Sensoria. Маккензи Уорк

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СКАЧАТЬ an art world example of what Keller Easterling calls extrastatecraft—a kind of secret museum, a “luxury no man’s land.”¹⁸⁴

      Or consider the documents to be found in WikiLeaks that may show that the architect Rem Koolhaas was in negotiations to design a museum for the Syrian government. His office will not confirm their authenticity. Many dictators now favor contemporary art museums, biennales, and art fairs as a way to look fashion-forward in the dictator world. The national museum may have once provided some sort of temporal anchor for the modern state, but the contemporary art museum can’t perform that purpose. Following Peter Osborne, Steyerl sees contemporary art as a proxy for a kind of transindividual junktime.¹⁸⁵ They are a proxy for the nonexistent global commons. It’s like the commons, but out of harms’ way—autonomous.

      “Seen like this, duty free art is essentially what traditional autonomous art might have been, had it not been elitist and oblivious to its own conditions of production.”¹⁸⁶ Here Steyerl builds on Peter Bürger’s famous critique of the failure of the avant-gardes and suggests a little of what might be culled from the wreckage.¹⁸⁷ But we have to keep in mind art’s conditions of possibility now: dictator’s contemporary art foundation, arms dealer’s tax shelter, hedge funder’s trophy, art student’s debt bondage, aggregate spam, leaked data, unpaid precarious labor, all accumulating as value in the freeport.

      Steyerl frankly takes advantage of a position in the art world, whose simulated autonomy is doubled edged. The art world is a point from which to observe the destruction of many features that were once characteristic of a certain modern, capitalist world and the installing of some other mode of production and control, still based on exploitation and oppression, but of an algorithmic and derivative rather than disciplinary and industrial kind. Both the autonomy of the art world and the disruption of the historical world may yet, in subtle, minor ways, be dialectically reversible. Their negation of the world might be negated in little ways.

      On the side of art, Steyerl wants to stay close to what Gregory Sholette called the dark matter of the art world, such as all the invisible affective labor performed by gallery assistants, curatorial assistants, interns, art students, and the like.¹⁸⁸ She even defends the International Art English that has sprouted out of the billion art world press releases now pouring into our inboxes. Steyerl has a thing for low genres, and the art world press release, written by the assistant or the intern, is surely one of the lowest.

      Steyerl’s knack for rethinking very low genres reminds me of the work of Lisa Nakamura, particularly when Steyerl looks at romance scams, that subset of internet scam where the scammer gets the mark to fall in love with them and then takes their money. Steyerl reads them through Thomas Elsaesser’s work on melodrama, a form all about impossibility, delay, submission, and repressed or forbidden feelings.¹⁸⁹

      The romance scam comes with customized products from a hyperprivatized culture industry, targeting those excluded from metro dating markets as too old, too fat, or too much a parent. Race and empire play a role, as the scammers are often from outside the metropolitan world. As does language, as translation software might be used to produce an odd semblance of English or some other metropolitan language. To Steyerl, these are “languages from a world to come.”¹⁹⁰ After all, there’s usually a trace of hope in any epistolary form.

      Such moments are rare. The internet is no longer a space of possibility. It became, we are told, the best of all possible worlds. The internet, like cinema, like all the preceding technical gods, is dead. The internet is now surveillance, free labor, copyright control, troll-enforced conformism. As for cinema: “Cinema today is above all a stimulus package to buying new televisions, home projector systems, and retina display iPads.”¹⁹¹

      Where the cinema became the core of a specialized culture industry, the internet rewires all of production and circulation, subjecting the making of things to the control of information protocols. Steyerl: “What kind of corporate/state entities are based on data storage, image unscrambling, high-frequency trading, and Daesh Forex gaming? Who are the contemporary equivalents of farmer-kings and slave-holders?”¹⁹² I call them the vectoralist class. Where the capitalist class owned the means of production, the vectoralist class owns the vector of information. That is the ruling class of our time. What I think Steyerl’s perceptive vision offers us (to update Fredric Jameson) is not the cultural logic of late capitalism but the algorithmic logic of early something else.¹⁹³

      Reality is now made of and by images and models designed for computers and sometimes even by them.

      Improbable objects, celebrity cat gifs, and a jumble of unseen anonymous images proliferate and waft through human bodies via WiFi. One could perhaps think of the results as a new and vital form of folk art, that is if one is prepared to completely overhaul one’s definition of folk as well as of art.¹⁹⁴

      And to understand both the folk and the art, it might help, as Lev Manovich has also counseled, to understand the proprietary software within which the folk thinks it designs the art, but which might actually shape both to its own designs.

      Before it’s too late. Steyerl does not hesitate to use the F-word: fascism. Perhaps what we’re looking at now are “derivative fascisms.”¹⁹⁵ Fascism is a gap in representation itself. What some call the “neoliberal” moment appeared to be one in which forms of political representation declined in favor of forms of market participation. But then these too receded, leaving economic exclusion, debt overhang, and riots in their wake.

      Some inherited forms of cultural and aesthetic politics might not work in this context. As followers of Antonio Gramsci, cultural studies advocated seizing the means of cultural representation.¹⁹⁶ This was part of a long march through the institutions meant to secure political representation and state power. But now an inflation of cultural representation correlates more with political disenfranchisement. Everyone can have their cultural proxy, even if, as Yves Citton reminds us, it is a long way down the Google search results. But political representation, political proxies, seem not to function. Fascism happens when political representation collapses; it’s a short circuit, reality by fiat. It appears to do away with mediations, proxies. Fascism blocks reality, it is a “blind spot filled with delusion and death.”¹⁹⁷

      Maybe it’s time to try different aesthetic tactics.

      The Soviet avant-garde tried to counter a socialist realist aesthetic of ideal models with productivism, an art that hewed close to labor, the machine, and their product.¹⁹⁸ Perhaps what Mark Fisher calls today’s capitalist realism might be met with what Steyerl calls an aesthetic practice of circulationism, which finds ways to circulate not only images but value.¹⁹⁹ Maybe it could short-circuit existing networks. Maybe short circuits are the problem, and it could instead reinstate what Bernard Stiegler calls the long loops of culture, art, and education.²⁰⁰

      The figure of circulation might be linked here to a certain reversibility of terms. Duty free art may be the art that circulates through international art fairs or freeports. It might even be a kind of decentralized currency, an analog bitcoin, encrypted in International Art English. But it might also be an art that shucks off the old duties to history, faith, and nation and exploits its own liminality as a radical project.

      Speculation may refer to a world in which derivative markets overshadow markets in actual things, trading not just in actual time but every possible forking timeline. “It represents mood swings around derivatives of derivatives.”²⁰¹ Speculation might also be a philosophical tool, for risky thought with a looser relation to its object, which may find new objects hitherto undetected. In the spirit of Randy Martin, Steyerl senses a world of volatile relations between referents and signs, persons and proxies.

      Steyerl: “What is the opposite [of] СКАЧАТЬ