Research Catalogue

(This comment includes both the reviewer comment and the author's response)

Juuso Tervo (Reviewer 1):

This manuscript presents a performative intervention; not only in terms of the artistic practice it refers to, but also as a piece of writing in itself. As the author underlines in the introduction, rather than presenting an academic argument in the conventional sense, the aim of this text is to disturb established conventions. For a reviewer, this presents a challenge that the author acknowledges, sarcastically perhaps: how to “judge” a piece like this? Due to the difficulty of answering this question, I will offer a brief commentary instead of a clear judgement; a commentary that, hopefully, helps the author to clarify their position as a writer – if not to the reader, then at least for the author himself.

In this commentary, I focus only on the written part of the exposition, because that is where my expertise is. This does not, however, mean that I would not pay attention to the artistic process linked to this exposition. On the contrary, due to its nature, the written part is inseparable from the artistic practice it delineates. As such, it can be understood as artistic research; at least how I understand it.

While the author clearly demonstrates his deep knowledge of the theoretical framework he operates with and shows that he can put it in use (both in writing and artistic practice), the text itself resists a critical involvement and dialogue. It offers a demonstration of a close reading that eventually creates its own conditions of understanding. It is, so to speak, a hermetic text: if one is to critique it productively, the reader must first agree with the conceptual space the text delineates and the theoretical apparatus it draws from. This becomes clear already in the Introduction, where the author tells the reader how his text should be read and even offers a preliminary counter-critique to possible critical concerns: “Obviously, my heterogeneous form of expression and content can be criticized from other epistemological and more supposedly “orthodox” political-artistic perspectives; but since there is no dogmatic common ground to define a discursive or stylistic “truth” in this "fringe" of knowledge, I cannot tolerate a blind totalitarian arrogance of judgment.” As a reader, I’m left perplexed: what is my role here? Just to take all in and either agree or disagree? And if I disagree, am I an “orthodox” reader suffering from “a blind totalitarian arrogance of judgement”? If the author cannot “tolerate” a critical reflection with his reader, why would the reader “tolerate” his “fringe of knowledge”?

Of course, this just might be question of fiction: as the author underlines, his wish is to blur the boundaries between fiction, philosophy, and reality – a goal I have not problems with in itself. From this perspective, the text can be understood as a performative exploration of an authoritative voice. As such, it would come close to the ironic mode of writing as it was practiced by the Jena Romantics: by bringing forth the limits of representation, the text itself performs the fundamental failure of representation. The fact that the author wants to distinguish his text from traditional academic research while simultaneously performing the kind of hermeticism academics are so often accused of supports this reading. Passages such as “The Disturbanist intervention generates a chaosmagic nihilophany that reveals the mysterious ground of a chaosmic body without organs that activates the vital percept-chakras of the Anartist’s body and its capacities to affect and be affected by the virtual plane (the Undead) at each new chaosmotic experience” and “The raising Black Sun of black angels will be a concentration of mana that will give full expression to the occult monster-plane of the metamorphosis with its chaosmagic production at the limit of the Undead” offer a play of signification that opens mainly to the initiated. As an initiation, however, this text fictionalizes both philosophy and reality to the point where it is unclear what each of these terms (“fiction,” “philosophy,” and “reality”) really mean for the author or to the interpretation of this text. This is why, partially, I’m not totally convinced that the author is really aiming at irony, but, as mentioned above, to a kind of discourse that attempts to escape critical engagement. I’m guessing the author has in mind some other interpretation, but for the reader it’s difficult to draw that from the text itself.

Here, I wish to underline that my issues with the passages above are not related to the fact that they might seem difficult, complex, or just plain ‘weird.’ My point is, rather, that the complexity surely performs the theoretical framework it’s based on, but this performance leaves open some fundamental questions concerning the very disturbance it ought to provoke. How, in its hermeticism, does the text reach outside of its own ‘schizoid’ ‘excess,’ that is, its ‘excrement’? What does it disturb except its own logic of signification? When it comes to the possible “weirdness,” I completely agree with the author that the exclusion of the so-called occult and magical practices and discourses from academia has been historically problematic, especially when this exclusion has been targeted toward indigenous knowledges. But again, it is hard to draw these conclusions directly from the text, since the argument gets lost in the endless play of signification.

The weakest and the least rigorous part of the text is author’s discussion of conspiracy. While partially drawing from Bataille’s writings, the author gives quite a lot of space to the alleged global conspiracy of the Freemasons and its possible manifestations in the dollar bill. Here, the author comes close to the most banal conspiracy theory websites, thus flattening the very argument he is making (or seems to be making) as well as the artwork he refers to. To claim that “I enjoy imagining the conspiratorial connections between the dollar symbol and historical facts” is not enough in itself to justify this part as it is currently written and I would strongly recommend the author to think through what does he really want to say with that.

That said, it’s worth going back to the difficulty mentioned above. It would be easy to discard this text as being ‘too out there’ or, alternatively, celebrate its profound complexity. This is why, as a reviewer, I’m willing to accept this text with some revisions – namely, that the author clarifies his position as a writer/artist vis-a-vis the disturbance he aims at evoking (i.e. disturb what? where? how? why?) and discards/rewrites the conspiracy part.

