The Anti-Capitalist Sublime

KNOWLEDGE, SPIRIT, LAW BOOK 2: THE ANTI-CAPITALIST SUBLIME GAVIN KEENEY KNOWLEDGE, SPIRIT, LAW BOOK 2: THE ANTI-CAPITALIST SUBLIME KNOWLEDGE, SPIRIT, LAW BOOK 2: THE ANTI-CAPITALIST SUBLIME Gavin Keeney punctum books earth, milky way knowledge, spirit, law // book 2: the anti-capitalist sublime © Gavin Keeney, 2017. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical meth- ods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. First published in 2017 (in a limited print-on-demand edition of 500 copies) as a co-imprint of punctum books Earth, Milky Way http://punctumbooks.com CTM Documents Initiative Center for Transformative Media Parsons School of Design http://ctm.parsons.edu/ Cover image: Detail from Gavin Keeney, James Joyce Café, Via Roma, 14, Trieste, Italy (2014). Photo © Gavin Keeney, 2015. Photo-editing by Ed Keller, Claudio Palmisano, and Chris Piuma. Cover Design by Chris Piuma. Book design by Eileen Joy. isbn-13: 978-1-947447-34-9 (print) isbn-13: 978-1-947447-35-6 (ePDF) lccn: 2017960499 Facing-page illustration by Heather Masciandaro. For John Berger A black space is not a space, it is a nonspace, a fullness with maximum density. Black is the heaviest, most ter- restrial, most perceptible color: it is a theoretical limit, a noncolor through the absolute proximity of the eye; the noncolor of the death of all gazes in the shock of contact. Louis Marin When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of the night, which is neither an object nor the quality of an object, invades like a presence. In the night, where we are riveted to this darkness, we have nothing to do with anything. But this nothing is not that of a pure nothingness. There is no more this, nor that; there is not “something.” But this universal absence is, in its turn, a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence. Emmanuel Levinas TABLE OF CONTENTS // xiii Proem // xxi Acknowledgments // xxv Notes on the Edition // 1 Introduction: Life-works // 11 Essay 1: Kandinsky and Nolde // 35 Essay 2: Marker’s Archive // 79 Essay 3: “No-media” // 101 Essay 4: Breaking the Glass // 119 Epilogue: Neo-Hegelian Spirit // 139 Appendix A: Tractatus logico-academicus // 187 Appendix B: 2015 Exhibition Reviews // 223 References PROEM God did not die; he was transformed into money.1 Giorgio Agamben The Anti-capitalist Sublime, Book Two of Knowledge, Spirit, Law, as a critique of present-day forms of Cognitive Capitalism, privileges what Alain Badiou has identified as the twin gestural posi- tions of modern and late-modern French Arts and Letters (that is, “existential vitalism” and/or “conceptual-formalism”), while sug- gesting ways forward—and backward—toward the literary-critical mode for philosophical inquiry he also considers the future for discursive and artistic forms of cultural criticism (from both within and beyond academia, and from both within and beyond the commercium of the contemporary art world). This suggestive syn- thesis and elaboration of a successor “state” to modernist and post-modernist theoretical praxis in the Arts and Letters arguably hinges upon the production of the author’s “voice” in the work of literary-critical merit, and the personal responsibility of the author and/or artist for a nominal return to useless speculative thought and its time-honored forms of dissemination—for example, the 1 “In order to understand what is taking place, we have to interpret Wal- ter Benjamin’s idea that capitalism is really a religion literally, the most fierce, implacable and irrational religion that has ever existed because it recognizes neither truces nor redemption. A permanent worship is cele- brated in its name, a worship whose liturgy is labor and its object, money. God did not die; he was transformed into money”: Giorgio Agamben and Peppe Savà, “‘God Didn’t Die, He was Transformed into Money’: An Inter- view with Giorgio Agamben,” Libcom, February 10, 2014, https://libcom. org/library/god-didnt-die-he-was-transformed-money-interview-giorgio- agamben-peppe-sav%C3%A0. First published as Giorgio Agamben and Peppe Savà, “Il capitalismo è una religione la più implacabile mai esistita,” Ragusa, August 16, 2012, http://www.ragusanews.com/articolo/28021/giorgio-agamben-intervista-a-peppe-sava-amo-scicli-e-guccione. xiv | knowledge, spirit, law // bk. 2 long-form book, the singular art work, the library, the gallery, and the archive. Against the current penchant for mediatic and performative splendor in contemporary discursive and artistic praxis, this “return” is only possible through the evocation of an a-historical and a-temporal, universalizing agency in such works that also makes any such return paradoxically “futural,” with rote temporality present only in terms of the necessary negation (via subjectivized meta-critique) to be visited upon the socio-cultural and socio-economic biases of politically and