3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing

3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing I. science This work considers the relation of theatre and writing. It does so on the basis of a distinct problem. Artistic research is a problem that does not initially appear to be a problem. But it presents us with one. Artistic research is a relatively new form for academic institutions. It is first a category of accreditation. Candidates following a course of artistic research or practice-as-research as it is also known gain credit for their practice in one or another artistic discipline. The credit is fixed by the institution in recognition of the value of the artistic research. Artistic research formalises the acknowledgement of the value art practices have in making significant and original contribution to knowledge. But it is neither by the practice engaged in the individual’s research nor by its artistic quality or quality as research that the institution sets its value and level of credit. These are neutral in view of those qualities: the institution however, acting through the candidate’s supervisor or supervisors, at the level of school, department or faculty, acquires by its neutrality, where an art critique might stand and where a committee might stand in review of the quality and tenor of research, and retains, power of veto. The academic institution takes a role in artistic research that is not analytical but formal. It acknowledges this form of knowledge production and offers it as category of accreditation within formal and not analytical power relations. It looks for qualities other than those of art critique; its review of the art practice is other than that of the expert peer review system we might expect in disciplines of science. Simon Taylor 1 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing In acknowledging the value of artistic research the level of credit set, the number of credits, the rate of progress of both art and research and the level at which these contribute to the fulfilment of institutional requirements derives not from analysis. The painting of the candidate is not subject to an analysis comparing it with what is contemporary in the discipline, with the work of professional artists. The writing of the candidate is not subject to an analysis of structure. The performance is free from the critical analytical gaze of the critic and from the artistic gauges that in its instantiation in performance are placed on its social, sexual, political and performative intervention—on its effects on a putative community. The level of credit does not increase with the degree of public success in achieving these effects. But it is neutrally placed according to formal accomplishment. This makes it hard for the institution in the case of a purely conceptual artistic practice. It equally creates difficulty for the institution in the case of successful or professional artists. This raises the question of what the academic world’s interest in art is as it is conducted through the formal accreditation of artistic research. It is not in the setting of an art school or in art education that artistic research is engaged. It is in knowledge production. It is in its capture that the art outcome and research output is measured quantitatively as a percentile contribution to knowledge, however it is produced. Production concerns here analysis, the question of how a thing is done, and is not one of the form of what a thing is. Still the question, since it is not a thing, arises of what in this setting a practice is. The candidate must ask herself what it is to have a practice in this setting. He must ask since the analysis is missing in the system of accreditation as it delivers him to the ontological status of the practice before any encounter with artistic production what a practice is such that it fit in this setting. The question of the institutional capture of knowledge produced through her artistic research and through his practice becomes secondary. It does so even as the form taken by research and art practice is emptied. Research and art practice are in this setting no longer analytical functions of artistic production. They are formal functions of knowledge production. Simon Taylor 2 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The academic institution in terms of its agency is put at a remove from the practice of the candidate. It is so even in so far as the knowledge produced is concerned because the formal recognition of the art practice is emptied of analytical recourse in view of its production. That is to say the onus is on the candidate to support the art practice and research project in an analytical sense. It is from her understanding the institution derives its recognition of achievement—with the ultimate aim of it granting and the candidate gaining accreditation for the qualification in question. The self-survey of the practice concerns us here. But perhaps in this structuring of responses and responsibilities we are able to see a theme. In this pattern of relations that are imposed we are able to discern a power formation held in common among neoliberal institutions. It is one instituted in the way of governance in the instruments of agency of a general ethos of governmentality. The work is not the object of governance but the worker is. Neutrality of agency—the agency of the supervisory and managerial apparatus—is applied to production. A worker must account for her productivity; he must prove he is productive. Through the proof a worker provides she is the representative of production; he is the living proof (a biopolitical datum): the product is only a formal requirement. We can imagine a time when scientific disciplines are similarly neutralised. It is in fact heralded by the decrease in support for research in the pure sciences as well as in the address to the biopolitical of technoscience in which Big Pharma meets Big Data. Scientific research is increasingly output-based and financialised at the same time as it is marketised, changing the relation of scientist to research. A scientist is one who makes account of research as much as researches, as well we might say a teacher is one who makes account of teaching as much as teaches. A scientist is one who cares and works for the stabilisation of her area of research. In upholding and holding it up, to be the recipient of attention, both in scientific and general communities, a scientist is a caretaker of his discipline. In upholding and holding it up as exemplary, to be the recipient of funding and achieve institutional stabilisation, she becomes caretaker of science. Simon Taylor 3 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Science is now a marketplace for ideas that is neutral to the research, the discipline and specialisation in which a scientist trains and by which he is entrained. Rather than to her own testing, analysis, comparison of findings, methodological discussion, rather than to contemporaries in the field or to expert peer review in the publication of findings, a scientist is one whose ideas are submitted for selection by a marketplace. Ideas are selected on a case by case basis, on an example by example basis. That is they are selected, with the scientist as their representative, on account of their exemplary rather than intrinsic qualities. They are selected, from one discipline or another, for the exemplary qualities they display. They are accounted for within a representation and with the scientist as representative that comes to stand for the whole field. Cixin Liu imagines the scenario precisely—as a science fiction.1 Liu recognises in it the limit that is effectively placed on research. This is not the simple constraint imposed by the practical efforts a scientist now expends in justificatory examination and in exemplification of her field. It is not only the limited time left to him, after the paperwork is done, to conduct research and to do the science. Neither is it, outside of projecting outcomes, accounting for purposes and reporting on progress, in focussing on the outcomes, the holding to those outcomes and the holding to the adequacy of their given representations that holds back, holding up, science. It is not the constraint of what representation constrains science to in the final outcome of an exemplary research project. Neither is it the justification sought in the final outcome for having undertaken research, having spent time and money and expended resources on it. It is not the justifying a scientist does to claim the distinct finding as her own, in the case of this as an institutional or a funding requirement. Neither is it the advertising he does in light of commercial applications and opportunities to secure commercialisable IP as these too may be required. Although they involve expenditure, in scientific labour, in so far as representation is exemplary of what the general scientific effort has become, neither outcomes nor selfscoring or institutional scoring on scorecards on the way to achieving outcomes nor the 1 Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem, Trans. Ken Liu, (London, UK: Head of Zeus, 2018), 393. Simon Taylor 4 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing impetus to gaining technoscientific capital impose the limit. Since it is the constraint placed directly on this overall effort—the scientific effort as exemplary—it is a constraint on science in general. It is the restriction to the terms of representation in which the constraint and limit placed on science consists. The research of the scientist, the science of the researcher is now restricted to the terms and concepts of this now. A scientist is constrained to use current terms and common concepts. She is limited by the present framework of reference. He is restricted from exceeding the framework currently held in common in one or another discipline. Progress is pursued, projects and purposes are pursued, within the terms of what agrees with the present and with the present understanding. Scientific enquiry goes along up to where it meets the outer limit of what the fundamental understanding can sustain. What exceeds it, disagrees with it, or refuses it, is disbarred. What extends it is accepted up to this limit so long as it is coextensive with the field of representation of which the science is representative. What disrupts, what threatens to overturn science, to destabilise it cannot, since the field, within the stabilisation of its polity, is already constituted as disruptive. A scientist participates in disruption much as we might say she performs it as part of the representation. For a scientist, that is his role. In a marketplace competitive outriders are to be encouraged, even to the extent of achieving monopolies and gaining technoscientific capital— or rather claiming its gain. This sticking to the script is not an abrogation of knowledge production but an arrogation to the authority of a given representation of knowledge, in which knowledge consists. Science arrogates the decision of what it can know and of what can be known as the product of enquiry to the exemplary, stable paradigm of recognition. No terms, concepts or functions under its regime not belonging to the present paradigm will be recognised, subjected to recognition, authorised. No attempt to initiate paradigm shift will be tolerated since the field’s existence—that of one scientific discipline or another—is the issue of its stabilisation, of the maintenance of disciplinary authority, the production of exemplary character (or caricature), Simon Taylor 5 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the whole theatre of operations. (In this sense, the marketplace is only scenic. As critics of its elevation in neoliberal thinking have concluded, the market does not exist. It too is caricature.) The fact of authority, of maintaining the discipline, stability, integrity of field of representation does not in turn entail neutrality. Rather it is neutralising. Neither is objectivity entailed in it, except discursively—as a kind of logic, an apology, a Science-ology. (We will see this logic to be that of writing, to which it is irreducible but which is its condition.) The selective system thought to be neutral, thought to be objective, is thought so because it is not interested in the production of which the existence of fields of scientific enquiry is the issue. The selective system thought to be disinterested and impartial makes decisions based in formal considerations rather than analysis. Leave analysis to the theorists of science, it declares, much as it might similarly declare for art—or politics, or matters relating to mental life, or those relating to the natural environment—leave analysis to its representatives, to the experts. What impels the declaration is this assumption: Let us see how they do against the facts, the material facts. The raw data then represented, we are to be convinced these are exemplary. It is on the basis of the conviction in the exemplary empirical status of data, quantitative survey and statistics— with the scientist, the artist, the politician, the psychologist, the biologist, the ecologist, the expert in her field, its spokesman and presenter at a TED talk, its representative—the decision will be made. We are all aware the facts may be misrepresented, but not all of them all of the time. The numbers do not lie. It is only a question of getting at them. What other role could the public intellectual have, as one whose research is published? A scientist is a conduit, a scholar a medium. After that it is all informatics, infographics. In other words it is a matter of how the representation is managed, not a question of its production. (We will see this belongs to the invisible work in preparation going on before any representation is made, before it is made visible, before being managed and published and marketed. It is a glimpse into what follows as theatre we catch here.) For Liu representation is the subjective expression of one who sees, the ones who see, since in his books it becomes multiple. We can imagine a time when each scientist is in effect a Simon Taylor 6 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing performer and science is a performance of itself. Liu imagines an audience. Not only does the audience exist as points of view that are everywhere and see everything, this fact by itself is sufficient to impose a deadlock on human science.2 (Liu does offer another explanation which relies on the participation of the audience in the falsification of scientific results.3 This appears to us rather to strengthen our line of argument than weaken it, since the object of observation is here reversible to the subject of representation. In addition, proceeding by falsification forms part of the current paradigm recognised by scientific knowledge, by which its practice is recognised.) There may be conflict between viewpoints and among them, just as there are conflicts in the representation of empirical data and in what these represent—to an onlooker. But from this multiplicity emplaced globally—and Liu’s audience to the performance of science and scientific research is necessarily extraterrestrial—is contrived a temporal shield over the disciplines of science defending them in their homeostasis. What makes the situation precarious is the complete grasp institutional oversight can have and is enabled to maintain. This intelligence is gained at the cost that it—and not the overall effort of scientific enquiry or the effort engaged in overcoming institutional capture—inform the practice. In the account made that has to take them into account for the sake of disciplinary stability, integrity and scientific authority, or just expertise, sciences give up selfimposition of disciplinary borders and boundaries as those applied from within one discipline or another to their imposition from without. They give up to imposition from without also designs on interdiscplinarity, transdisciplinarity and collaborative engagements crossing institutional lines—as these are enabled by the structural isomorphism characterising neoliberal institutions. They do so as part of the self-participation in the grasp held on them by oversight over disciplinary practice. But the precarity in the homeostatic relation of disciplinary practice—which we can also generalise as being characteristic across institutions—comes about because accounts fulfilling institutional requirements, required by this power formation, consisting in responses and responsibilities, include general strategies of self-defence and local tactics of resistance and refusal. Now practice polices. It does what it 2 3 Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest, Trans. by Joel Martinsen, (London, UK: Head of Zeus, 2018), 360. Liu, The Three-Body Problem, op. cit., 354-355. Simon Taylor 7 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing polices, is nothing but that effort at holding itself in, being the object of observation that holds itself in to the subject of representation, to the extent and limit of that subject’s patience. Disciplinary practice must never lose sight of this self-recognition. The risk of stepping out onto the void is loss of support. It must control and contain itself, at the risk of losing audience. Disciplinary practice must never lose self-participation, on which the sense of itself comes to be entirely based. We can also see in terms of techniques determining a sense of itself this form of governance in the institution of the individual. The individual, the institution of the individual, is the legacy of liberalism producing individualism. The institution of the individual suffers an identical fate that is the fate of identity, of an identification, of selfparticipation and self-recognition. These techniques of neoliberal governance that are performance-oriented determine and terminate in sense of self. Sense of self is a matter of performance geared to indicating a shifting set of coordinates in representation. What individuation achieves for individualism, the presentation that is in representation achieves for the performance of what we might call personalism. The personological form sits quite apart from the process, production and preparation individuating. It is instead in autocorrection, autoveillance and autoperformative participating in the process, production and preparation of the person that personalism is announced. Precarity gets personal given the techniques of control. Liberal individualism invests in neoliberal personalism. For this reason strategies resisting and in which effort is engaged in overcoming lockdown feedback. We have heard the cries, You can’t run away from the future! You can’t escape progress! But these, what future there is and what progress there can be, are only inescapable where both future and progress are formed in the image of the institution—whether it be the institution of a scientific discipline and practice or the institution of the individual. Where they are formed in the image of a feedback cycle of governance, in which representation plays one part, in which recognition plays another, these institutions are of the same thought, are in effect the same subject. In both intelligence and information coincide, since they coincide in the eye recognising what is represented and understanding only that. Precarity happens when what is represented is not recognised, when what is recognised is not the represented expected, is in Simon Taylor 8 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the wrong key. The feedback loop breaks because key indications of performance are and are recognised to be missing, when what is represented is not and is recognised not to be understood, when it breaks with a paradigm that internalises disruption. The self-identification that is performed by neoliberal institutions as personalism or scientism is not however a false identification but a matter of alienation. It is not a falsification, except as we understand falsification to be evidentiary, in this case of identity. Not a lie, it is but one of a shifting number of key coordinates given in representation. It concerns two truths coexisting and coinciding. The matter of institutional desire consists in its coordinates. That of personal desire comprises autoveillance, performance, as we have said, and the autoparticipatory moment resulting even spontaneously resulting in identification with the same. It is where the researcher’s desire and the institution’s desire for recognition and for representation coincide. The difference underlying the coincidence and why there are two truths coexisting, cohabiting, in the identical, the same, and not one lie, is in the division of labour. The institution is on the side of capital. (This formulation is from Frédéric Lordon, who takes it from François Ruffin’s La guerre des classes.4) A scientist, a researcher, is on the side of labour. But she is required to answer for capital. Opting for institutional recognition, holding himself exemplary and, responsible for the representation his discipline receives, its representative, he opts for the side of capital. To give the impression capital is a two-way street, that one can be on the side of capital, while the other is on the side of labour, we know to be a local tactic of oppression, one that globally cannot be sustained. Arrogation of oppressive agency, through emptying the division of any human agency, is the global strategy. But it is only a strategy. Arrogation is operated by those we recognise to be working as much for total automation of economic institutions as against human intervention in them. Being human, the workers of political economy are then divided against themselves without dividing the disciplinary identity or territory of political economy. But this division of two truths goes further than the invisible hands it is the work of—which is for that reason theatrical. It goes to the alienation of 4 Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, Trans. Gabriel Ash, (London, UK: Verso, 2014), 147. Simon Taylor 9 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing those who believe themselves to be on the side of capital as well, whose labour consists in large part of sustaining this belief—a luxury surely, while the ones on the side of labour have only to suspend disbelief they work for these employers, as employees, whose terms of employment largely consist in insisting that in the eyes of the law they do, eyes that evidently do not see the invisible work. It becomes then a division in law, with its iron rule, never better formulated than when, discussing politics in the theatre group that was my research practice we heard the Russian actress say to the Chinese actress, In Russia, if you don’t work you die. The Chinese actress then said, In China it is the same. If you don’t work you die. And we both had revolutions! the Russian actress said, and they laughed. Death is less likely as we go up the payscale. But, the higher he climbs it, precariousness is the sign he is not on the side of capital. Neither the manager, the director, the boss, the employer is, nor is the employee. For one who works with her hands and for one who works with her intellect the fact of it is unmistakeable: the more employees’ rights are reduced, the more the employer’s rights are protected, she remains a servant. But she, the CEO, having aligned her desire for recognition and representation with the corporation’s desire for recognition and representation in the FTSE, the NASDAQ, is not a servant of capital. She is not enslaved by her answerability to the share- and stakeholders. The absurd millions expended on her are only compensation for upholding the pretence she is on the right side, when really she stands facing the wrong way up a one-way street while the future hurtles headlong towards her; and at night, it has to be at night, she is blinded by the oncoming traffic and carries with her, to AGMs and in frontpage news, the air of a rabbit in the headlights. She is not on the side of capital but on the side of a precarity that holds her position to be purely formal and regards her accomplishments, including failure, in the same light, holds failure, in fact, to be a formal accomplishment, an accomplishment of form. It is the same for the boss as for the membership of a casualised workforce. Precarity is the representative state of work in the labour market. But what it represents is not universal enslavement. It is rather equivalence, commutability. He can be swapped out and another can do the same job. A substitute can be found to fit the same mould. Simon Taylor 10 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Call it general opportunity, the prospect of infinite replaceability: comedians can be presidents; sociopaths can be heads of corporations. But still this does not mean that the role around which the mould is formed is not in some way produced and does not in some way have its production managed. It does not mean the one found will not be subject to measure. It means the form of measurement is taken from the mould. Qualification is subject to it and key competencies are judged from the fit of it not the fitness to it. It is not a matter of being or not being fit to task. It means that the role and how it is performed is not informed by the person occupying it. The one who fits it fulfils the task of occupying a position for so long as its formal function is observed. The intelligence of which the role is the product, the subject of which it is the project and the analytic function handling information—its information, its intelligence, moulding its subjectivity—is not involved in the formation, production or management of the mould. Intelligence is sequestered to the automation of capital. Information is subject to this automation. Analysis is part of it and regards it as having achieved autonomy: the autonomous formation, production and management of infinitely replaceable parts. Its participants are evolved as data sources from which information is mined. But this is in order to produce the endless chain of service and client at work in the automation of capital, the service-client chain that working as if to produce it. It is as if cause and effect are replaced by service and client. HR evolves as a service. Even management evolves as a service. But the first’s agency is the second’s cliency. Where it has and exercises agency it is as the client. It reproduces the management’s cliency in its own management. Here we see the practical neutralisation of division at the same time as division is fractally reproduced. All the way down evolves as all the way across the organisation of institutions. The division of labour that the client-service relation reproduces reaches the individual. But when it does, it does not do so in the manner of an atomisation of competing individual interests, because individual interests are no longer free and because the institution of the individual is subject to the client-service relation. It is not in the manner that individuals now view themselves as agents in competition with others of their like and equally free to pursue self-interest the division of labour arrives. They recognise however others as being of their Simon Taylor 11 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing like for being likewise both client and service. They recognise in each other their neutral selfinterest, their response to a competition which concerns them but abstractly, for which he has no end of responsibility and for which she can claim no final responsibility. There is another along the chain, always another, for whom I am agency, and who assumes for me the status of a client. My self-interest survives in the manner that I am too this other and receive from myself this status that is subjection, a burden, and a responsibility. It is one I cannot stand in the place of, as if it too is on the side of capital. Liberalism’s free agent evolves as neoliberalism’s dumb actor. Rational agency belongs to the network of interrelated interests and to the relation of desires, institutional and individual, represented in the scenography of a political economy. Rational agency is first this relation, this networking, of clients and services. It is an evolution in so far as the automation of capital is seen as self-organising and autonomous—an ecology in which both progress and the future together feature as inescapable facts. They are what we might call the specifications of a global programme, strategically linking growth with a living and autonomous being. The market that we remind ourselves for neoliberalism’s critics does not exist first mobilises information and second assumes the form of this mobilisation, is formed first and then is itself capable of independent movement—it evolves, from which automobilisation, where, as we saw, its headlong advance seemed to be without us or with us in the way, on what was once called the Information Superhighway, it evolves as a thinking network. The intelligence, which is that of being a free agent having freedom of choice and enjoying its exercise, itself is sequestered in the automation of capital. Emptied of human agency, which assumes the form of human cliency, the programme consists in the automobilisation of oppression. It represents oppression as an evolution from the division of labour. As critics of neoliberalism point out, each one who works becomes a manager of her time and schedule, each one presents and must promote himself as a human resource, each, his own entrepreneur, remains both permanently vigilant—autocorrective and autoveillant—as well as connected, contactable and part of the network. Competition pertains to participation in the information network. So each one is her own data mine or he strip-mines the unconscious for the desires and interests that are in coincidence with the institutional drivers of a political Simon Taylor 12 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing economy. Alienation persists rather in the analytical perspective of being alienated from possession of the means of production than in the form of actually not having access to these means. Since the data is within, since to perform is to produce data, since the subject is the resource from within which it is to be presented, and since each is the exemplary one both who represents it and who is represented in it, it is in each one’s service to herself that she become her own client and each one’s cliency to himself that he become his own servant. The division of labour is inserted between the brain that commands the hands that take up and the eye that registers. The body is consummated as information technology, but that it performs as the means of production for this of which it is no longer the information. Now we are wrong to say the brain is a client for whom the service of the hands is done. We are as wrong to say the brain is seat of desire, source of the intent and purpose which the hands carry out and we are wrong to plot their coincidence and deviation, the clumsy slips they make, and their steady accuracy in accomplishing a task, as giving information, whether conscious or unconscious, on its performer: the body does not do the brain the service of information. Neither is the intelligence outwardly given, nor is it by the map localising centres of activity across the network, both in the brain and nervous system. But we are right to say it is in the eye that these are collocated, that it is in the visible and that it is from its viewpoint and perspective work is well or badly done. We are right but that we do not see what we have done. We still do not know, whether isolating it at the synapse or in the genome, in the neuron failing to fire or in the genetic flaw, if this is what the brain wanted, whether what the hand did came to this point. In isolating this point we isolate it in the visible. We isolate in it only the visible and in what is visible what is complete. This is a meaning that is signified as much as a datum of knowledge. It is both, but that the analytical information is missing. We might say that the intelligence is missing as well; and this is the problem: a genetic order is given without genesis; an instance is isolated on the order of the visible without instantiation. It is without preparation, which means, while the actors, unconscious or conscious, are identified, or the genetic or neuronal elements are, intelligence is not only without agency, it is without Simon Taylor 13 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing an intelligent agent, and is in the access or performance of intelligence. Intelligence is deprived of the means of production but not of this access. The role of information, then of data and then of automated algorithms is important in determining the position of the brain. We are wrong to say the brain is client because it is not client to this automation. The brain-body relation is and remains a resource for the symbolic inflation: it continually emits information. That cybernetics is retained to clip the ticket, in biofeedback, reinforces the notion of a human bodily origin and of it being an issue of the brain. But the brain is not in a position to be higher up than itself. It is then not the end of the client-service relation and not at either end. Although that relation is increasingly called upon in place of causality, the brain rather describes a distributed organisation, flat and screen-like, in which the division between those on the side of capital and those on the side of labour gets lost: there is nobody and no brain on the side of capital. Still, it functions like a brain; and it is to algorithmic functions transforming data that it owes its resemblance. The image of the brain’s cliency hides the fact of its loss of agency. This is being borne out in the progress made in neuroscience of a neurocognitive model showing a more even distribution of agency across localised clusters of nerves in the body and across different areas in the brain. It is a model in which the brain is immanent to relations of service and cliency and where it is able to provide neither agency nor mastery. It cannot even inform on itself. But we should not expect it to, since this model gives another viewpoint from which we see in the brain the consummation of a loss of mastery—a loss of power. In its visibility, since we recognise in it a contingent impoverishment and lessening in the power to command political economy, we should also be suspicious of this loss of power. It is then not in the monetisation of personal data that we discover the most salient aspect of the use of the human for the intelligence sequestered in capital automation. It is in the subjection of data to functions of transformation, in the algorithm, that we see what is most human and humanly cultural about to happen, since here what has ordinary symbolic value— which has always been historically accorded a cultural role, a cultural power even—is articulated, elaborated. Automated algorithms function to transform the ordinary symbolic Simon Taylor 14 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing value of data. What results is not for the common senses but is super- or extra-sensory: it transcends the human; and, like any human cultural value, its inflation to transcendence is conducted out of a framework of reference that is entirely symbolic. The brain is a special symbol. It is both end of transcendence conducted by symbolic means— the thinking network we have mentioned—and means to that end. The brain is called on to supply itself as an image for that end—its cliency—and to serve as means. Its requisition in service to a higher field, a transcendent end of representation, presupposes of the brain that it too is made in the image it is called on to supply and that it not only represent itself in this image but that it is also its representative—its highest. So the brain’s highest functions are representational, are thought to be, and thought is subjected to representation. But this is what we might call a theatrical illusion, effecting a viewpoint, the viewpoint, from which it appears so. We will come to see this as being a subject position and find in it a preparatory stage preceding subjection, before what is made visible, a period of production, belonging to, and taking place before, the subject. We will come to see, as holding both the symbolic object—here the brain—and the point of view that is generated on it, theatre as addressing the feeding-back-on-itself of subjection by an image the subject itself has supplied and as better addressing it than cybernetic feedback. The feedback loop escalates, works up and integrates the imaginary in the symbolic, fusing together, at the site of reference of the brain, symbol and subject, so that the only recourse for analysis is regress, is positing another brain behind this one, and another behind that—a state of affairs still maintained in regard of human consciousness. Regress holds out the promise of integration at the local level but, because it is as impossible that consciousness is behind the brain as it is that another brain is behind the brain, it cannot keep its promise. So, taken for granted, it is passed over and consciousness is placed before the impossibility of regress. For regress to have, or to have to posit, even no more than one brain or consciousness beyond begins an iteration that is potentially endless, of brains, consciousnesses, of subjects, each one either both operating or observing its operations, each one beyond in emulation of the one before. The impossibility, that overwrites in repetition the absence of final identity, Simon Taylor 15 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing underwrites in representation the presence and finality of identity: it makes identity total. In summarising it at no more than one, it totalises—making it inescapable. The first step is the final guarantee. While renewed scientific interest in consciousness is explained by this problem, which is of consciousness that cannot be found, but that it is in identical replication of itself, but that it has lost its seat in the brain, the operations of which it either both commands or oversees, it is research leading to the solution, about to lead to it, of the previous problem, which is finally and entirely identical with it, that is put in the position of, and has to be posited as, either both commanding it or overseeing it—the previous problem of the brain, having the brain as its alpha and omega. The multiplication of research fields prefaced with neuro-, from neurocognitive to neuroaesthetic, is an indication in recognition of institutional interest, a show, we might say, of formal interest, but it is multiplication in iteration of the same and has a totalising identity as its finality—the solution of integration at the symbolic or representational level. Meanwhile the brain we are conscious of either as a physical or a cognitive network is frozen in place as both identically: as both the heavy organ we can weigh in our hands and the site of symbolic integration it has the character of substrate of all characters. Its impassibility is assumed from the impossibility of there hiding behind it another operating and observing. It will be haunted by this possibility, which is the possibility of the invisible, acknowledged in referral to the problem of consciousness, and, even as it engages in the symbolic inflation that is always a construction characteristic of defence, because it is