The Aesthetics of Necropolitics Prologue

Prologue Natasha Lushetich Politics can only be traced as a spiral transgression, as that difference that disorients the very idea of the limit.1 Today’s global semiocapitalism—a recombinant machine that deracinates knowledge and habit and floods the nervous system with information deluge2—is coated in smooth aesthetics. The aesthetics of uninterrupted connectivity, of shiny Macs and iPhones, of Brasilian depilation that erases the difference between actual and virtual bodies, of transglobal food, fashion and telecommunication chains that make landing in Paris, New York or Taipei into a relatively undifferentiated experience3; finally, the aesthetics of big data working imperceptibly in the background integrating financial, medical and consumer records into a new (digital) class that segregates (human) ‘trash’ from ‘stars’4. In such a universe, death has a bad name. It is avoided, devalued or it returns to the scene in an overbidding gesture5 of cataclysmic destruction. In the Western world, unspectacular death does, of course, have a long history of exclusion from the public domain. Not only do the majority of natural deaths occur in hospitals where the fiction of a likely recovery is maintained until the very end, but the deceased are often shown to family only after they have been shaven, coiffured, dressed and made up to appear as if asleep. In a society preoccupied with accelerated accumulation and rampageous consumption, death has no value as it can be neither accumulated nor consumed. Worse still, death is that final consumption that puts an end to all possibilities of ‘having fun’. Consequently, the dead and the dying are seen as a class of the ‘less fortunate’ and any association with them is regarded as best kept to a minimum. In recent years, the obstinate denial of death has 1 18_661_Lushetich_Book.indb 1 10/29/18 12:12 PM 2 Natasha Lushetich been punctured by the so-called senseless violence—mass murder and suicide—conveniently attributed to individual psychopathy rather than seen for what it is: infested, putrid social tissue, a horrifying yet utterly ineffectual attempt to ‘trump’6 systemic biosocial violence in a gesture imitative of the avant-garde shock tactics that propelled experimental composer Karlheinz Stockhausen to dub the terrorist attacks of 9/11 ‘a work of art’7. (It’s important to mention that Stockhausen doesn’t exonerate killing, only draws attention to the long history of destructive gestures in art that operate in the manner of the speech act8.) At the heart of these outrageous yet, it would appear, unstoppable tendencies, is endemic necropolitics in Achille Mbembe’s dual sense of the word: necropolitics as the expression of sovereignty that resides in the power to ‘dictate who may live and who must die’9, and necropolitics as the ‘generalized instrumentalization of human existence’ and ‘material destruction of bodies and populations’10. Rooted in Michel Foucault’s biopower11 and in Giorgio Agamben’s (Schmittian) state of exception—which initially referred to the concentration camp’s suspension of law12 but has, since then, come to stand for engineered crisis—necropolitics shapes the conditions ‘for the acceptability of putting to death’13. By extension, it also shapes the conditions for the acceptability of ubiquitous exploitation and denigration. This phenomenon or, rather, process can be observed in many domains: in the grand-scale destruction of the earth’s ecosystems, in the overt and covert forms of genocide (the co-called refugee crisis), in the feeding of dead poultry to genetically modified legless pigs, or in the more recent ‘ecological’ inventions such as biocremation, in which human remains are used to produce heat for leisure centres14. Given that necri-fice (sacrifice without sanctity) is built into the first principle of capitalism—the subjection of one thing to another with the speculative aim of producing some future ‘value’—it comes as no surprise that in the age of ‘absolute capitalism’15, necropolitical tendencies have ramified and intensified. The problem, however, is that the increasingly automated, logic-locked conduits of exploitation and denigration—in short, conduits that lead to irreparable destruction, systemic violence and devalued death—also function as a discursive and sensorial loop that produces hopelessness and devalues death and, by implication, also life. This volume is an attempt to think necropolitics otherwise, as an emergent practice that operates in and through interpersonal synchronisation16, existential refrains17, asignifying semiotics18, in infospheric, atomised time19. In order to move beyond the notion of necropolitics as a logic- and sequence-locked destiny, contributors to this volume chart the sensorial-affective cartography of