Self-identity is a bad visual system.
Theory is passionate fiction.
These are two statements that, even or just because of their isolation from their original context, are both open enough to let loose our thoughts, and precise enough to become sharp tools of criticism. The first one is from Donna Haraway’s seminal essay “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988), and the second one is by Teresa de Lauretis in The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (1994).
These two phrases have accompanied my intellectual life for quite a while now, albeit separated from their specific contexts and metaphorized for my own questions. Haraway uses the visual metaphor to characterize the limits of self-oriented positioning in scientific knowledge. In my reading, “self-identity is a bad visual system” becomes a brilliant comment on narcissism as a cultural practice that also motivates and steers technological inventions that are out to control, sell, and dominate.
“Theory is passionate fiction” is taken from de Lauretis’s reading of Freud’s theories of desire as passionate fiction—an interpretation first proposed by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit. I read it as a critique of grand thinking with global pretensions, which in my view abounds in the rhetorics of network apologists as much as in the theory of accelerationism.
The link that connects them, in my view, is narcissism—the narcissism of interpretation in the widest sense. Interpretation includes theory; the one who interprets facts, issues, and presumed world conditions is, consciously or not, always also producing theory, grappling with what s/he considers to be a truth about the world. The fact that theory is driven by desire often passes unnoticed—more so if theorists and theory are embattled in the intellectual frontlines of the day. No one wants to be reminded of the fragility and limited value of his/her interpretations—and the fragility of one’s own subjectivity.
So in a way I link theory, in the sense of its universal application to global problems, to narcissism, and narcissism to such claims made by producers of theory—that in fact could be my passionate fiction involved in, and fed by, a deep distrust of grand narratives and those who propose them. To me it is astounding how the critical negativity of theoretical thinking—and this negativity connects pre-poststructural thought like the Frankfurt School to the poststructuralism of Foucault or Lacan (or, come to think of it, Donna Haraway, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler)—is again being turned into the heroic narcissism of thinking in totalities, accelerationism being one version of it.
Old stuff? Eighties critical thinking on difference and situated knowledge, with no value in today’s acceleration toward global catastrophe? Individualization of critique in the face of the need for a theory or the theory to save or at least explain the world?
“Acceleration implies the submission of the unconscious to the globalized machine,” Franco Berardi writes. “It generates panic.”1 This too is a quotation taken out of its context. It made me think of a very special panic that transports itself in expressions of drunken happiness: the selfie. These expressions are not unlike those produced by high-spirited young people decades ago in photo booths for ID cards. The selfie seems to me the perfect example for this submission of the unconscious to the globalized machine, more so as it is made with so-called self-expression in mind.
For Sartre, selfies would have been pure horror: his fantasy of the self as voyeur who is himself watched in the act of gazing by an unseen other has become the matrix of theories of the gaze. The gaze of the other, if only imagined, constituted a deep danger for the consistency of the self. Imagine widening this gaze of the other into the endless circulation of the internet.
Selfies, the fastest-growing narcissistic practice of recent years—another case for technology steered by and catering to narcissism—turns Sartre’s evil gaze of the other on an endangered and paranoid self into its opposite: the incessant reassurance of the self through the constant re-performance of its presumed integrity before the eyes of countless anonymous others. Still, the anxiety, I imagine, is always just around the corner, in those moments between selfies. This again propels the drive towards circulating countless images of selves staring into the eyes of cameras—the self-image as a mirror for the other in an endless circular economy of narcissistic exchange.
But where has Sartre’s paranoia gone in the age of the selfie? Is it the substitution of the body and the face with its image that makes people expose themselves and their images to the gaze of others, forgetting their panic and trafficking their selfies so recklessly? If so, then let’s rediscover our panic. It might be the drive needed for practices of critique lost in this naive, jubilatory, infantile mirror-gazing.
Another version of narcissistic cultural practice seems to be curating. The curator has lately become the master of “content,” and artists are expected to follow suit. The curator formulates something considered programmatic; the rhetoric of typical curator-speak has the pretention of being a ponderous comment on the state of the world, assembling all the latest theoretical buzzwords (the documenta 13 Book of Books is a prominent example). This is not only bad theory; it also stages the illusion of the writer’s control over the interpretation of the world.
Artists as curators, then, will need to be all the more careful to give their peers, the participating artists, room enough to breathe, think, and act.
Resistance is needed against a narcissism that steers the global machine and is steered by it. Narcissism is no longer a welcome addendum in the development of a healthy self, as proposed decades ago by the psychology of the self. Instead, it has turned into a vast and quickly-expanding field of cultural practices sustained, framed, and driven by technology.
Might art have a role in practices of resistance? It has been said that art as a specific practice is dissolving within the circulation of the global image machine. That could indeed be the case, but art as a specific practice might also find forms of resistance within it. Here, Haraway’s “self-identity is a bad visual system” becomes helpful. Self-identity does not help with critical positioning. Getting distance from oneself(ie) does.