I can see, and really hope, that this piece evokes critical discussion; it has great potential for that. However, due to the reasons explained above, I can also see why it would be difficult for the research community to engage in a dialogue with this piece. In order to create conditions for such dialogue, the author should also be willing to sacrifice his own knowledge and position, not only defend it.

Gian Luigi Biagini's response:

I really wish to have a public discussion with Reviewer 1 but I cannot make the changes he asks me because we should discuss some metaphysical questions on the statute of "art" object before.

1) As I understand he asks me to disambiguate my position respect to the text, to say if it's ironical or not... But if it's disambiguated it falls prey to representation again. As simulacrum I have always an ambiguous relation with reality. For example, my avatar, the Anartist, is ambiguous with both the Anarchist and the Artist but also with the Alchemist...it's a series of heterogeneous "ands" that stick because they resonate with an unstable equilibrium. My praxis is not just post-modern irony (where you have a disambiguated distancing that makes a parody of the essence of the "object" simulated). Instead in my practice more dimensions are resonating together in a heterogeneous synthesis that cannot be disambiguated. It's a heterogenesis or heterogeneous catalysis of a multiplicities from different origins that create a composition that remains unique. The mask of Dionysus is comedy but also tragic. It's a heterogeneous synthesis of a superject as a catalytic event, it's a libidinal plane of forces, not the unitary synthesis of a subject that correlates an object. The field of emergence is pre-individuated. My praxis emerges also in a different conception of space that is topologically based on singularity and not a Cartesian space that is based on an origin with axis. The superject, as a singularity of multiplicities, can be correlated only to its internal difference that differs as an ambiguous event that is never concluded. My simulacrum is not just a parody but also something that escapes the apparatus of signification in the darkness, becoming-imperceptible. If it was just post-modern irony (that is a dimension that is present in my praxis but not exhaustive) it would be still in reference to a subjective awareness of a position respect to an object, just a linguistic pragmatic operation of performativity as the gender performance that contests a dominant stereotype by mocking it. Instead my avatar is born for an urgent obscure need to respond to my actual situation and sensation of unemployed immigrant. My avatar is emerged as an urgent and dark need in a complex contingency, as an event that repeats and intensifies its internal difference producing a singular refrain. Then I have discovered that the refrain has a mystical side related to alchemical Nigredo because it resonates with a chaosmic field. It's related to chaosmagic. I have also produced a chaosmogonic chaosmology of my avatar. All I have written in my research is written ex-post. There is not an act of subjective conscience before, it's not just a semiotic operation on a sign, like a détournement that is still in a Kantian subjective tradition. It's more a gnostic-becoming based on chaotic attractors that emerges in a chaosmotic field. If one does not make this experience, one cannot understand. You know the "understanding" is related to being in a praxis, it's not knowledge. And also the experience is problematic because it is still interspaced by fiction when I go to recreate it by writing. Writing is another praxis and experience that not only adds but also affects the praxis itself and its experience. It's a flesh that becomes writing but is still an act of creation and not of representation. This is why the writing on art cannot be scientific but must be elliptical literature because it deals with the twilight of noumenous experience that cannot be approached directly. It's not a phenomenal experience produced in a laboratory with an intersubjective methodology. The methodology is still singular in art. I have invented my own techne. As Foucault would say I have invented a technology of Self. This is explained very well by Jung when he approaches alchemy but also by more cutting-edge object-oriented philosophy. There is a virtuality in the object, and in particular the object of art, that cannot be exhausted with signification. If one does not have this noumenal experience that grounds the understanding, one takes it as just "irony". He can think I play with language when instead I am just using the language that I consider more proper to generate an elliptical sense to catch the excess of sense of the object that is withdrawn in the virtual. This is why the language on art must have a certain obscurity to approach the object of art. My experience of Anartist is ambiguous. For example, as simulacrum I make a parody of black bloc but also I am a parasite that use them as "screen" and I also admire them as "persona" that moves my desire. It's the same attitude of Deleuze with all the authors he has been writing of: Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche etc...It cannot be reduced just to irony, there is a bodily pathos of the simulacral mask that is also sacrificial and tragic as Nietzsche would say. I could say much more on this point (I could write an essay) but I take it as already exhaustive or I will be too long...