temporal, spatial, embodied, embedded, affectively, culturally and scien- 18_661_Lushetich_Book.indb 2 10/29/18 12:12 PM Prologue 3 tifically transmitted memes and ideologies. Using divergent methodologies, such as exegesis, ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, auto-ethnography and peripatetic decolonial knowledge production, they identify resistive potential in the manner of the judo throw. The judo throw is a martial arts move that does not oppose or block the opponent’s attack, nor does it launch a counterattack. Instead, it uses the impetus of the opponent’s attack to redirect its force. Like the spiral transgression Mbembe speaks of, it is an oblique and iterative rather than a frontal tactic aimed at destabilising existing positions and well-rehearsed moves. THE SENSORIAL AND TEMPORAL, LESS-THAN-CONSCIOUS POLITICAL Invariably, the political is both a residue of past practices and relations and an emergent phenomenon. To borrow from Claude Lefort, it is ‘the mise en forme of human coexistence’20 that includes conscious, unconscious and purposefully ignored regions of being, seeing and doing. It is therefore necessary to situate the political at the threshold of perceptibility and knowability, in spatial, temporal and sensorial terms. Arguing against the conception of politics as the (more or less consensual) governance of the commons, Jacques Rancière foregrounds that which precedes consensus: precognitive attunement to rhythm and patterns, shared space and time, divergent perceptual habits, affect and the correspondingly divergent ideas about what constitutes the commons. The difference here is one between sound heard and understood as speech and sound registered as mere ‘noise’21. Lurking in the background of Rancière’s aesthetic conceptualisation of politics is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of perception as action22, further developed by many phenomenologists23 as well as artists such as George Brecht, for whom every perception is an active arrangement, in spatial and temporal terms24. Perception partitions; it includes and excludes, organises and delimits. It lends duration to a thing or an occurrence; it engages in its development, or it does not. Although partially culturally formatted by a culture’s ‘phenomenological vector’, which organises ambiguous perceptual possibilities into what is experienced as uncontestable physical phenomena—surfaces, images and sounds25—perception is also increasingly shaped in and by the infosphere. Consisting of perpetual communication, cultural production, symbolic and affective regimes, the infosphere configures the grids of sociopolitical possibility by recoding spatial, temporal and corporeal parameters and by modifying (our understanding of) attention, memory, care, support, empathy and value. 18_661_Lushetich_Book.indb 3 10/29/18 12:12 PM 4 Natasha Lushetich As Byung-Chul Han suggests, in the informational age, time is fragmented not because it is accelerated; rather, time appears accelerated because things and objects have become disposable26. Designed to last a year or two at best, they are no longer repositories of memory; instead, they recede from the world and from human experience with speed and indifference. While mythical (preindustrial) time was, for Han, anchored in the figure of god and, for this reason, immobile—it resembled an image—historical (industrial) time was anchored in the figure of the human being; it resembled a running line. Digital (postindustrial) time, which resembles vacillating points, is anchored in the algorithm but has no gravity27. It is unhinged. Uprooted now-moments vacillate without a direction, or they are strung into interminable yet empty durations that create a sense of provisionality, unfinished-ness and thus also diminished importance. This problem, which is a problem of value, places an enormous emphasis on the temporal, actual-virtual domain of the imperceptible, on the less-than-conscious working of the senses as well as on memory, which, arguably, is a meta-sense—the sense of all senses. In the informational age, learning and memory are entwined with technical objects (the computer, the mobile phone, the camera), which function as a perceptual-mnesic motorway of sorts. As Bernard Stiegler notes, new generations are socialised into a world in which ways of seeing, being, experiencing and memorising are already grammatised. Grammatisation here doesn’t refer to the articulation of the sensible only but also to the isolation and automatic reproduction of the producers’ gestures28, that is, to the mise en forme of possibility. It overwrites perception by means of a technocultural practice, which, in turn, overwrites the ‘affective activity of the nervous system’29. The inseparability of atomised time, technical objects, mnesic networks and the nervous system are the reasons