Dan Westlake
Words
The Real:
Alienation, a sense of disconnection, appears pervasive in a culture characterized by simulacra. In a media/advertising saturated society the distinctions between simulation and authenticity have largely dissolved. What we know to be real is no longer real enough because it pales in comparison to the seductive gloss of the hi-tech copy. Many of us may now rather be photogenic than attractive. For something now to be seen as truly authentic, something of quality, it now needs to be digitalized - given value through reproduction as witnessed by the thousands of camera phones held aloft at pop concerts.
Can anything now be experienced directly without us seeing it through the looking glass of the hyper-real? Is it now possible, assuming that it is desirable, to ever re-engage with authentic lived experience or is simulation all that remains? Sex, for instance, may seem on the surface to be an area of authentic primeval sensation but the universal access to pornography brought about by the internet has led to the language of pornography’s appropriation by the mainstream advertising leading in turn to a facsimile sexuality. Where the original function of pornography was presumably as a substitute for real sex we are now conditioned to aspire to its representation. The appropriation of the homemade gonzo-porn aesthetic by American Apparel is a recent addition to this hall of mirrors. Could the only authentic event now be pain? ‘I hurt myself today to see if I still feel, I focus on the pain, the only thing that’s real’ sang ‘original outlaw’ Johnny Cash in his Nine Inch Nails cover-version. The increase in self-harm, body modification and mutilation as performance can be seen as symptomatic of a desire to reconnect with the real. Could this mean that there are no significantly alternative strategies of re-connection other than following the example of Chris Burden and getting ourselves shot at?
Language & the Self:
How historically unique is this disconnection? Advanced capitalism’s ideology presents its own illusions, a net covering, and by so doing distorting reality, but as human beings are social animals we exist within societies and any given society will always present its own historic ideology as natural. Social relations are mediated through language and it is language, the system of signs, which ultimately disconnects the self from the other. Language is the meta-sign system on which thinking, the cognitive linguistic process, is dependent. It is this process that defines us in both universal and specific terms. The language based cognitive process is what separates mankind from other animals. We are to use Terry Eagleton’s phrase the linguistic animal. We are individualized, through language, rather than existing as a singular unified entity. The choices we make from the options that language presents are what define us as semi-autonomous individuals.
Once we are aware that we our thinking we become self conscious thus witness the separation of the ‘self’ from the ‘other’, a division emerges between that that is me and all that is not me. Unless we are radical solipsists we intuitively understand ourselves not to be the sum total of the universe in which case we accept that the rest of the universe exists and that we are in separate from it. The primacy of the self has become increasingly central in West thought. A historical progression can be traced from the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment and Modernity too such an extent that 20th century has called the Century of the Self. Until challenged by post-structuralism the certainty of this individualized and autonomous self has been commonly accepted a priori or at least common sense in the West but not in Eastern belief systems. A central tenant of Buddhism is the concept of no-self, a belief that the self is essentially an illusion - a trick of the mind. Language's processing of experience systematically divides the world into a series of binary oppositions thus forming a barrier between the self and that that is other than self. Processing the world through language we are caught up in a network of signs so divorced from the authentic reality that these signs purport to represent. Language as a quasi-logical system, attempts to classify all as either ‘1’ or ‘0’ denying the possibility of that which is neither or both (or neither and both). Derrida deploys the term hymen as being neither inside or outside to elucidate languages inherently unstable structure. As it is language that defines us as human beings, the more we have evolved - the more human we have become - the more enmeshed in language leading to ever increasing alienation. ‘The map is not the territory’ (Korzybski) - language is how the mind attempts to make sense of the world it is not the world itself. It is an illusion to believe we can logically comprehend the world without a transcendental signifier as structural anchor. Even the first principles of western logic themselves have now been destabilized as the wave/particle duality in quantum physics has thrown into doubt the foundations of a previously Newtonian universe.
Language & Society:
Michel Foucault has argued that language is essentially an instrument of control and subjugation. In order to control something it must first be delineated therefore the naming is a prerequisite for the controlling. The first lesson a child is taught, through language, is that they are separate entities from others thus it is language that defines us as individual beings. Society and the individual are essentially constructs of language. Whether society or man could be said to even have existed before language is a circular question of cause and consequence but the self is always defined by its relationship to the society it inhabits. Society, whatever socio-economic system in place, is mediated by human beings through language so is hierarchically structured as language is itself hierarchically structured. Any creative practice with emancipatery intent is attempting to transcend language. As human beings are social animals and as long as we remain recognizably human we will always have some sort of society i.e. a codified institutionalization of human relations. Our tool for the organization and mediation of social relations being language, that which defines us, it is language itself, this veil of interlocking binary opposites obscuring experience, that denies us what Jacques Lacan refers to as the 'Real'.