substrate of the human, all signs will be removed from it of engagement, construction, labour and elaboration: all sign of the human. In order to serve the end of the most human dehumanisation the process is neutralisation at the neuro-centre, the anathematisation of thought, denaturalisation of human language—at the site of reference of the brain. Consciousness is drawn off to be the ineffable site for a new problematic. In order to assert itself as symbol of its own supersession the brain need have no recourse to consciousness, for the reason that this supersession is itself symbolic. That it is Simon Taylor 16 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing conducted in a state of nervousness around the question of consciousness raises the question but subordinates it. The brain will process data. By doing so, it is connecting data from its local field of reference in the body, from sources of transmission in the field, and from recollection, to a general economy of information that will select from the data provided and, by deciding its meaning, decide its value. Consciousness, because it is a liability from which the brain and its data have more or less to be protected, disconnected from this network, is displaced by it. Since it is subject to the play of any one of a series of nonphysical latencies—the powers of subjects otherwise ejected or drawn from the site—the brain operates within certain specifiable tolerances beyond which the data it emits is vulnerable not to corruption but to the devaluation of subjectivity. Consciousness is liable to appropriate the data to itself and— because it cannot halt it, because the brain cannot cease their emission, choke it—to hold back data, holding them from the general economy. Where this retention of information is not communicated, it has the characteristic that is familiar from defence of an overvaluation internal to subjectivity, which is of an exaggerated and nonmindful ego, neither participating nor performing, disengaged. We see once more how neoliberal personalism differs from competitive individualism: the former’s reappropriation of personal data is governed by feedback loops encouraging, rewarding and reinforcing self-presentation; the latter’s self-preservation easily flips over either into art, and artistic self-expression, where it can be institutionally mediated, or into acceptable and unacceptable illness, where it can also be institutionally mediated—as pathological—or remediated. Competitive individualism as a sociopathology is remediated as group leadership qualities, where nothing less than fascism is at stake (albeit a powerless fascism). Extreme self-interest is not only acceptable it is useful in positions of unselfreflective power. We might say it is theatrically useful except that here theatre is only used as a formal categorisation made in consideration of performance: the dumb actor is just the one who performs without knowing. So the group or people leader performs without acting. Then the sense of theatre is lost. The costumes, against the scene of the market, the play of the event, become nonevents, when in fact they are carefully prepared. They become natural when Simon Taylor 17 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing in fact they are manufactured. Produced as natural facts, they become moral. As moral effects, in them play is suppressed. They are laden with significance. If they are heavy with meaning, they are also heavy with intention: what they intend is to find examples and to educate. Liberalism progresses to neoliberalism by evolution—a natural fact; while its natural evolution proceeds to moral education: the theatre entertaining the free play of associations is then the didactic and educational one engaging the forced play of symbolic operations, or functions. The brain is exemplary, or is the example most laden with symbolic significance, in the instance of didactic, and we must also say, political theatre, because of its performance. (Since it plays an analytic role, we will repeat here the use of theatre in the sense of a didactic theatre, having the character of a performance venue against the sense later to be returned to it: its analytic role is to be considered as having been occluded by theatre’s role in formal education, a formal one of setting examples. This occlusion may itself be seen to be exemplary of analytic workings we will call theatrical.) Of what it performs, of its functions, in order to meet the performance requirements of that we may further term neuroliberalism, it is unconscious. It needs to be, while the brain’s free play of associations was—and is—conscious. The educative process follows an intention to liberate in an exemplary and morally responsible way the brain from consciousness, from the responsibility of consciousness, from being a conscious agency in responsible action. Education is to free the brain from the play of associations that is free; neuroliberalism can be said of the brain freed from freedom. It is then to be the venue for the supersession of the human however haunted by it. Its anxiety is turned to good effect in inoculating the neuroscientific understanding of the brain, producing in it an immunity to that of which it was formerly in possession and of which it is now dispossessed: the brain is enabled to quit its own company. In doing so it looks—the purpose—to another to make arrangements—of the human—in the distribution of economy, in social and political relations of community. (This is to follow Esposito’s analysis of the ingestion of a small portion of what is alien and other in what we here frame as the education of community: the Simon Taylor 18 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing metabolism of immunity has in the institution of the social polity its issue.5) The other community we are ‘woke’ to is the one that puts us as individuals to sleep. We are not unconscious during the operation, because we rightly fear the alternative, that is the lesson of the brain. In the scientific account of neuromedical research—and this factor, that the research is medical and medicinal, is also a feature of its moralism—the brain is made innocent of that which affects it. It is divided and subdivided. Formally organised as a unitary substance it is not, in any of its parts, functions or faculties, present to itself. If these assert functional schemes, in which, in strong emotion, in passion, a surface topography is linked to a deep one, in which amygdalae and hippocampi as well as prefrontal cortex enter into relation, by way of the cingulate gyrus, they cannot be accounted for, either structurally or in the structure of their relations. Neither can the facultative movement from deep in the memory of past passion in its involuntary return to consciousness. Neuroscience does not know how it works, because it cannot see, except by appointing formal indices and applying symbolic overlays, the value of which is the privilege afforded the practitioner. Over these instruments of the profession the one engaging in disciplinary practice can claim no oversight. As Dr Rahul Jandial, a neurosurgeon who has conducted thousands of procedures, says, when asking himself how any one of them might work, “Brilliant question. When you find out let’s connect.”6 So it is with economists: the brain’s autonomy is like that of the market as a thinking network—it is a matter of upholding it while maintaining it; of retaining and exercising professional authority while deferring to the operation of this higher authority of thought, of which the highest function is through the means of its own representation, of its own instrumentation. As with the market, that critics of neoliberalism contend does not exist, the brain’s autonomy is falsified. So we see why it is contended the market does not exist: it is not only because it 5 6 Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, Trans. Zakiya Hanafi, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011), 6. Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon: The New Sciences and Stories of the Brain, (London, UK: Penguin, 2019), 5. Simon Taylor 19 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing affords the privilege of working on it and alongside it, of being the crew who pass on its benefits to political interests, the one whose blunt force interventions and whose precise surgical operations, on the one hand in its baroque or byzantine intricacies, on the other opening its cavity with a saw, a chisel and a hammer, to those who build and install it, whose efforts are passed off as necessary but negligible; it is not only because its critics are cynical, resentful or envious, and see such efforts as undermining, impugning or falsifying the market’s existence, that they contend it does not exist: it is in view of autonomy. It is not at all that critics have oversight over the instrumentation the pit-crew is engaged with on the edge of the Information Superhighway, as it was once, that the economechanics, technician, philosopher and academic economists lack in the pit of their specialisation insuring the increasing volume and increasing rapidity in information flow, the symbolic transactions which are the traffic of the marketplace. It is because proofs of nonautonomy point to the future. They draw out a critical task: the animation and automation of the market towards autonomy.7 Autonomy is raised as a critical threshold to be reached through the animation and automation of symbolic transactions and one on which the existing technology is converging. The contention that the market does not exist is made in reference to this convergence, in a form that economists presuppose and that is presupposed in neoliberal political economy as a thinking network. But critics are right: the market does not exist, yet. Or they are wrong, because in order for it not to exist in this form means changing the way we think about thinking, about knowledge and about science. To say it does not, to claim it does not exist is unscientific, because in science, in scientific research, in neuroscience as much as in physics, it is apparent and on show. Increasingly we do not, but if we hold on to the idea that we think with our brains, that thought takes place in the human brain, largely, and that we are not thought-readers, that is, thinking is individual, largely, and not collective, taking place in the individual human brain, in 7 The conjunction of these three terms—animation, automation, autonomy—is Gregory Flaxman’s in considering the technosemiotic of cinema announced in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Technosemiosis engages the nonhuman view that can take in the history of the universe from the beginning of timespace and marks in Kubrick’s film a technic as well as cosmic threshold for human becoming transhuman, nonhuman. Gregory Flaxman, “The Screen is a Brain: On the Techno-Genetic Evolution of Images.” Keynote presentation, Deleuze/Guattari Studies in Asia, 7th International Conference, Tokyo, June 21, 2019. Simon Taylor 20 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing giving it this autonomy, even in admitting that its autonomy is in the process of being eaten away, we demonstrate that in neuroscience, in neuroscientific research, in the knowledge we have of the brain, at present, however partial, the brain’s autonomy already points to another autonomous entity. Instituted by neuroscience, in place of a thinking brain—and one largely but never wholly responsible for its own thoughts—as the object of neuroscientific research, is a neuroeconomics in which the facultative labour of reason, intellection, intuition, imagination, memory, sensation, and of course that portion surplus to this labour mindful of having a lifestyle that is personality, are not only located functionally and topographically and given formal designation. Facultative agency is removed, divested, or as we have said, educated: to fulfil the task of the brain’s objectivity for science, all the parts of a brain, into which it is divided and subdivided, have at once to be present for their division and subdivision to be observed. Once recognised by science, they have once and for all to be represented by science. But a brain’s parts, as has been remarked, neither have oversight over themselves—there is no facultative agency in the brain with oversight over memory, or reasonable judgement, but an administration and management of resources—nor is oversight given a brain over its own instrumentation. Rather it is given that the representation itself has this oversight, being coterminous with instrumentation. That is it is to the brain’s higher functions that oversight—the ability to take in both the work and how it works—is given in the transaction and inventory of formal terms, indices and symbolic relations: since the highest function of the brain resides in its capacity for symbolic representation. It is for what is most human that the brain’s higher faculties work. If it is free to do this work, it cannot own it. It cannot own this work for the dual reason that owning it means retention from the general economy which gives it its value and because there is noone at home who can claim it. The fact of neuroeconomics is the endless referral of responsibility, enacted under the regime not of signs but of formal and functional indices of which neuroscience takes inventory, and the management of the flows of information by which no neuronal actor is ever informed. Each is only ever in possession of cliency being done the service of symbolic and transactional data processing—never author, never agent—by amygdalae, hippocampi, thalami, and cortical divisions, including those of language production, in the areas named after Broca and Wernicke. Simon Taylor 21 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The brain itself is insensate and this insensibility is carried out to the lengths of neutralising neural centres beyond the brain, forming the network as neutral and flat when it comes to the data being processed, whether it is objective sense data or subjective personal data being carried. Retention and holding back, as has been mentioned, or the stepping back the mind may do in pursuit of itself, in consciousness and self-consciousness, do not mean breaks in transmission but produce data further substantiating formally designated functions—in what we may now call, invoking an administrative denaturalisation of language, functionality. Data produced by psychophysical stresses, resistances and breakdowns as much as those caused by external physical strikes go to a functional gain, to a neuromanagerial gain, of giving new insights into enhancing neuroproductivity, brain plasticity, resilience and into models of both therapeutic and medical treatments to remove inefficiencies, creating greater processual efficiencies, from disruption, to the agility, for which the demand is placed on it, of the managerial mind. Denaturalisation of language follows the shift in accountability from any locally acting agency to that power which takes inventory of it, whether facultative, disciplinary or institutional. Before this inventory the mind is innocent: the mind is made innocent before its own witness, in its conscious or ‘woke’ state, which as we have noted corresponds more closely to being asleep—but only in so far as the administration, in for instance a biopolitics, avails itself of this term can it be said to belong to the denaturalisation of language. In its registrative or retentive state, thinking the thoughts it is free to think, the mind is no more than a client. So is the managerial mind no more than a client. It is no more responsible for its daydreams or its nightmares than it is to the pain that afflicts it—to pangs of loss or the numbness that is without pain and the shame accompanying it; and it is shame since any loss of feeling is a loss of functionality: but even that, which points neuroscience in the direction, by showing poor function, of the natural function in its good form when it is well, and which shows an index for neurosurgery of operability, is not why care is taken over feeling. Inadequacy is essential. In order that the chains of governance are activated, the flux of electrochemical aesthetic flows passing over the anaesthetic brain of anyone are overwhelming. They are so absolutely: the biodata of the times are not only to be performed and narrated, and, rehearsed, iterated, Simon Taylor 22 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing corresponding to the new narrative; they are not only to be serviceable emissions feeding algorithms and fed into statistical models; they are to be absolved. An administrative language has the performative object of removing natural recourse. In the brain it supports the shift away from facultative agency: the brain cannot be held accountable for the ideas that sparkle among the embers of neurotransmittors, leaping and dancing from axon to dendrite across the synapses. The brain has been freed from their freedom: the chain of association is forged from the simple expedient of substituting signal and function for signs, autonomic functions producing signals, prompting, on reception, complex electrochemical emissions as much as emissions of data of which the brain has no idea and on which signs are badly or arbitrarily fixed, while the system it is running on is automatic. The brain is neither responsible for its automaticity nor the accidents of which badly fixed signs or their fixation may serve as example, seed of both art, poetry and pathology, while the automaticity of autonomic subsystems is natural, moral and good. In the institution, as much as in the scientific or artistic discipline, administrative language supports a shift similarly, but one away from what we can call profession. The professions have now to account for themselves in terms belonging to the administration of the more general political economy; while the terms of profession are badly or arbitrarily fixed, these express an automaticity of the autonomic subsystems called services. This automaticity is naturally better because it allows for terms arbitrarily fixed, by recognising them as arbitrary, to be improved upon and for terms badly fixed to be open also to replacement by better ones. It is improvement on moral grounds. It views findings as so many outcomes to be selected from and regards the profession of the one who professes interest or professional preference to be a confession of personal interest, personal preference and liking—which can and must, in line with neoliberal personalism, be taken into account. It is for an improvement on the grounds of a political morality that knowledge progresses without the professor. That is without ties back down to the individual or the social passions which constitute the political as such.8 8 From Frédéric Lordon, op. cit. Simon Taylor 23 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The knowledge of the one who professes to know is uncoupled from its formation in that one, much as in the brain the reason and reasonable judgement is now a matter of signal processing, the automatic subroutines of which—or what forms it—are both invisible and out of its control. Forces, individual and social, producing either the thinker or the professor are not regulated by reason, judgement or acquired knowledge—professional experience in labour of any kind. They are deregulated and so they are ordered—their disorder managed— by a nongoverning principle of nonhierarchical administrative governance. This principle finds expression in the denaturalised language of administration so that deprofessionalisation and the denaturalisation of language go together. Agency and knowledge, agency and power, come apart. The brain is emblematic of the denaturalisation of professional language in its loss of facultative agency of which it retains the form but is unable to form the thought, that is most natural to it, of its own formation. We have considered this its education, served by its evolution, which is one in reverse, since it proceeds from an investment in the moralism of a liberatory project—the neoliberatory project: this is to free the brain from the chains of what is most natural to it—the uses of symbolic reason. The thinking network towards which neoliberal political economy is geared is absolved of these uses by the absolution of humanity the finality of which will be assured once it has autonomy, is singularity. The insurance taken—insulating the brain from thought—its anathematisation—and educating professions from individual professional responsibility, towards a confessional state of innocence, or shamelessness9 (the management of shame)—is enforced separation from natural expression through its mediation in administrative terms. This will also be its tabulation. The one who professes to think or to act speaks to the table of established mediative terms and concerns. She is not at home in the neuronal economy of her own brain; neither is he except that he participate in the language of the boardroom and concede to the imposition of a political morality neutralising professional authority and autonomy. 9 Cf. the uses of shame in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, (London, UK: Verso, 1995), 106-107, 108. Simon Taylor 24 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Denaturalisation of language is not translation from a field to which it is native, the terms of which natively express and constitute this as a field of institutional, facultative or disciplinary and professional knowledge. Mathematical science takes up a symbolic language through which it models and tests, where it is said to have and to have had historic success in describing and predicting how things work. The knowledge that is science has gained from the procedure native to it that things become objects of technical knowhow and subject to operations, operations that in turn are towards utility and in the service of knowledge. As we saw in the case of Dr Rahul Jandial, the success of science or neuroscience is not in saying why; and what a thing is, the material brain for example, such that it performs in the way it does, such that its performance can be foreseen, science does not know. It is the administration of technical things, belonging to an autonomous realm, the automaticities of which science maps in the hope of constituting that realm’s autonomy. That these things include its own technical language—given natural or native expression in a mathematical symbolic register—allows science to become innocent of its own expression. The professional scientist is not guilty of mistakes in the realm that is mapped by scientific knowledge. Whatever shame she carries it is personal and whatever it is that is professed to be known it is from shamelessness he confesses. But this lack of recourse is bought at the cost of denaturalisation of what we can call technology—or technologies, because it is always a question of languages pending the convergence of technologies in a single unified theory (and here we may draw a parallel with the nonexistent market, pending that convergence through existing technologies.) We might also say that this gives to language an evolutionary purpose, which is the reinforcement of a point of view, that of the market and technology, or of EnglishAmerican, the multiple extraterrestrial viewpoints of sophons in Liu’s science fiction or the singular viewpoint Latour names the Terrestrial, being the ought to of offering the one overview on global bioeconomic resources and ecosystemic finitude that is necessary because of the coming catastrophe.10 10 Cixin Liu, op. cit.; Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Trans. Catherine Porter, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018), 38ff. Simon Taylor 25 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing This makes the evolutionary purpose of language, through what its administration in a denaturalised term might call feedback, to reinforce the point of view in its position of terrestrial singularity. AI names it so too, a field wholly denaturalised, since it names that of which it does not speak, and is a technology with managerial discretion as to its cost and application administering human intelligence in managing human resources—and not replacing them if the price is too high (price being the primary sense organ of neoliberalism’s market). That is the workers in whom popular fear is instilled are in areas of work where it is cheaper to have humans than develop costly technological solutions.11 The one solution is to be educated to this viewpoint, and to have it reinforced in administrative language, of a managerial mind—because it is automated, both in the brain and in the world—to which we have no recourse: it is this subjective institution—of education, evolution and psycho-capital investment—which we will later call theatre. Given the double catastrophes—of an audience of one and of ecocide—at the same time as it is required, professional, and scientific, expertise is neutralised. But if the denaturalisation of language signals the removal of recourse, is a performative operation removing the professional’s accountability for a field of knowledge, expertise or competency, it is not so to announce the reign of irresponsibility. It is rather because the expert, the one who professes to know, who is competent in that field, again from experience of labour of any kind, ought not be held accountable or responsible. (Competency is then required as an administrative category and Capability is a department: those who meet core competency requirements, having key capabilities, are automatically selected.) Those who work in the field ought neither to be held to account—in fact are rendered incapable of making account—nor to be made responsible because the field ought to account for itself. For this reason is it subject to management assessment and the imposition of administrative metrics. For this reason measures are taken. This is not to say natural recourse is only removed at the level of professional life in the social or public sphere but also that the one who makes her avowal or professes to his knowledge as a private individual is no longer to be held to it. The individual is absolved at the same time the personal is confessed. It is another freedom that neuroliberalism frees us of: the freedom 11 Peter Fleming, The Worst is Yet to Come: A Post-Capitalist Survival Guide, (London, UK: Repeater, 2019), 62. Simon Taylor 26 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing to be guilty. I am not incapable when I talk to Capability. Capability will take care of my coming absence. I have done nothing wrong to report on Āwhina, as I am expected to in my job: the report itself bears that weight. I have only to capture accurate stats. Their accuracy is not mine to vouch for, it is the act of capture that is the demonstration—and neither would I be held to account if I falsified—even as it is to the stats that management will refer to rate my performance against organisational KPIs. I have learnings and I have behaviours—and these are demonstrated before me, often in pictorial form, on Tupu. Because it does not reside in falsifying or fudging the figures, because this can always be confessed, it is professing to dishonesty as much as to honesty—it is profession itself—that is embarrassing. Deprofessionalisation of professions—where no responsibility is taken, recourse is removed and where poor function is resolved in administrative functionality—is the object of a performative operation—as an enactment or demonstration—as much as denaturalisation of language and the neutralisation of responsible use that is the power of agency. This, where knowledge is a subroutine of administration, and knowledge and power are separated, enables the administrative apparatus of governance to coopt a natural and native language. It amounts to a re- or neo-colonisation of language such as occurred with Māori language— denaturalised in the term native to it, Te Reo, unnatural to itself in the Latin alphabet, meaning the language—in New Zealand. While it does not explain the terms Āwhina and Tupu, used above, it explains their use, or they enact and demonstrate and express an equation that is not a relation, that is nonrelational. So too the usage of Aotearoa for New Zealand has come about from administrative function: in terms of functionality, it performs the gesture of recognition of Māori and demonstrates biculturalism. But again, like Te Reo, like the name Māori itself, neutralises responsibility—the responsibility of all language, removes natural recourse—to its nativity, and liberates New Zealanders from the freedoms of shame and guilt—while the feeling of shame is essential—for partial genocide. To feel shame, to feel inadequate to social and collective responsibility is essential in activating the chains of governance, here of post-colonial administrative governance. Simon Taylor 27 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing As it has been described neutralisation of the power of agency in a language—effected by denaturalisation—makes its use innocent, free of guilt: a shamelessness extends over its user base and a powerlessness attends on its popular uptake. Its administrative use re-politicises at the same time as it de-politicises, because it is a politics without power. Rather it is a play or performance and, subject to ratings, has the aspect of populism. The personality of Māori is retained but it loses—is liberated from—the potential of individuation. It is a means of personal expression not that through which an individual becomes one as such; and, being administered, it offers a channel of communication, of narration, of personal confession and not of profession or avowal—of what has been called positive affirmation. A depoliticised politics, a politics that operates off another power than its own—just as measurement displaces analysis, the social will is displaced by its measurement in ratings—is populism, while the personal is repoliticised, so: at the level of the individual, personalism; at the level of the social, populism. Popularity supplants the political and suffuses the sphere of communication—given over to the market for and of social relations in networks administered by algorithms so that they are in fact nonrelations, since, denaturalised, they also operate off another power than their own, that of ratings and rankings—which in turn supplants the social. Here it is, in this neutralised zone where knowledge and thought denaturalised are rated by how they score, that the popular availability consists to take on personally both inadequacy and adequacy before social and collective responsibility and by these channels—because education in history is supposed to be overwhelming and because inadequacy and adequacy are essentially equal— simultaneously to confess and be absolved. The PR of using a denaturalised language may be good. For science this is the voice of technology; for the New Zealand public service it is Te Reo (in part, insofar as there is administrative gain to be had from their use; in part inasmuch their managerial usefulness is able to be measured). But, although the usage is to put them first, marketing and PR exist at another layer of measurement of the usefulness of using administrative language, of how useful it looks—in public performance—to recognise in science that it is its application Simon Taylor 28 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing through technical means which matters, in service, that it is its representation of a woke state of political culture which matters (even as political responsibility goes to sleep. Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam attested to this when, as the Guardian put it, “she said normally sleepy district council elections had had a rare “political dimension” this year.”12). The use occupies the layer of measurement, the useful that of capture. Marketing and PR proceed from and do not construct the populist aspect administrative language already has. The point of view reinforced in this language is picked up from its administrative use and captured for its usefulness to perform the use of how it looks, on, what we may call, the heuristic layer. In the New Zealand public service, there is a rollout of Te Reo as well as a rollcall to capture Māori language in situ. It is as if the picture taken—at the heuristic layer—by the rollcall—which is in some sense literal since it entails naming oneself and one’s whakapapa, genealogy, in this language—of degree and extent of organisational and individual uptake comes before the rollout because the means by which both are measured remain the same: measurement is always a technical matter; it is a technology of administration. The measure taken then before, in rolling out this use of a coopted denaturalised language, is from the same point of view as the one to give a popular rating taken after, which coopts technology as a denaturalised language of science. (We will see that by its methodic and systemic application it serves the methodology of administration in technocratic management.) In science, the point of view reinforced in technology, the point of view of technology, is that of what is properly called technocracy, whose purpose in the administrative culture is to measure outcomes. These measurements— in the case of both service and science—must then be captured and sold on, on the market, given the market’s access to the heuristic layer. Technocracy is not closed in itself, but also acts as an open network of interests and extends its connectivity across layers in relations of clients and services. The methodical scientific 12 Emma Graham-Harrison and Lily Kuo. “Hong Kong university siege: staff say almost all protestors have gone.” The Guardian, International Edition. November 26, 2019. https:www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/26/hong-kong-elections-carrie-lam-holds-firm-as-chinesemedia-blames-external-forces, accessed November 27, 2019. Simon Taylor 29 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing work of measurement connects and extends from empirical research, use on one layer, to the capture of measurements, on the other—those useful, of successful outcomes in technological terms and of commercial applications: there is then a confusion of terms—from science and from technology and from commerce—of scientific, of technological and of commercial interests—in which the properly technocratic denaturalised language of scientific administration consists and which it enables or constructs (or what is enabled and constructed by methodology). This confusion makes it look as if tools are implemented because they work and as if instrumentation and representation coincide. It makes it appear that what is useful is also of use and that PR and marketing, that the advertising concept, are affective through what has been called their manufacture of consent. But such as are also called the media do not produce consensus so much as proceed from it and the community given rise to is not a construction so much of political, business and what Stiegler thematises as pharmacological interests,13 therapies of conciliation and powers of appropriation, as of social, in fact communitarian, interests, reinforced across the heuristic layer of administration and the statistical or algorithmic layer of population by a denaturalised language that, in refusing political, scientific and analytical recourse, refuses its responsibility to power. As politics without power it is, as we have said, from populism—irreducible to the global reach of information technologies—that the affect of these technologies proceeds: as if they spoke for science, for knowledge, thought and for understanding. The population is not populated by the data, neither is it by technocracy administering the gathering of data and managing the data gatherers. But the confusion of knowledge and stupidity does go this far:14 the denaturalisation of language we see in technology is thoroughgoing; so that the technical means of population control are confused with their administration and the technocracy administering with a ruling class. What is useful for control is confused with what is used; what is useful to control is confused with those who use it. 13 See for example Bernard Stiegler, States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the Twenty-First Century, Trans. Daniel Ross, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015). 