At The Beginning Was The Imagination

E-Flux Magazine, Issue #18, September 2010, 2010

The context of this essay is a larger project of mine which has been examining the concept of space and self which we have inherited in the Modern tradition. I owe a lot to the work of Alberto Perez-Gomez who has shown own how our concept of space as geometric void upon which a transcendent consciousness bears upon -fully codified by Descartes -evolved out of the detached abstract post-socratic philosophical tradition, and has gone on to fruition within technological society. If you live in the modern secular world, as most in the west now do, then this is the pre-given conceptual understanding of spatiality, and it has repercussions on how we understand our relationship to knowledge. In the detached perspective consciousness achieves knowledge by the appropriate correspondence of symbolic representations to an external reality. This is commonly called mediational epistemology. 1 The other tradition one could say comes out of the Abrahamic heritage of the west, and during the 20th century has been expressed in the works of the existentialists and phenomenologists. This work has been primarily a return of awareness to the dependency of our detached rational conceptualizing upon our embodiment and existential investment in reality. From this perspective space is not a void, not detached, but something we as body and mind, are within, and by our action achieve accord with truth, which includes but is not exclusive to conceptual understanding. This has repercussions for how we understand the artist's relationship to knowledge.

Examining the problem of image and imagination in the modern age must face to a twofold difficulty: one is to consider the multiple theoretical delimitations in the traditional metaphysics; another comes from the abundance of digital images by technical simulation in which the image usurps the reality. This essay tries to investigate these two dimensions of  The author must express his gratitude to the two anonymous referees who give many precious critics and corrections. Some suggestions are adopted for the modifications in this text, but the other topics are left, as important as well, to my further research.

Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 2016

Le Journal des Laboratoires d' Aubervilliers, Paris, 2010

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. How does one start at the beginning, if things happen before they actually happen? (Clarice Lispector) For some time now we have been considering questions related to the political potential of a work of art, or, put somewhat differently, about freeing the revolutionary potential of art from its social and political forms of representation and from the limitations of its communicative medium. Jacques Ranciere, for one, talks about the emancipation of art from its representative regime. But what does this actually mean? When we consider the political potential of an artwork, we are usually attentive to the possible changes in the social field that this work can stimulate or evoke. We think about the devices in an artwork (such as the motives, the narratives, or "meaningful spectacle" as Ranciere put it) that contribute towards raising political awareness in a social and economic order. We can even say that it is all about certain political pedagogy. But what we are actually talking about are the ways politics conditions art and not about art's emancipation from the representational regime. What we are interested in, then, is something else: the unmediated experiences, acts of creation, operations of desire or even insights, which are not yet formalized knowledge but thoughts in their purest formation, passing the field which has been liberated from the institutionalized rationality. Translations of these operations into the so called representative regime of art are never unproblematic, since they stimulate anxiety, incite new reactions and interruptions of the already-known and if not, they remain hidden until they reach their "extractive conditions". But how does one recognize the moment of moving beyond the subjective territory of the "not yet" into the plane of transversal linkage? How can radical imagination contribute towards crossing that threshold in question, bridging the gap between subjectivity and the representative regime of art? In order to attempt to answer these questions we should not only reconsider the meaning of imagination and creativity but also the long tradition of conformity to forms of expression and content which resulted in representation coming to dominate our way of thinking. It has been suggested (Simon O'Sullivan) that under different circumstances the art history practice as it is known now might disappear; that is, the kind of practice which positions an artwork as a representation, as a hermeneutic activity.

This thesis explains the reasoning behind the convergence of two cases of the outmoded and the anachronistic in my art practice. The two instances of obsolescence are old fashioned, pre-cinematic optical devices and the social model of the counterculture commune. My thesis investigates the theoretical, socio-cultural and formal issues associated with my interest in these outmoded phenomena. It will also examine the role of obsolete technologies and ways of living in other contemporary art, asking whether the rekindling of anachronistic forms possess critical agency in the present. Detailed analysis of the twin foci of my research will elaborate how and why I incorporate and reconfigure outmoded forms in my art practice, and through this contribute new knowledge to the contemporary art field. I argue that the outmoded forms given new life in my art hark back to times in the past when it seemed easier to imagine a space and a thinking outside the dominant socio-economic system of modern Western culture; when faith in inventing alternative visions of the world via utopian imagination seemed more vital. My studio-based and written research draws on theoretical resources allied with the tradition of Marxist critical theory, which locate socially critical potential within phenomena considered obsolete within the context of capitalism. Two key early proponents of this way of thinking are Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who both figure prominently in my research project. My project also builds on the findings of contemporary theorists of Neo-Marxist persuasion who address the social, subjective and ecological shortcomings of the current phase of global capitalism. These thinkers include Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Źižek, Felix Guattari and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi among others. Regardless of the current challenges to imagining alternatives to prevailing modes of capitalist production and consumption, my project sets out a politics of the outmoded, which seeks inspiration in technical and social experiments of the past, which, while relegated to the dustbin of history by the techno-teleological drive of capitalism, offer glimmers of hope for alternative futures.

Anthropology & Materialism

López: We would like to start with a very general question about technique and technology as an object of study. In your text "Modernity Theory and Technology Studies: Reflections on Bridging the Gap" (2003), you claim that technology studies are split into two opposed branches: Essentialist philosophy of technology represented, for instance, by the Heideggerian position, and empirical research on technology, for instance the Science and Technology Studies. The problem is that the first branch, while critical of modernity, even anti-modern, is essentializing technology. The second branch, the empirical research on technologies, is not essentializing technology, yet, it ignores the larger issue of modernity and thus appears uncritical, even conformist of the socio-technical development. Between these two lines of thought, how do you think the research on technology should be conducted? What are the stakes and what are the means of pursuing a non-essentialist study of technical life and technology that accounts for the wider frame of social, ethical and political implications?

What's the place of imagination today?

Da compreensão da arte ao ensino da história da arte.

Like a great many others at the turn of the millennium, questioning the essence of perception, knowledge and our very outlook on the world, we stumble upon so many theories that we can but humbly restate them: everything has been said, thought out and committed to writing. But if Everything is false and everything is permitted and if, above anything else, we “(…) must prize strength over truth, creative, simplifying, ordaining, generative truth”, isn’t this the proper goad to begin with Nietzsche’s theorization and probe deeper into our concerns, that we may test our own creative and interpretive skills? Edgar Morin, his stance somewhat similar to Nietzsche’s, maintains that knowledge is always translation and construction. António Marques, drawing on Nietzsche, infers that “perspectivism” stands on a set of theses, or claims. The third claim is of particular relevance to us: all perspective is interpretation and a regulatory fiction. This informs the questions before us when, in the scope of artistic creation and analysis, of knowledge and education in general, we are faced with differing ways of representing, creating, perceiving and conceiving what human beings have made use of over the centuries. We question the way Man gazes upon, creates, simplifies and ordains the world, as well as a knowledge which is systematically translation and construction. We probe into the vision of the creator and the understanding of they who enjoy. Which is to say, we investigate the gaze that develops forms through which representation, expression and communication are made possible, as well as the gaze of those who decode and interpret such communication. We investigate the mind that builds conceits and theories and the mind that decyphers, systematizes and internalizes such conceits. Likewise, the words that are given in explanation as well as the understanding that captures and apprehends such words. Throughout is a unique process, the same lonely trail, one despairing to convey or capture a single dimension, one’s own perspective. Perhaps this occurs because even at the instinctual level we are bound to recognize that all simplification mutilates, and all value judgments, as Finkielkraut pointed out (1988: 70) carry the seed of violence.