Apocalypsis, or The Dragon in Her Cave

Having no body and no name is a small price to pay for being wild, for being free to move across (some) countries, (some) political boundaries, (some) historical ideologies, and (some) economies. I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. 

The supercommunity does not propose a new form of togetherness. It does not replace cozy humanist universalism. It knows things will not be better when we come togehther. Our commonality won‘t make up for our differences. We are not united. We don‘t even like each other. We are simply stuck togeher, like a bad group exhibition. The supercommunity is not the world. It is a disastrous new ecology of bad faith closeness. But it comes with vast new powers that are ony starting to become apparent. 

Corruption is the disappeared body coming back to life. Its flesh seizes the veins of the post-revolutionary state, pumping, circulating, and blocking in a synchronized manner while unleashing shape-shifting forms as its residue. This ultimate stench of capital thrives in passing from body to body, as though an uncontainable viral flu.

Several decades before the 1917 Communist Revolution, some thinkers and artists in Russia experimented with a number of materialist metaphysical programs for overcoming death, starting by colonizing heaven. Perhaps such wild thinking is precisely what is so urgently needed at a time when most progressive ideologies appear powerless in preventing the catastrophes we are currently faced with.

If the laws of the universe can be reduced to binary code, say, on a subatomic level, there might be no actual difference between the universe and the computer. Take 3D software for instance. In order for objects to move through space and time convincingly, the software needs to have the laws of physics installed into it. If the physics are the same, then maybe, as in the case of the atom bomb, computing hacked into the deep structure of the universe,and that’s what we peer into each day through screens.

What is ending is the modern world—a very particular world invented in 1492, animated by a naturalist ontology inside of which nature and culture were not to be confused. Which is to say that humanity can no longer be taken as the solution to anything—at least not alone, in its enlightened cosmo-ecological ignorance. On the contrary, from the perspective of the earth, humanity looks increasingly like the problem.

Shine and shininess are characteristic of surface effects, of glamor and spectacle, of bling-bling contingency, of ephemeral novelty, value added, and disposable fascination. Shine is what seizes upon affect as its primary carrier to mobilize attention. Shine could be the paradoxically material base of an optical economy typically (mis)understood as being purely cognitive or immaterial.

Let’s be clear about something: it is infuriating that most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three professions that are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness. When the flexibility, certainty, and freedom promised by being part of a critical outside are revealed as extensions of recent advances in economic exploitation, does the field of art become the uncritical, complicit inside of something far more interesting?
 

From early prehistoric times up to some point in the late twentieth century, humans believed strongly in something they called “ART.” This topic reflects affectionately on this concept, the objects associated with it, and the mode of writing characteristic of the era.

What whispered confidences and secrets may citizen and alien trade as they make their moves? What new things may be afoot in their wake? In 1762, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau added a conditional “but” after the phrase “man is born free” in The Social Contract, was he implying that there could be hidden costs to birth in the human species?

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?