why the political cannot be thought as separate from the interplay of perceptibility and imperceptibility, spatiotemporal and medial dynamics. ‘Process-based’ accounts of ‘co-action’, of coexistence in time, such as those discussed by John Protevi, that do not focus solely on communication as speech or on information as a message but foreground body postures, conversational rhythms, signals and patterns that trigger interpersonal and group ‘impulses’ and that can, for this reason, be seen as forms of entrainment30 cannot be overestimated. The role of temporality is crucial in this context not only because, as humans, we are profoundly temporal but also because in the deterritorialised and deterritorialising universe of global capital, technical objects incessantly proliferate new forms of entrainment by incessantly proliferating new existential refrains. In his prescient, McLuhanesque31 theorisation of human-machine assemblages, Félix Guattari suggests that an existential refrain couples ‘heterogeneous leitmotifs to the 18_661_Lushetich_Book.indb 4 10/29/18 12:12 PM Prologue 5 existential territory of the self’ and installs itself within the ‘sensible and significational chaos’ like a ‘strange attractor’32. Suffice it to think of everyday refrains such as checking one’s mobile devices for messages every five minutes or of the phantom phone vibration33 to understand the extent to which these new biosocial patterns choreograph relations. Significantly, they bypass consciousness. They do not communicate representations to the conscious mind but, instead, operate through asignifying semiotics—languages that act directly on the nervous system34. Aided by digital ‘diagrams’35, existential refrains channel flows in a way similar to Bentham’s panopticon, in which the incarcerated’s behaviour is spatially and temporally orchestrated through the interplay of visibility and invisibility embedded in the architecture and independent of human agency (a particular prison guard’s intentions, views of or attitudes to surveillance). When combined with aggressive financialisation and precarity, grammatisation and existential refraining (which, according to Stiegler, lead to ‘affective and cognitive proletarisation’36) make precognitive perception of phenomena—or aesthesis—into an urgent political concern. THE IMPASSE OF THE ‘BREAK OR MEND’ AESTHETIC NARRATIVES Unsurprisingly, ‘agentless’ biosocial violence and systemic denigration have created a sense of enclosure, even hopelessness, which has, in turn, given rise to two dominant aesthetic accounts. The first rationalises the breakdown of perceptual orders and symbolic universes. In this category we find Paul Virilio’s aesthetics of disappearance that focuses on the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed—gaps, glitches and speed bumps37—Eldritch Priest’s aesthetics of failure, which foregrounds boredom and formlessness produced by the overload of sensory information38, and Kieran Cashell’s transgressive aesthetics that reformulates (neo)avant-gardist practices reliant on affective deterritorialisation and cognitive disorientation39. Since the 1960s, and concomitantly with the progressive invisibilisation of control mechanisms increasingly immanent to the social field (and therefore increasingly difficult to identify and discuss40), there has been a veritable boom of staged pain, suffering and abjection. Between 1960 and 1990 the work of many ‘abject’ artists made a significant contribution to identity politics41. But we have to ask ourselves whether staging transgression of a visceral kind in a universe in which visceral transgression is the norm—and here I’m thinking of the run-of-the-mill online profiles that combine images of well-groomed individuals with the images of discharging vast amounts of urine, or similar, 18_661_Lushetich_Book.indb 5 10/29/18 12:12 PM 6 Natasha Lushetich in a drunken state42—has any politically transgressive potential. Even artists who once articulated invisible violence with astounding poignancy, for example, Paul McCarthy in his 1970s orgies with urine, blood, ketchup, mayonnaise and excrement, are now resorting to more tongue-in-cheek references to their formerly radical work such as dropping giant inflatable plastic poop on cities with serious pollution problems, like Hong Kong43. The second aesthetic account, rooted mostly in H. G. Gadamer’s dialogic hermeneutic tradition, acknowledges the erosion of sociality, the increasing economic injustice and pervasive biodigital violence and proposes a remedy. In this category we find Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics44, which seeks to remedy social fragmentation produced by neoliberal precarisation and market fundamentalism, found in such works as Carsten Höller’s giant slides that cue ludic sociality in an attempt to (re)create