THE FALLEN HERCULES OR THE ARTIST AS BARTLEBY
I would prefer not to.
Hermann Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story
of Wall-street
At the End of the Myth or beyond the Columns of
Hercules
According to Greek mythology, Hercules, as a sign of his furthest journey
during his labors, erected on Gibraltar two columns marking the end of
the world of Antiquity. For the seafaring conquistadors and the enlightened
philosophers of the Modern Age, the idea of sailing out beyond the Columns
of Hercules symbolized setting off for new worlds, unknown spheres of
knowledge, and exotic colonies as well as the expansion of political and
economic power. With the curiosity that was inherent in seafaring, the
old world order was subjected to a new cartography, and the craving for
the new-for new knowledge, lands, resources, wares and treasures-advanced
to the status of a virtue and value of an emerging globalized modernism.
For the English philosopher and leading Enlightenment figure Francis Bacon,
two of whose books feature engravings of the Columns of Hercules facing
their title pages, the ships returning to their home ports with goods
and information of all sorts and thus playing the role of modern-day agents
of knowledge personified a new epoch or, better said, a new paradigm that
was characterized by an insatiable drive for insight and expansion and
by a euphoric faith in technology and the future.
The Columns of Hercules embodied the portal to a new international trade
and globalization project at the disposal of which stood geography, religion,
science, politics, economy and society. With the conquest of previously
unknown worlds, the Columns of Hercules shifted to the west and, as a
result of this occidentalization or westernization, gave rise to a new
Herculean myth of the pioneer and techno culture that was supplanted by
the American settler mythos in the form of trail
west and frontier spirit as the "search
for the Geryonean cattle," and that lives on among the cowboys of
the prairie, the space-cowboys of the cosmos and the cyber-cowboys of
the Internet.
To paraphrase this old metaphor, the idea that suggests itself is to identify
the 20th century's Columns of Hercules not as those of Gibraltar but rather
as a sign of the take-off of the financial system and the reflux of the
pecuniary booty yielded thereby in the form of the twin towers of the
World Trade Center in the US.
Whereas the Columns of Hercules symbolized the plus ultra of occidental expansion in the Early Modern Period, the twin towers during the age of unbridled capitalism represented for many globalization skeptics the non plus ultra of transnational markets and suprastructures, as well as their systemic self-regulation by means of the law of "survival of the fittest." When airplanes were suddenly perverted into the "medium of their message" on September 11, 2001 in order to invert the system, it was an imperialistic Hercules and his economic and cultural hegemony over the rest of the world that were the target. The attack on the hegemonic order was an event of global significance, a declaration of war on globalization that demanded correction and redistribution, and a political and cultural remapping of global conditions. Did this seal once and for all the doom of enlightenment and humanism? Did apocalyptic ideas then begin to replace utopian ones? Did the periphery penetrate into the center to have its case heard? Or was it all just a welcome cooling-off for overheated markets and a way to infuse cultural fronts, economic spheres of influence and global strategies with new strength and vitality?
Between Scylla and Charybdis or from Enlightenment to Clarification
In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, we no longer associate
9/11 with a fast sports car made by Porsche, nor with speed, fun and lifestyle,
but rather with melancholy and horror. The mood has sunk to zero, and
Ground Zero has come to symbolize the identity crisis of Western civilization.
Symptomatic of this situation, this year's Ars Electronica presents itself
according to its title as "unplugged" in order to focus on the
blind spots of globalization and to inquire into the political element
of art. The festival that traditionally provides a forum for the artistic
and technological avant-garde gives itself over this year-on the very
anniversary of the catastrophe-to the hangover after the hyped-up e-commerce
party and its failed hopes of unlimited growth.
In the media and in politics as well as philosophy and art, the old longings
for what is real and necessary, for dogmas and dualisms and, along with
them, the demands for exclusion and security are celebrating their resurrection.
Politicians, managers, and artists make a practice of expressing alarm
and dismay, and call for the strengthening of morality in the form of
a new ethical front. The end of the fun society is being proclaimed, as
individual independence, egotistical self-realization or hedonistic entertainment
culture are juxtaposed to solidarity and modesty. An emerging restoration
of simplistic ascriptive concepts and good-versus-bad dualisms demands
that art interrupt the "prevailing system" and makes it incumbent
upon artists to take exception to and work to bring about a turnaround
in economic, social and political conditions. But is this wish not a part
of the very logic of the system, and is it not so that the hegemonic order
waits thankfully for any form of critique in order to affirmatively utilize
it to stabilize its own power?