The Lacanion Real can be understood as the only authentic freedom - freedom from language’s hierarchal structure with its inherent judgments of privilege and exclusion. Thus a hierarchal structure inevitably exists in all institutionalized inter-human relationships be they between two people, a family, community or society. These relationships are fluid though the word structure implies a level of solidity all structures are, as is all phenomena, in a state of permanent flux therefore open to continues remodeling. The culture of any given society will inevitably reflect and reinforce its social mores but it is also an arena where fluctuating negotiations and power struggles take place. Cultural practice, whether or not performed within the institution of art, has the ability to shape the society from which it emerges. Constructive discourse within a given culture does not reside simply in a contest between opposition and support of the status quo. When this happens an oppositional alternative may appear to be offering liberation, though actually limiting real while reinforcing the incumbent ideology by offering the false choice fallacy of either the status quo or its opposite. The possibility of transcendence exists in the exploration and exploitation of a given systems psychological between spaces.
Language & its Other:
Society and the individual are both then formed by language just as society and the individual form language and each other. The codification through language of social relations defines the society that defines the individual. We can see here a triangular structure comprising of three interdependent parts: language-self-society. As Language is an instrument of power, that could be said to subjugate its user as well as the used, the emancipatery drive may appear to cast language itself as the enemy to be defeated but this could never be realized. As the three parts forming this triangle are intrinsically linked to destroy language be to destroy both society and the individual, an impossibility unless one is contemplating the literal extermination of all humanity. Though a specific society i.e. a specific set of codified rules mediating social relations may collapse another will automatic emerge in the vacuum created. As social animals that cogitate and communicate linguistically social relations will continue to be constructed and conducted through language and languages innately hierarchical structure will inevitably beget the division of the privileged from the marginalized though who constitutes the privileged and who the marginalized is indeterminate. Emancipation from language is to transcend - to rise above or go beyond – not to destroy.
If language is the house of being (Heidegger) what might it mean to transcend language? Buddhism speaks in terms of an awakening and Heidegger postulated a radical awakening but as soon as we speak we are in the world of signs thus divorced form the Real. Language may communicate relative truths as its fluidity enables it to evolve and adapt to changing circumstances but it can never be the absolute truth that it flows over. What Spinoza referred to as ‘the underlying truth that manifests itself’ may never be successfully mapped out by language though it may emerge in the spaces between words. To attempt to define it with language is to remain enmeshed within the symbolic realm. The Real is what language is not – it is languages’ other. It is only the Real that holds out the possibility of authentic and absolute freedom; freedom from language’s innate hierarchal power structures that divides the whole into the privileged and the marginalized. Ultimately the Real may only be contextualized through negation: conceptualized by what it is not - a strategy known as via negitiva or negative theology.
Iconoclasm and Idolatry
From Moses to Marx idolatry, the worship of false idols has been an ongoing concern. The human condition appears hardwired to search for existential resolution. Whether we put our faith in monotheistic Gods, technological progress or Manchester United we do so to deliver us form the void of a meaningless existence and into a continuously differed promised land. Marx warned of the error of commodity fetishism - the worship of things - while postulating a messianic faith in progress through dialectic materialism. In advance capitalist societies we don’t worship products but the abstract concepts they represent such as youth, beauty and wealth. The relationship between consumable products and these abstractions is mediated through the use of lens-based imagery by the advertising and entertainment industries. The seductive gloss of these images is an ideal so far removed form all possible realities of youth, beauty and wealth that finally it is not even these abstract concepts themselves that are worshiped but their actual representation. Such is the all-pervasive ubiquity this image lead Spectacle that the possibility of artworks based on lens-based imagery, even those produced as explicit critiques of it, ever resisting its cooption is highly questionable.
Objects & Dematerialization:
'The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more' wrote Douglas Huebler in 1969. Applying the word ‘object’ in both a colloquial and philosophical sense encompassing images-events-thoughts-opinions etc do we need actually need more? All these objects exist as signs signifying other signs: behind these signs nothing, a void that Hegel termed the ‘dark, shapeless abyss’. As linguistic animals inhabiting the symbolic realm we appear inherently drawn to idolize signs in order to give purpose to our existence. In the modern city where the phenomenological terrain is dominated by the hyper-real we are constantly confronted by advertising and other forms of capitalist seduction creating the illusion of need. Strategies of distraction deny us the space to contemplate the emptiness that exists silently lurking behind the shiny facade of our consumer driven society as it does behind all things. A ideology based on spectacle succeeds because we fear nothingness and wish it to be kept at bay so are grateful for distraction. In such a society free non-contaminated space paradoxically becomes the most valuable of substances. In a terrain of hyper-stimulation designated art-spaces can provide a space where an individual may for a period of time inhabit a space free from the pressure to either produce or consume. Unfortunately this experience is often denied us by the actual art objects placed in this precious space. A valuable experience is thereby denied by ‘needy’ art objects appearing to demand, like infants, our attention. Thus art can provide yet more of the spectacle and distraction that denies us the opportunity to simply experience the essentially empty nature of being.