a temporary community45. Grant Kester is even more adamant about the need to engage participants in social utopias. Arguing vehemently against the shock tactics exemplified by the work of the abject artists who continue to stage (what is seen as) blasphemy, incest, deformity and disgust, Kester claims that such symbolic order–annihilating works do nothing but cut even deeper into the already damaged clinamen and destroy all hope of a hermeneutic community, coordinated action or, in fact, all hope tout court. For Kester, such works make viewers ‘viscerally aware of their own complicity in an oppressive specular economy’ which only adds ‘both to social and symbolic oppression’46. Consequently, Kester advocates projects that defy the erosion of the social by engaging the haptic and the visceral and by facilitating the process of collaborative interaction and ameliorative co-creation. But doesn’t this take us back to consensual politics and the unwavering faith in human rationality, only more attuned to the demands of emotional capitalism? Bypassing the hegemony of the ‘break or mend’ aesthetic narratives, this volume’s chapters focus on specific aesthetic and pre-aesthetic dimensions that are spirally, not frontally, political: the emptied image, the folding of the past in the present, the incompatibility of global contemporaneity and the outdated notions of autonomy, sensorial saturation, scientific and semantic overdetermination, the aesthetics of annihilation narratives, indeterminacy, other-species proximity and embodied encounters with the environmentally embedded abuse and humiliation. Instead of formulating a political aesthetic—or defending the aesthetic space as autonomous, a gesture appropriate in, say, Herbert Marcuse’s time47, but one decidedly out of place in the accelerated semiocapitalist infosphere in which art, technology, science and politics all form part of a variegated topography—the authors gathered in this volume articulate a necropolitical aesthetic as a political space. 18_661_Lushetich_Book.indb 6 10/29/18 12:12 PM Prologue 7 THE STRUCTURE AND ORGANISATION OF THIS VOLUME This volume is divided into three sections, each of which serves a different purpose. The first—‘Sedimentations: Race and Gender’—examines the inherited ‘conditions’ that create the ‘acceptability for putting to death’ and denigration48. The three chapters in this section make transparent the formation, continuation and, in some cases, perverse sophistication of past necropolitical practices, while engaging critically with their normalisation. In FKDSWHUµ:KDW,VWKH$HVWKHWLFVRI1HFURSROLWLFV"¶0DULQD*UåLQLüWUDFHV the historical progression from biopolitics to necropolitics. Through a crosstemporal reading of Hortense J. Spillers, Michel Foucault, Étienne Balibar and Achille Mbembe, she identifies strategies of racial, gender and, more generally, identitarian entrapment that are as violent as colonial subjugation. In a single blow, these strategies imprison European citizens (third- or fourthgeneration descendants of immigrants from former European colonies) in a foreign identity, much like they blame the supposedly ‘historically dysfuncWLRQDO¶EODFNIDPLO\RQWKHIHPDOHOLQH.H\WR*UåLQLü¶VFRQFHSWXDOLVDWLRQRI necroaesthetics is the simultaneous invisibility and overvisibility of the image—or the emptied image—which articulates a spectrum of imperceptibility reliant on amnesia and aphasia. In chapter 2, ‘Get Out: From Atlantic Slavery to Black Lives Matter’, Sarah Juliet Lauro offers a reading of Jordan Peele’s 2016 fantastical film about body snatching (Peele refers to the film as ‘a documentary’) to accentuate the similarity between Atlantic slavery and the lives of African Americans in the United States today. Engaging with the metaphor of social death and drawing comparisons with the Domingue slave revolt and the figure of the zombie, Lauro reassesses the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in light of Alexandre Kojève’s, Paul Gilroy’s and Achille Mbembe’s arguments. Relying on Ian Baucom’s concept of temporal accumulation, she proposes a broadened spectrum of resistance that death, killing and suicide provide. In chapter 3, ‘Aesthetic Autonomy at the Border: Notes on Necro-Art’, Verónica Tello analyses the legacy of artistic autonomy as an outdated phenomenon that continues to plague institutent practice, such as the Silent University (SU). Pointing to the fact that the utopistic nature of the project (which foregrounds the knowledge of refugees) depends on a practice that, although operative in the social realm in the manner of Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture49, remains indebted to the modernist idea of the artist as genius creator, Tello analyses the division of labour. Separating the transformatory work of SU’s initiator and the ‘banal’ work of the (mostly female) administrators and 18_661_Lushetich_Book.indb 7 10/29/18 12:12 PM 8 Natasha Lushetich coordinators, the SU, argues Tello, produces necro-art. Through a reading of postautonomy, based on feminist conceptual art and on theories of contemporaneity, she proposes that the concept-practice of maintenance replace outdated inaugurative gestures, as maintenance relies on low-key constancy and a distributed concept of autonomy that is far more attuned to the (uneven) global contemporaneity. The second part of the volume—‘Abstractions: Technological, Financial, Cultural, Scientific’—takes stock of the multiple processes of repartitioning the sensible via the various mechanisms of abstraction. This section accentuates emergent directions sprouting from the various abstracting mechanisms and focuses on the reorganisation of epistemic practices as well as on the resistive potential always already present in scientific procedures. Part II opens with Franco Berardi’s ‘Inside the Corpse of Abstraction’, in which he discusses the entwined problematics of financialisation, technology and capitalist immortality (immortality achieved through the virtual transubstantiation of capital), which, in reality, is no more than dead labour, however dead labour that has usurped life and is now turning all its segments into automated (necrotic) abstraction. Focusing on issues as diverse as Narendra Modi’s proposed demonetarisation, Trumpism, the return of American colonialism, and the increasingly present semiocapitalistically induced lack of empathy, Berardi diagnoses the current condition as one of global civil war in which aggressive identity politics is back as a form of forceful reterritorialisation, a revenge for the violent, unceasing deterritorialision of work, culture and, more broadly, life. The following chapter, Jens Hauser’s ‘Greenness: Sketching the Limits of a Normative Fetish’, develops a comprehensive analysis of the threefold trope ‘green-greenness-greening’ as a cultural and scientific fetish against whose symbolic value noxious environmental practices are ratified. The abstracted necropolitical line Hauser takes is less visible than the phenomena discussed by Berardi; however it is no less important. Employing a media-theoretical approach, Hauser deconstructs the pervasiveness of the ‘green’ metaphor and traces its technoscientific and art-historical roots while simultaneously articulating the absurd human need for reassurance through the conceptual construction of ‘natural’ otherness, regardless of the widespread (human and environmental) death and destruction resulting from programmed obsoleteness (of tools and apparata). For Hauser, what is needed is a reorganisation of epistemic practices to foreground the relationship between modelling technologies, measuring systems, media-specific technicity and the (human) thresholds of perception. In chapter 6, ‘Desire, DNA, and Transgenetic Technology: Life after Necropolitics’, Mi You presents an insightful analysis of scientific overdetermination and the necropolitical entanglement of capital- 18_661_Lushetich_Book.indb 8 10/29/18 12:12 PM Prologue 9 ism and life, not as a force to be extracted from living human beings through labour but as a biotechnological product. Using two artistic practices, Paul Vanouse’s and Lucie Spiess and Klaus Strecker’s, You shows how Gilles Deleuze’s notion of capitalist desire for desire permeates biotechnological necropolitics—the power to redesign, discontinue or annihilate—that concerns both the patenting of genetic data and the subjection of the so-called healthy bodies to medical monitoring. Pointing to the seemingly inescapable loop in which genetic-specific medication remains tied to large-scale diagnostic testing, which turns products, such as pills, and testing technologies back into information—databases, test results, marketing and media campaigns—You formulates a subversive strategy of inorganic becoming based on Luciana Parisi’s concept of abstract sex. Although all three sections ponder strategies of resistance, the third section—‘Tactics: Detourning the Limit, Overbidding, Mourning’—is concerned with the formulation of tactics at the limit of the necropolitical horizon, the digital unconscious, indeterminacy and loss. The first chapter in this section, Critical Art Ensemble’s (CAE) ‘Necropolitics and the Dark Comedy of the Posthuman’, examines posthuman scenarios associated with technoromanticism and technofatalism. Scrutinising cyborgs, transhumanists, green posthumans and their various scenarios for overcoming the unfortunate human condition, the CAE analyse existing proposals for mass extermination, such as those put forth by E. O. Wilson and Lierre Keith. Reappropriating the gesture of deliberative politics, they suggest that since the death of several billion people is what seems