Conclusion
It took me some days to realize what had happened at the meeting. It was not until the ISA officer wanted to know about my talk with Mr. Tovar that I got the information needed. They muted professor Tovar’s 3-E. It was not the proposed mass murder of artists but the questioning the whole worldview of the purpose that did it. Before, it used to be newness, making new knowledge, new products that gave purpose. Some thousands of years ago everything was built around it. Intellectuals strived for making machines that would always produce new things. Gadgets got old in a few earth months. It was a mantra that had hypnotized everyone. No one really cared about the amount of debris. Everyone was blind to the obvious fact that it was a vicious ferret wheel. It was a culture based on excess and overproduction, which led to steady loss of sharpness in the sensory experience. Later the content had to be cut back so that people could see again. You have to want to see. But is his purpose any better? Professor Tovar showed us that there is essentially something twisted about purpose itself. But how can one live without a purpose?
46 Susan Sontag, in Against Interpretation, says that the problem with criticism is a mistaken belief in what it is for: explaining artworks into something transparent. It is an act of translation from one medium to another, of the sort we have brought up repeatedly through the secondary treatment of primary, here. Famously, Sontag ends her essay against interpretation claiming that we need an erotics, not a hermeneutics of art (13-14). We can only add that perhaps an erotics of criticism might not be such a bad thing either, given there is plenty of criticism of erotics.
47 Wilem Flusser argues in his book, Into the Universe of Technical Images, that purposelessness is essentially at the core of what it means to be human: ‘We may be at the point of finding our way back, on a strange detour through telematics, to being genuinely human, that it, to a festive existence for another, to purposeless play with others and for others (locations 1863-66 ebook). We think Flusser is the appropriate place to end our secondary argument (this section) hoping that thoughts of his predictions will linger with the reader.