We ought to keep in mind that the wish to critically thematicize the culture
of art in order to thereby create a new consciousness and, in turn, conscience-its
motif going beyond a disinterested, purely aesthetic aim to please-has
recourse frequently and willingly to a didactic element. However, inherent
in this substitution that puts political and ethical values in place of
aesthetic ones is the risk of reductionism whereby art easily ends up
as propaganda or, phrased in current parlance, as fashion and lifestyle.
Nevertheless, in the aftermath of 9/11, artists are called upon more than
ever to assume social functions and to act as catalysts of a social "transformation."
The question of what is being transformed thereby in what direction or
into what, however, seems to have become-while the USA has been wallowing
sanctimoniously in the role of victim and mourner, and celebrating its
national unity-a spot that is even darker than the blind spot of imperialistic
globalization tactics ever was. The danger slumbering within this set
of circumstances lies in the panic-stricken obsession with wanting to
take social contingency (i.e. the possibility or the potency of a future
that is open and can be shaped at will) hostage and to force it into the
realization of a single unavoidable necessity. There are those who would
destroy the network of that which is possible, conceivable and worthy
of consideration, erect a new hierarchy of values, and thus cement the
foundation of a Western community of values in order to diametrically
oppose it to others.
Although it has not been just since 9/11 that the process of coping with
contingency phenomena has become the greatest challenge facing a medially
constituted world society, postcolonial core problems have been exacerbated
thereby, and navigating a course *between* the dualisms has become as
difficult as finding a path through a labyrinth. If, in the 1990s, the
national society and the market regulated according to neo-liberal thinking
stood side-by-side like the twin towers and, analogous to the sea monsters
Scylla and Charybdis, offered us the choice between two evils, then the
fatal options have now melded into the emptiness of a catastrophic identity.
The street battles of Seattle, Montreal, Genoa and other North American
and European cities as well as the rioting in countries outside the so-called
First World such as Argentina, Turkey and Nigeria as a reaction against
the policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund bespeak
the failure of neo-liberal ideology. In this sense, Ground Zero constitutes
the "vanishing point of no return" from which the periphery
has apparently intruded into the center in order to negotiate in this
emptiness the ideological differences of global change.
It should certainly have become clear by now that the terrorist catastrophe
was less a matter of the conquest of reality by images or, vice versa,
the intrusion of the real into our world of images than yet another release
of the symbolic that now, in turn, restrictively determines the way we
experience reality. The towering pieces of the global chess game were
indeed checkmated as both king and queen were brought down by a massive
violation of the rules, but the struggle of the pawns on the street continues.
What is at stake in this game is nothing less than the process of coming
up with viable strategies in the face of unmanageably organized complexity
summoned forth on one hand by an unsuccessful American and European economic
policy of deregulation, liberalization and privatization and, on the other
hand, by a general crisis of modernity. Global society as a system for
the reproduction of social, political, economic, technological, and ecological
inequalities cannot, in this connection, be reduced solely to a juxtaposition
of subsidiarity versus solidarity; rather, it must be discussed as an
extended cultural dispositive in the context of the values and consequences
of the Modern Period and the Enlightenment as well as of their modernistic
obsessions and promises.
From Postmodernism to Supramodernism
Just as architectural theoretician Charles Jencks once announced that the postmodern was inaugurated by the demolition of the principles of modernism as embodied by the Pruitt-Igoe high-rise public housing complex in St. Louis in the early '70s, much evidence now suggests that 9/11 could go down in history as the caesura leading up to postmodernism's end. From the Counter-Reformation through romanticism to postmodernism, the project of modernism has undergone fluctuating crises; nevertheless, every critique and every swan song revitalized modernism anew and transformed it into another aggregate state. It is certainly the case that modernism has reached a relatively advanced age; nevertheless, this project nourishes itself since it operates accumulatively and irreversibly from its own history and anticipates self-reflexively its future in that it permanently transports the present into a futuristic dimension.
Modernity means a life in science fiction, whereby the current utopia
is an "atopia" of anywhere and anytime, the aim of which is
the homogenization and synchronization of cultures in the form of globalization.
Globalization as the central effect of the Modern Period now culminates
in a model of medial and financial convergence for the establishment of
the supranational compatibility and comparability of all competitive parameters
including time, space, currency and production. This economically and
medially synchronous world that defines the state of post-coloniality
strives for a global matrix of "real time" to achieve the universal
conversion of all information, goods and cultures. Since, however, conversion
cannot ensue without losses, the expansive progression of this supramodern
project leaves in its wake more and more losers who experience this global
reformatting as a system of inequality and injustice.