to be needed for the continuation of life on the planet, an open and democratic debate about who may live and who must die should be staged as a matter of urgency. In ‘Dirty Your Media: Artists’ Experiments in Bio-Sovereignty’, Tiffany Funk examines the integrated problematics of big data, medical and police surveillance and tracking. Analysing artistic-activist practices that focus on social and ethical problems inherent in the fact that medical and criminal records are shared across governmental agencies, she foregrounds the work of glitch and dirty new media artists who employ indeterminacy to detourn necropolitical operations that stigmatise individuals as criminal, ill or uninsurable. Discussing such practices as obfuscation and Trackmenot plugins created by Helen Nissenbaum et al., plugins that, in a gesture of overbidding, bombard tracking programmes with an overload of information, Funk argues against the foreclosure of the future. Despite the fact that big data predicts human behaviour and thus, arguably, confiscates the future, Funk’s focus on the zone of imperceptibility, usually referred to as the ‘digital unconscious’, makes clear that resistance is not impossible, only that it has relocated to a different realm: the infosphere. In chapter 10, ‘Intimacy, Ignorance and Mourning in Iowa Hog 18_661_Lushetich_Book.indb 9 10/29/18 12:12 PM 10 Natasha Lushetich Confinement’, Malin Palani offers an auto-ethnographic account of caring for an injured pig. Analysing the confluence of entrepreneurism, the corporate tactics of evasion and cultivated agnotology in light of Foucault’s biosecurity and Rancièrian blind spots, she arrives at an affirmative tactics of death care. Anchored in mourning—not as a state to be rid of but as a process grounded in the materiality of existence—Palani argues for the need to restore dignity and faith to, within and around death. This is not a weak strategy of acceptance but a form of articulating the full cycle of composition, decomposition and recomposition that is life-death. In the epilogue, ‘Archipelagoes of the Unseen’, May Joseph brings the multiple violent pasts of New York, a city often associated with what Berardi has termed the ‘global civil war’, triggered by 9/11, into the present moment. Using a decolonial methodology of reenvisioning what lies below the surface of ecological meaning, she roams the forty islands that shape the New York archipelago listening to ‘quiet soundings’, a form of ontological excavation of the erased (yet resurrectable) spaces of possibility, and a form of attunement to the longue durée of death. Death as a dimension of ‘being otherwise’ that needs to be valued and honoured as such. NOTES 1. Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 16. 2. Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (London: Verso Books, 2015), 68. 3. Byung-Chul Han, Sauvons le Beau: L’esthétique à l’ère numérique (Paris: Actes Sud, 2016), 9–10. 4. Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 65. 5. Overbidding, which refers to raising the stakes higher than the system can endure, is a concept first introduced by Jean Baudrillard in The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 6. It is, of course, ironic that in the age of perpetual stake-raising, in the vortex of abstraction that is the financial world, and overbidding in the form of terrorism or mass murder, the name of the president of the United States is (Donald) Trump. 7. See Anthony Tommasini, ‘Music; The Devil Made him Do It’, New York Times, 30 September 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/arts/music-the-devil-made -him-do-it.html (accessed 22 December 2017). 8. Many radical performance art practices—the Viennese Actionists, Gina Paine, Carolee Schneemann, Paul McCarthy, ORLAN or, more recently, Michael Landy— used blood, semen, urine, excrement, self-inflicted pain and the destruction of material objects as a performative statement against the absence of the lived body from 18_661_Lushetich_Book.indb 10 10/29/18 12:12 PM Prologue 11 social systems, the glossing of pain and misery, the suppression of nondominant knowledges, such as female knowledge, and against aggressive consumption. 9. Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, 11. 10. Ibid., 14. 11. Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended,’ in Lectures at the College de France 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 255. 12. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 168–70. 13. Michel Foucault, quoted in Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, 17. 14. See Hannah Rumble et al., ‘Disposal or Dispersal? Environmentalism and Final Treatment of the British Dead’, Mortality 19, no. 3 (2014): 243–60. 15. Berardi, Heroes, 87. 