14 See Stiegler at ibid. Simon Taylor 30 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Such measures feed the algorithms of assessment. They certainly give ratings of individual achievement, engagement and personal performance, differentiate amongst workers and count in expected behaviours, but these are for the management of global work of a whole workplace culture. They are formal indices for the administration and control of work— against a data template describing the field of work and the actions, efficiencies and outcomes towards which it is directed—not of the work. They are tools for the selection, command and allocation of resources for the tools of work or trade: they are symbolic tools forming an evenly distributed administrative apparatus governing inequalities in the uneven distribution of the technical tools of labour, including money, knowledge, the specialist languages of technologies, and populations—the control and management of which is known as the exercise of biopower. They make inventory indexing the physical in the exchange of human and natural resources, but represent these through the instrumentation of the symbolic, the automation of which, the speed of which, the efficiency of which, in data processing—the brain as data processor is emblematic—only increases—increasing the impression of autonomy, of a systemic administrative autonomy—by increasing the distribution to it of the technical tools of labour, including the funds necessary, the support for data collection and retention (knowledge), and the denaturalisation of language removing natural recourse and siloing populations into blocks of data in territories and camps. The rule of science-as-knowledge and of knowledge-as-power, and we should add, of the political itself—including that of so-called ideology, as it is heuristic—comes down to the tools with which science has concourse and commerce with the world: the moment of confusion does not consist in their misappropriation. It is not as an act of control or conspiracy of and administrative rule or of class rule—or as an act discriminating against bureaucratic minorities—even one, as Coleman puts it to end with minorities and to finish with their potential—against this backdrop of technocratic usurpation—of forming and acting on notions outside of the majority, since there is no outside of what she calls algorithmic humanity15—that the tools of science, the instruments of observation, technics of measurement, and methodical testing, by which its worldview has enveloped the world, are turned to those of rating, scoring 15 Felicity Coleman, “Becoming Algorithmic: Modalities of “collective interactivity” in the post-media era.” Keynote presentation, Deleuze/Guattari Studies in Asia, 7th International Conference, Tokyo, June 21, 2019. Simon Taylor 31 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing and ranking. That they are the same—whether dealing with instrumentation or with representation—has to do with the fact that they transcend human interests: so connectivities, functionalities and technical modalities belong to a single worldview outside the human and human institutions, in which these are instituted. From this viewpoint capture is as clear as a photograph—a photograph from space. It is from this heuristic lens data are gathered, rated, scored and ranked, and data on the gathered data are also. Data on the datagatherers are subject to further data-gathering: and to the fullest extent that science is capable of—on the principle it is good to know; it is however unsurprising and how much this knowledge is distrusted—are gathered the global data. These are used, because useful, and because we have this usage or propensity, to draw a picture; and they are not to be confused with Big Data, where there are really too many competing interests to get a good idea: because they capture the human condition in its limit condition which is that of anthropogenic climate change. Even the measurement of risk from a rise in temperature of 1 through 4 degrees is not enough. Observation must be made of how it plays. This includes interests that are immeasurable, represented in Big Data, the data too big to fail, against which our best efforts fail, and in global economy, which it is forgotten is an implementation, so that the absolute limit for humanity is not one. It is even less an horizon for experimentation. Science is too locked into the capture of its own heuristic. It experiences the feedback of representational lockdown. At an historic time of being called upon for another point of view it is the same. It too, like global economy, proceeds from an absolute that is in its nature or in its history, the history of its human nature, an absolute capture against which it inoculates itself, in the language, hardly ever technical, neither scientific nor, thought Adorno, poetic, of administration. Populism comes before. Its precedence is to situate in the social another power that is out of its control. It is the power to speak for us. The social subject is in the point of view that speaks for us. In cancelling human agency the apparatus of governance administering biopower does not work, is not set to work towards, the cancellation of the human. It is sped towards the end of Simon Taylor 32 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the autonomy of purely symbolic exchange that is the market—that does not exist but for and at the cost of the physical in the exchange of human and natural resources, its material base. Its reason in cancelling human interest and ending human recourse and responsibility is to avoid the annihilation of the human—when what happens happened. It is not thoughtless. This is its thinking: the market will be all that holds us back from annihilating ourselves; we rightly fear the alternative. The hope is we will be held back by what does not yet exist. Simon Taylor 33 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing II. method The institutional capture of artistic research relies on form not analysis. From the start the onus is on the artist researcher and not on the academic and disciplinary apparatus to conduct the analysis from which formal accomplishment is assessed and accredited. It is up to the institution to understand the researcher’s analysis. It is up to the researcher to find the form. Self-survey does not in this case mean framing or casting research in a framework such that it is understood by the institution responsible for its examination and assessment. It does not entail fitting or fixing it to a form that would then be the form of a discipline, an institutional form and formalised knowledge. Yet the practice is a form of research: the practice is assumed to be a form of knowledge. It is practice as research. Self-survey is finding the form which the practice is already assumed to have. Self-survey is the analysis necessary to find it. But should the institution so assume? The forms practice-as-research can take are as many as the practices, the disciplinary practices of the arts in general, or artistic disciplines. What does it mean to say performance or sculpture or poetry, painting, conceptual art or speculative fiction, is a form of research? What does it mean for it to be assumed? What does it mean for the institution offering accreditation for this form of research that is relatively new to it? What does it mean for the candidate taking up the offer to undertake practice-as-research in this setting? Simon Taylor 34 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The problem is the practice is not first the form of research that for the institution it is. This is the problem with what we might call the idea of artistic research in the setting of the academic institution: an idea relating to the condition of populism that precedes the PR internal to the institution, its marketing and ranking by ratings agencies; a common and popular idea, as well as the way the practice is grasped by it, an heuristic idea. The other problem is the one we suggested as being to find the form of research, which we might call the thought of practice-as-research: a thought that is individual to it, without personalising the research, without the personalisation of the form over which the researcher, freed from responsibility, exercises freedom of choice in the supermarket of ideas, forms of personalism; a thought that both shows its individual origination and individuates alongside in relation to it—a genital thought in which knowledge is not different from creation. What is created is the origin of the idea by which the institution takes hold of the practice-as-form-ofresearch the thought expresses—its original contribution to knowledge. The full expression of the thought is the idea and is so at the end of the interrogation of the practice that is its analysis. The case is that the candidate knows the practice. Its practice requires this disciplinary knowledge. It is first for her a form. She already has her ideas and perhaps he is complacent in his opinions. In fact the institution sets the requirement she know. A doctoral student came to be reviewed in the first year of her candidature with dual practices, one in photography, one poetry. She had, she admitted, only recently begun writing poetry. Had she done so perhaps in answer to the muteness of the photographs—as if to express their ideas? Had she started writing poetry so that the institution understood and could grasp the form—so that it could get the idea? Trying to present a practice one did not know, as part of a practice-led doctoral project, said a reviewer on the panel, who happened to be my doctoral supervisor, was like hoping to enter the Sorbonne expecting you could pick up French along the way. You simply do not. You cannot hold this expectation. Veto was not applied in this instance. But perhaps he is a bad artist and Simon Taylor 35 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing not complacent in his ideas but an ineffectual artist? It is not then that he does not necessarily know, knowing first, as the institution does not, his practice as art form. The institution cannot remain entirely neutral in regard to the quality of the work. Perhaps it is a disaster? But might this disaster not still return results worthwhile as research? What results? There will be some sort of collusion between the institution and the artist researcher, between him and the school, between her and her supervisor, supervisors. Will there be collusion amongst the examiners, or the reviewers—will it continue on until the results are worked up, the ideas understood, the results tallied? Will there be exercised a conspiracy of silence where the work is bad? Or will the consensus be generosity towards it, or else neutrality? Is what happens to the assumption on the part of the institution that a form of art can be a form of research its assumption of the role of arbiter? There seems to be little in it for the institution, for the professors, for the schools, the faculties, the departments, the reviewers, supervisors, for the candidate, except the formal undertaking. This agreement can take the form of collusion in which all parties are complicit, although they know better or suspect it— and there is still the thing called knowledge, usually written into the formal agreement held between parties in the form of original contribution to knowledge. Is it written in out of habit? It is over to the candidate, to the artist researcher, to show such a contribution—to knowledge. But an understanding can always be reached over the quality of the work, over the quality of its contribution. Art practice is not after all quantifiable. Is it not then the case, in the possibility of complicity, collusion, silence, the possibility of using personal and professional favours, the favours of status and of power, in the form of an ideal neutrality, that this is all a performance? The identities involved, the active identifications and the involuntary, the ones we are unconscious of, they are roles, in a power play for status, for rank and kudos. Over them our oversight is exercised in autoveillance and in the demand for self-assessment. In them our engagement is exercised in autoparticipation and in the demand Simon Taylor 36 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing for convincing self-portrayal. By them our thought is exercised by recognised authority and in the demand for recognition; our speech is authorised as our personal stake is by the mutual relation recognised as one of service to client: the terms of reference, the language used, are fixed in the process of its denaturalisation—are neither ours nor of the authority but only of recognition—under the condition of a populism preceding it. As we have seen, it is a thoroughgoing process and an ongoing one that frees the institution equally of responsibility to us and to itself and us of responsibility to it and to ourselves. It goes all the way through from the institution of the individual in the form of personalism to the institution of knowledge and its institutional accreditation in the form of populism. It is what we may call popular science this knowledge belonging to the marketplace of ideas.16 Recourse, in the measurable outcome of our performance, then proceeds from that measure instituting artistic research as a category of accreditation, setting the fashion for it, measured from the point of view of populism and on its condition. Recourse is reinforced by the process of denaturalisation to that single viewpoint represented in the score, rating, rank and metric, of price as of kudos, at all levels of popularity. Recourse is made in the unremitting positivity of the data which are emitted, produced, which result and which drive them, permitting all outcomes, to the language of positive outcomes. What is to become of this freedom? Without the self-survey of the candidate, knowledge is still produced: the artist researcher’s contribution is still calculable. In the absence of her analysis, knowledge takes the form of calculation, which unlike art practice makes it quantifiable. In this absence he does not so much make an original contribution through his research as perform for an audience, whose viewpoint is one shared, is reticulated and recursive, across client-service relations, from ratings agencies and consultancies to the personal likes of institutional representatives. In the absence of her analysis, of and in the chosen practical field, she tells its origin story, narrates a genetic history that is the field’s, belonging to its hypostasis, even to introducing 16 Cixin Liu, Death’s End, Trans. Ken Liu, (London, UK: Head of Zeus, 2018), 706. Simon Taylor 37 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing within it some local disruption, not a genesis. She does not stage the genetic origin of her own practice which is its individuation, that is the meaning of analysis. It is genetics without genesis. Without analysis a contribution to knowledge can be made but one with no other origin than that one viewpoint of calculation. It is all one, even if it is a shared one, one shared by a multiplicity, one participating in a network, a thinking network, across disciplines and fields of research, transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary, there is none outside. This explains the happiness of academics to discuss digital technology, to embrace hacking and coding, as if the discourse of the digital were a step beyond technology. It is from a desire for the outside that the problem of the digital is invoked, staging the problem of a digitology as a discourse separate from technology, an autonomous realm. Taking the step over the threshold of the digital, we advance towards the prospect of artificial intelligence as well as advancing its prospect. That is we stand on the same, we share the same horizon. But what is suppressed in this desire is the darker prospect of our wilful self-deception that the symbolic turn taken by the physical machine when it gains language, machine language (even calling it that hides the fact in plain sight), and knowledge, through computation and calculation, is anything like a transcendence. The law and language appeal to us as being what is most human. But the darker prospect simply adding to its attraction is that it is a transcendence, of the human spirit, will and reason, being one for ourselves that we prepared earlier. It is the transcendence of (human) self-mastery through its (willed) appropriation to the autonomous realm of as-near-lightspeed-as-we-can-maintain symbolic exchange enabled by (the discourse of) technology, in which the digital (discourse—digitology does not yet exist) is no more than an elaboration on the technological, its as-near-light-speed-as-we-can-manage accelerant.17 17 Stiegler in States of Shock mistakenly has it that “symbols circulate at the speed of light on digital networks,” implementing “radically new processes of writing, editing, distribution and reading” (op. cit. 193), a change to light-speed information, knowledge and data transfer, or what he calls ‘light-time’—‘temps-lumière’ (at ibid. 175 & 261n7), “comparable to those great moments of grammatization that profoundly shaped ... the content of modernity.” (The ellipsis conveys the thought this has happened “in a way that has been largely ignored by philosophy” while we see in it the return in desire of the object it has repressed—a temporal object.) Op. cit., 193. Simon Taylor 38 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing In the absence of the thematisation of his thought, in the anathematisation of thought, positive outcomes are entirely probable. Participation and communication accompany the performance, to which the institution attends in the outcome most desired. But so do denaturalisation of professional language and deprofessionalisation from which follows the professional embarrassment on which we have remarked. The cause of professional embarrassment is not the professional’s loss of hold on her own field of professional knowledge. The cause of professional embarrassment is not being or falling behind in the advance of knowledge at as-near-light-speed-as-we-can-maintain but being in front of it. The cause of professional embarrassment is not that he humanly cannot keep up with the advance of knowledge. When it comes to progress in technology, that is the discourse of science, it is not that she is behind in her knowledge. The cause of embarrassment for professionals is they are in front. They are in front, at the front, the forefront, appointed so to be. Expected to be on the bleeding edge, they are expected to front up and represent its cause, unless they are disappointing. The embarrassment is brought about by professionals’ embarrassment of professionalism, leading some to confession of personal failure, of professional aporia, others to invoke personalism to shore up professional relations, and most to act unprofessionally in personal retaliation against the professional role, officially imposed and recognised, that they occupy, to resistance and refusal of their own professional position, to shore up personal relations. The cause of professional embarrassment is that they are its representatives: they or we represent in our professional capacities the capacity of professionalism which is inadequate—a capacity evacuated of its own power, left vacuum, left only status, and an incapacity to speak for itself or to speak for capacities except in the language of administration that is the only language, sanctioning status in the first place, in which professional capacities are officially recognised, maintained and managed. So they, we also represent—like the munchkins of Oz—the advance of knowledge. Simon Taylor 39 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Progress at whatever speed, price or cost, is not, as others are led to believe, 18 what causes or what pays for professional embarrassment, since they, we represent it. What this progress is is the advance in administrative knowledge. What this advance is, that we represent in our professional capacities, is that of existing technologies, which we also front for, towards structuring all data, all knowledge, in a single system of governance, and the complete selftranscendence of administration and the managerial mind by AI. Professionals are the custodians for the security of information technology—are its instruments—in the management and maintenance of which humanity is already seen to have failed. Since it has failed, we can only represent. Embarrassment like shame has humanity not personal failure for its cause. The situation of the artist researcher in the setting of the academic institution does not reverse that of the researcher in the scientific institution. There the researcher is pressed into service representing her disciplinary field, he is the custodian of science, its caretaker and we can imagine a time when undertaking and performing research is no more than upholding the representation of science, no more than performance. The science professor is the one who does not profess to knowledge. She is not called into service to be its representative and the bounding of the scientific disciplinary field is not impugned, denigrated, neither suffers insult nor is assaulted, by his admission of the inadequacy of his knowledge or hers of its incompleteness. Science does not yet have all the facts. The theory, whatever its adequacy to certain facts, does not hold for all; scientific theory, however elegant, is not complete. Neither our understanding nor our account—the data not yet all in, not yet all accounted for—is complete. Scientific research is a professionalised field. Where the professional status of the professor remains intact with the admission of inadequacy and incompleteness, the status of the professional scientific researcher is overtaken by the discourse of technology. It depends on 18 Stiegler, in States of Shock, holds technical advance in digital information technology to be the cause of the incapacity to teach and therefore maintain knowledge. Although his project runs in parallel to our own, what is technical for Stiegler and a question of technics is for us political: technical autonomy, the autonomy of the technical realm, is sanctioned for political reasons: to forefend against the failure of the human. The knowledge economy, in its management by digital technologies, is only one case in point of a digitology yet to exist, the invocation of which is entirely political—that is, to do with the social passions. Op. cit. Simon Taylor 40 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the advances to be gained, on the not yet but coming soon of technological breakthroughs. It relies on giving advance notice, so is representative in the sense of advertising promise, giving it to be performed, is performance in the sense of having to be effectively to communicate and to convince, and in the sense of exaggerating claims, minimising the time, the money and the effort required—a performance on which the whole undertaking may also depend—and marginalising risk of failure. Pitching the promise of technological breakthroughs in development of which the professional researcher is representative, she pitches the benefits of research, in health and welfare, to the planet, to the human and to the planetary populations. He presents a schedule for realworld applications and a plan for potential commercialisation of IP. Under science, supporting it, is the discourse of method distinct to it. Methodology is that morally neutral discourse with which good science is synonymous. It distinguishes scientific knowledge, and is that with which it is instinct. The spirit of science, in which it is carried out, is carried by its method; the scientific spirit is methodological. Since she does not profess to know or to know completely, is it not of method that the science professor professes, in which she professes faith and in which he acknowledges truth? Is it not the case that the science researcher does not represent knowledge, as calculation performed by technical instruments, as technoscience, but that he is representative caretaker and custodian of a discourse of truth, a discursive method or methodology, of which technology is no more than instrumentation? Is it not a case of technical discourse, of technology, subject to methodology and subject to its truth? Is not one discourse instrumental and the one implemented by the other? Technology is no more than a participant in methodology. Is it not the case that technology is as morally neutral in the discursive pursuit of truth as weapons in war? Or is it this discursive subject that makes science morally superior, all claims for its neutrality to the contrary? The contrast between the artist researcher, the professor under whose oversight she undertakes research-as-practice and the scientist researcher conducting his research under a professional scrutiny less bound to science as field of knowledge than to spirit of science as Simon Taylor 41 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing methodological first appears to be a reversal in who is representative. The scientist researcher represents her field and has to; the artist researcher does not, cannot in fact. Even if resistant and despite himself, the humanities’ or liberal arts’ professor represents his field; the science professor can, through recourse to technology, but need not, being invested with the spirit of science in the discourse of method. Then it appears of the scholar, the professor in humanities—in the liberal arts faculty or arts faculty, the schools or scholia, liberated from the freedom to profess to historically humanistic precedence except by personal confession of preference—that her professional standing, her rank, is a function of her performance as a manager of the field in which she holds office and officiates, a hold once sinecure, then tenure, now more often than not contractual. A contracted officer, he is ranked as an administrator. It also appears that the professional status and rank of the science professor—who as often is a professor of technics, occupying a position adjacently in the school or faculty to his liberal arts’ counterpart—is invested with the moral superiority of the modern scientific ethos: that method is the essence of good science; and good science the way to truth. This ethos however is a pathos, it would finally appear, because the moral highground, assumed by the discourse of scientific method, is achieved at the expense of having to defend it, against the cultural background that sets such store by it. It is a defensive position the soaring spirit of science has over the truths it sends down, the approval of which in general culture, the political economically directed acceptance of which, is like a warm wind holding it aloft. Science is also imprisoned by its discourse of method much as we said earlier of capture by its own heuristic. It is set up by the truth that sets it up in its exalted state. But celebrated, so popular as it is, and so essential to cultural progress, to the civilised global culture, the knowledge that is science identified by those in the field with methodology comes to be an administrative object, an object of official interest. Approval is meted out under direction of political economy with the expediency of which the supreme moral good of scientific method comes to be associated. Methodology identified as good science—pointing the one true way—concerns now the administration of scientific Simon Taylor 42 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing interests as well as their pursuit and conduct. Its moral authority represented by the discourse of science applies to science itself; so the moral authority of scientific governance, authorising its administration and managing its interests, is smoothly assumed—in the disciplinary sense of a discourse—by technocracy as discourse of governance in political economy. Its way is smoothed: the denaturalisation of methodology as a discourse native to science assures it the position of making the other its instrument, the one discourse implementing the other, the language of truth—and by extension reason—articulating the other technical discourse of technology, wielding it as weapon or tool. We could say that methodology is politicised except that economics is scientised, so that the denaturalisation of language is mutually reciprocated across the sciences of economics, biology, sociology, physics and chemistry, and is thoroughgoing, even as the mathematical laws and statistical functions of physics are adopted throughout, or the interactions of chemical bonds of molecules, the transformations and metastabilities, are assumed by all, and the logics and languages dealing with society or with life are usurped by these stronger, more moral and more truthful ones. From being the disciplinary language of science the administrative and managerial initiative engaged in governance, its necessity, takes methodology, out of necessity of its truth, to be the language of control, reinforcing its truth, through which, throughout, control is exercised. Soon methodology is the one way street of general progress, its epistemic and apodictic guarantor, setting its rule an ineluctable truth to which any alternative is unthinkable. The discourse of science—the one true way—forms a bulwark against populism—since it is the already-exalted—in the same way as we used to say that the state is our only bulwark against global corporations and it fails the same way. Now the interests of corpocracy are largely those of technocracy, with the knowing collusion of institutions committed to the profession of knowledge. This coincidence that occurs inside political economy—we might say, this interest (this investment in) progress, shared by business leaders, political leaders and knowledge leaders, leaders in technical knowledge—enables the bulwark of methodology still to be maintained. Science is maintained as that which is irreducible to popular knowledge. Through methodic discourse—so it is a coincidence in language—science defends itself from Simon Taylor 43 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing popular science, and holds its central truth to be unassailable. This could not happen without collusion. Methodology seems to be the one region of what we may call the knowledge economy not subject to administrative ranking, self-assessment, to tests and scorecards, to seeing how well it is doing in light of the general consensus of popular approval and populism. Since there are not two truths but that they are methodologically identical, a true and false one sharing the relation that is the nonrelation of equality, it only seems that the true discourse of science has elevation which technology as the false does not. Knowledge workers collude with technocracy because it is in their interest that science-as-knowledge accede to superlative height. The fiction of science fiction is this: although extraterrestrial species have technologies far in advance of what has been, even of what can be, presently achieved by terrestrial science, still, Liu confirms of Trisolaran technology, humanity is able to understand how it works once its fundamental principles—that are discursive principles, even to straightening the bend in spacetime and using it for locomotion, which is narrated in an allegorical tale nested in the main narrative—are explained.19 Humans can use alien tools through grasping them discursively since the discourse of method is universal throughout the cosmos. The universe itself might be said to be carried on a wave of duration that is methodological.20 Always equal, relative and in nonrelation, to the truth that is false, a truth that is adequately falsifiable, the science of scientists defends itself against the bleeding edge of popular science and technology, against the stories and speculation, that lead its narrative, of science journalism, behind the protective shield of methodology. But this bulwark also isolates even as the discourse of scientific method makes its way as just good sense and sets up for the discourse of technology the common sense of populism.21 While science defends itself by the bulwark of methodic discourse against speculation as to in what it consists that science is; while its popularisers bring missives, smuggle reports, of good sense over from the other side: there are fewer to hold researchers to their faith in the truth of the “apodictic experience of 19 Cixin Liu, “The Third Tale of Yun Tianming “Prince Deep Water”, in Death’s End, op.cit., 399-414. 20 For “waves of duration” see Alphonso Lingis, “The Levels”, 55-68, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, Ed. Tom Sparrow, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 56. 21 For “good sense” and “common sense” see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Trans. Paul Patton, (London, UK: Continuum, 2004), 166-170. Simon Taylor 44 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing geometry”22 that is its demonstration. Even as it is incumbent on researchers to stand on the top, so they must address themselves to popular approval ratings and pitch for funds, while a dwindling number of scholars and professors whose professional standing is secured by the methodological bulwark, even as they are professionally disposed to have their backs, crouch down behind it. The moral highground is represented by its proselytisers and the populace basks under a shower of truths. If in what it consists that science is is captured by methodology (and when we are talking of science we are always talking of knowledge) and if it is just and if its good sense is above true and false what then causes the failure of its bulwark? What leads it to fail—in the same way we once thought the state our only defence against global corporations failed? What makes those who upheld it leave its cause? Is it for personal reasons or for the money that scientists now profess to expertise? This expertise is the profession of science and of themselves as its representatives given in the prescriptions of recognised knowledge—within a marketplace of ideas; it contrasts to the situation we are addressing, which is not of its consistency with knowledge but of the consistency of science—and the spirit of science—with methodology: here science is both above popular speculation as to in what it consists that science is and out of reach of those not expert in the field. The expertise that pertains to a methodological field, as a case of a term long since denaturalised and of a field long since deprofessionalised, is not readily recognised since it does not rest on knowledge but on method—from which come its ethics. (Although we will see that method when situated in art research comes to be what is recognised—as knowledge and expertise—in which is entailed the annexing of science ethics to become the business of philosophy and one of its few disciplinary success stories.) Professional expertise rests neither on knowledge, a depth or breadth of learning, or reading, or on mathematical understanding, nor on having the brains to do it (in the popular notion of the intelligence of brain scientists), but on adherence to nonrepresentative principles of method through which, when rigorously practised, it sets about determining knowledge like whether size is a determinant of the brains necessary to do science and the intelligence of which science would 22 Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., 214. Simon Taylor 45 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing have and get intelligence.23 This intelligence then is also that determining the expertise of the science researcher, who is then free to represent that research, claiming expertise according to what we may call common sense, above good sense, to be recognised as its representative in the market. If the numbers dwindle of scientists ready to crouch down behind the failing bulwark of methodology it must also be that it is not as appealing a proposition as it once was to keep faith with the spirit of science. There are commercial incentives not to, and professional reasons: success is now as much a matter of attracting funding for one’s field and may even be included in the terms of one’s employment as of the research outputs which put one in good standing with one’s profession, one’s peers and colleagues. These however will also be the beneficiaries of one’s marketing efforts, gain from publicity and be impressed by initiatives through which they may themselves advance or be advanced. What both commercial good sense and the professional sense hold in common is that they belong to the same reality, the same commercial reality prevailing in current political economy. That is they are suffused by currency in all senses. The practice of good science may have fewer to say that it is—is science-as-truth (and adequately falsifiable) following the nonrepresentative principles of method—and have lost its appeal—but it must not have given away its height: it must have changed—with the general collusion of business—of any of those whose business administered man is24—have changed use, from having the defensive role of a wall, a rampart or a fence, to having one of survey, serving the use of a tower, palisade or lookout. The view it has always commanded must now be more useful than the authority it once commanded. The practice of good science must in 23 Cf. the finding that an 8.6% loss of total brain volume afflicts adopted Romanian orphans 20 years later, with trauma and deprivation during infantile brain development cited as causative. Nuria K. Mackes, Dennis Golm, Sagari Sarkar, Robert Kumsta, Michael Rutter, Graeme Fairchild, Mitul A. Mehta, Edmund J. S. Sonuga-Barke, and on behalf of the ERA Young Adult Follow-up team. "Early childhood deprivation is associated with alterations in adult brain structure despite subsequent environmental enrichment." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. November 11, 2019. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/1/641, accessed January 8, 2020. 24 Cf. H.G. Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch: Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland, (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr, 1974), a work which “presents the view that the deportation of the Jews of Germany, and even their extermination, were administrative acts.” The English administered man is of course not wholly adequate as Mensch means man and woman. Simon Taylor 46 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing fact currently claim its authority not from having structural value based on methodology but from having optical value—and this in view of power also, and of its own power and potency that is agency: it must have gone from empowering to entowering. In what it consists that science is, we have said, is out of reach of those not expert in the field. But methodology puts it within reach. We have asked if in what it consists that science is is captured by methodology what causes its bulwark to fail. We have also said of this capture by methodology that it sets what is in the pleonasm of scientific knowledge above popular speculation and the common sense account of science, which is where the pleonasm arises. Scientific knowledge, we have said, is just and only given expression in the discourse of method, which is where, with methodology as the bridge, since its seven or eleven stages are open for all, both the mistaken idea of a general scientific knowledge common to all arises, as well as that of expertise being specific to the one who knows and not individual to the way it is known and knowable. The one possessing knowledge is the expert, not the one professing science, since the first serves the truth and claims her findings to be steps on the way to it—as well as rungs up the professional ladder—while the second suspends the truth as the adequately falsifiable, we have said, following the nonrepresentative principles of method. The second—his expertise being method not knowledge—reserves the truth for demonstration. If we take from Stiegler the formula—which he himself draws from his reading of Hegel—apodictic experience of geometry we can say that the truth, far from not being the issue, belongs to experience and, far from being a magic trick, belongs to the demonstrator, is, we can say, subject to her technical experience.25 Her technical experience is however another aspect of her methodological expertise. Since his project as a philosopher lies in the encounter of philosophy—thought not at all to be good sense or common—with the technical, with technics, a problem it has up to and now at its peril ignored, we can call technical experience the type of experience engaged in scientific demonstration. So it offers the apodictic experience of geometry to be the measure and standard of all knowledge. Crucially, for Stiegler, the spirit of science stands for all knowledge, and its loss, or loss of faith in it— 25 Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., 214. Simon Taylor 47 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing through the pressurisation, amplification and acceleration of technical means—stands for the loss of all knowledge into the future.26 We do not say that technics carry over so well into discourses of method—the discourse above all others being that in which the apodictic experience of geometry takes place. Technics do not relate to ways to know. Neither are they ways to show—a performativity, when it comes to science-as-knowledge, Stiegler permits. They are not techniques. But it is in technical experience—and with it—and with technics—that the fields of scientific research, theory and their associated bases of knowledge—which Stiegler calls protentions, following Husserl27— separate out, differentiate themselves and enter into self-possession as individuals. That is they individuate. Through technical experience—in demonstration and experiment—science is first specified and knowledge comes into its possession as what is proper to it. But here the danger arises, and the advantage, recalling us to why the scientific discourse can be identified in its eminence to be good sense: from the demonstration—or what we might equally call the performance—is recognised the truth. The truth itself is what, again the pleonasm, to reinforce the univocity of designation, scientific knowledge risks. The show is taken for the reality: the reality itself is of technical mediation. So there must be another stage beyond specification—and we can use this word in both its technical sense to refer to that which a technical device is capable of and in its sense of species and kinds of knowledge. This stage is individuation. In it we see how species and kinds of knowledge individuate, leading to their differentiation and specification. Methodology, we have said, works through implementing the technical discourse belonging to the familiar meaning of this word specification. It works through the capacitation of technical means as capabilities. Technical experience refers to this operation of one discourse on 26 See especially Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., 153. From his first book on technics Stiegler takes a sanguine view of performativity in relation to technicity: see Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 80. Cf. (for performativity in the context of neoliberal economic discourse) Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa and Lucia Sui ed.s, Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 27 Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., 152. Simon Taylor 48 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing another. The knowledge worker—we will see it is not specific to the scientist—is specified in her technical experience of a field of study. His experience is sensual. In Lingis’s terms it is the imperative in the field of the sensuous levels which call him out; the imperative placed on her is individual, as if she is called out by name; and the approach is a physical movement.28 It is not technically mediated because the media are directly sensuous—exactly when they are technical. Technics are the sensuous instruments of digitally aided visual modelling, of material measurement, calibrated to the scale and properties, the level of involvement and proximity required, in subjects under study. Not their outputs are experienced. Neither are they indices to objects: the symbolic data created is also of a vital and sensuous nature; statisticians develop a feel for the numbers, can often tell when discrepancies arise from instrumental malfunction and sense the anomalies and outliers in the fields they observe. The careful calibration fitting the machine to the scene, setting its indices of operation and operability to the sensible organs of observation, manipulation, demonstration, according to the conditions of the experiment—making the technical experience—neither maintain in its disciplinary homeostasis nor disrupt the field under study. The preparation of the necessary sensitivity and profile of level in the instruments and elements of registration, whether digital or analogue, involve a movement, one not in the least objective: taking some readings in the field, getting the level, optimising parameters, while all instrumental are not matters of application, adjustment or accommodation but of distribution; and they are not those actions where there are processes for everything. These actions discriminate, distinguish and differentiate; they are actions leading to ever finer discriminations, distinctions and differences; ones of refinement in manners, tastes and culture: its achievement is that of professional expertise in a professional and disciplinary culture, not a safety culture, built on good manners and common tastes, but a culture practiced in method, built on its manners, and taste—a sensual quality—acquired from technical experience. Neither are these actions, is this movement that is instrumentalised, an imperative 28 Alphonso Lingis, “The Levels,” 55-68, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, op. cit. 49 Simon Taylor 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing of protocol or established procedure, but of institution. The refinement proper to a culture practiced in method of its manners and tastes is that of an institution and it is through the singularising bias and tension of these actions, this movement, that it changes, that it is imperative and that it must. Its growth is then in the institution’s capacity for change, a capacity for freedom, that is like an advance. Its advance is of a knowledge for which as Lingis writes “any point turns into a pivot, any edge into a level, any surface into a plane, any space between things into a path”.29 Points once grasped turn, become pivots; edges once sharply delineated as world horizons extend levels; surfaces, once bounded, plateaux, arrived at, stretch out onto planes; the spaces between things once indiscernible, indivisible now open a path; and the volumes so disturbed at every step in their calculation with each one risk and register a void on which they rest that is boundless and incalculable. So is the refinement in knowledge a matter of manners, tastes and culture but also of their dispersion—a distribution upon which the institution is conditional in terms of the freedom it grants.30 Science being what is to come has failed to anticipate what is to come. When what happens happened it gets; and fails to recuperate.31 It fails in the task Lingis describes as Husserl’s of which the framework of reference is temporal and longitudinal: in the increasing absence of support for longitudinal studies we can see this failure partially reflected.32 (The 10,000-year 29 Ibid., 60. 30 On this understanding of the freedom of interests of institutions see Joe Hughes, Philosophy After Deleuze: Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation II, (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2012), 123ff, where he links Deleuze’s book on Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity with Instincts and Institutions written in the same year (1953). Hughes writes: “We enter into institutions because we cannot satisfy our needs without them. Institutions are invented means for the satisfaction of a tendency. The central political task, Deleuze will suggest in Instincts and Institutions, ... is to ensure that they provide us with new possibilities of life which secure our freedom.” Ibid., 123. 31 I am writing this on Auschwitz Remembrance Day. 32 Cf. Darian Leader, What is Madness?, (London, UK: Hamish Hamilton, 2011), 14: “We lose out here on what can be learned from long-term conversations. ... It is telling that since the end of the nineteenth century, the psychiatric literature on reticence [that pertains to the mad] has been almost non-existent, as if we want to know less and less about what matters to our patients.” And Cf. Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness, (Toronto, Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), 193-194 n4:“If one looks at the charts of patients institutionalized in asylums and state hospitals in the 1920s and 1930s, one finds extremely detailed clinical and phenomenological observations, often embedded in narratives of an almost novelistic richness and density (as in the classical descriptions of Kraepelin and others at the turn of the century). With the institution of rigid diagnostic criteria and manuals (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals, or DSMs) this richness and detail and phenomenological openness have disappeared, and one finds instead meager notes that give no Simon Taylor 50 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing clock, Clock of the Long Now, comes up against the fractionally advancing countdown to midnight of the Doomsday Clock.33) Husserl’s task, that for Lingis is what is most extraordinary about his philosophy and the task Husserl conceives for it, is to go from absolute consciousness to absolute corporeity.34 Consciousness here does not concern either a sphere of consciousness, or what comes into or is said to enter it. Neither is it absolute in the sense of having been freed from the duties of its incarnation. Absolute consciousness is not absolved of the body and not concerned with it. Corporeity, as for its bodily charge, is already found in the constitution of absolute consciousness. But, Lingis writes, it is not enough for consciousness to be of the body or to have agency, control and authority over it. The task of going from absolute consciousness to absolute corporeity demands a temporal synthesis. The corporeity already found by Husserl structuring consciousness in the orientation of consciousness to its objects—its ideas, ideality constituted in their relation to it—and their objective ‘reality’ attested to in the movement and shifting perspectives of a body—whether instrumentally assisted or not—that corporeity must be shown not to belong to a body relative to absolute consciousness. It must be the same for the sensorial flux of the physical field of exploration as for the transcendental field of absolute consciousness. The absolute corporeity of what a body does in relation to it must share the same time as absolute consciousness. The two absolutes must dutifully coincide. A temporal synthesis then secures their identity. real picture of the patient or his world but reduce him and his disease to a list of “major” and “minor” diagnostic criteria. Present-day psychiatric charts in hospitals are almost completely devoid of the depth and density of information one finds in the older charts and will be of little use in helping us to bring about the synthesis of neuroscience with psychiatric knowledge that we so need. The “old” case histories and charts, however, will remain invaluable.” 33 The Doomsday Clock is at 100 seconds to midnight at the time of writing. It is set by scientists; whereas the Clock of the Long Now is seen more as an artistic venture, despite the scientific technical difficulties (the ‘cuckoo’ is supposed to appear every 1000 years) attendant on its physical construction—that it is mechanical and not for example atomic may be taken to signal a technologically retrogressive nature in essence unscientific. 34 Alphonso Lingis, “Intentionality and Corporeity,” 104-117, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, op.cit., 106. Simon Taylor 51 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The security of identity breaks apart at the stage of its temporalisation, at the stage of becoming a question of timing. This can be the timing of individual levels of technical intervention or of individual organs of sensation. Distributed over the levels through the senses—where we can say, following Stiegler, even the computer is a sense organ, in an organology,35 although we may be mistaken about which sense it has—and the technical means of sensation afforded by technical experience, each instrument, technical and organic, and all schemata of their instrumentation, rely on a different time, insist on it, for their development, which is a kind of involution. It involves the figure in mapping the relief of a feature who is reciprocally involved in its movement—who is individually, we have said as if by name, called upon to make it. This time is both risk and registration at once but it is not the same time and it is not because of the relative speeds of a hammer or a near-speed-of-light data transfer, of an electron density map,36 exploded-view diagramme, console or flight plan: each one has only one speed which is that of its formation, through which both it and onlooker, searcher for noetic data, consciousness and flesh—as Merleau-Ponty writes37— individuate, a reciprocation of mutual involvement Simondon calls transduction.38 Transduction, like the translation Deleuze and Guattari say is universal, and perhaps the reason they say it is,39 means that knowledge of individuation is an individuation of knowledge. Translation achieves a singular consistency and sets itself up on this plane; it also singularises the time it involves and this is not at all the time of reading—reading will take up and occupy another time. 35 Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., 244n2: “Organology attempts to describe the becoming of physiological organs, technical organs and social organizations as the co-deployment of three processes of psychic, technical and collective individuation insofar as they are inseparable.” 36 The example is Ruyer’s. Raymond Ruyer, The Genesis of Living Forms, Trans. Jon Roff & Nicholas B. De Wedenthal, (London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 35. 37 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Ed. Claude Lefort, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 244, from the Working Notes April 1960: “It is necessary to take as primary, not the consciousness and its Ablaufsphänomen with its distinct intentional threads, but the vortex which this Ablaufsphänomen schematizes, the spatializing-temporalizing vortex (which is flesh and not consciousness facing a noema)” [ends without period]. Quoted at Lingis, “Intentionality and Corporeity,” 105-117, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, op. cit., 115. 38 Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notion de forme et d’information, (Grenoble, France: Millon, 2013), 32: “Nous entendons par transduction une opération, physique, biologique, mentale, sociale, par laquelle une activité se propage de proche en proche à l'intérieur d'un domaine, en fondant cette propagation sur une structuration du domaine opérée de place en place : chaque région de structure constituée sert à la région suivante de principe de constitution, si bien qu'une modification s'étend ainsi progressivement en même temps que cette opération structurante.” 39 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. Brian Massumi, (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014), 72. Simon Taylor 52 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The advantage gained is lost by technical means—and organic. Risked, it is lost in the replicability of demonstration—and returns to being the magic trick of showing the truth to be true, performed day after day in our common concourse with the world. Seeing the tree flourish in the surrounding biosphere we inform ourselves of the mycorrhizal network underlying its adaptation to the society of plants. Told that the planetary atmosphere is as the thickness of a layer of varnish on a desktop globe we wonder at the processes of its creation and condemn those of its despoliation. We consult the expertise of the public relations crew representing medical science to get a mole checked out, book an MRI, or have explained the slightest aberrancy of anatomical construction hopeful of a diagnosis that is treatable or at least operable, and in which we are able to believe. A new study and its findings are announced on the radio, parsed down to a few filaments of public facts to titivate our private prejudices. The new diet and we de-clutter both inside and out, obesity and promising results for T-cells and cancer, the campaign for teen abstinence in Brazil that is without scientific evidence: all this we know to be true. We stake our knowledge on the advancing horizon of what science’s advance marketing gives us to know—in speculation: speculative statements that can only be called predictive since they are what everybody will be given to know. We can describe as predictives a class of statements having the virtue of the prepromotion of what we know to be true. Predictives form the protentions proper to the correlation of data we produce, parcelled in the advance news and evidentiary by sheer weight. But it is a computative sleight of hand. The calculations do not gloss the facts and may be speculations on what the facts will be. They may in a sense perform them as suggestions, reinforce, propagate existing tendencies, and reproduce them big, at the scale of what being scalable suggests. The calculations may be self-fulfilling prophecy. The class of statements called predictive belong as units of measure to speculation. They do not represent. Neither do they apply. They are as efficacious as the set of statements called performative in terms of having realworld effects. (Although these enact the relation they Simon Taylor 53 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing announce.) But it is from moving from behind: push, not follow. 40 Neither are the calculations theoretical—in leading to predictions, or thetic, in advancing theses, and speculative in that sense; nor are they exegetical in doing the opposite, informed by and informing on datasets to follow with a sense of their direction where the numbers tend: they are not speculative in this. The numbers bring self-fulfilling prophecy to a close, foreclosing on the prophetic in predictive reckoning. Their calculation, which can be conducted by numerical machines, does not get the calculation engaged by the researcher in jigging to fit either premise or promise: she makes a calculation which is not speculation but based on technical experience; his care, knowing the simple fact of observation alters the observable, is to minimise contact to maximise the contact that is of his sensation of the sensible. Expertise may be called this sensibility; and technical experience this sensitivity. Her contact may only be through numbers but still this is a dimension of sensation, a level, on which the reliefs of what differs are distinguished, and the refinement of differences advanced. The actions and the movement a researcher makes in coming into contact with her subject may be unconscious. The tendency to prefer the conscious marks out the two calculations: one is from the numbers, two is to get them. The actions and the movement a researcher makes to bring into contact a technical apparatus with his field of study may be routine. They occur out of habit, habits formed through training and technical experience. Her conscious intention may lead her to miss entirely the time it takes to assess the scene. He may assume the set of relations he has with it along with the techniques he brings to bear on it as having been established through previous scenarios, even those in different locations and at different times. These will despite their diversity however presume a consistency or intend one. But it will be according to the other kind of calculation that she plunges in, that he goes directly to the machine’s results and tabulates, which occurs having made a calculation of the other kind—one of risk. 40 Ruyer uses push for the stimulus which both guides and drives instinct, instinctive response, where it is pushed [poussée], inciting it also in body formation, in morphogenesis. (The French is also given in the English translation.) Ruyer, The Genesis of Living Forms, op. cit., 111. Stiegler also invokes a drive-based capitalism but for different reasons. Where he relates it to the effects on the drives to consume of marketing, we say the drives as already present tendencies are driven, pushed, by the predictives of economic speculation in a speculative politics. We maintain a political etiology where he finds for the autonomy of the market; where he finds technical reasons, we find political reasons. Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., 2, 106, 144, 254n61 & 261n4 (here he attributes it to Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, op. cit.). Simon Taylor 54 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing She has anyway no taste for excitement, avoids it in her technical experience, protects herself from it in order the better to project an aura of sober expertise. But this is not the sobriety with which, write Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy may proceed.41 It is austerity. Neither is it the expertise of a sensibility maximising contact at the risk of its advantage with the calculated sensitivity of a technical apparatus. Data are data, methodologically understood as positive facts on the field and horizon of enquiry, as the only ones before the common and popular speculation—as to in what it consists that science is—against which science protects and inoculates itself by taking in a little of the advance marketing in the predictive statements of that speculation. We see that— like the state against the interests of global corporations—the methodological bulwark fails not by lack of faith—in the discourse of method we have identified to be the spirit of science— but by this spirit too. The reason for its failure, the reason those lose their faith is that they gain it. The advantage gained is that of Pascal’s wager—to the incalculable benefit of belief and of believer. Those gestures made in the field or at the computer keyboard, in the lab or at the test site, in the classroom demonstration, are the genuflections of habitual faith. They can remain unconscious. This too is to the benefit of a vantagepoint which is to the advantage of science, since it unifies a body of knowledge, and incorporates distributions over fields, erasing differences, and for the diversity of times and locations, giving a single sense and a continuous time. All the setting-up, all the preparation preparing the scene, as well as the fostering of distinct sensitivities—what one might call induction into the rituals of the field—are lost to the same time of temporal synthesis. The dispersion of sensibility is covered by habit, the habit by conscious acts; the readings displace reading, performance experience, instruments representation: technology as a discourse of technics becomes itself instrumental. It is demonstrated and the displays of instruments are given to and for experience. Technology is 41 Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy?, op. cit., 1. Simon Taylor 55 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the raising of the symbol. It is seen to be said; or it is a discourse seen and not said. The discourse of method becomes doctrine: and it is a narrow church for the imposition of its rules in disciplines. We have said the spiritual bulwark that is method fails in the same way as the state before the onset of global corporations. This is because the state is as narrow a church for the belief in the economic salvation of a globalised set of rules. The scandal of the WTO—as Stiegler writes—is not its imposition of austerities, expectation of obedience to rules, its injunction to chastity to the real of their construction, and real poverty, but that it is in “reality the global organization of the market—against trade.”42 Its disciplinary practices are matters of belief and delusion: they are religiously followed. Method now demonstrates. It is not demonstration. It remains on the ground but is not itself the ground. This has shifted in the institution of a tendency to prefer science of knowledge to science as knowledge, to turn from the empirical field, to derive it from the transcendental. In any case, data science forms the entrypoint of methodology into the official interest, enters the official interest of the market to the organisation of which the official interest directs itself. Data science becomes a mode of speculative modelling, capable of framing the tendencies by which it is instituted, and by which it institutes a speculative economy, that Stiegler has called the ruin of capitalist production, that we consider a phase of capitalist production consistent with the enchantments of and in the market for data productivity.43 Mined raw, data is subject to methodical testing, minute adjustment and correlation with the statements of a former politics of representation. The correlation is the only part that is performative, since it enacts the efficacity of that class of statements we have named predictive. The action itself is neither performative nor representative, belonging to representation or to a politics of representation: a speculative politics of data as power 42 Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., 262n22. 43 Stiegler, ibid., 145. Shoshana Zuboff links data productivity to what she calls surveillance capitalism in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2019). Data, where it is a matter of power, as it is in Zuboff, must correlate to bio-data: we do not think this form of economic speculation deserves to be called a different capitalism but a different politics, in the polity embodying the social passions to it gives rise to, a speculative politics. Simon Taylor 56 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing operates imposing the universal of number, that Deleuze writes constitutes “the ideal cause of continuity or the pure element of quantitability.”44 This universalisation and ideal continuation although it participate in the logic of large numbers is not part of the same logic and does not depend on it.45 Rather large numbers confer methodological legitimacy on the statistical modelling as a stage in the preparation, counting and computation, of scientific data for correlations to take place, which, when they do, when they take hold, are of a different order: they are the unassailable statements of insuperable odds. That is they surpass representing a case, in theory or in practice, by using the numbers, scientifically, to push it ahead of them. This universalisation and ideal continuation—a pure element of quantity—has its own logic. It invokes a temporal synthesis from which vantagepoint it has the advantage, gained as the spirit of science, in the spirit of science, drunk on method. Its achievement is on the order of a reduction in explanation, a reduction of commentary. To meet the demands of the media, of business supply chains, of politicians, in that order, of the universalisation and ideal continuation entailed in a pure element of quantity, requires the removal of all extraneous quantity. But it need not require the end of all demonstration in quantification, where demonstrability will be handled from now on by secondary calculation, where it will be argued by outputs not experience. That is, where it will be assumed and the assumption will follow the formula: it can be scientifically demonstrated that true statements made will be. Such a formula frees up data scientists to be data managers, and, after data managers, consultants. It frees up data scientists from responsibility to their field. From now they will be responsible for their field, as a specialism. As a specialism it will have passed through the first stage of specification but not need individuation. This will belong to the statements scientifically predicting and foreclosing on which true statements made will be: 44 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., 219. 45 Cf. Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem & Helen R. Lane, (London, UK: Continuum, 2008), 307-308 and note: the paranoiac “invests everything that falls within the province of large numbers.” ... “the schizo goes in the other direction ... waves and corpuscles, flows and partial objects that are no longer dependent upon the large numbers; infinitesimal lines of escape, instead of the perspectives of the large aggregates.” The process described of speculative politics, of the official interest, has both paranoiac and schizo characteristics. Simon Taylor 57 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing individuation will be of the class of statements; their development into predictives will be instrumentally achieved, the push factor of which will properly be said to be their information. The universal and continuous replicability of transactions that is their methodological condition and scientific conviction requires the reduction of what Lingis calls the time field, which is that of consciousness.46 It is to a reduced consciousness that method as demonstration appeals: it makes its appeal in none but one sense. This is the reason in the common acceptance of economists the information of none but one sense suffices the global organisation of markets. Price alone is needed to inform that organisation. It does not explain why, neither why one source nor why this one, only it is not as an index to the spatial contexts for trade or against, however generalised globally, but that it suffices as an instrument, what we may call a sensory input or organ of which the output alone commands the attention of a reduced consciousness; and by which the global organisation of markets is instrumentally achieved, this achievement being on the order of a reduction in explanation, a reduction of commentary and analysis. The actions and movements that are based on technical experience of researchers along the sensorial levels and the reliefs of significant findings all manifest consciousness directed by intention. We have said intention in turn by the virtue of predictive statements can be pushed in certain ways of which it is unconscious. With the information of price speculation enters the marketplace as a drive. It also enters the marketplace of ideas, where we can specifically locate research and development. Through the computative comprehension of humanly incomprehensible big datasets and through algorithmic accuracy in targeting and correlating data with humanly comprehensible, if ungrasped, statements of intent, data science, we have said, is the entrypoint for methodological interest in the commercial reality. Through their calculations, which include the risk their instruments, the probes they launch, the codebots they send out, will not return or will have no returns, data scientists experience the reduction of the humanly incomprehensible to the sensorially available. But by this reduced consciousness their 46 Lingis, “Intentionality and Corporeity,” 105-117, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, op. cit., 111. 58 Simon Taylor 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing attention turns from the methodological deployment and distribution of their sensorial apparati to focus on the reduced dataset of the computational model: their sensorial engagement is reduced to the advantage of their performance. This is in fact the direction of advance, driven by the predictive statements of speculation. While it is all about the contact between the machine and the scene, human contact is intended to be replaced. Whereas those who work directly with data might be thought to bear the responsibility of shaping intentionality—in management roles and consultancies—they are, like the functionaries of a sinister regime, the last to know. The speculative market is not itself the object of speculation, it is its subject and nonhuman agency. Do data scientists, managers, consultants not see the smoke from the chimneys from the human rubbish burning? Do they know nothing? Do they know only that they will be last to be known, that the real drivers driving the bulldozers of commercial reality—through the ruin of capitalism, if you like—are the ones engaged in the apodictic experience not of geometry but of universal quantity? They are those after all to whom history speaks in its humanly incomprehensible language, to whom it is demonstrated. Reduced consciousness is required not to know, rather to deprive oneself, ourselves, of distractions and extraneous factualities as well as extraneous fictions. Dreams lurk about the edges, passional discontent and passional contents play over the surfaces, whether symbolic, organic or physical, of things we handle. Conscious intention sometimes forces itself upon the miasmic and distorted view, sometimes raises itself over it, a wave of light concentrated into a ray—or produces in the object the subject which commands it. There is a compelling sensuality to order, a satisfaction following orders—just as consciousness feels the currents and swells, the pull and push of the unconscious organism we are—even as the push is that shaping and massaging, instilling and driving our intent in the first place. The data scientist need not follow the formula. She has to balance the competing claims upon her competencies. There are the data, in arrays, demanding his attention. They are tangible in their claims, fibrous luminosities, dense drifts, filaments, flows and specklings against Simon Taylor 59 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing what?—a background of dreams? or further unseen compulsions, forces invisible, dissipating energy towards entropy, void. The politics are however personal not matters of personal choice. He cannot opt out of the task to which his intention is directed. But the politics are not so compelling—in fact negligible in power—when comes to the cause, which is the autonomy of the field itself. This is a speculative autonomy and they are speculative politics which, through the control of social passions, engineer the foreclosure of the speculative economy on itself, projecting in an ongoing process its futurity from the advantage of temporal synthesis: producing the time field in its entirety and totality at once. She is unlike the trader, Kiko, Virginie Despentes describes, who attends to the titration of his doses of coke—so as to reach the inhuman speeds of the speculative market—with the care the data scientist, manager, consultant gives to the results of his instruments—in the service of universal number.47 Kiko is almost a class warrior: he puts himself above politics, in particular those of social pamphleteers and their liberal causes. He recognises the flow of transactions to be a torrent he cannot lose himself to but must somehow match. His technical expertise is a weaponry, a muscularity, wielded on the only human as much as against the data—the alphanumeric symbology and function signs in cascade across his inner and outer screens:48 in their overcoming, he also overcomes himself; and in overcoming himself, he neither succumbs to their inhumanity, nor concedes to his humanity. We earlier compared the neutrality of the technical apparatus of science with the weaponry of war, of just such a war as Kiko wages. But in his case you will say these are metaphorical weapons—even as they are technical—and his is a metaphorical war—even as it plays out in the social arena. That it plays out on the social passions Lordon identifies with politics, and in the political realm, you will say does not qualify it as comparable with tools to kill, with which the technical comparison or the social comparison is irresponsible, exaggerated and theatrical. Still, where do these tools come from if not from technics and how is their development funded if not by the speculative economy, which Kiko serves as much as the state 47 Virginie Despentes, Vernon Subutex 1, Trans. Frank Wynne, (London, UK: MacLehose Press, 2017), 196-198. 48 But this must be complicated. Ruyer writes an organic screen, external or internal, is an absolute surface of registration on which images or ideas are perceived, from which they are reproduced or performed—for us a stage. Ruyer, The Genesis of Living Forms, op. cit., 216. Simon Taylor 60 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing which uses them? How is the science funded if not by the state that buys weapons? How do these differ from the technical weaponry of the trader’s arsenal? Is it that they are bloodless? But the bodycount can be arranged to exceed that of the bloodiest war. We can at least say the notion of the gun’s neutrality has lost its bite, the metaphor lost its sting. It no longer means so much to compare technical progress in its neutrality with machines for killing in theirs—until they are set to kill. This too marks the drift to administration. It also signals as we have noted that technology has come to claim the place of a neutral discourse once occupied by methodology, that technical discourse facilitates the overlap of once distinct vehicles, tenors, drives—metaphorically at least. The problems of science and the interests of the state more and more coincide. But states must defend the morality of their interests, defend their actions as moral in following them—must they not?— while science does not defend the morality of its problems or the actions taken in their pursuit. Philosophy is permitted to enter through this narrow opening and work out the ethics, which are those belonging not to ethical problems but to the problem of ethics: not a scientific problem. We can say the problems of science are not those of weaponry to equip states to defeat enemies—or scare them—to the mutual benefit of their economies, and to the global economy: arms sales remaining a significant driver of what is called global economic wealth. The problems of weaponry—like those of digital technology—are iterative: for states they are how to have the latest and for science they are how to provide the latest or weaponise the latest technology. They are then those driving consumer electronics, driving social desire in the consumer market for consumer electronics: how to have the latest iteration. States are simply at another scale where it comes to placing their orders, what we may call another payscale: they are also beholden to ratings agencies setting credit levels, who have won the war on capital through speculation. We may say there is an optic of superiority shared by markets, states and sciences. But it is set down scientifically, is methodological, even when a matter of statistics. It need not be that the universalisation and ideal continuation, that the pure element of quantitability, as Deleuze Simon Taylor 61 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing puts it, means demonstration comes to an end and is foreclosed on as well in the foreclosure of its futurity in apodictic experience.49 The problems of science, the problems of knowledge, are not problems for science, for knowledge: they are problems for experiment, for what we have described as professional expertise and technical experience. Defined respectively as sensibility and sensitivity, the practice of research is their consequence. Consciousness reduced in its intent to, in fact, the same data as fills Kiko's perceptual field— the alphanumeric sequencing, the functions of algorithms—need not grant itself this as the apex of its self-possession. This need not be endorsed as its positivism. Philosophy need not be the last resort of consciousness and conscience, even while it keep the discipline alive and relevant and above all applicable. The committees which meet to discuss ethics are bypassed anyway by more practical concerns: they delude themselves in regarding their province as knowledge, let alone science. Kiko is more practical and his author, Despentes, writes in acknowledgement of his distraction, of his unconsciousness, expanding his zone of attention to passional economics and politics, to the sex and parties, to include the drugs he rates as enabling him—like the speed Nazis took to keep up with the war—to reach the speed of the market, in an expanded and organic consciousness. That is a consciousness of his organism. As Lingis writes, no one can work out an epistemological theory while running at full tit through the Stock Exchange.50 Neither need it be assumed such a consciousness as belongs to the organism maintains consciousness of the whole organism. Where would it stop? Nor need it be assumed such a consciousness is incapable of focused attention: Kiko compares himself to traders on their high in touch with the as-near-lightspeed-as-possible torrent of data—in which orders of cascades appear and opportunities to make money—who attempting to sustain that high in that proximity to money and speed take too many hits. Just one too many, they lose it. Kiko never does. The consciousness that is reduced to the sensorial availability of money and speed involves the consciousness that is expanded to carry on and carry out the tasks of reduced 49 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., 219. 50 Lingis, “A Phenomenology of Substances,” 25-41, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, op. cit., 34. 