on Heterotopias

Heterotopias

First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.

Taken from Of Other Spaces 1967. Full text here.

Jean Baudrillard - Simulations and Simulacra

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

Read the full essay here.

Maurizio Cattelan - The Fat Is On The Table

Maurizio Cattelan We Are The Revolution 2000

The Fat Is On The Table, Maurizio Cattelan on Joseph Beuys
First published in Tate Etc, Spring 2005

Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist, 1922

During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one's own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different world now. At one time the whole town took a lively interest in the hunger artist; from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted; everybody wanted to see him at least once a day; there were people who bought season tickets for the last few days and sat from morning till night in front of his small barred cage; even in the nighttime there were visiting hours, when the whole effect was heightened by torch flares; on fine days the cage was set out in the open air, and then it was the children's special treat to see the hunger artist; for their elders he was often just a joke that happened to be in fashion, but the children stood openmouthed, holding each other's hands for greater security, marveling at him as he sat there pallid in black tights, with his ribs sticking out so prominently, not even on a seat but down among straw on the ground, sometimes giving a courteous nod, answering questions with a constrained smile, or perhaps stretching an arm through the bars so that one might feel how thin it was, and then again withdrawing deep into himself, paying no attention to anyone or anything, not even to the all-important striking of the clock that was the only piece of furniture in his cage, but merely staring into vacancy with half-shut eyes, now and then taking a sip from a tiny glass of water to moisten his lips. 

Unitary Urbanism at the end of the 1950s, Internationale Situationniste, 1959

In August 1956, a tract signed by the groups preparing the founding of the SI [Situationist International] called for the boycott of a would-be "Festival of Avant-Garde Art" being held in Marseille at the time, an event that the tract called the most complete, official selection of "what in twenty years will represent the idiocy of the 1950s."

And, indeed, the modern art of this period turns out to have been dominated by, and almost exclusively composed of, camouflaged repetitions -- a stagnation that bespeaks of both the definitive exhaustion of the entire old theatre of cultural operations as well as the incapacity to discover a new one. At the same time, however, underground movements have come into existence. Such is the case with the origins of unitary urbanism (UU), intuited as early as 1953 and first named as such at the end of 1956 in a tract distributed on the occasion of a demonstration by our Italian comrades in Turin. ("Obscure statements," wrote La Nouva Stampa on 11 December, on the subject of the following warning: "Your children's future depends on it: demonstrate in favor of unitary urbanism!"). Unitary urbanism is one of the central concerns of the SI and, despite any delays and difficulties that might arise in its application, it is entirely correct (as the opening report of the Munich conference confirms) that unitary urbanism has already begun at the moment that it appears as a program of research and development.

The 1950s are about to come to a close. Without trying to predict whether the idiocy of this decade in the art and practice of life -- itself a function of more general causes -- will diminish or intensify in the short run, it is time to examine the current state of UU following the first stage of its development. A number of points need to be clarified.

First all of, UU is not a doctrine of urbanism but a critique of urbanism. By the same token, our participation in experimental art is a critique of art, and sociological research ought to be a critique of sociology. No isolated discipline whatsoever can be tolerated in itself; we are moving toward a global creation of existence. 

The Temporary Autonomous Zone

The Temporary Autonomous Zone is a book by social theorist, philosopher and anarchist Hakim Bey. 


Comprised of eight chapters the book focuses on temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control, negating a hierarchical system of social relationships Bey asks us to focus on the present. By giving uncompromised agency to the individual in this new territory allows an empowerment through creativity.

Adam Curtis on the Yanomamo

Guinea Pigs Up The Creek by Adam Curtis

Adam Curtis is the documentary filmmaker behind series such as The Century Of The Self and The Power Of Nightmares. His methodology involves trawling through the BBC's film archives and pulling together threads in order to craft astonishing stories of our recent historical and political past. His style is polemical and the stories that emerge are often amazing.

His blog - The Medium And The Message - is a regularly updated outlet for things he stumbles across during his research, alongside Curtis' illuminating commentary.

The above linked article details the history of the various, ever-changing ways that the western media has portrayed the Yanomamo tribe; A remote tribe who live on the borders of Brazil and Venezuala, and apparently the inspiration for James Cameron's Na'vi people in the 2009 film Avatar. Each time they appear in the archive it seems they are used to illustrate a different western ideal about human nature and primitive civilisation, becoming a mirror for our anthropological fanatasies, utopian dreams and political ideals.