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Art Without Death: Conversations on Russian Cosmism Contents e-flux journal Art without Death: Conversations on Russian Cosmism Contents 5 Introduction 9 Hito Steyerl and Anton Vidokle Cosmic Catwalk and the Production of Time 41 Elena Shaposhnikova and Arseny Zhilyaev Art without Death 57 Anton Vidokle and Arseny Zhilyaev Factories of Resurrection 73 Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Anton Vidokle Chaos and Cosmos 93 Boris Groys and Arseny Zhilyaev Contemporary Art Is the Theology of the Museum 109 Marina Simakova, Anton Vidokle, and Arseny Zhilyaev Cosmic Doubts 133 Bart De Baere, Arseny Zhilyaev, and Esther Zonsheim Wahlverwandtschaft Introduction For those who still benefit from colonial wealth, the indigenous lifeworlds destroyed by the steamroller of modernity are always somewhere far away. It is important that they remain so. It is important that the centers of power remain places where healthy 5 state infrastructure and decent industry produce forward-thinking and empowered individuals with enough energy in their bodies and money in the bank to believe all of it had to be for the best. After all, progress always comes at a price. The heroes of modernity can never be allowed to waver in this, for they have learned the important lesson that trium- phalism can be the only entry to the modern. And their job is to give life to those poor souls whose his- tories were usurped, who can only traffic in death, whose victimhood disallows ever reimagining their own conditions. But what if the heroes of moder- nity are also paying the price? What if, behind the veneer of triumphalism and pity—pity for others, pity for oneself—we have all lost? What if we are all victims, not only of modernity’s great redistribution of wealth, but of its wholesale reformatting of life in relation to death? But what if another kind of modernity had been developed which was even more radical—so much so that its forward arrow actually sought to conserve and preserve previous lifeworlds against the ravages not of vanguardist reforms but of time itself? And reanimate those worlds. It would project a different kind of modernity altogether, beyond right or wrong sides of history, without victors and victims. Our families have all been the victims of destruction or death, as we will be in time, and the labor of living comes in overcoming this loss—not in denying its existence or projecting it onto other continents. The ravages of modernity are inside and capital, by installing methods of internalizing each of our bodies, embedded in the banks and laws and limits through varying degrees of self- institutions of colonial capitals, in the walls of reli- governance and relative autonomy over one’s own gious shrines and family cemeteries, on the streets thought and action. But the substance of life for and in the homes of the colonies. The task of prog- citizens or economic subjects is not the same as for ress would then be to care for and preserve the historical subjects. Historical subjectivity cannot 6 lifeworlds of history, not replace them. But such a be reduced to the laws of the state or its adminis- 7 modernity could not be a polite or deferential one, trative machinations, and is often defined by cul- for its mission could only be to intervene into the ture—by human suffering and the loss or denial of mechanism of the great equalizer—death—in order culture, even (and especially) within nation-states to redistribute the only really precious resource that that celebrate a history of conquest and achieve- exists, the force that animates time itself: life. This ment. Curiously, if this mode of being is emerging is the debt we already carry, and the one we must in a new light as part of a late stage of Foucauldian always continuously pay. biopolitical reality, then perhaps the embrace of First, death must be understood differently. dictatorial strongmen, from Duterte to Trump, can Similar to understanding the soul as being pres- be understood as a denial of that pain. In contrast to ent in spite of having exited the body, death can be Foucault’s political realism, however, Fedorov was understood as a change in a human’s material state. wildly imaginative in his emancipatory ambition, According to the teachings of Nikolai Fedorov— even advocating the conquest of outer space as nineteenth-century librarian, Orthodox philosopher, the territory of immortal life and infinite resources, and progenitor of Russian cosmism—our ethical where all resurrected generations of humans, ani- obligation to use reason and knowledge to care mals, and all other previously living substance on for the sick extends to curing the dead of their ter- our planet could eventually live. minal status. The dead must be brought back to Today, Fedorov’s vision may appear arcane life using means of advanced technology—that in its mystical panpsychism and eccentric in its is, resurrected not as souls in heaven, but in