16. See John Protevi, ‘Political Emotion,’ in Collective Emotions, ed. Christian von Scheve and Miko Selmela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), http://www .protevi.com/john/PoliticalEmotionOUP2014.pdf, 3. 17. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 17–19. 18. Maurizio Lazarrato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, trans. J. D. Jordan (Amsterdam: Semiotext(e), 2014), 80. 19. Byung-Chul Han, Le Parfum de temps (Paris: Edition Circé, 2016), 17–23. 20. Claude Lefort, quoted in Chantal Mouffe, ‘Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces’, Art & Research 1, no. 2 (2007): 4, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/ mouffe.html. 21. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 29. 22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, trans. J. M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 162–63. 23. See, for example, Alphonso Lingis, Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (New York: Humanity Books), 1996. 24. See Natasha Lushetich, Fluxus: The Practice of Non-Duality (Amsterdam and New York, 2014), 41–52. 25. Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 150. 26. Han, Le Parfum, 17. 27. Ibid., 22–23. 28. Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 33. 29. Ibid. 30. Protevi, ‘Political Emotion’, 3. 31. For Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. It is not what we are watching on TV that matters—the news, a children show or a football match—but the fact we are receiving televised information passively. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). 18_661_Lushetich_Book.indb 11 10/29/18 12:12 PM 12 Natasha Lushetich 32. Guattari, Chaosmosis, 17. 33. The phantom vibration syndrome refers to the mobile phone user’s experience of vibration or, more precisely, his or her hallucination of vibration when the mobile phone is, in fact, not vibrating at all. As two separate groups of researchers have shown, one reason for the high percentage of such hallucinations (70 to 90 percent) is stress. The other is the close proximity of the phone—usually carried in the pocket or in a handbag—and the nervous system. See Michelle Drouin et al., ‘Phantom Vibrations among Undergraduates: Prevalence and Associated Psychological Characteristics’, Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012): 1490–96. 34. Lazarrato, Signs and Machines, 80. 35. Lazzarato borrows this notion from Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Michel Foucault’s theoristation of nondiscursive power, found in such technologies as the panopticon. See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2004), 78–81. 36. Stiegler, For a New Critique, 30. 37. See Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009). 38. See Eldritch Priest, Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) 39. See Kieran Cashell, Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art (London: I. B. Tauris and Co., Ltd., 2009). 40. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 23. 41. Abject art is a form of public outrage at the diffuse yet palpable effect of the increasingly invisible violence, perpetuated by all sorts of consumerist, class, and gender interpellations. Prominent examples are Paul McCarthy, Kiki Smith and Andreas Serrano, among others. For a discussion of abject art, see Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). 42. For more information, see Natasha Lushetich, ‘The Performative Constitution of Liberal Totalitarianism on Facebook’, in æLçHN DQG 3HUIRUPDQFH, ed. Broderick Chow and Alex Mangold (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 101–5. 43. The reference here is to Paul McCarthy’s 1974 performance Hot Dog and video work Tubbing and his 2013 mixed media work Complex Pile. 44. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002). 45. This is a reference to Carsten Höller’s 2006 Test Site, made for Tate Modern, London. 46. Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 62. 47. In 1979 Herbert Marcuse argued the following: ‘The truth of art lies in this: that the world really is as it appears in the work of art . . . the political potential of art lies only in its own aesthetic dimension’. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, trans. Erica Sherover (London: Penguin Random House, 1979), xii. 48. Michel Foucault, quoted in Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, 17. 49. For Joseph Beuys, social sculpting was a socio-aesthetic practice aimed at transforming society through interdisciplinary multilogue, relationality and co-action. 18_661_Lushetich_Book.indb 12 10/29/18 12:12 PM Prologue 13 BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End. Translated by Chris Turner. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Berardi, Franco. Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso Books, 2015. Berardi, Franco. 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