62 Simon Taylor 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing consciousness; the perceptual field involves the field of phenomena, of symbolic, physical and organic reliefs and the sensorial levels. For Merleau-Ponty, Husserl is guilty of consciousness. But what Husserl's consciousness, what his phenomenological understanding of reduced or absolute consciousness smuggles in is something alien to it. It is this Lingis considers extraordinary about Husserl's philosophy. In the consciousness reduced to the utmost degree—in consciousness at the absolute—Husserl finds corporeity. That is Husserl affirms corporeity. Thought does not exclude extension, does not exclude the extended. Not only is thought not wholly representational; not only are the operations of thought not by way of correlatives and in correlation. In thought at the utmost of its concentration corporeity is found by Husserl; and not as bodily demands, which would then be represented to the brain, in consciousness; and not as correlations with the claims of organic life—the need to eat, drink, shit or breathe: and not as the unconscious subjugation of the needs, drives and demands that are facts of embodiment; and not finally as their subordination to a necessary and gratuitous self-elevation of thought, above, setting all the ugliness and dirtiness of fleshly existence below. The phenomenal field in Husserl which belongs to the intention directed by consciousness constituting thought is instituted corporeally and by it is that field also constituted: it is constituted temporally by corporeity. Consciousness in the inclusion of the physical organism, the physical signs and signals of worlds of experience, in the inclusion of the symbols of their internal registration, reproduction and performance, becomes a field as such. From the phenomenal field's inclusion of the physical, symbolic and the organic comes the notion of the combinatory. That is the idea combinations of these different aspects combine to form reality. From it arises a multicausal genetics. The idea that I have come about through the chance encounter of this woman and man, with the added inestimably numerous variables attendant on that encounter:51 the idea of chance and indeterminacy—and of our historic vigilance both registering and trying to control chaos and determine chance—come about when the phenomenal field offers up to thought and in thought the possibility of corporeity. 51 Cf. Lingis, “Cause, Choice, Chance,” 146-157, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, op.cit., 148-149. 63 Simon Taylor 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The possibility is of consciousness's continuity—the possible constitution of consciousness to be continuous with itself and to hold together, to be consistent with itself to an absolute degree. Corporeity is then the guarantor of absolute reason and of a rationality which will exceed and seek to overcome it, in overcoming exceed and overcome itself: it will exceed and seek to override its guarantee, which is that of the field constituted as such; and we might have thought the field to fall apart at this, but it does not. Or if it does it is in the nature of a dispersion, of its decomposition, which the absolutes—of thought, and consciousness and reason—avoid. But the field of survey so constituted tends towards unity and in this way corporeity returns. The field so constituted tends to the unity and wholeness of a body—even in its dispersion and decomposition, even in its unwholesomeness, which thought painstakingly reassembles and resolves. The body returns in the sense of a body of knowledge. The instruments, traps, instruments of capture of phenomena remote to our senses, either too small, too hard to get to, too large and on the matching timescales of large and small, far and near—that is taking too long to arrive or arriving before we know it—are not prosthetics extending our existing senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, or taste. The body is not returned to itself in their deployment unless in the managerial sense of returning what is already recognised to belong to it. The sight is not new which descends into the deep submarine fissure and records there life at the limit of its possibility. Neither are the sounds of starbirth or of the blackhole against the background static from the Big Bang those we recognise as belonging to hearing. The body does not return to itself because it has sent out devices to be its spies and ears on alien grounds impossible for it to reach. The body does not because it has put out feelers, extended antennae, reached out to the alien through sensors which make it impossible to return to itself intact. Timescales inconceivable are not reduced by analogy with human lifespan to those we can countenance, to ideas and durations we can entertain, are not correlated and are not so represented—except in the popular conception and in speculation. They are and stay inconceivable except for the devices concerned and the senses they provide. The places stay Simon Taylor 64 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing unreachable. The durations stay unreachable. The reaches of what they reach remain unthinkable. They are so and do so and remain without our grasp until they are brought together in the field—of our consciousness—so constituted and if so constituted by corporeity that it include them: the combinatory holding together chance in a body, holds together in one chance all the random chances that brought me here, to this word. It enables you to ask, Which ones were they? and What are the odds? What are the odds we are here? Consciousness can hold together the combinations in a single field by instituting a single time field. It is able to constitute itself by synthesis of disparate times belonging to the field and to the instruments deployed upon it. Consciousness does not itself hold together; absolute consciousness does not hold itself in survey of itself as field whereon it pegs markers, determines territories, and their boundaries; neither is consciousness produced by nor does it produce a single field of time on which to synchronise the exercise of its attributes, of reason or ratio, on which to form and direct its intention and consciously act: consciousness does not come up with the notion of a combinatory, of a game of luck or chance, or contest, without a body, without its continuity, without the combinations for which a body provides and is provided for by a single chance, a onetime stroke of luck, a winning blow. The temporal synthesis Husserl finds for we do not. Where Husserl finds corporeity in consciousness we find an excorporeity, an exosomatism and the distributed body of the sarx. Once treated as combinatory, the field, consciousness, corporeity become determinations of chance, formed from chance encounters amongst their organic, physical and symbolic aspects, each one limiting the next possible set of chance encounters in a process thought to be autonomous, self-organising and material. From indeterminacy the leap is immediately taken to a fully determinate field, of consciousness, of the extended reality occupied by bodies and of the bodies themselves. It is fully occupied, as if in abhorrence of a vacuum, a void. What in the consciousness constituted by corporeity enables the notion of combinatory is the passing over of the different times taken in favour of, in a conscious preference for, selfpresence. But it is self-presence without self-survey. The parts, parts of parts and in parts, are all present to one another in sum as so many possible combinations. They are all present in Simon Taylor 65 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing space because they are so constituted by corporeity as to be present in time. This is like the brain represented to be present in all its parts at once. What it ignores in favouring the completed form is the virtual form, which it neither fulfils nor actualises. But the virtual form of its completion, fulfilment and actualisation exists as the point of view by which the form is completed, fulfilled and actualised. Such a point of view cannot be present to itself, is not in the same space as the combinatory where there is no space. It cannot be in the same space as the combinatory that would see in the layout of parts, amygdalae, ganglia, hypocampi, cerebrum, or in divisions of peoples, individuals, societies, or atoms, molecules, bacterial organisms, flora and fauna, in the divisions between beings, worlds of human and natural construction, a constriction and a finality, that would find in one part the part which completes the other, giving it its final form. The processual comes at the cost of the formative, just as the instrumental came at the cost of the representative and instrumental interfaces with material and symbolic processes at the cost of representation. The form is not in space at all. Neither is it, owing to the total occupation of presence with itself—in the sum combination of material and energetic processes—available in time. Not present, the form is not synchronous with the combinatory, neither can a temporal synthesis be formed of its combinations which does not presuppose the determination of the whole and the full self-occupation, since in it matters and energies are interexchangeable, determined to be a materialism. Neither is its point of view informed by particular combinations that are locally present, as if it could be formed by the statistical certainty of general determination that these are the right ones, derived from the fact it does form or from the weight of the law of absolute number. These can neither be invoked to explain what we are calling, after Ruyer, the organic, or, as we might say, the unconscious, nor in, what we are calling after Deleuze, analysis, meaning genesis of form, formation, and, as we might say, apprenticeship, and—go further—in developing an individual style. There is no place in the layout analysed as combinatory for the completion of the field of survey, although in order to assert this etiology or that teleology it is treated, since completion is found in every part, as complete. So analysis ordinarily understood takes the gamble and far from setting it on one throw sets it on all of them at once: what are the odds? The analysis of a Simon Taylor 66 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing genetic startpoint is displaced by statistic probabilities assessing the likelihood of a certain endpoint being reached not there at the outset, not in the past and not there in the present. This assessment replaces the analysis we are interested in, with, as we have said, a genetics without genesis. If a byway is preferred, to epigenesis is applied Occam's razor to find it the shortest route to reach our goal. It would be tasteless and inelegant to leave out of the field of the combinatory the goal, route or cause we have determined for it, just as it would be tasteless and inelegant to leave out any first cause but that it would be one caught up in its self-presence forever, with which it would synchronise: from alpha to omega occurring in the figure of infinity and under the attribute of eternity. Corporeity then returns by forming a temporal synthesis of the times of organic, symbolic and physical engagement in a time field. We have seen that such engagement extends beyond intentionality by instrumental means, in the unintentional and habitual disposition of sensory apparati: the relays set up calculated to bridge the different times of sensation. We have suggested a reduction where sensation is taken as given and what is sensed is taken for given in the usual rounds of experience by the familiar senses of our bodies, where, secondary to corporeal sensation, the feel of a sensory support is relegated to being secondary to the sight or scene registered. We have seen primary calculation take second place, and the secondary calculation, of performance in the field and effective reproduction across the faces of our instruments, take up all the space, where the mechanism is elided by the human-sensory index, by the look, taste and feel, by haptic design, and where consciousness instituted by corporeity reasserts itself. The unity of the time field of consciousness which it accords the combinatory through the institution of corporeity has its positive sense in computation.52 Synchrony is assumed for the combinations being computed by the fact that they are, in the present, in the better-thanpresent of the almost-faster-than-light. But once again the synchrony assumed for the combinations being computed, allowing the temporal synthesis of their computation, is 52 Deleuze writes, “We should reserve the name 'positivity' for this state of the multiple Idea or this consistency of the problematic. Moreover, we must guard every time against the manner in which this perfectly positive (non)-being leans towards a negative non-being and tends to collapse into its own shadow, finding there its most profound distortion, to the further advantage of the illusion of consciousness.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., 254. Simon Taylor 67 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing asserted on the basis of impression rather than fact, the impression that sufficiently large bodies of data produce. The actual processes do not have the consistency they are assumed to have. It is simply the overlay of what is thought to be symbolically consistent, to follow a code and constitute a language, overrides material-energetic inconsistencies in the processing of combinations. But that this impression is produced means it is sensory, a matter of direct sensation, and it results directly from the presumptive determination of the data field as it produces reliefs. That is it acts as a sensory level which is not the body's and is not the product of internal continuities: its experience is discontinuous, one where technical demonstration of discontinuities constitutes the sense to be conveyed, of extent over intent. Apodictic experience does not concern impressive specs and data crunching but the first power of the computer, its primary sensation of the out-of-body mind, of a disincarnation so compelling it is called virtual. This is the computational unconscious or what we can call the computer's organic form. Computation compels us to move out onto the level of its discourse, in the instrumental displacement that comes at the cost of representation. It compels us to move forward in the discourse of technology but not without a movement that is necessarily retrogressive, belonging, we have said, to the discourse of method, to methodology, which concerns the use of computers in knowledge procedures, in science. The compulsion is however sensuous. While the discursive movement may be claimed for desire and to reflect conscious intention directed and oriented by corporeity this other movement cannot. It is one of which we are not ordinarily capable. The computer primarily acts to protect us from the physical experience of which it is capable and we are not. The computer does not aid us, but in the organic unconscious of its form surfs, navigates and mines the combinatory, of the present as absolute combinatory, to which we—this is its positive sense—submit ourselves. In submitting ourselves to its affect, neither do we have nor can we claim the computer as our bodily support. It does not extend or enlarge the field of which we are in cognizance but that it extends the practical intention that pursues knowledge; it does not mediate the sensory data with which we are in contact: we do not feel through the Simon Taylor 68 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing computer but that we feel through computation and calculation data with which we are in contact that it feels and is subject to, already uniquely, through computation and calculation, sensory data. The practical intention which pursues knowledge because it hangs on the direction and orientation of the body, but more so because it holds to temporal synthesis in the constitution of consciousness, in the way it attends, searches and conceives of the field of research, the combinatory in the case of computation, risks taking the computer's affectivity for its own. It risks taking the field for the extension of its own practical intent, swapping out extent for intent. Practical intention extended by computation, calculation in the deployment of sensory apparati, in the timing of calculation and in the timing of computation, tends to make itself at home in the extension which is home to the unconscious affectivity of the computer; it does so out of the affection we have noted in the compulsion of the virtual. As we have said of the combinatory, the tendency is, through computational comportment, to regard it as a field already confirmed, always already: having been synthesised in its temporal uniqueness and spatial specificity, the combinatory—with which one might identify the cosmos—is given to be a layout composed of knowledge, facts waiting to be found out, data already confirmed, their arrangement complete; it is one as if prepared earlier. The practical intention that is in pursuit of knowledge through the extended time of infinitesimal difference, of as near-light-speed-as-we-can-afford computation, runs the risk of returning the same, of occupying the same space as itself in extension. Our practical interest in research hazards its own betrayal in pursuit of truth which will betray itself, existence, as Deleuze writes, traded for insistence.53 It runs the risk of falling into the habit of the present, say the bad habit of being human, into the memory of the past, and not falling apart, failing by the tendency to hold together in synthesis, out of the break from which the future will, is and can only be entailed.54 53 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., 103. 54 Cf. Hughes: “The third synthesis would come before and coordinate the other two and from this point of view it constitutes the transcendental future. In fact none of these things will happen, and this leads to one of the most novel and interesting aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy: the third synthesis is a failed synthesis.” Joe Hughes, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Reader’s Guide, (London, UK: Continuum, 2009), 115. Simon Taylor 69 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The tendency is for suspension, pending an arrival, which for some is always deferred and for others is due to the withdrawal of things into themselves. In Liu's universe it is not because they are not there that we do not see any signs of its extraterrestrial inhabitants. The universe is a dark forest, vast and full of threat, where making any sign is immediately to be at risk of annihilation. They are in hiding.55 For yet others and more commonly we, like everything else around us, including atoms and aliens, come about by a combination of chance and the kind of luck which can only be rewarded, by being called skill or fitness, precocity or genius, after the fact. Only after the fact do we know of the combinations which were selected that won us the advantage, an advantage that is like a tree in Liu's dark forest, constantly branching. It is of course the advantage of actually existing but also the advantage of consciousness, of knowing that we do; and it is unclear whether this is the knowledge winning us, along with the atoms, the aliens, and other stuff, the advantage. If we did not know, as some say we do not, or could not know, as some say we cannot, would we lose the advantage? This advantage of existing belongs to the transcendental field of demonstration that is necessary for demonstrating it as much as experiencing it. But once the practical field of our sensory deployments and technical comportments, where we engage in research, succeeds in being identified with the transcendental field, once its tendency to reification is assumed accomplished, factual and complete, is not our actual existence and the processes that led to our arrival, along with everything else, on it suspended with it? But what is this suspension if not the temporal synthesis we have been talking about, out of which we see arise the combinatory to be the practical scene of the deployment of computation and calculation, from which we draw its positive sense, the virtue of the virtual, affirming in computation as in other technical comportments belonging to the discourse of technology the sensory, not for our access to it but for its excess to ours? Our bodily assumption, in the constitution of consciousness by corporeity, is to the virtual, and what is suspended in this suspension is the outside and its excess we go by way of—as if in a 55 Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest, op. cit. Simon Taylor 70 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing spacesuit, composed, rather than as we would affirm, decomposed by an instrumental field become representative, that is, having usurped representation by other means. We go then, by the third who walks before us, in virtual isolation insulated from the infinitesimal as from the astronomical, from the slow and from the fast, protected, by an equipment of symbolic and technical tools and metaphors. This array of screens, interfaces and readouts inoculates us, as its penetralia are introduced into the human sensorium first skindeep, then, as we approach the cyborg dream, braindeep, against too strong a sensation of the alien thing and its affect that the computer is and has enabled—that it comes, as we have said, to represent. It represents that which, as we have said, it is in primary and directly in contact with, and that which it is pursuant to the extension of our practical intention and interest engineered to be in primary and directly in contact with—the combinatory. We have seen from this how, rather than reducing exposure to excess to the manageable, the manageable itself comes to displace it—and after it the management. Suspension is a question of accounting for the inadmissibility that the transcendental field, as necessary condition for experience and demonstration, for, as we might say, information, admits. A typology of suspension is available: where the combinatory that is directly computational suspends it is the virtual, for the compulsion or drive from which it originates. But what is this suspension from which I now write if not the impossible of writing itself? (This we will be expanding on in the second essay.) I am writing—the confirmation of which is inadmissible unless you remain still in the state I describe—from and, we might say, into a suspension imposed on much of the world's human population. Constrained to the physical limitation of its environment it stays at home, which home is understood not to be in human society. It stays at home, and except for engaging in what are called essential industries, as distinct from the singular, essential industry, as if all industry is not essential, it stays away from work. Public life is suspended, except for the public life of what we have called the public passions, that engaging in politics are responsible for government, for the government of the current crisis—the pandemic COVID 19. Simon Taylor 71 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The transcendental is the place of the third. For the relativity of public to private life a third is required who is in neither, that we readily identify with the state of exception of a current State of National Emergency. The PR line runs united we can beat this. The advertising facechecking popular figures from public life, from the cultural arena, cajoles, appeals, impels, beseeches, according to individual style, jocular or sincere, to unity against the virus, and presumably against the virus's spread. Our unity can neither however be presumed to be political, nor assumed to private life: the bodily assumption here is to a national body, in which we are to be united, in the formation of which we are to find unity, a unity worth fighting for, and immunity. But this immunity is to the dissensus of private life, in individual dissent, and to the consensus of public life, in community, which are suspended because of and in the emergency, which is its (inadmissible) transcendental condition, of a National Subject. The political prerogative itself becomes inadmissible for a politics without power. So the use of it is disavowed. The immunity then afforded by a National Subject—the transcendental subject of Nationalism naturalised in an historic synthesis, its temporality suspended—is a coimmunity of the autoimmune kind, of government against the exercise of its own authority. It is a matter of managing the crisis, rather than of the imposition and enforcement of measures to combat it. While the analogy of wartime is the most historically pertinent, with constraints on public life, the closing of borders, responsibility for the general good taken all the way to the individual, and the fighting talk about national unity, it is an impertinence: the government has not suspended economic activity for the sake of the national welfare, or for its own sake, or in its own voice; but with the support of two trillion dollars from the US Federal Reserve more than ever before is being given in economic financial aid; the government is doing everything it can to bolster the economy. Here, it is not impertinent to say, the true humanitarian crisis lies, since this is not medical aid, since the health of a nation and the general welfare reside in its economic health. Government is subjected to a suspension of economic activity, as is all private economic activity and self-government, in the National Subject, the transcendental condition external to it of governmentality. But this suspension still belongs to the political is Simon Taylor 72 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing of the political and is of a political or democratic type, which is what makes it inadmissible, what drives its transcendental reason. Suspension in its types sustains in each a certain belief through the interposition of a suspended body in which we will not disbelieve. It enacts a projection that is theatrical before it is the subject of psychic automatism and has as resource for theatrical production, through which automatism is procured and determinacy confirmed, transcendental means, which are the necessary conditions for procurement and confirmation, not to say demonstration and experience of the existential advantage, tradeoff or bargain. The outside is purchased at the expense of bodily assumption, that is, in the case of the computer a compensatory elevation of the digital—to be a separate realm—of the combinatory to the consistency of a field of lucky transactions and chance interactions—and its suspension in a third space or cyberspace. This is not to impugn it with unreality but misses the point that the transcendental as necessity, excluding all external conditions except its externality, brings with it the condition of necessity. Duchamp's third studio is the condition necessary for his Étants Donnés. Equally, for the relativity of two observers, a third is required whose intent is on the demonstration. Here our assumption rests on what is familiar: his face and his tongue poking out raspberry red in the screenprint by Warhol.56 Neither is it necessary to say the screen will imprint itself in place of the experience of ours that it cannot be anything but so, nor that we cannot exceed or surpass the demonstration being given, for the necessity of the transcendental is of its outside. Necessarily too, our own position is as readers going over the pages, the significance of which we catch up with only to find the sense has escaped us. So we are drawn to the familiar, to the recognition of one light cone outside another, recreating the conditions of the transcendental in its necessity. But then we ourselves stand observed and, as if by the words themselves, are being read and our bodies are betrayed in senses which escape them also. Another outside will always come to interpose itself, and we will need the right tools, apps and outfit, as if our own exteriors are better able to grasp, and our own exteriorisation is, what comes next in 56 Raspberry tongue and pastel light blue face in one iteration; raspberry face and pastel light blue tongue in another. Simon Taylor 73 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing terms of the outside and the certain belief in which we will not disbelieve which is its renewed condition, since, being necessary, it will have been given, unanchored in time and the obverse of the scene, or its obscene and excess, an impossible cascade of externalities having been taken, at one time or another, for the limit. (But we are not here limited to this cascade of exteriority, and will return at length to its reconsideration.) We should take from this that the transcendental is not reducible to its own necessity and transcendentals do not concur. Rather the condition of its necessity brings with it the realm— supporting, elevating, suspending it as a realm—of simulation. The condition of transcendental necessity creates the condition for the simulacrum and the necessity on which it is conditional. As we know the simulacrum is where nothing can be taken as given, not even the obscenity of the void or nothing itself. It is the zone of risk and being copied. We are there from our frame of reference formed, formed from experience and expertise, an individual sensibility and sensitivity, poised, as it were, on the threshold. Would it not be a mistake to put one simulation, one suspended realm in which we will not disbelieve, before another, when it is not at all its adequacy in question but our own, suspending judgement? Such would be the challenge of experience: our inadequacy; given a form—the body or the field, the plane or its edge, the framework or the sill, the void, spacesuit and difference engine—the consistency of which is nothing but the dream of adequacy. But out of the same necessity as for dream, what the transcendental addresses is inadequacy, inadmissibility and now impossible—flying, faster than light concourse with the universe, faster than light communication, commercial transactions and financial speculation, futures. We can imagine one where communication is seen as affirmation of the global community before it is accomplished. It is a dream made on inadequacy. We do not, Spinoza writes, suspend judgement through an act of will, as we would suppose or like to do. Our suspension of judgement is really a perception.57 We have exceeded the limits of our knowledge of what a body can do.58 57 Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, Ed. & Trans. Edwin Curley, (London, UK: Penguin Classics, 1996), 66. 58 Cf. Spinoza, ibid., 71. Simon Taylor 74 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Is not this the problem of method? Is it not to test cases but to encounter events we engage method in practical disciplines and for this reason engage in methodic discourse? Is not then bodily assumption compensation for transubstantiation, for the body transformed, through the practical discipline of method and its technical comportments? Since it is to the dream body as much as the body of knowledge we are, by transcendental necessity, consistently returned, we might say the third comes to us in dreams. We dream of it. Dreaming him or her we suspend ourselves in the dream in which we are being dreamt. Does method not allow the self-survey of the organic form that is dream, to separate dream from desire? What then leads us to take it as not having the inconsistency of dreams this transcendental so backing the whole thing up it is behind itself, so curving away it is beside itself, is our own bodily assumption performing the synthesis that excludes the organic and unconscious features of transcendental experience. (We will later find by performance is meant exclusion of the organic and unconscious features of transcendental experience.) So it is for the body set free from the brain in which the computational combinatory—and ultimately the market or super market59—consists, filling all space with the transactional continuity of calculable differences. So it is for the brain set free from the body, under the compulsion of the virtual, suspended in the instrumental array, that is not yet a detached body.60 We must then contend with the foreclosure of the prophetic: this voice or that wind we feel. The window is closed to the sill and space is enclosed and we are self isolated because of the danger. But what is at risk if not the extension of communicability, of the ordinary and 59 Levi Bryant, in his article at the time of COVID 19, writes, “A trip to the market is now an encounter with your mortality. Now everything in the world is present-at-hand or broken because the relations between things that allow them to be unconscious and ready-to-hand in a seamless network of meanings and references has been broken. Every humble thing of the world is now menacing. I now notice everything.” Levi R. Bryant, “A World is Ending,” Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 3 April 2020, online edition accessed 7 April 2020: https://identitiesjournal.edu.mk/index.php/IJPGC/announcement/view/21?fbclid=IwAR3Mce3ny1uoYptru UjRhgiob-ql-zvdke3sGqPqJt62MGNaMECTwkemoCQ. 60 Lingis writes, “A human primate detaches something—a loose stone, a branch, a pipe wrench—from the continuity of the natural or fabricated environment. With his tool he detaches himself and shifts his view from the environment continuous with his body to goals or results beyond it.” Alphonso Lingis, “Catastrophic Time,” 446-459, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, op. cit., 447. Simon Taylor 75 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing communicative realm, where again and again we choose for the body, are directed by its analogy towards the body of knowledge that is common and that has unity: are directed that is by epistemology not methodology? What is at risk if not method? We can see that an understanding of form to be complete, in the complete simulacrum as in the complete combinatory, underlies this turn from the discourse of method to the discourse of knowledge, an understanding based in the formal analogy of the body from which consciousness intends. Although we might as well say consciousness extends from the body's intensive nexus of sensibility and physical sensation, that it insists in that which consciousness—and by extension, again, knowledge or science—consists: it assures its consistency as body of knowledge, but not as instrumentally distributed sensation; that is not as the sarx. So constituted the body is assisted, at the insistence of its intents and direction. It finds itself as its one insurmountable and positive fact the product of combinations not the productive or creative, unconscious and organic form. We can imagine an avocation for science proceeding from its specification as one or another field of research. We can imagine the individual researcher discriminating in that region so specified her exact interest, a discrimination that will be, as we have said, from experience and expertise: she will be called out as if by name because of a sensitivity and a sensibility which is individual, and his manners will be formed and his taste developed in the culture of the experiences around him. But we will be imagining a body, a gendered body, and that of an individual and not the genesis of the unconscious organic form it takes, in which that sensibility and sensitivity are engendered, only their formalisation. We are not interested in how near art research and science research are. But can we imagine the method we have described to be the spirit of science, that is of knowledge, moving out through its actions in the field onto the sensuous level, the pursuit of the unconscious organic form of individual research as much as the form of body individuating against the reliefs engendered, the problems encountered, in externality? Can we imagine science, in its sensuous reality, being practiced as an art form? Simon Taylor 76 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing In the attention to the vibrations of a needle, to its pinpoint fixation on tectonic movement in contact with planetary forces, no less than in that directed and oriented by the shifting coordinates of oil shareprice, or that tabulating the vicissitudes of the attention economy itself, in classrooms, in demonstrations of its methodological integrity, of pupils engaged in the apodictic experience of geometry—or mathematics, as Spinoza writes61—we find the body's integrity to be dispersive and unmaintainable. The geologist's perception is not mediated by the seismograph but hinges on the line mapping geologic time. It is not itself the demonstration of its own verification, upholding its methodological verifiability in equal nonrelation with that of its falsifiability, but an edge extended over magma, subducting and throwing up a mountain range. Neither the scientist nor the trader are in touch with the reliefs of remarkable upswings or notable downtowns and outliers in their respective fields through movements and actions extending those of the body or its vectors of action and movement. The computer's graphic user interface does not represent a reduction of or limitation of access to the computer's vast resources its software puts at our disposal: it does not mediate but that it equips us with a different sense and different time. Consciousness reduced does not entail reduction to human scale or to the durations of sensuous experience pertinent to the body but there is an impertinence of different senses in which disparate times and durations evade capture that makes them interesting, remarkable and extraordinary. The extraordinary body is the sarx. It is not made from prostheses. Neither the computer, its model, nor the network extend the wetwork of the brain, or enhance it. The harddrive is not longterm, RAM is not shortterm memory. Instrumental frames of capture are not the exosomatisations Stiegler names, in Husserl's term, tertiary protentions enabled by the discourse of technics. The body is itself exosomatised, disembodied, gutted, brained and decomposed in the experience that is technical experience, sensitivity, and expertise, sensibility, with the technical relays providing the socalled information. In fact the sarx, informed by their technical matrices, is ejected by them. Neither is it, as Merleau-Ponty found it to be, the flesh in which the world is embedded. This would permit no escape. The apodictic experience of geometry is finally escape. In the 61 Spinoza, Ethics, op. cit., at 27, 57 & 61. Simon Taylor 77 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing demonstration is its protention, the path taken by the researcher and the student, learnt from sarcous experience, its method, and from it, the discourse of methodology of which the maintenance is almost impossible to imagine. III. knowledge We have asked whether we can imagine science being practiced, following the method we have outlined and described to be the spirit of science, as an art form. Is this the question we should be asking? Should we not be asking if art can be practiced as science can, as a science, and, if so, as a means to knowledge? Should we not be asking if art has a spirit from which its method or methods are drawn—or, we might say, under the survey of which they are? Should we not be asking after the discourse of method