Stephen Squibb,
and Pierre Dardot & Christian Laval
www.e-flux.com/issues/52-february-2014
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When symbolic calculation and semiotic abstraction mix with real power, they unleash an entirely new way of understanding the limits of both. Not everything is relative. Some things just don’t flow. Some things don’t translate; some things are heavy. The whole point of symbolic games is to mediate these absolute limits. When a crime causes irreparable damage, you need a symbolic equivalence to make up the difference. You can’t always return stolen goods. You can’t stop islands in the South Pacific from going underwater. You can’t bring back the dead. You need to make up for it; you need reparations that spin right. It is less about solving problems than about finding the symbolic resources to move on. Even if financial and computational abstraction regimes convert laws and borders into commodities and psychotic projections of desire, it does not necessarily mean that these things were so stable to begin with. And maybe the role of institutions was always to find the language to mask that very fact, to inscribe authority so deeply that symbols can be absolutely believed. Which is to say, maybe we aren’t so crazy after all.
—Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
In this issue:
Reza Negarestani—The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I: Human
Inhumanism is the extended practical elaboration of humanism; it is born out of a diligent commitment to the project of enlightened humanism. As a universal wave that erases the self-portrait of man drawn in sand, inhumanism is a vector of revision. It relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposed evident characteristics and preserving certain invariances. At the same time, inhumanism registers itself as a demand for construction, to define what it means to be human by treating human as a constructible hypothesis, a space of navigation and intervention.
Ane Hjort Guttu—The Rich Should Be Richer
We are taught that the sun shines on everyone. The sun is one of the best things in life, and the best things in life are free, or so we’ve heard. But that’s not how it is. The sun belongs to someone. The clouds belong to someone. The road, the trees, the houses. The sound of footsteps on the street. It’s all for sale.
Tom Holert—National Heterologies: On the Materiality and Mediality of Flags
To what extent is a flag not only a symbol, but also a medium? Flags exist in different manifestations and materials, from the sewn flag on the mast to the GIF file. In essence, they are artificial, manufactured objects. Sewn together, printed or embroidered cloth-segments, their symbolic effect is a result both of antecedent production—from graphic development to the sewing machine—and of formal and informal use. The flag serves as a vehicle for political-identical argumentation; but it should also be considered in its materiality—as hardware.
Tyler Coburn—Charter Citizen
Theoretically, anyone in the world can migrate to a charter city. It remains the sovereign territory of a host country, but is privately held—as with a case like Singapore, infrastructural and administrative costs are drawn from the revenues of land leasing and value gains. A given charter city sources its rules from a guarantor nation, in the manner that Hong Kong recruits judges from common law jurisdictions, or Mauritius appeals cases to the United Kingdom’s Privy Council.
Jonas Staal—Art. Democratism. Propaganda.
What one could conclude from this is that if we can speak of the art of the world fair in terms of propaganda—keeping the Venice Biennale in mind as our starting point—we should do so not from the superstructural role of the artwork itself, which serves mainly as a decorative function of ideals of civilization and innovation, but in relation to the underlying uncontested base that facilitates this exchange of goods. A further, more interesting conclusion could be drawn relating the United Arab Emirates to the doctrine of democratism, a political construct that dispenses actual electoral, parliamentary representation.
Antke Engel—The Elegantly Strong Triad: Defamiliarizing the Family in Works by LaToya Ruby Frazier and Henrik Olesen
Frazier’s image denotes the ambiguous power relations of this triad in various ways; for one, Mom takes up the powerful position of photographer, image-maker, and framer. Yet Mom also includes her own body in the frame, refusing to let her daughter stand alone. The mother’s pose is ambivalent; she stands erect—her back straight, her shoulders stiff, her chin up—like a young recruit trying to claim authority she doesn’t (yet) convincingly embody.
Stephen Squibb—Genres of Capitalism, Part I
Associated with historical approaches, this genre has a tendency to identify capitalism with a monetary economy, and focuses on exchange relations rather than on relations of production, consumption, or distribution. Generic examples tend to seek “the origins of capitalism in the first encroachments of specifically commercial dealings upon the narrow economic horizons and the supposedly ‘natural economy’ of the medieval world.”
Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval—The New Way of the World, Part II: The Performance/Pleasure Apparatus
The “unbounded world” does not pertain to some return to “nature,” but is the effect of a particular institutional regime that regards any limit as potentially already outmoded. Far removed from the model of a central power directly controlling subjects, the performance/pleasure apparatus is apportioned into diversified mechanisms of control, evaluation, and incentivization and pertains to all the cogs of production, all modes of consumption, and all forms of social relations.
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