Any sleight of hand, as is well known, relies on the complicity of its audience; the “rationalist veil,” as the belief in the “rationality” of modern power as modern myth, is what constitutes this complicity. It places rationality always already on the side of the moderns, rendering its power a self-fulfilling prophecy—a necessity exempt from any qualification beyond just what is rational and what is not. If we are no longer modern, but still unable to be anything else, it is perhaps because the residual “rationalist veil” constitutes a form of continuity that binds the present to the modern past.

All of these artists are still inhaling doxa and are becoming more and more hegemonic, but in contrast with official or governmental artists, they are praised in the name of subversion. They should fight with monsters, yet it’s true that “whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.”

Despite modernity’s obsession with fragility and its aspiration to produce instruments of preservation, it is unable to preserve bodies—so it resorts to preserving images. Ava Gardner remains an enduring image, even as Ava Gardner the person grows old. Since modernity cannot bring those societies drowning in violence and tragedy under its control, it confines them to an image that, from the instance of capture, assigns itself to the past.

The viewing copy thus widens the reach of the work of art, but confidentially and in semi-secrecy. It is precisely this eccentric status of the viewing copy within the economy of art—which itself has an equally exceptional status within contemporary capitalism—that makes it an exemplary object, a theoretical object par excellence.

But how does a life look when it doesn’t define itself in relation to the status of wage labor, but rather through the desire to freely decide one’s own conditions for living and working, effectively comprising a demand for a flexible labor market? What does it mean for our work and life when the social, the cultural, and the economic cease to be clearly distinguishable categories and instead condition and permeate each other?