in art practice such that it can be called research, and can make original contribution to knowledge? Should we not be asking about a discourse of method, about methodology, in art research? We have felt in consideration of these questions a tide pulling us and a wind blowing us, in the first two parts of this essay, towards science as the modern project of reason and towards science in apodictic experience—the demonstration of notions which may be held in common because undeniable or held to belong to good sense from a type of moral respect. We have found this reputation of science to be moral dubious. The shadow cast over the modern project of reason in the uses to which science has been put, as sum and height of human knowledge, in the modern era, by that block of darkness called Shoah, Fury, in the experience of holocaust, casts doubt as much back on the spirit of history as forward on the spirit of science, on the twin myths of historical necessity and scientific progress being in either direction projects of reason. We find as much for any sense of evolution. Simon Taylor 78 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing We have also found apodictic experience to hold science to standards practically impossible and politically impractical to maintain. But we have found for these standards precisely because they are those of method, belonging to the discourse of method, to methodology against epistemology. We have found for them not because they are neutral but because they are not, because they are matters of taste, manners and culture, of sensibility and of sensitivity. We have identified sensibility with professional expertise, and ethics, and sensitivity with technical experience, and ethology. We have said that technical experience concerns direct sensation, not instrumental mediation or representational correlation; and that the formation of the discriminating consciousness does not follow from the institution of corporeity, is not a constitution or even a composition, but a distribution and a decomposition. Style forms unconsciously, in a sensuous distribution, across levels. Individuation occurs in a decomposition of supposed corporeal and temporal unity and synthesis in the discontinuities and differential durations of the sarcous body, or sarx. We have located the sarx to be, after Ruyer, the organic form of the body, a form that is both unconscious or virtual and outside its parts—a form which exists for experience and expertise. From the viewpoint of a distributed sarcous sense of the body, we attributed to computational analysis in turn a positive sense which is not derived from impressions of speed and control in the shepherding of massive bodies of data. Because we have seen these feats of data management, workflow and the corralling of large numbers to be sensory facts, evocative in sensation and impressive, we have established them to provide sensorial access to the statistical fields on which they conduct their operations. This access and this taste for sensation, the culture in which it develops and the manners of its enjoyment, even its intoxication, are the computer’s own. They are not solvents, its alkahest, and the sarx not dissolved, is not extended or plumbed into them but appropriated—as politically as banks or industries are nationalised or privatised—and cut up by them. Simon Taylor 79 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing These fields make up the body of computational affectivity as composed of statistical facts; and this body, although it is derivative—both from what it gives intelligence of, which informs it, and from its theatrical evocations of impressive performance—is organised and formalised as a formally complete body of knowledge. We have called the combinatory that which our difference engines turn over, appropriate, circumscribe, mine as if what is unearthed were not first there buried, buried in the organic unconscious of the computer. As if its existence were essentially due to overwhelming statistical probability, to the amplitude of the numbers talking, impressing us with certainty, we have attributed to the tools of dataprocessing forms of sensation that are compelling, that so compel we risk overlooking it is our own sensations which compel us, which we call virtual, when it is only by virtue of the sense the computer takes on as its own—we have demonstrated that it is not—that we feel and experience the compulsion of the virtual. Access is not given to human sensation of the combinatory’s statistical workings but that the virtual sensation which is the computational affect is unconscious: we reverse this organicism, and claim for the computer the freedom of a brain without a body, when the positive sense of computation comes from it being a body without a brain. The body of the computer is hidden from view; and it is not a matter of our own being distributed through it, but of our own organism being distributed, apportioned, partitioned and pulled apart by it. It is this which the organic apparatus of technicity protects us from, and it is to the sarx it belongs, this awareness. Not access, correlation, not representation, it is excess. In this excess we would locate thought, the excess of thought exceeding perception. But it is thought going by way of the outside of an other’s perception, or affect, that we have the habit to and remember, returning to memory, returning to the body, as our own. Although it is expressed we have the habit of its impression. We recall it as the correlate of impression. We envision it in forms of instrumental representation. The affectionate regard in which we hold ourselves is because, Spinoza explains, and Husserl in the constitution of consciousness by corporeity agrees, there is no thought before that of Simon Taylor 80 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the body;62 and the mind and body are one and the same thing:63 of thought, mind or body there is none before our own. Deleuze finds in what breaks the identity, unity and continuity of association of thought, mind and body—adding image and idea—the problem.64 This is why we say the sarx is the body of the problem. Not the other way around, being neither body of knowledge nor one of thought, the sarx is the body belonging to the problem, to the question, the question of excess, for the reason that what breaks comes from outside. Is there in every type of excess then an openness to the problem, an escape from the body of knowledge, an adventure of thought? It seems intoxication is given to us with more and more ease. Computation seems to be effort expended on eliminating effort in attaining it. So a taste for sensation, for the feel of a gigabyte, a terabyte of data, for the feel of numerical scale, whether the millions saved from poverty and disease or the billions condemned, is it something we have learnt, or adopted? A culture of excess, flooding us in sugary drinks, as well as pornographic and violent imagery—are we not tumid fit to pop from the pandemic of obesity, to burst outside into the outside that relentlessly pours in?—a culture of excess is it not a culture of thought, where everywhere there is the question taking us out of ourselves? Everything subject to construction—in everything is the vertigo, the dizziness and discombobulation, the derangement of the senses: desires themselves pushed to their limit, the pushing driven, the drivers pushed from behind, instinct with forms which can only end with because open to the one form—of extinction, one because the outside is one. The cascade is internal, mad growth of forms of desire, breaking up psychic unity, social cohesion, historic continuity, each bubble bursting on the last, the one before, down to the final unity: equally, the brain or the market, since the thought is its, each one. Our excesses, are they not products but produced? Products, from distribution and supply chains, automated, autonomised, optimised which animate the market, do they not animate us as well? Are we not so animated, striving to persevere and living? 62 Spinoza, Ethics, op. cit., 39. 63 Ibid., 48. 64 Among many other instances, see: Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., 252. Simon Taylor 81 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Is not this the form of psychic life? Are we not fodder pushed to overconsumption by oversupply? Is this not what drives speculation—that speculation relies on size, scale, weight for the statements we have called predictive? Speculation is not only geared to ourselves as consumers and overconsumption but also to ourselves as producers and overproduction. Is not the data, in cascade, in atomsplitting internal amplification, the belt running, the belt and roadway project, feeding back, to make the earth spin faster and hotter? Is not the human population its inadequate heatsink headed for extinction? Is this not because sensibility plugs in, is plugged into the problem permanently? Sensitivity, is it not numbed but brutalised, numbed up, not down, desensitised only in order it is ever on, so as always to be avid? But is it the market or the brain? Lost appetite for less, craving sensations fresher, stronger and evermore brutal, how else contrive them and conjure them for experience than through the power of the brain? Must not the brain then be unleashed? To have and feed its avidity—to harness gorging—must it not be freed from the body? Must it not first have to overcome its limitations, the limitations of its constitution, of its corporeal constitution, those physical limits of the body, to be able to employ itself as the field of its own experience? Is not the sarcous found in its self-enjoyment? Is it not more product, one product more? We have said they are not prosthetics, our tools and technical devices, except when they are. They do not extend what is after all only sensation except when they do. We are equipped with public and private infrastructure extending our zones of influence and ultimately compassion. Another’s pain is unearthed for us from the millions who suffer, whose suffering is too large to feel and is anyway too general. Her story is told. He is identified with a personal history. Her affliction is put onto social circumstance. Reasons are explained in commentaries on his personal case for his predicament. It was imposed on him by externalities that can only be attributed to chance. She had the bad luck to live within a community, which, although it had the potential for compassion, had not the underlying attitudes of ours, and reserved the exercise of care and the provision of medical attention for others belonging to another class, race or gender, who could pay. Neither can we blame them for the allocation of resources: these problems are systemic and structural; we are told not even the dispensing of political Simon Taylor 82 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing wisdom can mitigate the situation, such that our own leaders and representatives might confer; meanwhile NGOs are working with authorities at the local level, and largely flying under the radar of the regime. Our commentators need not explain how he is in our hand, how she is on our screen. If we want to we can catch her candidly and hear the resentment, her own and of her neighbours, she was singled out, from the numbers of women and children who die of hunger each year. How can she be proud? She is a victim of circumstance; he too, hanging his head and with downcast eyes, he is ashamed, but not alone. He will find a reasonable outlet for his resentment through the understanding although the problems are systemic and structural they are inflicted from outside, from outside a country of which he is justly proud; 65 he will find outlet through the understanding he is not alone: not only does he stand with his country and his people, not only does his face stand for them, he faces us and others who might help but do not; he accuses us. They are not alone through understanding something we have carelessly forgotten. Our condition of privilege is as structural and systemic as theirs of its lack. Prosthetics for a human heart, our devices keep us in touch with progressively more of the globe. Each surge in technology brings a fresh slew of data; each device is new and personal to us even before we personalise its settings; and each successive iteration increases with its own our capacities to manage personal information and to let in the world. Both are engaged in becoming intimate. Our capacities do not mirror those of the devices we equip ourselves with; in their capacity to mirror our capacity for feeling, in the mutual personal affection that is theirs and ours, they are coming to mirror what we feel: just as they know where we are, where we shop, our passwords, when we do not, it is with our affective lives they enmesh, as the most rational tools of the irrational. But this is no longer the collective irrationality of the multitude’s unconscious drives. 65 Cf. Pankaj Mishra, for whom Voltaire is the first figure of reason inaugurating its export by exalting its influence in social improvement—largely where European expansion had already achieved by its influence deleterious effects; and so also initiating in the local missions of nationalism to which it gave rise, the later bounceback of nationalism to Europe’s globalised West, the rebounding backfiring results of which we currently witness. Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, (London, UK: Penguin, 2018). Simon Taylor 83 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing What our devices know about us, their ability to make it public, or sell it to interested parties, is less important than what we might call the affective income that is our private profit; we profit in what we already know about our devices and from our devices, which is their ability to make private and personal what the world has to offer. We do not so much trade in our privacy but that we privatise the affective capital of the globe. It flows in through filters as intimate as internal organs; and with the same affect as internal organs in the seamless production of continuous streaming reality, as much as more goes over the threshold of consciousness so more goes below. So we can say we are us—or as us: because by the ceaseless incoming of the public multitude in this as it enters the meanwhile of a now without surcease, where it stands as standing (human) capital, where it is suspended. At any hour of the day and night we are open to the demands of signals from SETI, from our neighbour, whose point of contact we are in a medical emergency, from Amnesty, from the embassy about our visa application; typhoon alarms; we are alerted to our accounts being hacked, to software updates, to mobilisations of civil defence, to share price falling, to a new offer being made on the apartment we want, to new clients for our business, to a cat video, a product, a baby, a death, the toll for the recent calamity or pandemic pushing 2 million or 36. We feel a physical pressure to take the call, watch the clip and click buy now; and we feel the pleasure of relief when we do. Or if we resist, at our partner’s bidding, the desire to, just to swipe quickly right, to see the screen light up at our tactile prompt, just to peek, passing over the image gently sneaking a look with one eye, the other closed feigning sleep, we resent it, we miss it, we mourn it and we cannot help getting angry, at anyone, even ourselves. Or if we are making love or eating the meal of a lifetime, attending a birth or a funeral, and in our pocket we feel the slight vibration of the incoming call and we deliberately ignore it, sending the busy signal, we congratulate ourselves on our fortitude in resisting the demand of whoever or whatever it was. We check later, when we are finished, when he is in the shower, when the pastor finally stops in her fatuous praise of one she has never met and now never will, when we have time and when it is too late. Their demands which are the demands of our compassion, our curiosity, our avarice, our care—and ultimately a compassion going out encompassing the globe even as it closes in on Simon Taylor 84 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing an urgent care for oneself, to take care of that intimate urge we feel to be intimate with the global community, to share its intimations—come now. They are continuous with the endless present. Brought in as close to realtime as the provider gets on our current deal, the alert, the alarm, the thing, whoever, whatever it is demanding attention, is immediate, we feel. A world is inside us. It could be our heart. It could equally be our colon. Its demands are an intimate and continuous presence. It is the realtime of the actually existing world which calls us, ever turning, never faster, never slower than now. The lives going on we see from aeroplanes, as the height increases of the drone shot, below in the camps, more and more of them, on the streets, in trains, on motorways, in queues of traffic, shut up in countless houses and highrises, watching who knows what, thinking a billion billion things at once, fill the present horizon of our experience. They reach out from inside to us. They present their pleas with pangs like hunger. With cramps, twinges and twists they confront us with looks to the camera that are like veins crossing. Their looks and their imperatives are pings and pains in a connectivity that is soft fibrous, organic and bodily felt. But it is ours undistributed and all of a unity and we answer knowing we give away our location and these vital signs of life not to the levels and channels that occupy the living, the problem of the living, but to be gathered up in the excess that alerts and alarms and signals to another body our demands. This information is being communicated to you now. The rule of compassion divides time along the thick lines of instantaneity through to the thin of a structural and systemic time scheme which underlies it. What is instantaneous builds up over time; while the ongoing root structure of the system of time is in a state of radical inconstancy. It sends out probes. It erases its former traces. It grows along pulses of light, firing shifting particles, their accretions caught by waves of luminosity, that suddenly dissipate leaving no pattern on the black sheet of organic memory.66 Only the instant remains, thickening connexions. We have the image of the bubble to account for them; while it is as impossible to recall the underlying structure as it is the path lightning takes. We should think of it as a system of 66 Raymond Ruyer, Neofinalism, Trans. Alyosha Edlebi, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 37. Simon Taylor 85 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing strobes, each instant refurbishing the image coming after, that is the afterimage: bubbles occupying a cinematic time; or, like the deep red veins you see thrown against the office wall of the optometrist when she directs a torch into your pupil, the dark tendrils of which are always there on the retina but your brain is in the habit of forgetting them so that you do not notice them cutting through everything. (These in turn are like seeing all of a sudden in an old photograph the black roots of disease spreading over the figures looking out at you and knowing death to be the truth of Dasein in its de-distancing;67 moreover they are a part of the visual field for you alone— although you do not usually notice them perhaps you dream them?—and their pattern is as individual and unique as a fingerprint.) The system of time passes over the true blackness like lightning. In one pulse it is gone. The rule of compassion metes out the time of work into the projects of repeating instants and the downtime when common feeling deploys itself across its global reach. Downtime because it pertains to the structure and system of the entire scheme is not regularised but percolates through, illuminating you with its small pieces of information in flashes that never gather enough momentum to be bursts.68 The momentum necessary would go against the grain of the strobing repetitions which do form the bursts of networked time, by thickening into figures. Their characters and personae fill the screen of the brain with a sense of the strong and conscious identification it uses in its direction and orientation towards work, that it is used to: these are my working buddies; these my familiar means of instantaneous communication. You do not lack for strength in performing the synthesis on which they are attendant and that you can thank for your position and your status. But just like the irretraceable path that lightning takes, in which they say the brain lights up, the bursts of strobe animate particles to which no position can be assigned, without conceding them to the status of effects, that are, because spatial, only thought to be special. Now is not reducible to the and then of work. So when the screen of the brain lights up, it lights with the demands of strangers, along the irretraceable line lightning takes in common feeling, that it partitions, cuts and assembles. The 67 Credit for this reference to Heidegger goes to Mark Jackson, personal correspondence, 21 April 2020. 68 Cf. Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Patterns Behind Everything We Do, from Your E-mail to Bloody Crusades, (New York, NY: Dutton, 2010). Simon Taylor 86 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing assembly itself is the work. Its effects, for the workers, on the thick lines of its production, who share the work, are as unique to them and individual as a network of capillaries—as if in sharing a cinematic vision we shared the same retina. The work is however endless. Its overwhelming demands threaten constant collapse. No human effort is spared its lightness; none is left in keeping up its precarity; noone is in reserve in the waitingroom. Angels in fact act as ushers for workers who fall. But none do. It is the first factory in which noone falls. Is this the final unity reversing social dehiscence, historic and personal fragmentation, a place in which statements are possible like everyone is doing the mandala challenge? We can say at the least that the statement is honest: everyone is. But neither global cohesion nor any identification the individual might make are as interesting as this honesty. Its communication performs not the fact of doing the mandala challenge, as if the statement installed a subject in itself, demonstrating, “everyone,” with whose singular the global audience identified its own experience; and it is not then of apodictic experience that we are any longer talking truthfully or, honestly, of a speculative drive’s payoff. There is no honesty in speculation. What is spoken speaks the fact of communicability, that is. Now it leaves no room for doubt, and no time for work. No other assertion can be made, with none to follow. No other thing can be admitted. Honesty does not enter into it, enters not into its circle, but stands by, is the interesting face in which we register the scene, eyes wide like exit wounds. We might say no other thing, only honesty can be admitted, but it is inadmissible. Its condition is that of a poor thing, less than one, serious enough, with no other reproach to be made against it but that it is, incapable of irony, ill-equipped with distance and for lack of space unable to circulate—ephectic, underprovisioned. Of self-survey we can say it is manifestly less one because it cannot complete. Even the short bridge of parallax absent, the ends come together, puncture vision. Of self-awareness only this honesty is left, like a worn stone rubbed between thumb and forefinger or, in the pocket, with Simon Taylor 87 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing such diligent and relentless repetitions, rotations and part-rotations in digital close circuit, a coin that is rubbed for so long it is worn one-sided, worn dishonest, so it is, in a bet, useless. For purchase we can say it is useless, but a coin one side down is something to speculate on; and for carrying fine. Say we were to go ahead, and double back, with whatever end, now we would find the tail does not meet the head, now the head does not the tail. We would want to keep doubling back to the present, finding with whatever end we had the image of the other missing. So however exhausting our journey will have been, and no matter how frustrating, in the end the lack will still have had the desirable affect on us—a lopsided achievement, asymmetrical—of presuming our future advancement. We should say retinal display: the black gaps are inadmissible. But we know security in the flashing gathering on the background, images skittering against a framework each moment threatening to give up, a heart we keep alive by looking. The imperatives of others are pretext for a rule of compassion that becomes more limited all the time. We have to work harder to feel it. Our capacity to care does not lessen. Neither in fact does our capacity to feel in the famous desensitisation caused by acceleration, amplification and intensification of technical means. We have to scope out its opportunities. We are prospectors. We would stake claims under the rule of compassion, pity, rather than break it. Each golden moment is a miniature sun shining with warmth but no illumination on a miniature world in retinal display. Our hearts do not harden. They become trade routes. With oversupply grows specialisation, however not to tasks. You do not turn into a connoisseur whose refinement discriminates among newsfeeds, podcasts. You are in your inundation by gifs and emoticons more a fisher specialist in a single species, that if you bring it to the table you know everyone will eat. Like everyone you patiently address, you are not aficionado of some recondite field, do not spiel off on foreign authors or bands and zines nobody has heard of; you do not mix cocktails or perfumes for which noone has the head or nose. Your patience is rewarded: of this you are connoisseur—because what does the word mean if not one who knows?—of that which everyone can like. Simon Taylor 88 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Their collective endorsement is not experienced in individual alone but equally by collective acts of kindness in reception and recognition of the connoisseurship you demonstrate. Held in common on one side, where one might say the garden of the world is yours to walk, you work your own. Generalising on one side, your specialisation is to what we know to be our times. You sign your own work with a moving point, less than one: that is locative (given the sense of time) and forms a link or hook linking the two parts of the time scheme,69 the flashing of images and ideas and the inconstant framework over which their forms skitter and pulse. One part produces instants which accrete in the other. You experience the equally locative moving links of the collective to be parts in reciprocal reinforcement: instantaneity feeding the immediacy of your network; its immediacy feeding the instantaneity of your demonstrated knowledge. About this knowledge it remains to be said it is the demonstration of sheer communicability— having or entertaining a certain decadence—on the instant of a statement like Everyone is doing the mandala challenge. There is as well the positive sense which can be derived from it of a subject staging the interest of a network, catching it, suspending its experience as instantaneous form of knowledge.70 As an individual form of knowledge the instant is hooked from and suspended on a background, which immediately plunges forward to claim it.71 Or it reclaims it to the night from the lightning. But neither is it the collective experience which is reclaimed to generality, 69 Cf. for hook, the vinculum, about which Deleuze writes, “In this way the vinculum takes up its variables in a massive effect and not in their individuality: whence the passage ... from the individual mirror to the collective echo ... it thus causes an inversion of appurtenance.” Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Trans. Tom Conley, (London, UK: Continuum, 2006), 128. 70 Cf. footnote 52: Deleuze writes, “We should reserve the name 'positivity' for this state of the multiple Idea or this consistency of the problematic. Moreover, we must guard every time against the manner in which this perfectly positive (non)-being leans towards a negative non-being and tends to collapse into its own shadow, finding there its most profound distortion, to the further advantage of the illusion of consciousness.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., 254. 71 Cf. Deleuze, whose use of the active term plunge in Difference and Repetition, is most often in relation to the virtual; and of reversal of lighting and ground, this, where it is ground to the lightning of difference: “Lightning ... distinguishes itself from the black sky but must also trail it behind ... as if the ground rose to the surface ... The rising ground is no longer below [behind or beyond], it acquires autonomous existence ... When the ground rises to the surface, the human face decomposes in this mirror in which both determinations and the indeterminate combine in a single determination which “makes” the difference. ... It is better to raise up the ground and dissolve the form.” Deleuze, ibid., 36-37. Simon Taylor 89 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing nor the individual of which the reclamation or recuperation is the collective’s. The notion to be affirmed is that of a subject suspending collective experience as instantaneous and individual (knowledge) against a background of blackness or void surging forward to swallow it.72 This we will later in turn claim to have a properly theatrical sense in the staging of the subjective event, to be its mandala challenge. Where we might have expected the transcendental moment, an obelisk, perhaps, impenetrable and secret, in a Second Empire bedroom, antechamber to the cosmos, the trap of the mechanism is a stuttering projector, stopping and restarting at odd and irregular points in the vast panoply of its cinematic repertoire. The screen is an old sheet. It shows a sea nightlit in surges of free and captive electricity, wild and direct as a demand. Where you might have expected decadence sustained in the absolute, you get a flicker of recognition against a monocular vision which, improvised, costs the earth to maintain. We could speak, as of fame, of the instantaneity of the flicker, and, as of being known, of the cost of recognition, and of knowledge, as of the sliver of a chance we will be, as a vanity. We would be approaching the current horizons of sociability in the relations entertained with communicability, in which decadent state, far from not existing,73 and far from improving or advancing, society is improvised. The cost as we know is planetary. Or we might say astronomical: we would be suggesting the decadence that in science fiction goes to the extreme of universal cosmic sociability (or, in Liu’s solution to the Fermi Paradox, its opposite, unsociability),74 of technology being the cosmos’s common tongue—a decadence recuperated in the improvement and advance of the language of technical means. Since these are those of communication, binding communities, warming the relations of the global network without illumination, they would go to an ongoing catastrophe of science that is knowledge. But we 72 Cf. François Laruelle, “On the Black Universe: In the Human Foundations of Color,” Trans. Miquel Abreu, in Eugene Thacker et al., Dark Nights of the Universe, ([NAME] Publications, 2013), 102-110. 73 The reference is to Prime Minister of the UK, Margaret Thatcher’s statement, made in interview in 1981, “there is no such thing as society.” At Samual Brittan, “Thatcher was right – there is no ‘society’,” 13 April 2013, Financial Times, online version, viewed 30 April 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/d1387b70-a5d511e2-9b77-00144feabdc0. Srećko Horvat writes that the true triumph of Thatcher’s other wellknown dictum ‘There is no alternative’ (acronym: TINA) “is that not even the left believes there really is an alternative any more.” Srećko Horvat, Poetry from the Future: Why a global liberation movement is our civilization’s last chance, (London, UK: Allen Lane, 2019), 94. 74 Liu, The Dark Forest, op. cit. Simon Taylor 90 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing would say the reverse, reversing the reversal of the communicating language-centred brain, and say the body is that without which these relations are not decadent: it is what makes them decadent, the cost of compassion vain and the thought communicative relations will prolong knowledge vain. Abundance in the profuse gifts of our historic situation tested the resolve we once had to acquire it. Those whose struggle is continual in its acquisition continue to test it. The drive to excess is general as if there is too much desire when there is too little reason given to stop wanting. Spinoza analyzes the affects of lust, greed, gluttony and avarice and, stating that for a passion to relent requires another stronger and opposite affect to come to bear, comes to the conclusion moderation, self-control, reasonable or social behaviour and injunction, the moral force of the good, either what is good for one or for many, do not oppose them. He concludes not that there do not exist stronger passions and affects, and that this is why desire runs to excess and is relentless. Neither does he conclude that they are part of a human nature, either for better or for worse. His conclusion is they have no opposition. Virtue does not oppose the sad or destructive affects of desire. Reason does not. But reason’s use, although not mounting the opposition of a stronger affect in libidinal displacement, as Freud tried to show, through fear or castration, in the Reality Principle or Death Drive, can show sadness and destruction to be properties of excessive desire. Then these are not sad or destructive effects, or influences. Sadness or destruction is not found in the results we should either fear or consider inevitable either in the mortal or fallen state of human durational life, or in that state of affairs we might attribute to history as being one of our situatedness, giving itself to be endured, survived and surpassed, to be transcended, in either case, or not. Neither is it to reason’s merit, fortune or good use it can show the affects of excessive love, ambition, pride, love of self or of another or others, to be sad and destructive. Simon Taylor 91 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Such excesses are not causes of sadness and destruction: they are sadnesses and destructions of what is essential to the nature of any one of us through limiting our power to think or to act (of anyone at all, or, as Nietzsche writes no one). Reason demonstrates that sadness and destruction are continuous with the sad and destructive passions and, because they have sadness and destruction as properties, in them we experience no other thing but them. Because they have nothing to oppose them, and we find in reason no reason to, their power becomes continuous with ours and we are locked down, constricted, conscripted to a single power, to the exclusion of any other. Reason demonstrates our experience to be a sadness of being for placing a limitation on the power to be and a destruction for destroying other powers to think and to act. This does not mean powers to think and act differently but as Nietzsche and Deleuze following him will say by destroying the powers to change excludes the possibility of change, to become our own creature, or to become what we are. The experience we have then in Spinoza is being to be a power to come into and of an increase in our powers to be being an increase in our powers to exist. It is not then in overcoming or transcending or in abrogating what is in our nature— which is never a composite—we take power—or in arrogating it to another being or intelligence give it away—but in coming into it—which is never a singular—we affirm powers to be, to think and to act: to exist. We have too much. This is the problem of abundance. We desire too much. It arrives and we pass on according to the famous law of the lack never filled. Reason suggests that it is not unreasonable to desire too much but that doing so involves a diminution in the powers to be that follow from a nature which is never composite. So we compose these powers. We use reason to compose the powers to follow from the individual power which is ours. Our understanding is not complete. Neither can it ever be if it is open to new powers, unless we seek to understand too much, when understanding would seem to circle the same lack that is never filled by the arrival of what we have desired, or its arrival in abundance. Then the reason must be confused. The famous lack leads us into a circle we cannot leave, unless we compose the powers to escape it. We cannot come into these powers by overcoming, Simon Taylor 92 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing transcending, or by arrogating them to another intelligent thing. They are composed by reason for the enjoyment of our understanding. But we pass on from their enjoyment, desiring more as if without understanding. The planetary resource is poured into our research and our desire. However we understand too well the latest commodity to be just that, a lure for desire and a trap for an understanding that circles the same lack. From this confusion of reason comes the excess we fire questions at as if abundance or the new were the problem. Our resolve in acquiring abundance in the profuse gifts of our historic situation are tested as those continue to test it whose struggle is continual in its acquisition. But the confusion does not result from the excess—this is not the catastrophe. Rather it is the reverse. Lingis asks, “Is there not something catastrophic in the very nature of thought?” 75 More catastrophic for reason, understanding or thought, is the avoidance of catastrophe, which is, after all, simply a reversal. Since thought, understanding and the use of reason, preeminently its technical use, following from the discourse of technology, had us arrive here at this historic moment and composed the powers which produced the Holocaust, are not those powers to be abrogated which follow from the nature of our understanding, thought and use of reason? Is it not our rational complement which is to be lopped off us? Here the confusion we have characterised as a decadence of sociability commences because it is in avoidance of catastrophe that it is formed. The question is which brain is to go first? Is it the monkey brain? This brain would be the site of drives and subhuman plots to the exercise of aggressive, sexually competitive and destructive urges. Although its tool use would suggest some rudimentary grasp of the principle of technics, it would be the brain before language, being incapable of instrumentalising primitive desires through language and social ritual, theatre and writing, and incapable of internalising them in social organisation. It would be the brain before technology and for that reason alone ought to go. 75 Lingis, “Catastrophic Time,” 446-459, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, op. cit., 458. 