Sound:
Language is structurally modelled on a visual processing of phenomena forming an ocularcentric interpretation of reality. As Marshal Mcluhan showed in his essay ‘Visual and Acoustic Space’ the development of western thought from ancient Greece onwards has privileged sight uniquely among the senses. Visual processing shows us a separation of things, a hierarchy where each object is separate and distinct and exists in a geometricly linear order decreasing in prominence towards a horizon line. This is of course an illusion, an object's mass does not become greater or lesser as we move through space. The very solidity of objects is also an illusion as at the atomic scale solidity is absent. That objects exist at all as separate entities is itself a visual illusion. On a quantum level we there is delineation between one object ends and another begins. As an example of the advance of ocularcentrism we can contrast the perspective in renaissance painting, where we observe a single correct point of view, with painting of the middle ages where scale appears (to us now) arbitrary. We can draw an analogy with the privileging of a centred anthropocentric point of view in painting with those in science and philosophy. By the age of enlightenment Isaac Newton had seemingly fixed man at the centre of a rational scientific universe with this centred point of view necessary for measurement now being seen as true. With sound there is an absence of spatial hierarchy as the ocular illusion of solidity disintegrates. Aural processing allows the merging of phenomena as the apparent distinctions between objects blur. Sound enables us to transcend the binary oppositions of language as we can experience sound pre-linguistically. We hear sound not only through our ears but feel it through our bodies. On a physical and emotional level we feel sound blurring the divisions between inside and outside. The Cartesian distinction between the self and other dissolves as we experience sound moving through us - being both inside and outside.
Open Work:
Umberto Eco defined specifically open work as not only open to interpretation, as all can be said to be, but work which actively invites or requires the readers participation in the construction of meaning. Closed work, by prescribing a single specific reading designated by its author, is self evidently authoritarian thus anti-democratic. Open work facilitates a space sympathetic to multiple interpretations: Closed work’s intention to is antithetical to the human spirit as it attempts to treat a human being as a machine. To attempt to impose a specific response on a viewer, as advertising and commercial entertainment attempts to do, is to dehumanize. To prescribe a single correct reading of a work thus proscribing all others as wrong is to engage in a process of subjugation whereby one’s own choices are imposed on another human being. The logical conclusion of such a strategy is, if successful, the annihilation of the subjugated as our ability to make are own choices is what defines us as autonomous beings. The indeterminacy that the viewer brings to open work destabilizes the structure on which value judgments are dependent rendering a simplistic evaluation through the binary-oppositions of success redundant. Open practice is not an applied science but analogous to the pure exploratory science of CERN - a journey undertaken without a specific end point in mind and is antipathetic to utilitarian use value. Both Eco and Gilles Deleuze have argued that open work is the appropriate response to the indeterminate universe exposed by the quantum physics. Within a socio-political context open work invites a horizontal and anti-authoritarian arena of democratic engagement. As quantum physics has shown the observed is interdependent on the observer contrary to a Greenburgian claims for arts autonomy. The context of a piece is as important as any other element that contributes to the viewer’s construction of meaning. In a post-Gutenberg age where all can be reprogrammed and rewritten we all exist as both producers and consumers of culture as the delineation between viewed and viewer is increasingly dissolved. All art now accommodates multiple readings and re-writings, a form of play between artists and viewers, authors and readers, musicians and djs, producers and re-mixers. This fluctuating engagement or play is an end in itself.
Post-Marxism:
As autonomous agents defined by our environment the option of non-engagement with the present socio-political sphere does not exist but a local/historical situation can only exist within the context of that which is universal. As society is the codification of social relations through language and language operates through hierarchy and division society (any society) necessarily begets privilege and marginalization. To attempt to operate outside of our present social system would be to allow one's self to be defined completely by it. To live in London in 2009 and attempt to operate outside the capitalist system would be like attempting to operate outside of the weather without the option of moving to a sunnier climate. Advanced capitalism being the arena contemporary art, like everything else, operates in it is not a case of if but how we choose to engage with and within it.
Art is Affirmation
Language introduces the ‘cut in the real’ that divides the world into things. It is this division that produces choice and it is the exercise of choice - free will - that individuates the self. Duchamp applied a razor to all but that which was essential to the process of art making leaving only the selection of objects to be shown i.e. to bring to the attention of an other (the dematerialization of the art object that followed dispensed with the necessity of the object to carry material form). The creation of Art is then in essence an act of choosing and where choice is exercised there is individuation. As an artist brings to the attention of others acts of individuation that need not serve any utilitarian purpose it would appear that the primordial drive to create art is the affirmation of self through the gaze of the other. As the self is an ongoing project of competing desires and the other’s encounter with the art object can never be undone the artist is destined to strive for an illusive authenticity that is indefinitely deferred.
selected writings Dan Westlake ©2008-2009