Prelude (edited)

This post contained an draft version of a dissertation section. A more recent version is now available on the works page.

A Prelude to Escape

This post contained an draft version of a dissertation section. A more recent version is now available on the works page.

“Giving Shape to Painful Things”: An Interview with Claire Fontaine

Parisian artist Claire Fontaine is a fraud, a forgery, her name casually lifted from a generic brand of school notebooks, her existence only present in the art that bears her signature. She was first brought to life in 2004 by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, art-world refugees of a stripe that has become increasingly common these days. She resides now in the neon gas, the video pixels, the found objects, the paper, the ink and the many languages that constitute her work. Where an ordinary object, say a urinal or a bottle rack, can become a readymade piece of art simply on account of the artist’s saying it’s so, Claire functions as a “readymade artist” to render this very artistic subjectivity in a more critical light. Along the way, she subverts the totality of contemporary art by plagiarizing its most sacred styles and forms.

Claire is attuned chiefly to what appears possible, and to what impossibly appears, as cast against the heavily policed image of the present. When given the opportunity to work, Claire would “prefer not to,” which speaks less to her keeping her hands clean than to her potent desire to restore conditions for a general strike.

She has a long list of influences. Most directly, her inspiration springs from the radical feminization of the Italian Autonomist movement in the late 1970s. Her philosophical roots are planted firmly in the revolutionary political theories of Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault. Her artistic allies include the ironically subversive Bernadette Corporation and the anti-political writing collective Tiqqun.

This interview began concurrently with Claire Fontaine’s visit to Columbus, Ohio in the Fall of 2009 for “Descent To Revolution,” a group exhibit combining urban installation with public demonstration, curated by James Voorhies for the Bureau for Open Culture. Claire had two major contributions. The first was a solar-powered neon sign installed in downtown Columbus that cycled between the words “WARM” and “WAR.” The second was a multimedia lecture-performance on libidinal economy and human strike that focused on the bodies of women as site of political, social, and aesthetic contestation in Berlusconi’s Italy.

Alchemy of the Example

This post contained an draft version of a dissertation section. A more recent version is now available on the works page.

Leading By Example, or, the power of a good example

Brian Massumi suggests in the introduction to his 2002 book “Parables For The Virtual” that the most Bergsonian form of argumentation follows from an “exemplary method,” by which he means supporting an argument through an example. There are three major arguments, which, while not stated explicitly, forms the subterranean structure by which Massumi makes his case for the example: singularity, detail, and connectability.

Lines in the Sand

Replacing power/knowledge, I suggest the tripartite lines of rigid-supple-escape developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus.  In their anti-essentialist ontology, Deleuze and Guattari posit that heterogeneous collections of elements come together in particular relations to form assemblages, contingent formations that produce certain effects.  Capitalism, for instance, is an assemblage.  One way to describe how assemblages are organized is by the lines that compose them.  For Deleuze and Guattari, there are three types of organizing lines: supple lines, rigid lines, and lines of flight. 

Power: Breaking the Liberal Domination-Resistance Paradigm

Theories of power previous to Foucault were largely based in terms of sovereign or juridical power – roughly equivalent to the dynastic power of the monarch and the legal power of the social contract.  The sovereign view of power imagines power as an original right held by the king to which the subject responds.  As the state form emerged, power arrangements were recast according to a social contract that posits citizen-subjects that are afforded a minor autonomy that both limits and authorizes the power of government.  While most political and social theory is stuck within these two types of power, Foucault emphasized two forms of power that he argues have displaced the importance of sovereign and juridical power: disciplinary power and biopower. 

how to be an anarchist

If ‘anarchy’ is organization without authority, then the physical world exists almost exclusively in anarchy. In fact, as anthropologist Pierre Clastres argues, societies without a state aren’t evolutionarily ‘behind the times’ but constitute well-functioning human orders that anticipate the state and intentionally ward it off.[i] But, while some self-identified anarchists choose to be rocked to sleep to lullabies of primitive dreamtime, this project is something altogether different. Anarchism, as opposed to anarchy, is understood here as a conjunctural practice carefully constructed to intervene within problematics both historically and materially singular. Anarchy existed first as a nightmare to transcendent authority – first to the Priest and then to the King – whose paranoia began to secrete its own atheism, and only later was it taken up and given a material existence. Just as communism was the specter haunting Europe in the midst of an industrial revolution, as parts of the world now slip into post-industrial decay, anarchism extends as a figure of chaos hiding in the shadows of all ‘society.’

Luc Wander – Occupy the Futurepast

To the Communes: Tunisia to New York City; Egypt to Oakland,

I know, it’s a bit absurd, but *pop music has prefigured the rise of Occupy Wallstreet*, according to a dialogue entitled “Don’t Stop Beliebing”.1 Raided their songlist, cooked up a mix. Take it for a spin.

<3, Luc

plane of nothingness

From the foot of the Great Khan’s throne a majolica pavement extended. Marco Polo, mute informant, spread out on it the samples of his wares he had brought back from his journeys to the end of the empire: a helmet, a seashell, a coconut, a fan. Arranging the objects in a certain order on the black and white tiles, and occasionally shifting them with studied moves, the ambassador tried to depict form the monarch’s eyes the vicissitudes of his travels, the conditions of the empire, the prerogatives of the distant provincial seats.