93 Simon Taylor 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Then there is the social brain, the brain thought to be most human, after language and now engaging in the problems of human social organisation, but not at distributions requiring specialisation of individual castes, guilds, and groupings set to specific tasks. This specification and differentiation of social function follows from the network brain. The social brain must go because it has not yet learnt what the network brain knows which is how to turn others to good use, to the good of one’s own social organisation. Because its primary achievement is securing territories for itself against other social organisations, declaring a language in common for us in which our primitive urges are instrumentalised and internalised against them and to their exclusion; because it is thought to be most human for granting to others their subhumanity; and because its survival is colonial, it must go. Next comes the brain that includes the exclusion of others, producing a majority in which minorities have their role, usually supporting the majority in its. This we might call the political brain but that it is built on an economic order. We cannot call it the economic brain because it has not yet effected the inversion of power relations which are economic over those which are political. This brain thinks of economics as a property of unities politically articulated. It thinks of economy as belonging to a political unity, a nation or state. These unities are not yet reticulated except in commerce along lines of trade; those in turn are stated in terms of political alliance aggregated into conglomerates with socalled super powers or sidelined and exploited. We will call this the compartmentalising brain of social organisation. Although it establishes networks—of allies, enemy states and makes of states estates or service zones—and for the fact it does—and although the network brain’s precursor, it is not yet that brain. The compartmentalising brain consolidates on the social brain’s achievement of a primitive unity by political incorporation and economic expropriation and appropriation: it is us who use them and leave them politically disenfranchised; they may have human, civil or even equal rights but this is not in recognition of their human, civil or even equal humanity. It is in recognition of their utility as chattels. The compartmentalising brain is itself compartmental—so the monkey brain was monkey or early-stage evolutionary, which for the modern brain involves a kind of devolution: but already Simon Taylor 94 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing here we see the compartmentalising brain at work. It, in order to represent parts of itself, must partition off those parts, allocating to each a label and job definition. So the social brain was also strongly social, capable of identitarian commitments to a people, nation or state, to the various departments of identity later defined by the compartmentalising brain, of race, class, gender, and degree of political exclusion (through the whole spectrum of vagrancy, criminality, sexuality, or mental or physical disablement through age or accident); and so the social brain was set on defending the territory with which it identified itself. That is each brain is structured by the definition of the next in series. The compartmentalising brain, because it can hold the two truths, of us and them, inside outside—why it is sometimes called the screen brain—, it can hold the competing truths of the whole series in the development or evolution of the brain at the same time. The compartmentalising brain reconciles the principle of nonidentity, relativising the successive claims of the social and monkey brains, going as far as the network brain. Nonidentity haunts it however. It is the ghost in the machine, a spiritual remainder or residue,76 which in the network brain will come to be the machine in the ghost: and this is why the compartmentalising brain must go, not because it is politically incorrect, it is above all the last brain that thinks the power of the political. It must go because it thinks like a machine. Each brain survives in the last. The compartmentalising brain survives in the network brain like modernism survives in postmodernism. That is each affectively survives in the last in aesthetic form. The compartmentalising brain’s is a machine aesthetic for which periods in history can be held side by side—like in a newspaper or film—and by which they can be amassed and caused to fall apart, to rain in fragments and in black ash, to be pulverised by hammers on their way in the process to being liquefied in churns. For their containment still the flows are to be cut up, are to be represented and enter exchange, their identities not stripped but bared and reticulated. These pipes may contain shit and piss but both are, like it 76 This is the meaning of plumbing for Amelia Jones, to remove unwanted feminine fluids from the modern social organisation of the city—or, wetwork. Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 156-163. Simon Taylor 95 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing and surviving because repeating it, recuperable to art, commerce and banality.77 God is a piece of plumbing;78 and the social brain has its kitsch, maintained in the way we feel God’s plumbing must continue to work, like colonialism and other good work, and work itself until it is suspended. What has so far enabled the survival of each brain in the one by which it is superseded is majority rule. It needs to be said that each social organisation is also the social organisation of the brain, the society or counsel it keeps with itself. So the compartmentalising brain subjects some of its parts to the rule of its majority stakeholders or shareholders, who need not themselves comprise a numerical majority. They are a whole brain unto themselves and can survive whatever the situation. We need not believe in just these four brains: monkey, social, compartmentalising and network. A recent discovery has made belief unnecessary—which is not to say we suspend it: we are not here dealing with types of brains, in a typology or in a variety or mixture, a pick and mix of which is first to go. The brain does not belong to a realm in which our own adequacy or inadequacy, preferring one before another, comes into question. Whatever adequacy or inadequacy a brain has is it is not ours, since the discovery letting us off the hook of having to exercise our judgement on what we will not disbelieve or having to take a stand on it, is that the brain does not know what it is doing. We can no longer grant or afford to truth its mistake or its correction. It holds some of its parts imprisoned so to speak but it has lost control of its correction facility. A carceral society, one in which the many are held to ransom by the few, made marginal by a majority, or for its sake are actively underdeveloped, is also not a type, variety or a mix. It is not one for which we might pick out the watchword of diversity for example or where we might for goodness sake practice a more radical form of removal. Such is the case in theatres of war of the surgical strike. 77 Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit sold in cans—a limited series—in 1961; Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ serves as literal reference; but so does Jeff Koons’s 1989 Made in Heaven series in which, although pornographic, no bodily fluids are depicted, banalising sexual commerce. Cf. The series headed “Banality,” 1988, made for mass appeal. Jeff Koons, The Jeff Koons Handbook, (London, UK: Thames & Hudson Anthony D’Offay Gallery, 1992), 97-116. 78 Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s 1917, God, an S-bend on a wooden plinth, leads many to suggest it was she and not Duchamp responsible for Fountain. In ibid. 44. Simon Taylor 96 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing But, you will ask, if surgery on the brain is possible, why not surgery on society? Can we not open the prisons and free the prisoners? Are we to accept a kind neurological determinism for social organisation that hardwires failure and abjection? Have we not won through political and social experiment—and it must be said mental experiment—new rights for parts of society formerly marginalised? Can we not, seeing what freedoms we have, as Foucault is said to have told Philip Horvitz, a student at Berkeley, use them, to get still more?79 The state of affairs where the power in the brain cannot reach all its parts, cannot even see them, or has forgotten it has locked them up, is not reflected in social organisation because each social organisation has its own brain. If the brain’s organisation is not reflected in the other social organisation, that in the compartmentalising brain is also a political organisation, it is because they are one and the same thing. One is not responsible for the other. Or, better said, each social organisation, human and nonhuman, deserves its own. That each social organisation is deserving of a brain means the acquisition by each of a social and psychic consistency, and that it gets the brain it deserves; this is the lesson behind Deleuze and Guattari’s finding for a brain for a colony of rats, or one for a pack of dogs, that we can afford to think differently; it is also the reason why none of these is a mentality, without resentment, none a moral or ethical type.80 Neither is it the case for a herd brain protecting the vulnerable, for the human network brain providing them laptops, for a monkey brain both holding them close and offering them out, nor for a compartmentalising brain, taking up on the offer, and locking them up, that it is taking a stand. Each acts with the supreme purity— and, we might say with Ruyer, finality—of intention of its social and psychic self-survey.81 So what supersedes the compartmentalising brain in the network brain is a social organisation thought to be adequate to the task of an inadequate judgement in the former, 79 James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, (London, UK: Flamingo, 1994), 353. 80 Eugene W. Holland’s handling of the ISSO Problem, “Intra-Species Social Organization,” as a theme in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, ought also be acknowledged here. This is the problem of survival which human species address and experiment with solutions to, and that other, very different species do too, in ways which are both instructively different, Holland writes, but also instructively similar. He asks, “Are we a herd or a pack animal?” To the extent he the asks, in what combination or mixture? our account departs from his. Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2013), 25. 81 Ruyer, Neofinalism, op. cit., 120. Simon Taylor 97 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing where the suspension judgement undergoes because of its inadequacy survives in the aesthetic of a machine that thinks. Now the suspension is available as a type and a mentality. It is subjected to a kind of judgement; and it is this subjection rendering it animate. What pushes the network brain out, in social organisation, in its technical constitution, pulls it back in, in an aesthetic configuration belonging to that which has been called a survival instinct involving a variety of types of brains, able to be mixed, fused, confused and selected for because suspended in the judgement of their inadequacy: brains the primitive and nonverbal urges of which survive, sex gender organ body brains; brains the instincts of which are cathected and plumb the heights and depths of social status, in relentless pursuit of power and prestige, and incessant exorcism of social ills and wills, victim brains, blame brains, us and them brains; and those which arrogate to themselves rights to judgement, notarising brains, managerial and incorporating assimilated, incorporated assimilating cooperating and complicit brains; brains that have an excuse already worked out, with justification on the tip of incessantly working tongues ready to roll out; stupid brains and cliché-ridden brains. The only reason for the network brain is that no brain can be trusted, particularly none entrusted with social organisation. The function of the network brain is to outsmart them all, all the mad stupid hungry selfish brains, and leads to their suspension and their confusion, but also to their humour and their play—to their depression and their autism. Unlike the compartmentalising brain the network brain does not reorder the other brains, it does not take the city for its model, but the flows underneath it, the plumbing that is God. Unlike the compartmentalising brain that uses technical instruments to manage and control, to discipline and direct, the traffic of the social, top-to-bottom, the network brain takes for its computational model the instrumentalisation of management in every one of its applications, distributed, using the discourse of technology throughout to organise the social, end-to-end. For it management and technology are the same thing. Neither in the business of applying technological solutions to the problem of (intra-species) social organisation nor in the Simon Taylor 98 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing business of the management and distribution of their application, the network brain is that business for which the language of technology and management of species are one.82 The network brain performs the bridgework of knowledge, of knowledge in a state of abundance. But this can only be understood from the point of view not of a social or communicative realm but from that of all of the vaunted connectivity of our advanced historic situation at once. It is only from the network, the network’s brain, the means to acquire knowledge, contribute to and produce it can be understood. The easy mistake to make here is that it is cybernetic or cyborg, an amalgam of A and I. But this is to fall back on an aesthetic, which aligns with the suspension according to a perception it is already inadequate, as either knowledge or information, form or sense, of a cutting or threshing or weaving machine, from which the human has been siphoned off and discharged. It is to believe in the human being eradicated for good. So it is to fall back on type—and we may as well say and relay knowledge back to what we know about reptilian and monkey brains, hominid social brains, Voltaire’s and Rousseau’s brain, Enlightened, disenchanted and Savage brains, looking backward brains while walking forward brains. The network brain has ceased to do either. Unlike the compartmentalising brain, the network brain does not review and revise the order of the preceding brains. Neither does the network brain, as the subject of a knowledge of the social organisation that knows itself, appoint itself overseer, manager or boss. The network brain abrogates oversight. Neither does the centre fall apart because of this abrogation, nor is there one to decentre, nor a doubling of centre, as in the double axes of an ellipsis; and neither is there a fragmentation consequent on an exploded view either of society or an atomisation of the individual in it. To think so is to charge the network brain with a workover or makeover of the other brains, as if through a fortuitous disinterest, a propitious insight or intuition, or the intervention of a technology, or the accident of an event, which changes everything. Yet we hold on to these ideas, are disarmed by them: we deserve the dissolution of society, decentring and fragmenting the social, fracturing the ego, its atomisation—does not this follow from the 82 See note 80 above for Intra-Species Social Organisation. Simon Taylor 99 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing network brain?—and yet meanwhile our confident appraisal of both states of affairs and of our deserving natures corresponds to and finds confirmation not in reason but in avoidance of the catastrophe we are or ought to be. So we have been asking the wrong question: it is not what brain should be first to go; that question will have been answered, we have already answered it, in fact we come to it with an answer prepared, it is the human. The social order is not reviewed or revised by the network brain. As if passed through a shredder it barely holds together. The opinion that it does results only from the unity of image projected onto it. We have said the vested interests of the brains preceding the network brain survive in aesthetic forms: they are the interests which uphold it. Yet also we have the impression this unity belongs to the present and that this is the work and in the specifications of the network brain, that the makedo of social organisation is in fact due to considerations based in the amplification, acceleration and intensification of technical means. We have the impression from a technical network of what the network brain does—and of what it does to pursue its survival: which is the promise of an aesthetic replacing the social order. We have the impression of an endless now, but one gathering speed. It has then the speed of business with which we identified the network brain, of management and technology—or, specifically, of species management given the sole voice of order, technology, a language of accelerating, amplifying and intensifying technical accomplishment. The technical is accorded the status of an accomplishment of the species, human. This is to its management and control and also to its technical enhancement. In both we might contest the advantage produced as supernumerary, an equipment beyond the means of most as well as beyond any social utility. Innovation seems to the end of a seamless experience of superiority but one entirely virtual. We might ask of the excessive production of catastrophic means to technical ends regarding the minimal number who are to escape species conflagration by uploading brains and personality or leaving the planet, or both, becoming cyborg and enhanced colonists of the cosmos. Yet as surely as there exists engineered mass extinction for the dubious gain of the Simon Taylor 100 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing select, we would also, in so asking count ourselves among the extras and bit-part players by turns equally entertained and appalled but above all caught up in the same wind. In the honouring of the intermittencies with which we mete out social significance we are entrained by them and captive fascinated, like the angel of history by the pileup—the gross profit of our vaunted connectivity, shards, husks and shells—blown from paradise amassing at our feet. If there is teleology or organic finality here, now it seems to be towards an aesthetic and not a social order, or of the overcoming of the social in the aesthetic. But is this not to say that we experience our inadequacy to be an inequality to the social history we are in the act of—and so entrained and captured by—preparing? To question the ease with which we go along with being deserving of states of affairs is to question the ease with which social history so desisted still persists: the ends not of a finality to which we belong as species; rather ends we choose and affirm and make the thinking subjects imagining us. If it is easy to show the problem of the human as being one we cannot help but be plugged into, where in fact are we in order for this to be shown? Where are we for the demonstration to take place? If we are internal to the human problem we are a part of the final solution. Emigration, we have already said, is the possible dream for which the select are preparing; and it is twofold, and by the same means as the problem is put: either for a human to leave the planet bodily; or for a brain to leave the human body. The means or we might better say workings, since they consist of dynamisms such as those described by Deleuze to be the effects of negative theology and analogical thinking on philosophy,83 are the same between the problem of the human and the solution of escaping it bodily, in a rocket, or leaving the body by building a brain surrogate—as if brain and body were two distinct problems—because they come from the viewpoint of the network brain. They come from how the network brain imagines human being. 83 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Trans. Martin Joughin, (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2013), 56. Simon Taylor 101 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The network brain places all the brains in communication including its own brains, of which there are three. But to do so, it has first to throw them off the central hinge of time, 84 which was how the compartmentalising brain established and maintained order, having on its own institution re-ordered the hierarchy which the social brain established and maintained on its. Unlike the compartmentalising brain, and the brains previous, the network brain neither supersedes nor subvenes, neither associates nor dissociates, nor compartmentalises, on the notion of an order. The compartmentalising brain was the last evolutionary brain as well as the last properly political or diplomatic brain—the last one for which war is an option: so it survives aesthetically. The social brain we can thank for establishing and maintaining, on its institution, an historical order—although properly a sociohistorical or religiohistorical order. It too survives aesthetically in the compartmentalising brain’s legitimation of its own processes of inclusion and exclusion, the shifting partitions of memory and epistemes, and as its source of authority.85 The social brain has sign-off rights on the whole order of the genealogy. It is on the social brain’s authority that the compartmentalising brain allows itself to underdevelop parts of itself, cut itself off, while holding them in survey. These parts we may identify with the three ecologies of Guattari—psychic, social and of the exterior, or environmental86—which, much as we might say countries and societies are underdeveloped (or bombed back into the stone age), the compartmentalising brain allows itself both to underdevelop, as well as allowing itself to develop, much as we might say muscles are developed—or, overdeveloped, subject to hypertrophy.87 The monkey brain is not left behind. It is given outlet in the social, when the social allows. But the monkey brain is also in its primitive wants excluded in the social, which is the social brain’s form of control, discipline, where it enjoys outbursts and resurgences. The usually high degree of aestheticism associated with these ineradicable surges and enthusiasms are suffered by the social in paroxysms, giving rise to guilt and punishment, the chief one being 84 See Deleuze for time being out of joint or off its hinge, cardo, showing insubordination to the cardinal points of its orientation and direction: “On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, Trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 27-35, 27ff. 85 The territories of history and genealogy and discourse which are Foucault’s. 86 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, Trans. Ian Pindar & Paul Sutton, (London, UK: Athlone Press, 2000). 87 Cf. Lingis, where body-builders develop their musculature through exteriorisation and detachment from application and utility into orchids, organs-to-be-seen: “Orchids and Muscles,” 128-144, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, op. cit. Simon Taylor 102 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing isolation. Not until the compartmentalising brain is there a judge free of guilt, or critic happy to exclude, who does not feel her or himself afflicted with the social body. So the feelings are relegated to an increasingly distant interior, which is why the monkey brain is thought to be in the deepest and darkest spot in the psyche, next only to the reptilian brain, beyond which, as we know, lies only the body. The judge comes to compartmentalise: she uses a toilet or a bedroom or a secret chamber which is the counterpart to her chambers of office, a place filled with pent up furies, anxieties and ardours for the discipline, violence and punishment of which her daylight practice is composed. Here issue out onto the body she shares with others—that is a multiplicity— desires the social has shunted back into the psyche. We also know in neither place is there safety, not for conscience in consciousness and not for the unconscionable in the unconscious. The critic comes to compartmentalise by first separating himself from the subject as a subject of his critique, by then applying an anaesthetic he takes for his use from the discourse which at the time encapsulates objectivity. He may recourse to his own disciplinary language in his acts of social expulsion but this language, as he himself, has already undergone the condition of anaesthesia. It will be something like a critical apparatus which he wields, rotating on the armature of the science of psychology, for example: it will be a technology. But for all that his punishment relies on discursive effects it is no less severe: a matter of an aesthetic regime maintained under conditions of anaesthesia. The network brain rallies for its critical cause the network in its entirety, and it is on authority of the social, and with the separate authority that it is just and legally and politically justifiable, and that the repercussions will be minor, it forces into exile, an exile now a matter of internal isolation, the offending artist, marking a stranger, a criminal and to be shunned, the one who brings infection. The network brain has learnt enough from the compartmentalising brain not to want or need consensus in the critical or judging faculty of the network, just as consensus is neither wanted nor needed in their appropriate faculties by the judge or critic. What these faculties acquire from the compartmentalising brain is immunity, and what they acquire from the network brain is community. In the first case the immunity is provided by the Simon Taylor 103 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing law—that the judge is protected in her official capacity within a legal institutional framework from the fallout of her actions, that the critic is too; but a curious thing happens with the shift in critical discourse to that of technics, with the local anaesthesia then global that determines the conditions of its aesthetic regime. It happens as if an art of living were being trialled in absolving of critical judgement the human, in making the discursive formation—that is the regime itself—of technology the subject. Critique anyway has been determined to be more fluid than judgement meted out under the aegis of the jurisprudential institution in jurisdiction. The latter belongs to a universalism that is old-fashioned, scholastic and medieval, like the university. It is the fluidity of critique that can be plugged, directed and channelled into the plumbing of the modern city of God and its technical regnancy. We know the epistemological shift to be clearest in the case of art research, clearer than it is in science research, where methodological concerns still split empirical researchers from theoretical ones, who are the speculative others and who, despite the whole movement to technical applications of knowledge, science, retain the status of those whose theories are tested through observation—as if empirical research were an instrument in the service of theory; as if theory were instrumental in the service of science, knowledge; and as if scienceas-knowledge were out of reach of the technical apparati of measurement, observation, both theorists and scientists engaging in practice have access to, the only purpose of which is to prove or disprove a theorist’s work. A theorist is the true scientist. The commercial rule, investing in technological solutions to concrete and material problems, paying for positive outcomes, supporting the practice of science so long as it is relevant to the demands of the market—whether the market for knowledge and expertise or widgets, vaccines and commodities—tends to support as well the subordination of empirical observation to theoretical knowledge: those who possess the latter move sideways, start consultancies and companies that employ researchers. Then the knowledge of artists and the contribution of art researchers to knowledge, we would expect, because it is based in experience, to be empirical. The critical knowledge we are calling Simon Taylor 104 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing theory is however as useful for the entrepreneurial activities—engaging in TED talks, pitching projects, products and themselves—of artists as it is for scientists to their respective markets within the commercial reality they share. It is on the side of demonstration, while the research we are calling empirical is on the side of experience. How do we know the knowledge, thing, work, project, product, commodity talked up, pitched for, presented and demonstrated in a slideshow or powerpoint is knowledge? How do we know—except by standards we have stated to be practically impossible and politically because commercially impractical to maintain? In the case of art research we know by the standards of critical theory itself inasmuch as it does not address itself to the problem of knowledge—that is what is known—in art research but how it is known. We can begin to sense the significance of art research to the problems addressed here: art research, the research conducted in and by the practice of an artist, a practitioner, is not split on the subject of method. It possesses a methodology to which the history of critical theory in the arts attests: art as subject for discourse is old as philosophy. Such critical judgements as have been formed around it age art: it is now ancient now cast into the future, where the critic is set up in perpetuity to pay it court and permanently equipped and even gladdened by the slapdown—which is all the return, in spite of the attention advanced, paid and to be paid art and the artist, the critic will get. We know this as the game of bait-and-switch—or, the Art Game—with the artist’s evasion now a collusion now a strategic reversal, inverting the critical relations of art, the self-promotion of artists and critics, and advertising; substituting art for ad, and, taking the bait of the critic, switching out artistic for conceptual production, now dissolving the artwork now materialising it as a commercial product which dematerialises again in its demonstration, promoting the performance and performer in the absence of art and work. In the next stages of the current work we will take up the switch of art to theory, and the switch back, from the distinct viewpoints of theatre and writing. What concerns us here is the place of criticism or theory in setting the terms of knowledge production in art research. Simon Taylor 105 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The methodology attested to in the presence of art criticism, art theory, we know to provide material for the artist, whether for self-advertising—which may be all the art is—or imbricated in the artwork, richly worked up into the artwork’s text and texture, or simply embroidered into it. We see the artist able to pose as no more than an ornament to the critical text; and sense the power art has, to deepen theory by the surface effects of trompe l’oiel, or in the folds of the baroque, or on the gold and gem-encrusted volutes of brocade. That is we know the witness brought to art by the fine art lover as much as the critic to be false. This is its powerful allure. While the critic ages art, the critique ages; and this can only happen because the critique is already too old for its flirtation, and art too young for its infatuation, which is with and speaks for the eternal youth of art. Perhaps this is the true insight of critique: its object is a thing of timeless beauty in endless art. But just as surely is it a critical projection, the wishful thought of age faced with youth; and this no matter its jaded lack of innocence, the secret of Dorian Gray, and its ephemerality. We see the true insight of the false witness; and we sense the confusion of critical judgement held to bear false witness, while its true insight curdles in resentment. In surpassing any faculty of judgement of the compartmentalising brain, critique, the more it ages, compartmentalises and periodises—we can say historicises—the aesthetic object, no longer attains to it. Critique takes this for virtue, in fact: that art escapes, it takes to bolster selfimportance; and it flatters itself that no length is too great to go to—even to the transcendental—in its pursuit. But critical puff in pursuit of an unassailable truth, an unobtainable proof, an uncatchable criminal, caught itself in the web of theoretical intrigue and aesthetic decoys, can coexist, with a critical struggle that is pointless and without findings, only in the compartmentalising brain. The curious thing is in the spreading out occurring, when, as if taking out a search party to the transcendental, beyond the material and concrete, the network of connections itself materialises and the true as well as false, equally, become concrete. Simon Taylor 106 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing We know the case of art research to clarify the epistemological shift, when critical thought surpasses judgement, because the art researcher as critic of her own work is where she cannot reach it. He is made part of this search party, this search party prolonged to absurd lengths, this endless search party. The question she or he is asked, which takes from the priority of the question of art practice its priority, is: What research methodology will be used? What it means is not what will you be going to the body of critique to find, or even going to that critical body belonging to your own discipline to find, that in which your art practice is steeped, that in which it is at every step implicated in setting out its lures, traps and even in being one step ahead, always. You are not being asked the question of research methodology to refer to methods used in critical discourse to address art but to a critical discourse that does not. It is in your choice of methodology critical resentment achieves its apotheosis. Art research is not split by the question of methodology into practitioners and theorists because the discourse of method from which it is asked that art researchers choose a methodology has nothing to do with a method of art. Earlier we asked if there is such a method that would be the spirit of art. Now critical and theoretical discourse may purport to have identified in the practice of art its spirit to which the practice would bear the relation of a religious discipline and art the relation of a spiritual practice: method then disappears either into miasma or dogma and ritual and its performance—as we have noted. We can discern something of this push, into what is wrongly called the purely conceptual, or into abstraction, in how art history presents modernism: a spirit running in the opposite direction to representation; and we can discern that, with postmodernism’s emptying itself of the spiritual elevation of purity and simplicity, in its kenosis, also the nascent stirrings of a performance of the old ritual emancipated from spiritual significance. This art historical programme colludes with postwar guilt and the blame attached to the aesthetic representation of holocaust to the benefit of critique and the detriment of art practice by explaining it in its own terms, terms which age art, as we have said. That art practice is not explained by these terms—which belonging to critical discourse of method we can call methodological—is demonstrated by the renewal of art practices which are taken up by collusion with the terms of artistic explanation, a renewal that is constant, in continuous Simon Taylor 107 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing multiplication, confusion, evasion, obfuscation—and, innocent of the dogmatic insistence on guilt or responsibility, creation. So it is in connection with methodology and with the terms of the critical theoretical apparatus that art practices establish their own methods. Methodological concerns do not split art research into critics and practitioners because any adequation between discourse of method—in methodology—and art practice is and has already been abdicated. There is no methodology; and there is none to carry out the bridgework which is the focus of this writing. The critical position cannot be shared—its resentment; but also because it has been taken up with technical terms. The technical terms with which research methods coincide rather than bear on methodology bear on epistemological concerns. So in another reversal, it is in the refusals of art, in its evasions, in its obfuscation of issues which are for critique critical, methodologies for art research offer a smorgasbord, present a spread of applications and opportunities, that they multiply into the current abundance of academic offerings. In fact bridging critical and artistic concerns becomes unnecessary. A confused abundance of methods prevails, each hoping to claim, each claiming to encapsulate objectivity, over an artistic resource that, although practices and forms may proliferate, is in all instances of practice, in every formal instantiation, clear and distinct. Art research has to pass the test of epistemology. What it is critical for the institution to know, to know for institutional accreditation, is not what can be known through conducting research in art and what it—the institution—can come to know—the institution of knowledge to which art research is said to contribute—but how known? How can the research be conducted such that it can be said—by the institution—and summed up—in accreditation and conferment of a qualification—to know—and contribute to knowledge? The question is not how is it possible art can know this but how can we know it is possible. The answer is the whole field is taken up by its proof in demonstration. The whole field sifts, tastes, feels out, explores—and occasionally plants the evidence, because it is supposed to; and, because this is the test, it catches itself doing so, determining the proofs not of knowledge Simon Taylor 108 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing but of epistemological method. But art we have said exists on the same level as the terms of critique, including those of epistemological method. There is nothing to stop an art practice of this method, which far from being reflexive would make thinking through the demonstration of proofs confirming proper conduct of research according to creditable epistemological method its material.88 There is nothing to stop the aestheticisation of the whole field of research, turning it into a field for art practice, to make it expressive. This entails that the thinking through not determine the proofs of demonstration but laws; it demands that thought determine its own laws are those of real experience. To make the material expressive of thought determining its own laws89—in what seems the limit case, of material comprehending the whole critical field’s demonstration of proofs confirming research is conducted according to creditable epistemological method, as well as in the case of any art research, and for expression to surface in experience, sensuous, aesthetic and technical experience, partly solves the problem of knowledge pertaining to art research. What we saw to be practically impossible and impractical within the politicoeconomic social norms of science research becomes a practical and possible solution for art research: we should look for the laws determining living experience, life in experience, because the limit case of artistic research has the problem of experience, of demonstrating knowledge and of manifestation. The question is what do we do with a whole field that has gone live and is potentially expressive? We look to our experience of it, for which the compartmentalising brain cannot account. It holds to institutional demarcations of judgement and account, to evidence being weighed and to the clear distinctions between the objects of that judgement being respected. It does so in the academy regardless of adoptions of the transversalities of trans- or multidisciplinarity by the institution. The compartmentalising brain harbours and negotiates its values. The social brain upholds and enforces values. The monkey brain overturns values— but has no means of setting them upon their upset: it will not hold to them. Its laws and values 88 Such is precisely the case of a colleague, Rumen Rachev’s art research project, leading to the supervisory panel’s abdication of its role in critical and institutional oversight, a project currently struggling to carry on within the context of the academy, pointing again to the confusion of critical judgement with artistic production where it need not be confused. 