mate- embrace of realities that exist only in science fic- rial form, in this world, with all their memories tion or certain diabolical strains of Silicon Valley and knowledge. techno-utopian ideology. It can be difficult to grasp Art without Death: Conversations on Russian Cosmism on Russian Conversations Art without Death: The philosophy of the Common Task’s call to how it actually directly influenced the thinking redistribute vital forces resembles what Foucault behind a generation of young revolutionary anarchist famously called biopolitics. However, Foucault was and Marxist thinkers who incorporated Fedorov’s mainly concerned with the administration of life ideas under their own brand of biocosmism before in terms of the limits and allowances surrounding the 1917 Russian Revolution, even giving rise to the it, and as a technique of governance. In the neo- origins of the Soviet space program. This book of liberal era, the biopolitical frame has been crucial interviews and conversations with artists and think- for understanding how policing structures have ers seeks to address the contemporary relevance e-flux journal responded to the animating capacities of money of Russian cosmism and biocosmism in light of its influence on the Russian artistic and political van- guard, as well as on today’s art-historical appara- tuses, weird materialisms, extinction narratives, and historical and temporal politics. As a whole, the col- lection of exchanges asks how such an encompass- ing and imaginative, unapologetically humanist and 8 anthropocentric strain of thinking could have been so historically and politically influential, especially when placed alongside the politically inconsequen- tial—but in some sense equally encompassing— apocalypticism of contemporary realist imaginaries. Today, many of us can remember the dis- appeared indigenous cosmologies as parts of ourselves, lost to colonialism, industrialization, communist revolutions, and capitalist wars. Many names have been given to ideological or historical grand narratives to soothe the pain of loss, to reg- ister those losses and render them searchable, but these memorializing mechanisms still fail to reg- ister the pain of losing something much larger that cannot be named—a deep relation to the world, to the cosmos, and to ourselves that gives us strength and sovereignty without need for any other earthly power of right or dominion. Perhaps our own family members were perpetrators, victims, or both per- petrator and victim. And perhaps the progress we wanted was not the one that would erase all losses, but that would register them and invite them back Art without Death: Conversations on Russian Cosmism on Russian Conversations Art without Death: into life. —Brian Kuan Wood e-flux journal 9 Hito Steyerl and Anton Vidokle Cosmic Catwalk and the Production of Time This conversation appeared in e-flux journal, no. 82 (May 2017). A painting by Klee called Angelus Novus depicts philosophy of the Common Task: a total reorganiza- an angel moving backwards, away from something tion of social relations, productive forces, economy, which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, and politics for a single goal of achieving physical his mouth stands open and his wings are out- immortality and material resurrection. Fedorov stretched. This is how the Angel of History must felt that we cannot consider anyone really dead or look. His face is turned towards the past. Where gone until we have exhausted every possibility of 10 we see the appearance of a chain of events, he reviving them. For him the dead are not truly dead 11 sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly but merely wounded or ill, and we have an ethical piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before obligation to use our faculty of reason to develop his feet. He would like to pause for a moment the necessary knowledge, science, and technology to awaken the dead and piece together what to rescue them from the disease of death, to bring has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from them back to life. From this point of view history Paradise, it has caught his wings and is so strong and the past is a field full of potential: nothing is that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm finished and everyone and everything will come drives him irresistibly into the future, towards back, not as souls in heaven, but in material form, which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap in this world, with all their subjectivities, memories, before him grows sky-high. This storm is what we and knowledge. What appears to be a graveyard is call progress. in fact a field full of amazing potential. —Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Hito Steyerl As a German person it’s a bit hard for me to imagine a scenario in which all the old Anton Vidokle I have been thinking about Nazis are brought back to life.
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