Dividing up the past and the present into epochs and historical paradigms
is usually linked to the task of establishing order and worldviews, and
when these are disrupted or destroyed, there arises the need to get a
new grip on things. Here, the process of historical classification can
be punctuated by catastrophe or display continuity, whereby the explosive
demolition of both Pruitt-Igoe and the World Trade Center can be subsumed
under the heading of symbolic catastrophes that perpetuate continuity.
As early as the 1980s, thinkers like Jürgen Habermas and Odo Marquard
were already expressing doubts-though indeed for different reasons-about
the end of modernism, and were conceptualizing postmodernism in continuity
with it. .
And to be sure, more of the promises of modernism-at least those of a
scientific nature-were being kept in times of postmodernism than in the
entire Modern Period leading up to it. Modernization as futurization,
artificialization and globalization accelerated to an unprecedented extent,
and there emerged a potentiated aggregate state of modernity that can
only be described as supramodernism in the sense of the metastasizing
and hypertrophying of modernist concepts. Outside of the Western world,
supramodernization is associated above all with Americanization (meaning
the United States of America), which is why, regardless of US foreign
policy, highly simplified takes on the values and images of Hollywood,
the wasteful lifestyle that has come to be known as "The American
Way of Life," the carelessness in dealing with natural resources
and the ecosystem, and the naive "can-do" compulsion of the
natural sciences are now the focus of attention. This system of an "image
empire" and an "empire of empiricism" that guarantees in
elitist fashion the availability of great surpluses of foodstuffs, energy,
know-how etc. for a very few while parasitically exploiting the global
ecosphere positively demands that large parts of the rest of the world
instinctively rebel. The supremacy of the American model of modernism
that can be characterized in short as the mania of the real or the realization
of individual dreams on economic and technological levels evokes solidarity
with the struggle that has only begun with the anti-globalization movement
and unrest in Third World countries.
Among the errors and omissions of recent decades-and what ultimately led
to the failure of the so-called postmodern project-were a shameful withdrawal
from questions of politics and social welfare issues as well as excessive
hesitancy in dealing with technology, media, the economy and the ecosystem
under the premises of societal ethics. The perceived self-regulation by
means of systems and processes, the idealization of neo-liberal ideology
to the point of raising it to the status of a natural law, or the impression
of complete powerlessness in the face of the mass media and the advertising
and PR industries has resulted in a loss of subjective spheres of action
and a simultaneous increase in ambiguity, complexity and the abundance
of information and opinion. Postmodernism could contribute little to enable
mankind to deal with the transformation of its living environments and
its emotional and physical states that is being accelerated by the media,
science and technology, and the feeling that becomes increasingly pervasive
is of the "end of history" or of a static emptiness. The liberating
promise of "anything goes" exhausted itself in a state in which
nothing went anymore, a state of mind that was already bringing a whole
wave of recruits to the New Right in the '80s. The longing for a simple
process of complexity management that leaves all forms of contingency
out of the picture and propagates the necessity of dualistic action arose
and infected the Western world with arrogance and racism.
To return once again to the parallels between the Enlightenment project
of the Modern Era and the adventures of Hercules in Antiquity mentioned
at the outset: Western civilization has successfully completed numerous
freebooting labors of a scientific and technological nature over the course
of the 20th century. The Herculean civilization thus follows in the footsteps
of its mythological hero in striving to attain everlasting life and eternal
youth-i.e. a state made possible by computer science, biotechnology and
genetic engineering in which human beings may escape the entropy of death
in order to indulge in a scientifically purified life in technological
Olympia. But if we follow the Herculean myth all the way to the end, we
find that the hero, shortly before his apotheosis, suffered a tragic fate
in a narrative that can be briefly told here.
After completing his adventures, Hercules returns to Thebes but later moves to Trachis with his second wife, Deianeira, who inadvertently causes the horrible death of her husband. Out of jealousy, Hercules had killed Nessos the Centaur with a poisoned arrow. But shortly before his death, Nessos makes a bequest to Deianeira in the form of the blood running from his wound. He tells her to collect it and, when the opportunity presents itself, to use it to dye the undergarment of her beloved husband; thereafter, he will never love another woman besides her. When Hercules departs on a campaign, the misfortune runs its course. Unbeknownst to Hercules, Deianeira smears his undergarment with the blood. While he is sacrificing a steer, the potion eats through the material and burns the skin of his genitals. Deprived of the possibility of sexual reproduction, Hercules decides to escape the torturous pain through self-immolation. Lightening strikes the pyre and Hercules ascends in a cloud to Olympus.
