[-empyre-] I once ate a pea

["Christophe Bruno" <christophe.bruno@unbehagen.com>]

Christina asked me If I could write about my own practice. I'm still in the 
process of reading all the previous posts in a desperate attempt to catch up 
the conversation. Lot of work... I haven't finished yet. But I'd like to 
make an artist's statement that is in relation to the question about 
Modernity/Antiquity:

My work deals with some impossibilities, like for instance:
- in language with the "Google Adwords Happening": impossible matching 
between speech and knowledge...
- in happiness  with  "WiFi-SM"
- in Science, with a recent little project called "(In)human Sciences" 
(available on http://www.neterotopia.net )
etc..

Let me try to articulate one of these impossibilities respectively to the 
question of Modernity, in the piece WiFi-SM for instance. The piece plays 
with the fact that we are stuck in the circle 
modernity->postmodernity->modernity...
- if we are in a postmodern cynical state, we lose our relation to humanity 
and we have to deal with guilt
- at the contrary if we try to be politically modern, we encouter our 
sado-masochistic relation to the other (one of the beginnings of Modernity 
corresponds to Marquis de Sade).
This alternance is quite commonplace, but what the piece tells us is that 
there is no hope of going out in the context of the new world or BPSC 
(Benthamian Panopticon of Semantic Capitalism), in which we are all 
accomplices.

But the BPSC is an anticipation of a limit, beyond which the "division of 
labour" has reached an ultimate stage; division between spectacle an 
control, between terrorism and colonisation of privacy, between speaking and 
hearing: bloggers produce speech, Google extracts statistical knowledge 
about their intimacy etc. Here, the obstacle that modernity has to deal 
with, is related to Marx's Mehrwert, surplus-value, which Lacan turned into 
Mehrlust, plus-de-jouir. The postmodern master (Google) has to recover the 
knowledge of the slave (bloggers). This is done through hard science and 
technology.  This recovering of knowledge, this extraction from the 
gold-mine of free speech, aims at consituting an (impossible) implementation 
of Hegelian absolute knowledge, which would allow to optimize the economic 
dynamics of the new last world. So at the end of the process, there is real 
stuff, IPO.

If we ever want to go out of this circle, we need to avoid the false exits 
out of Modernity like those that history already produced. One way out might 
be related to the question of the "retour des choses" (cf a former post of 
mine), or double-hack, double-irony, or as Christina added: a double twist, 
transforming the circle into the border of a moebius strip.  Why the "retour 
des choses"? Maybe just because it's stupid or because of the "real stuff" 
or because Network = Death, or because: "You may freely eat of every tree of 
the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not 
eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die." In my article on 
http://www.cosmolalia.com , I left a little bit aside the relation between 
the crisis in the roots of mathematics and the spectacle society. The thread 
is something like that: Kurt Gödel - Alan Turing - Snow White - Apple - 
Disney - Debord. Variation on the forbidden fruit (read Alan Turing 
biography and the way he committed suicide by poisoning half of an apple!).

In a previous post I already gave a few examples of this "retour des choses", 
like webpaintings (Valéry Grancher), Internet Paintings (Miltos Manetas). In 
my work I can give two examples: "Human Browser" (dealing with the voice as 
an object) or my platform of "art on demand" where I produce books from the 
following double-hack:
All the books -> Google Books (formerly Google Print) - > N-unique (?) 
networked personnalized relational books on iterature.com
See an example here (more will be online soon)
http://www.christophebruno.com/wordpress/wp-content/artondemand1.JPG
http://www.christophebruno.com/index.php?p=9

These examples show an evolution from relational or networked aesthetics 
towards a return to objects that ironically use old media, but are fully 
embedding our new media world.

Can we call them, N-State "objects" ?  (I think it's Brett Stalbaum who 
introduced the term N-State in the discussion) Heterotopic objects? In any 
case, they cannot be separated from the ironical attitude that presided 
their production; to be compared, of course, to the attitude of the Dandy - 
with Sade, one of the ultimate references when talking about Modernity, Pop 
and BPSC ("I once ate a pea" is one of the famous quotations by Brummel, as 
some old baronness would ask him if he liked vegetables, another interesting 
variation on the forbidden fruit). The Dandy would lead us to the idea of 
"devirilization" in the Modern World... Waiting for the next episode of 
Desperate Housewives...

The "retour des choses", even if it might be linked to a way out, to some 
renonciation that would let us drop out of the circle, is not enough in 
itself to find the way out. It's just a hint.  As you may know, "les choses" 
are in a critical state in France right now... You may have heard of CPE (= 
First Hire Contract) demonstrations. Maybe you are not aware of this other 
french (US-inspired?) project, a study published by the French National 
Institute of Medical Research (INSERM), entitled "Child and teenage 
behavioural problems" (« Troubles des conduites chez l'enfant et 
l'adolescent ») which aims at detecting criminal behaviour in three-year-old 
children. This study takes place within the context of a general plan of 
prevention of youth crime which the government is currently preparing.
cf http://www.pasde0deconduite.ras.eu.org

Funny: Science thinks it can deal with the phallic stage but bumps into the 
anal stage ;-)

Christophe
http://www.cosmolalia.com
http://www.iterature.com
http://www.unbehagen.com