On Sun, Mar 28, 2021 at 9:37 AM Sandra Braman <bramansan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This piece from 1996 on art and various forms of capital in the digital > world has some things to say that are pertinent to this interesting > conversation. You'll see some theorists not as present in ongoing > conversation these days as they were then, but I stand on the piece. > > "Art in the Information Economy" > http://people.tamu.edu/~braman/bramanpdfs/011_art.pdf > Sandra, my thanks also for this text which has totally to do with the conversation. I can see why you stand by it, it's perfectly structural, it will only go out of date when the information economy does. I was intrigued by your quotes from The Other Heading/L'autre cap, a text by Derrida. I remember when this one came out from Editions Minuit, just after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, and during the Gulf War to make the world safe for neoliberal capitalism. The text is totally about orientation - where are we heading? - and valuation - what is it worth, how do we pay for it? You pick up on his questions around cultural capital and the way it concentrates in the head - apparently in danger of shrinking, due to the information society. This neoliberal decapitalization could actually be a decapitation, a beheading, some would welcome that violence with respect to Old Europe. But not Derrida, the self-declared Old European (Jew) who recalls that he was born in then-French Algeria, and dwells on a troubling etymological connection between capital and colony. Apparently in this text composed on the plane to Turin, he's coming around to his own return to Marx, which is really pretty amazing: the Wall falls, and suddenly it's necessary to resist a new totalitarianism. Yet Derrida finds himself in the classic liberal position of wanting to do two contradictory things: maintain the feasibility of (cultural) accumulation, and critique it all at once, subject it to otherness, change its fundamental orientation. So it's like steering a sailboat against the wind: you better know how to weave, because a straight line will definitely not get you where you are going. People in this thread kept bringing up actual artists, and not just Beautiful Beeple, so I thought, something interesting is weaving here. First of all I wonder how you see these things today, Sandra? How have the issues and the registers changed, within the structure of the information economy? Derrida could have recalled an adoptive Algerian, Frantz Fanon, who said: "To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization." One of the things I have always wondered about is the neoliberal language that is at the origin of my own subjectivity. Do white people also undergo acculturation? How was the information economy imposed in the 1990s? How did it affect all of us, with its particular forms of money, its codes of communication and its modes of transport, its hierarchies and its violence? I wrote a lot about it, back in the day. But it looks quite different today. Cultural politics is a very slippery business, because it is also part of states and corporations. What I'm trying to say is that, just as in the early Nineties, a new kind of world order is likely to come together in the wake of a major crisis. The crisis today is the pandemic - a relation to animals, zoonosis - and the first big blows from climate change - a relation to destiny. But such crises are resolved, at least temporarily, and this one surely will be too. Still the challenges to the old order are immeasurably more powerful than they were in the 1990s. The declarations of the curent administration contain many things that the US left has been calling for over the last twenty years, yet in the face of everything that could take form as Green Informational Capitalism I have the feeling that the critical blinders better come off very soon, as Bronac was also saying. The art-market event of NFTs allows us to talk about the conquest of space that's about to happen, the new technological wave, but I'm not at all convinced that cryptocurrency is the Next Big Thing in the halls of power or industry. No one in 1972 knew that derivatives were going to be the Next Big Thing, and for the most part they still don't know. What we all do know is culture, cultural hegemony, cultural struggle, and these things matter for sure. Intellectuals always want to tie culture to political economy, to talk about a "crisis of the spirit" and I'm no different. Sure, I think one should watch the space of technological development, whatever it is and there is always more than one. But the question is what lenses you look through, what valuations you make, what orientations you derive and propagate. Rene Char said it: "The history of humanity is one long sentence. The poetic duty is to contradict it." Right now I am interested in a film like The Embrace of the Serpent/El Abrazo del Serpiente, which doesn't have a thing to say about the information economy, but instead it's about a shamanic/imperial quest for a hallucinogenic flower that grows symbiotically on the rubber tree. So it's about the consequences of colonialism, the mistaken path, and where to go, the heading. Yes, but there is a relation to information, because the old shaman is tragically obsessed with having become, what was that? something like a chollalaqui, which is just an image of a self, ungraspable. With this kind of artistic curiosity I'm also thinking of Elizabeth Povinelli: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWf8Mv7WATI. She explains how she bore it, and couldn't bear it, the weight of a civilization.
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