The myth ends with his installation by Athena into the circle of the
Gods and his marriage to Hebe, the goddess of eternal youth, who bears
him immortal children. If one wished to metaphorically update this myth,
pathetically and fatalistically speaking, one might have it that the castration
and apotheosis took place in a single act of the suicide squad that simultaneously
turned the phallic potency of the World Trade Center's towers into the
pyre of modernity and set the seal on its elevation to supramodernity.
Even if art has long since ceased deriving its themes from classical myths
or illustrating them allegorically, these-regardless of obvious parallels
to the present situation-do give rise to questions of how art can position
itself in a strategic field of tension and interplay between symbolic
and/or real possibilities for action, between state of emergency, total
refusal, free-floating communications facilitator, service provider, etc.
Or to put this in other words: Is there an art that deals with morality
without being moralizing?
The Artist as Contingency Researcher
An art that solipsistically generates ideas while remaining completely
out of touch with social contexts now seems to have become obsolete. Art
does not just occupy a place at the interface where traditional cultures
and systems, natural sciences and the humanities, the social and the political
confront one another; rather, it has gone beyond this to become an interface
multiplier. Art is organized in heterogeneous and interdisciplinary fashion,
based increasingly on teamwork, and its actions are far more open to social
expectations, contentions and problems. Art thus proves itself to be more
reflexive and exhibits a higher degree of social relevance, which gives
rise to a new topology of art that exists not only within institutions
of the art system and is not solely represented in the person of the artist,
the curator, etc. Art forces its way into the world that seeks to think
it artistically, and it is precisely on this boundary that it is called
upon to negotiate and to act in order to exercise its resistance. The
principle of unconditional resistance is a right that art should simultaneously
invent, reflect and implement in order to thereby launch a counteroffensive
in opposition to sovereignty. This would make
it necessary for art to come out in opposition to a wide array of powers-the
power of the state, the economic power of corporations and international
capital, as well as medial, religious and ideological powers, and thus
all those forms of power that restrict the project of an emerging art.
Since power is fundamentally foreign to art and it rejects art's principles,
art disposes over no power of its own. In a traditional sense, it is relegated
to the field of fictions, simulacra and the modality of "as if."
It has been enlisted into the service of the symbolic, and deals to differing
extents and in varying shades of complexity with discursive ideality,
whereby the "as if" can mean both a privilege with respect to
the process of dealing with contingency as well as a mere deficiency of
reality. The mixture and hybridization of art with life, politics, science,
economics, etc. begins at precisely this point and practices the often-cited
incursion of the real into the symbolic. If one takes this one step further,
one arrives at an art that provokes the state of emergency and an infringement
of the order of the "as if." Art playfully assumes the "quality"
of power and of terror in order to inscribe itself into the real, to find
a venue for its deed, and to realize itself
there with all the consequences. Every act of terror, though-in contrast
to a natural catastrophe-is a matter of the symbolic and not the real,
so that in a culture which, for its part, remains out of touch with realities
and packed within a wad of symbolic insulation while constituting its
power in the realm of the virtual and de-territorial, the existing order
can be torpedoed only in the mode and the logic of the "as if."
An artistic act means work on the "as if" in order to prevent
this from becoming the agreed-upon and legitimated context of convention
and obedience, and instead goes about disrupting horizons of expectation
and standards of reception beyond any form of control. The limits of the
"as if" would be reached precisely at this point, where art
becomes entwined with the powers of reality and lets itself be led by
possibilities rather than necessities or takes up the cause of implementing
the impossible.
What is called for on the part of art in order to achieve this are not merely accumulations of works and oeuvres, but rather performative processes that aim to bring about social outcomes. In contrast to power that is out to demolish the possible and reinforce the necessary, art is most unnecessary and pure potency. In art that is a matter of the construction of the experience of the possible as such, the focal point is occupied by the "as" that neither identity-endowing-ontologically (as such) nor mimetic-phenomenologically (as if) transports us into the state of the relation to the other as the possibility in the future of something that had not existed previously.
And, consequently, this art would also be a dirty para-art, an art as
science, as philosophy, as sociology etc., which allies itself with forces
outside the domain of art and infiltrates foreign (immune) systems. This
kind of art would be a form of possibility that can be simultaneous or
something else or even not be. That means it would not be a legislative
art that does away with styles, commandments and laws and enacts new ones-like
the avant-gardes attempted, for example-and it would also not be an art
that messianically redeems the world from something. Perhaps it would
be an art that would corresponded to the attitude of the presumably most
radical dissident in the history of literature, Hermann Melville's scrivener
Bartleby, in which the artist refrained from producing works as copies
of originals and countered this bustling activity with a critique of production
and consumption whereby the point is no longer to do but rather to negotiate
contingency.