2) When he says the "banality of Internet's conspiracy theory"...It's not banality at all...what grounds this affirmation? It's just a different approach to explain capitalism in respect to leftist Marxist tradition but not respect to Marx that is fully compatible in a heterodox reading. Conspiracy presupposes an esoteric elitist dimension of power beyond the essoteric one of the everyday institutions. It's not this dimension also present in the idea of the obscure fetishism of commodities. Furthermore, I think the network and the rhizome created by new technology generates a conspiratorial episteme (or partial episteme) and I am concerned with my reality. The symptom of this episteme is also the conspiratorial literature of Delillo and Pynchon...The conspiracy theory is also related to the idea of labyrinth of George Bataille, that is similar to the rhizome of Deleuze. Being lost in a groundless labyrinth can engender a conspiracy theory attitude and the anxiety more or less paranoid to get out the labyrinth with a transcendent signifier that gives a fix interpretive order to the chaos but the network with digital encryption also generate the possibility of the "crypt" of an actual elitist control of the world. It's more than banality and paranoia...read for example the book on "how Goldman Sachs came to rule the world" that has won many journalist prices in France and in US. Furthermore, common to Deleuze and Bataille is also a certain gnostic anarchism and the idea of a dimension which is hidden, poetic and sacred and one which is profane, utilitarian and transparent...and both of them stress the difference between knowledge and unknowledge, between esoteric and essoteric, between day and night, giving more importance to intuition than formal logic. Their style of writing is itself labyrinthine, and in the twilight, because it tries to catch an excess that is typical to art and also philosophy. Then because these philosophers are in the tradition of Nietzsche that sees the philosopher as an artist.

Furthermore, because capitalism is related to my intervention, I like to explore many narratives and dimensions connected to capitalism without the fear to be not in tune with a leftist politically correct narrative. My praxis is an experiment. I am attracted by the sacrilege of heterogeneous catalysis, to transgress the orthodoxy to reach new synthesis that are also obscene, monster and excremental.

Furthermore, I think that if it's true that the internet heterogeneous rhizome can push to the paranoia of conspiracy, or to the schizophrenia of heterogeneous synthesis, it can also engender an episteme that resonates with Renaissance's Wunderkammer. Now this kind of episteme based on analogy and intuition, well explained by Foucault in the "Order of things", can be dismissed by the Kantian mind as obscurantism and regression but for the mind and the experience of an artist can be also inspiring because it works on intuition based on heterogeneous synthesis of symbols that are in themselves heterogeneous synthesis. It could be another form of hermetic knowledge related to the grasping of an intuitive hyper-rationality based on series of patterns (related to form, meanings, desire, synchronism, archetypes and rhythms) that cannot be fully explained in a logic of linear signification where a reduced subject approach a reduced object. It's an esthetic and intuitive approach to knowledge based on composition. For me it is however an interesting path that is worth exploring. I also think that conspiratorial paranoia, creative schizophrenia and metaphysic intuition do not exclude each other but are features of a reality of intertwined multiplicities as our contemporaneity. They can be assembled in various compositions.

To conclude... the object of art has a different metaphysic position in respect to the object of design that can be explained by its function in a system of functions. The object of art is not actualized in a utilitarian scope, it is a resonance of resonances, it has virtualities that also diverge. If I should follow the suggestion of the reviewer 1 I would break the composition that is sticked there (but also elsewhere) with heterogeneous derivations and that it makes it unique, singular and ambiguous. I think there is a positivist anxiety of explanation in the reviewer. This attitude cannot be applied to an object of art but not even to a text that concerns an object of art. The text can be only an intensification of the object to form a texture that is never concluded and explained. It's just a transmedia passage from a media intensity to another intensity but the intensity cannot be fully extricated or else it is an improper and violent reductionist extension (in the sense of Deleuze) from the dominium of art that is difference as such to the one of science that is axiomatic. The text of art, that forms a texture with the virtuality of its object, must be approached not only with rational logic but also with the esthetic virtualities that it opens and the synesthetic and cinesthetic becoming internal to writing. The analytic is always implicated with the analog in the making of sense, the eye with the ear, and this is already a feature of the pragmatic of language with alliterations, driftings, rhetorics, sounds and rhythms that are always in excess to a univocal signification based on the logic syllogism. This is why the style of writing becomes important as much as the content! It can be only a piece of literature that continues the experimentation of the praxis with language. Especially if the author of the writing is the same of the art praxis. The esthetic spin of the style becomes consistent to the expression of the praxis that describes/recreates.

For what concerns the "sacrifice" that reviewer 1 asks me at the end. I answer that I must feel the need of a "sacrifice". I just do not want to make it because it is moral according to him to be opened to the other. He asks me to exchange his openness to the other with my openness. As artist (and even more as Anartist) I am opened to the outside that is not the human other. My becoming is inhuman. I prefer to sacrifice his suggestions than my text because we are not in a symmetrical position. Because we are in the field of art, my right to be accepted in my ambiguity is superior to his right to clarification and he cannot catch me in his relativism. Because the specific ontological statute of the object of art is ontologically ambiguous. Here is not a question of a pragmatic compromise between two others as he seems to propose. Alterity is already inscribed in art as singularity and anomaly. It's a heterogeneous monad that inflects its own world as a singularity. It's not possible to translate the object of art in a scientific object or in an object of design without betray its specific heterology. Art is act of resistance! One can say that a text "on" art is different by a text "of" art but I think that a text "on" art cannot exist.

We can discuss this also publicly... I am not scared. It's basically the difference between art research and art-based research.

Editor's comment: The editors of this issue decided to publish this exposition without revisions suggested by one of the reviewers. However, some typos and spelling errors were corrected in both the exposition and the above comments.