I know, I know, there is no “outside” from which to change the world, but the inside should offer enough room for movement and resistance—in single, multiple, fragmented, particular moments between selfies.
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Cuba: The Fading of a Subcontinental Dream
As the revolution and its leaders enter their twilight years, what are the most relevant expressions of transition? How are the relations between the state and culture being reconfigured? Will the polemical and politically volatile divide between culture deemed to be inside or outside the revolution give way to more heterogeneous panorama?
Closing Editorial
A Knot Untied in Two Parts
Notes on the Abstract Strike
The Corruption of the Eye: On Photogenesis and Self-Growing Images
The Vectoralist Class
Mercury Retrograde
Surface Encounters
Soaking in the Daily Curses: A Conversation
Made to Fit, or The Gathering of the Balloons
Uncommoning Nature
Self-Identity is a Bad Visual System
Of Work Riots, Political Prisoners, and Workers Refusing to Leave the Factory—Translated Through the Pages of Faridabad Workers News (2005–2015)
Laboring One to Seven (Island of Terror)
Eating Glass: The New Propaganda
The Extraordinary Adventures of Guy Fawkes
Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries
Reading Art as Confrontation
Blackout City
A Few Notes from an Extellectual
Traitors, a Mutable Lexicon
It Takes so Much for a City to Happen
Less World to be Ourselves: A Note on Postapocalyptic Simplification
Give Back to Your Alma Mater!
Our Affirmations
The Revolution Is Dead—But Long Lives the State!
Extinction as Usual?: Geo-Social Futures and Left Optimism
Heart of Brightness
Supercritical Decay
THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION WAS CAUSED BY THE SUN: A PARTIAL SCRIPT FOR A SHORT FILM
TBH IDK FTW
You Can’t Ask Everyone to Behave Ethically Just Like That
The Arts for the Global Conflict: A 2115 Report
The Alchemic Digital, The Planetary Elemental
Castroneirics: A Dreamitaph for Fidel (The Exquisite Cadaver)
The Memory of a Deluge and the Surface of Water
Plastic Shine: From Prosaic Miracle to Retrograde Sublime
The Museum, Its Meaning and Mission
The Forms of Non-Belonging
The Message of Francis
Crimes Without a Scene: Qian Weikang and the New Measurement Group
Why Preserve the Name “Human”?
Empire and Its Double: The Many Pavilions of the Islamic State
Theorizing Deposition: Transitional Stratigraphy, Disruptive Layers, and the Future
Is There Any World to Come?
The Loop
After Nihilism, After Technic: Sketches for a New Philosophical Architecture
Do You See It? Well, It Doesn’t See You!
The Fruitarian Dilemma: A Dialogue about Kissing Ass, Corruption, and Compromise
Theorems of Life (As an Addendum and Clarification on Monism)
The Idle Monologue of an Unconvinced Surveyor
ISIS and the CIA Vie for the Claim to Divinity
On Direct Action: An Address to Cultural Workers
Field Guide to Skirmology: Handbook for the Skirmonaut
Arsenic Dreams
Provincialism Perfected: Global Contemporary Art and Uneven Development
Weapons Grade Pig Work
Botched Enlightenment: A Conversation
Immortality Day
Oh the Animals of Language
ARGUS is: An Almost Cock and Bull Story
Why We Look at Plants, in a Corrupted World
The Making of Americans
Styles and Customs in the 2020s
The Changing of the Gods of Reason: Cecil John Rhodes, Karoo Fracking, and the Decolonizing of the Anthropocene
Child as Material
La Ville Souvenir
On Solar Databases and the Exogenesis of Light
Men of Bronze, Homes of Concrete
Art After the Machines
Nomos and Cosmos
GORILLAZ GRRLZ
Torn Together
Online Digital Artwork and the Status of the “Based-In” Artist
Second Advents: On the Issue of Planning in Contemporary Art
Look Above, the Sky is Falling: Humanity Before and After the End of the World
Shiny
Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nts
On Deprofessionalizing Surgery
Things Based on Real-Life Events
Thinking About Art Thinking
Construction with Steel and Technology
Apocalypsis, or The Dragon in Her Cave
Turk, Toaster, Task Rabbit
On the Documentary
Cosmic Anxiety: The Russian Case
The Great Silence
The Art of Cooking: A Dialogue Between Julia Child and Craig Claiborne
SUPERCOMMUNITY (editorial)
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Franco Berardi, “Accelerationism Questioned from the Point of View of the Body,” e-flux journal 46, June 2013.
Go to TextFranco Berardi, “Accelerationism Questioned from the Point of View of the Body,” e-flux journal 46, June 2013.
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