socially motivated critique in the Arts and Letters, biases that tend to quietly service capitalist ide- ology, all the while denying such a role, but as generally clumsy and often-forlorn or pessimistic interlocutor. Therefore, a decon- struction of the supposed privileges of mediatic performance is the first-order examination to be undertaken in order to enter into a critique of the complex system that Cognitive Capitalism rep- resents (in second-order forms), with its inordinate prejudice or appetite for conditioning and capturing speculative inquiry in the Arts and Humanities as marketable products and/or its conversion and demotion to “information” and or entertainment—the payoff for authors and artists being celebrity as form of complicity. What becomes obvious is that intellectual inquiry has suffered the dual fate of becoming re-naturalized in socio-economic systems that automatically reduce any prospects for a decisive intervention in the neo-liberal capitalist capture of intellectual and artistic capital. The conversion of revolution to “®evolution” is of this order, and representative—in the extreme—of the reduction of first-order concerns to second-order commodities. When discussed across representative works, through works that cross the life-works of notable authors and artists, the anti- capitalist sublime takes on a set of qualities that are inherent to such critical works, but also a “messianic” edginess that transcends them. The inquest often comes with apocalypse….2 Tautologically, 2 Such is the case with the late works of both Johnny Cash and Townes Van Zandt—quintessential American folk and/or folk-blues artists. In the case of Cash, the works in question are the American Recordings produced by Rick Rubin (foremost, American VI: Ain’t No Grave, 2010, released seven years after the artist’s death). In the case of Van Zandt, the works in question include his posthumous release, A Far Cry from Dead (Arista Records, 1999), released two years after the artist’s death, and various minor live recordings to be found on YouTube. In both instances the late works include recordings that were made immediately prior to the artist’s death and rendered other-worldly by inspired post-production, with country-mu- proem | xv the life-work only exists when the life-work is closed (archived), and a life-work may only be assessed (opened) once it is closed. The premise is that, as a type of sublime excess given to such works, the anti-capitalist sublime is the virtual abstraction within cultural production that also contextualizes singular works into near oblivion, an element of the analytical project that is—far from being a disservice to authors and works—a peculiar compliment under the right circumstances, or as seen in the proper light. Book Two of Knowledge, Spirit, Law takes up where Book One (Radical Scholarship) left off, foremost in terms of a critique of neo-liberal academia and its demotion of the book in favor of various mediatic projects that substitute for the one form of critical inquiry that might safeguard speculative intellectual inquiry as long-form project, especially in relationship to the archive (otherwise configured—here and there—as the “public domain”). This ongoing critique of neo-liberal academia is a necessary corrective to processes underway today toward the further marginalization of radical critique, with many of the traditional forms of sustained analysis being replaced by pseudo-empirical studies that aban- don themes only presentable in the Arts and Humanities through the “arcanian closure” that the book as long-form inquisition rep- resents (whether as novel, non-fictional critique, or something in-between). As a tomb for thought, this privileging of the shadowy recesses of the book or monograph preserves through the very apparatuses of long- and slow-form scholarship the premises pre- sented here as indicative of an anti-capitalist project embedded in works that might otherwise shun such a characterization. The per- verse capitalist capture of knowledge as data is—paradoxically— the negative corollary for the reduction by abstraction of everyday works to a philosophical and moral inquest against Capital. The lat- ter actually constitutes a reduction to the antithesis of data—Spirit. Thus the anti-capitalist sublime also signals a type of antinomial- ism—a judgment of quotidian law as generally reducible to con- formity via anti-humanist, machinic measures. For similar reasons, the anti-capitalist sublime is primarily a product of the imaginative, sic session musicians effectively paying homage to Cash and Van Zandt by adding spare instrumentation to the bare-bones recordings. Cash’s great swan song is “Hurt” (American IV: The Man Comes Around, 2002), an ex- ceptional rendering of a song written by Trent Reznor and first recorded by Nine Inch Nails.

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