89 See for this epistemological formula, Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, op.cit., 160. Simon Taylor 109 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing are called instinct; and the apparent contradiction of the monkey brain not holding to instincts is explained by their hold being instinctive, by the monkey brain being the creature of laws and values not present to itself and that it cannot represent. We arrive once more at the creative potential of the aesthetic organism and at the problem it is precritical. But this does not mean it is original. There is no original brain. Neither is there one of which human being is the predicate. We might better say there is a surrealism of simultaneous spaces, the night opening off the day, the bedroom opening onto the beach, the snow-laden branches of trees in the dark forest unaffected by the fire burning in the hearth, the elephant in the moon. So critical terms are arranged or deployed by artist-practitioners, colour-fields, perspectives and perspectival variation and distortions, figuration and disfigurement, deformed temporal, spatial and representational realities, forming parts or stages of a technique, even where it is spontaneous or a matter of chance. What they express—what is brought to expression, expressivity being as much a critical-theoretical issue as any other—is, through the aestheticisation of the terms manifest, demonstrated, an expressivity in accord or in discord with the surrealist or any artistic theoretic manifesto: the plane or level expresses itself, the critical thought determining its own laws of expression; in experience its own proof. Technique can then be described, methodically laid out, just as the scientist would, her actions belonging to expertise in handling instruments, taking readings, the thoughts and feelings accompanying them belonging to his sensibility, to senses refined and developed doing science. Described, the techniques of art can then be ascribed to methods of practice in parallel to those methods of empirical practice in which science is engaged? As we have said earlier, the staging of levels that science research contacts, in we might say points of contact, is one of technical production; and this makes all the difference, because the parallel with art research’s epistemological shift is a technological shift in science research. We also said that this turn of science taking the discourse of technics to provide the material for research and knowledge, can be said to be a move to speaking the language of the silicon unconscious belonging to the technical instruments involved, that it translates scientific method into a Simon Taylor 110 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing computational level or milieu; and that it is here the exploration is pursued, that theory is supported by the proofs and demonstrations of statistical aggregates. In turn, the technological shift enables the translation into technical terms of critical discourse—as that which at the time encapsulates the objectivity of effective critique and judgement. The problem arises that for the translation to be complete the encapsulation cannot be, that there is a bursting out, that it busts the pipes of technical regnancy, and tends to the interpretation of all the facts, not just the scientific ones. It becomes communicative. This leads to the critical confusion we have noted; it also leads to the illusion of the autonomy, automaticism and animation of the technological subject, called progress, economic growth, as master of the human household. It leads to an abrogation of human powers of judgement but not on its own. As we have stated, we see this abrogation at the historic juncture not only of technical scientific ascendancy—achieved in theatres of war—but also of its use as instrument of holocaust. The answer is to remove the hands that are human from the digital machine. So science knows what it knows now from quantitative demonstrations. Displays of research (this is the meaning of the staging of levels being technically mediated), institutional critique, scientific theory, theories of economic development and underdevelopment, theories of human development and underdevelopment, are computational. Human hands, brains, are as far as possible, removed from the digital display. Brains are translated too into technical objects hardwired to certain acts and inclinations. Hardwired to connect, brains are networks, but they are not networks by analogy with technical ones. Neither are other networks such by analogy: the brain is not a network eminently or preeminently but interchangeably with other networks. The human brain exceeds itself in its technicity. It permeates while it seeks to conform itself to other fields, other markets, which in turn seek to conform themselves to a field, a market. The neuroliberal illusion is not that the market is like a brain but that it is interchangeable with one. The two are reversible and reversibly one—a brain. Simon Taylor 111 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing As clearly as its instrumental and technical discourse replaces the epistemological empirical discourse of science-as-knowledge, as surely as claims to what we scientists know are displaced onto what we use to know, the discourse of how we know, we are calling epistemological, replaces that of method, displacing in fact technique and the discourse we artists elaborate around it onto critique. In art research, methodology—or art research methodologies—expresses the displacement of what we use to know and how we use it onto how we know. The institution does not tend to ask the practising artist researcher what he knows—it assumes it. The institution tends to the assumption of a criticality governing and being the reason for her embarkation on a course of artistic research: so the critical literature takes precedence over the technical; and what this critical literature, we have said, opens out onto is of course all the work done by its old friend at the Academy, philosophy, as well as all of literature up to, including the conditions of its own existence and the discourse of Being. Such is its pedigree—and reach, of writing itself. The institution is not known to ask, about knowledge, what can be gained by art research. Not, it does not ask the artist, What do you know? But it does not ask what art knows, and what is knowable that the artist can make known—in the way we might do with science, the epistemological claims of which are secure, in the way we might ask the scientist what there is to be known. We know there is everything. But for all the inclusiveness of the literary theoretical and philosophical fields open to art research yet in the setting of the institution, although the premise for institutional accreditation of courses in art research remains an original contribution, the institution tends to silence on epistemological claims of art. Methodology, methodologies of art research, draw from the vast pool of literature, with its many contrary currents, as a pool of knowledge—which knowledge is then reticulated through the pipes, assuring its technical regnancy, an inexhaustible resource, and one joining researchers in a crucial dependency, since it enables the financialisation of flows. The institution changes established knowledge into the cash that is its lifesupport. The establishment works the exchange that the network brain enables, coordinated on the positions of the dependencies—individual researchers—who are its points of capital. Simon Taylor 112 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The explanation for the silence of institutions offering practice-as-research courses on epistemological claims of art is not due to critical resentment. Such resentment does, however, inform the relevant subversion putting the critical claims above the art-epistemological ones. Neither do the latter, drawn from art-technique, about which institutions do not tend to ask, offer the threat of subversion—through contributions to knowledge they are supposed to originate—that might break the silence, although artists historically have tended to think so. That is, the resentment is not so great an institution would want to put it down should an art research project turn the critique on it and the silence over what it does not tend to ask. This is not for the reason the threat has been recognised not to exist, since an art research project would thereby be changing critical into artistic, aesthetic material, and it is not because of a decision to refuse the artist so engaged the satisfaction of believing a blow had been landed, for freedom, setting in question institutional assumptions, in motion the establishment, rocking the core edifice of established knowledge with original findings as would sweep it away, tear down the old order, and all its monuments. History, through its course, has silenced scientists as much as artists. State and institutional history records the putting down of dangerous ideas, through violent force, expulsion and the force of law. Order has been seen to depend on knowledge’s protection, preservation and maintenance being rewarded—the purpose of education—and its endangerment being punished. Institutions, the state included, have been seen as discursive formations, their development going from the primitive social cohesion of forms of violence and physical and sexual aggression to social, then compartmentalising and disciplinary forms. The forms of control continue the compartmentalising brain’s way of answering the problem of social organisation—compartmentalising of the knowledge of mind by medical discourses and psychology; of the knowledge of society by the discourses of economics, law and social science. The knowledge of nature is where forms of control, although dependent on the socialorganisational formation, and, on the establishment of bodies of knowledge to be protected, preserved and maintained, no less discursive, become direct, where technical forms of control plug in and where the reticulation of discourses begins, in communication and technology. Simon Taylor 113 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing We have said that the brains leading up to the network brain live on in aesthetic forms: this is no lessening of their power or function since there is always room for the display, the readout, the passage of impressions, the symbolic or simply the representation to be taken for the transcendental, as a transcendental condition of the order that is. So the law which at its earliest belongs to the monkey brain—the reason for putting this one first; so the values which belong to the social brain; and so the contraries and paradoxes, the contradictory justice, injustice and hypocrisy of the compartmentalising brain, set themselves up to legislate on behalf of the social organisation they support. The artform or form of scientific research which finds its own laws in itself, the artist who professes herself to and the scientist who might rather not still pose a threat. If we have said that the standards for science were practically impossible and impractical to maintain, does this not also speak to the willingness of the scientist to publish upsetting results, to her desire to risk exclusion from the scientific community and the censure of his peers? An artist has historic reasons for his romantic selfbelief, but in art research she might pursue the reasons for those reasons: how is it possible for what she experiences doing art to be communicated, and demonstrated as knowledge? How then is that knowledge practicable, because the legal and formal practical demands it makes of his experience, should he follow its lead, is of a transvaluation of the accepted terms the institution legislates for in the establishment discourse and a perverse misuse of the values the institution formalises to assure itself of her dependency? These are ethical as well as financial considerations, which go from the acceptability of her research proposal to the eventuality of his project’s successful completion; they are the socalled formal requirements. Art is simply better placed to effect this transvaluation and to get away with its innate perversity—what we may call its obscenity for the break it needs to make, to be art, with what the institution requires. But for this the art research needs not the complacency of her supervisory and examining panels but their active collusion, going to the time spent on it and the accounts given in their self-management: their autoveillant posture in the handling of imposture. We see occasionally such collusion in the ranks of scientists when a breakaway theory will grow legs and will gain the support of colleagues, authorities from within the scientific Simon Taylor 114 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing community, publications and so on; and critics will relent. But this is less common given the increasing instance of the simultaneity with research of peer review. New research has barely the chance to grow legs before being addressed to the community, the intention here being collusion is necessary from the outset, so initial findings are not submitted for support but for collaboration in getting the support research needs, which essentially means funding. Now the team’s welfare is at stake in the science research project, from its often unpromising beginning, at which stage stakeholders are more likely than not to withdraw before potential shareholders are even pitched. Where an individual scientist or independent team might have gone rogue in pursuit of a beautiful dream, to be pitched the dream would already have passed the critical juncture of naming its pain point and claiming for technological innovation commercial application. Now even this scene of disruption of the discursive establishment of accepted knowledge inside the scientific community is one of cooptation and capture. Where the performatives of agility, of resilience and of working smarter seem to speak to the healthy passions of individualistic competition and seem designed to arouse them to high performance, to adapt or die, to give 110%, they are spoken, in threat and imprecation, for the sake of an adaptation that is surrender, for the sake of price-points, for the individual’s sacrifice to corporatist utility. Inside the scientific community means this utility is identified with its survival, speaks to its nature being agile and resilient, working smarter, to adapt—or die. Is not the situation of the theoretical scientist in meeting the formal requirements of doing the science the same as that of the art practitioner doing the research? We notice the division of theory and practice. The scientist to meet formal requirements of doing science is orphaned from science to commerce. To make do, a scientist can pitch her project; he does so on the basis of what is to come from it: it is a critical, speculative venture. She is a theorist, and note the judgement is not from within science. Neither is the issue the production of knowledge. Orphaned to commerce, a scientist-theorist is isolate in the R&D department of a university or research institute, unlike an artist-practitioner, lumped together with others by the appropriate and appropriative academic faculty, in sometimes an indigestible lump, as we saw with the limit case of art research, taking up epistemological method as its material for Simon Taylor 115 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing sensuous expression. A successful science theorist’s entrepreneurial activities are rewarded with a lab, which is not so much for experimentation as a production line engaging scientific research and researchers for deliverables. Since the practitioner of art also gets a lab (so called) but it is for her own experimentation and since it seems the freest part of the operation, we should ask what theory means, before asking after the meaning of commerce. It would be a mistake to consider theory as not involving experimentation, because, untethered from sensuous experience and from the technical tools of scientific research providing it, theory itself becomes a zone of sensuous experience. Again, this is the clarification art research offers. It shows theory to be a level, a stage, before there is any meaning, or thought of meaningful outcomes. Before the question what is knowledge? there is another which goes to the question of method we addressed earlier in terms of scientific standards. We have addressed it here in terms of the critical discourse attaching itself to art research as the middle term in the switch of a discourse of method to one of knowledge, where it is useless to art-as-form-of-research. An artist can go no further. He is stuck. Materials which were acceding to his touch are now intransigent, receding, withdrawing into the obduracy of objects. An artist does not know how to begin. She faces the data gathered that once spoke to her and discovers it mute. She wonders if it is her own failure, the failure of her sensuous grasp or whether the fault is in the foundation, the concrete of conception. Or she cannot face the obscenity her work presents to her and confronts the ethical dilemma with moral concepts which are inadequate. Or he has no terms, nothing comes, to get him over the hump: the way forward is blocked; and he recognises in the various ways forward roads trammelled and too-familiar, the slurry of expediency. Or it is fear of what is to become of an artist because all that is to be read on the face of the work is a secret, a dirty and little perversion: it is pathetically petty or it is as engorged as a public erection, and whether his or hers, whether punishable or anodyne, for whatever reason, it is unpublishable. She stops. He stops. No method mentioned in the critical theoretical territory inclusively called the literature or recognised to belong to research methodologies will help overcome a negativity that is a loss Simon Taylor 116 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing of positive emotion or bad faith or false consciousness or an acquired habit of self-sabotage and circle of blame, blaming the work, blaming oneself. The problem faced by the artist researcher is neither personal nor critical but can, can only be, affirmed of and in the material conditions of the work. These conditions of practice, of art practice and science practice, as Ruyer writes of a similar making-true, of attributing to magic the extension of technical tools, make true the error of concretisation, that it is in sensuous experience and developing sensibility the solution lies.90 We have seen how the material demands in a field of research constitute a level of sensuous involvement which, like Ruyer’s magic, pertain to organs that, because technical, are extraorganic extensions. Although formed in a technical discourse, technology, this extraorganic tool use extends sense into the field, onto the level. The error would be to see this as an extension of the organs themselves. Art research clarifies the level as that of a practice; it clarifies the experimental imperative as that of a problem and the problem as a positive one, since it clarifies the imperative as belonging to experience, to the experience of sense before sense is made of it: the method of art research consists in this affirmation. Before it is meaningful as a solution to how to proceed the level is subject to being materially affirmed. This is the clarity and distinction we earlier attributed to the material of art research. Its technique requires experience which is only reflexive in the case of a reactive critique, reactivating critical resentment, so that it seems there is a circle of blame or a hermeneutical circle. Before an artist knows what to do, what is to be done depends on the statement of the problem in its materiality. So a scientist extends the tools afforded by the discourse of technics, of technology, to find out what the level on which they are deployed has to say, to see what is first observable, before the stage of attributing meaning to its measurement. What is true of practice in art research is also true of theory. There can be no reflexivity if the method taken affirms theory, risks theory, as a stage raised rather than on meaning on its absence, so materially affirming theory as an aesthetic domain of experience—as much as any other. So cutting the theoretical foundation out from under the discursive establishment 90 Ruyer, Neofinalism, op. cit., 207. Simon Taylor 117 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing strikes the institution offering an alternative research pathway of practice as a threat and where this pathway insists on the provision of supporting documentation is where we would expect this dangerous, erroneous and magical thinking to be nullified. We would expect the division between theory and practice to insinuate itself through an institution’s formal requirement the practice pathway is not entirely restricted to demonstration in practice of an original contribution to knowledge but must also take written form. Theory would not then be experimentation but keep to the established order, an order looking for its judgement—on a number of questions, including epistemological ones—to the survival of an aesthetic remnant of the compartmentalising brain. Taking the critical viewpoint we would expect the artist-researcher to take up this writing as an abstract formal gesture, for it to be taken as given, considerations of whether art practice demonstrates aesthetic knowledge aside, this writing is different from the writing that may constitute the practice, this theoretical workout is in a separate compartment from the theory which may materially constitute the art work, and these terms, epistemology, methodology, mean different things here—that this thing inclusively called literature aboveall does not mean literature. Art research’s failure must be twofold: it must fail to demonstrate in itself that it has made contribution to knowledge; it must fail by not affirming of the written form it is required to take what it affirms of itself. It must fail as theatre and fail as writing. So what if it does? Still it may succeed to pass the institution’s epistemological test, and go all the way through to accreditation. The outcome of formal accreditation from following this research pathway does not depend on the assertions we are making here. The notion of risking theory as an artform, or of risking science as an artform, may be the worst kind of advice, setting the researcher against the institution, but it might also go to supporting the claim for art practice as much as questioning the assumption made of the practice of science that it produces knowledge. Then it might lead to the magical thinking of having real effects on the world. Theory is freest when it is a zone of the experimentation that economic realities—and collusion with them—normally preclude: it gives leverage to science. In the case of art Simon Taylor 118 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing research, of the art research pathway coming to the deadend of institutional censure, or worse, losing itself in compromise, freedom does not come from being able freely to theorise. Freedom comes from not having to make application to the world of use, to the practicable or even practical utility of what is produced—except in the sole outcome of a qualification eventuating that raises one’s price because it gives leverage to payscale. The attraction of the practice-as-research pathway of art as form of research or artistic research resides in this, but not its significance. We say use of art over any commercial application: there is little chance of art being orphaned to commerce and more chance of its orphanage to the academy from knowledge-production, from science or innovation in technology. We tend to the view that the value of art to an institution offering the practice-research pathway is symbolic, ornamental, symbolic of status, as if the pathway were a new form of patronage and the institution a new sort of patron. The danger to the institution is a critical danger, but it is hardly worked out in critical culture, since it wipes out critical culture as a zone of contestation: this is not to avert the catastrophe of knowledge but to invert it. To reverse the situation of critical confusion over what constitutes knowledge, to invert the situation where knowledge in the profusive abundance of what we may call its communication, where its actual excess produces confusion—what is true when everything is happening all at once?—, art mixes it up with something funny, connects the discursive establishment with fiction, lies, science with fiction. Art’s scabrous laughter levitates knowledge in the air; its excoriating laughter crashes knowledge on the ground: its confusion of knowledge is a transfusion of blood from living experience and gross sensuality. So it is from confusion that excessive abundance arises—the secret of desire, overflowing the surface of the city, undermining the plains, barely contained by the technical regnancy of God the plumber, bursting and spurting out of drains in a rising mist of luminous haloes and spontaneous gaseous apparitions. Lingis writes that it is not by the objecthood of what is there in its solidity but by the projections it makes in its shifting perspectives, its perceptual miasma, by its throwing out of Simon Taylor 119 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing shadows and illusive fields of reflection, that we know something is there.91 There is a face there we need not resolve from the surface to know is there. We read it in the transparencies it gives off and not by reading into them but by the symbols it sends out do we discern it is there. From confusion to excess: where there is no regnancy; this is the transvaluation we have been putting forth in our own confusions of terms, in our displacements. First epistemology is on the side of judgement. Then art-epistemology is on the side of technique, the corollary of acquired expertise in the refinement of the scientific sensibility. First form is a matter of a formalised institutional arrangement, having to meet formal requirements, to show good form. Then form is organic, Ruyer’s form of self-survey, pertaining to the atom, molecule and to the organism. Organicism is for Ruyer a false overlay of organic principles, of a metaphysics, on top and having nothing to do with the specification, individuation or entelechy of the bodies, not just theorised, that physics has observed. Organicism is for us neither the formalised institutional organisation of biosocial and typical good form, nor the speculatory imposition of a wholeness and dimensionality on atomic organisms, down to their intensive quanta, but the silicon organicism of the computer’s unconscious, given in its materiality, that neither belongs to the material nor the concrete. The use of science is clearly and distinctly its utility, including its usefulness to trade and commerce. We have considered the meaning of theory not to abstract from the conditions of experience but to be that which is materially demonstrated in them, not to dematerialise in the intellectual labour which is called immaterial, but consequentially to turn to that with which there is commerce and that in which science and scientific research trades. The theoretical scientist trades in his own creativity. She promotes herself as representing an august tradition of critical post-Enlightenment thinking, not as representative of a servile empiricism, a Natural Philosophy. He is not a technician who follows the logic of mechanism, cleaving to the physical acts and facts, not that theory is not tested but that its test is not undertaken under the auspices of a discourse of method but the discourse of technical application, technology—but application to what? New knowledge may theoretically, and 91 “It is because things turn phosphorescent facades on the levels and horizons of sensuous spaces that they also engender a graspable shape. What there is cannot be defined as a core appearance extracted by epistemological method, which can exist without its perspectival appearances, their doubles, masks, and mirages.” ... “the reality that engenders the phantasm is engendered by it.” Lingis, “Faces, Idols, Fetishes,” 278293, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, op.cit., 280. Simon Taylor 120 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing immaterially, be among the deliverables; but more consequentially it is to commerce in science itself to which technological solutions apply. That is communication. Communication becomes an element, information its memory, and the network its tracery. Confirmation of the elementality of communication is discovered in the production of statistical aggregates. These so to speak carry the theory; but they are themselves secondary productions, products of a creativity that is theoretical, and for that no less concrete and material. The importance of information turns on the conservation of theoretical data, on observing its conservation and on this statistical observation. In other words, information is the preserve of accumulated data, from which the aggregates carrying theory gain statistical mass and gravity. It informs nothing, as memory information signifies. The tracery the network is, is that materialised in the element of communication and, naturally, in the creative brain. The tracery the network is materialises in the discourse that it materialises. The brain is materially explicated; consciousness has a concrete explanation. The meaning of the question—which brain first is lopped off, where we answered the human—becomes one of which is lopped from the core or central brain, as a branch or bough is severed from the trunk, or an organ removed. Then how would we know, were it not a matter of continuities, forms of history, reasoning and written and recorded knowledge, from which we part company? How would we know without their being taken to be continuous over a period of time itself considered to have consistency and integrity, periodised as single? How do we know without the survey of form, an element in our thinking, of reason and knowledge, that either covers the span of time or is outside it? Can the protentions of data retained in information fulfil this function? We come close to explaining the silence of the institution regarding the epistemological claims of art research, its remaining dumb over whether there is a knowledge belonging to it, distinct to art. We recall that this knowledge does not take the critical form; it is not in the possession of art history or art critique. Not in the literature, neither does it have the theoretical armature of critical speculation, however clear, obscure, obtuse or abstract the terms with which it expresses itself. These interpretative signals are not the signs of art. At best they are Simon Taylor 121 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing placeholders, like an algebraic notation for the unconscious. Whether art accepts them or not, it does not follow their rule. Even the algorithm is in aesthetic terms, in the signs of art, material—a matter that for what we have called the limit case of art practice as art research is one of experience, and takes an artistic sense. It does so by what we have also called the perversion of artistic uptake in an illegal operation. If we should contend for a scientific standard of knowledge in practice following the same method, of science as form of sensible experience and aesthetic demonstration, the reason is to be found given by the concrete explanation of consciousness as a substance materialised through what it materialises, and, argues Ruyer in view of values, by what matters.92 Then it is no longer an it to which it matters. It is least of all a technical it or one capable of encapsulation as incontrovertible by scientific method: to the technical tools themselves pertains a techno-aesthetic sense (readouts are felt; feedback reinforces feeling— positive, negative and most of all random—demanding response; and responsibility), a sensibility of which technology names the discourse. The curious thing that happens with the technification of communication and commerce in data and the aestheticisation of theory, critical thought, thinking reason and knowledge, does not result in the whole—say a whole brain—being lopped off or cut off from the main thing. Neither does it go to its suspension, according to a compartmentalising typology of suspensions. Neither does it go to an increasing abstraction nor simulation. It tends to the opposite, the contrary position of concrete reality and material existence. This is the position of survey on knowledge of the network brain, after which we earlier asked, and, we would say, the position of survey on knowledge as such, that it is in communication. We are mistaken, however, in pointing to the communication between aesthetic remnants of brains as occurring through the aesthetic medium: it is the medium of it. Neither a brain’s internal nor its external communication is any longer conditional on it communicating. The reverse is true. Being in the element of communication, passing into and moving in this element entails that the communication that occurs in brains, in, we might say, living brains, 92 Ruyer, Neofinalism, op. cit., 228-229. Simon Taylor 122 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing and that occurring externally between brains is unconditional on any one brain or part of a brain actually communicating. The reason for this is the network brain. The network brain sits within its element, is at work along the lines of media of communication, is online and productive of knowledge, reason, thought, ideas—new ideas, refashioning old ones—without ever having to stir itself to communicate. It is not enough to say communication is automated, neither is it enough to say communication is automatic, autonomous and, self-animating, animate. We cannot truly even say its support is technology; neither that it is human, nor beyond-human, that it has these attributes. The fact is of communication existing without communicating. Human participation like technological participation is hardly necessary. Or we might attend to it as a substance expressing itself in technical and human readable media, and so communicating something, but only what it remembers, information that covers every transaction, data already communicated, collected, and leaving the trace we can read from the network and those yet technically irretraceable and unreadable. Neither tracing, the mapping undertaken of the network, nor the siloing of information and data suffice to constitute communication in its material existence, nor do they suffice to make it concrete as we are claiming. Against the error of concretisation, since identity being bootstrapped from it is a matter of course, we consider consciousness to be proof. Both the network and information are effects, but from inspection of network-effects—information is itself, in the silos it is stored, organised like a network—we can begin the study that proceeds to the materialisation in which they are in their element. The proof we claim for consciousness against the error of thinking concrete what is at least fluid and at most transcendental and metaphysical, does it not open the way for other continuities to reassert themselves—of identity, history, knowledge, reasoning of a particular kind, those belonging to a particular period, of which we say, So we thought then and So we did because So we believed all riding on the exchange of Now we know...? The thing to note is that these are communicative continuities; they form on the basis of community which already assumes their communication. It is not that the network is new, a new science, and network- Simon Taylor 123 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing thinking is a new theory. The case is rather that the medium of communication allows the position of survey of the network, and what we have been calling the network brain, in donation. If we say it is its elementary support we in turn allow that communication is the medium and the network its form of survey. It would only be by giving to this form of survey which is ideal, like the form the painting has on its support, the viewpoint of the formal structure of a piece of theatre on the material conditions of its performance, or that of the projection on the screen, that we would fall into error: in other words our proof concerns what consciousness does, which is concretise, and how it does it, which is from its position of survey. These themes will be taken up in the work to follow, but it might be noted that the formal attributes a piece of cinema has do not come from the point of view of the projector. This view of communication’s materiality from the network brain’s position opens the way for the consideration of discourses and logics, technical, scientific and artistic, as equally concrete. We here affirm them as having not only material existence but also existing as material values. If we swim in an element, we are flooded with communication, not with information. The inundation is not because the pipes are busted but because they work. They work to excess and this excess is maintained as the highest economic priority—an overproduction in communication that is pushed for the sake of an experiment: in order to think. To think concretely the confusion must be overcome but production drives faster and further than information; what drives it is the desire to outrun the claims it makes on materiality. Immateriality is the ideal but an inverted one. It is the ideal inversion which the network undergoes. Thought is freed from the brain, consciousness freed, for its mistakes of technicity by technicity, a technicity which suffuses, is suffuse with itself. Its highest achievement is the self-regard of gaining for the whole of its symbolism a world open to experience—a virtuality in artificial intelligence. It achieves this by taking the forms of its display for those of demonstration. Neither does it matter that full artificial intelligence is some way off, since the compulsion of the virtual is exactly the pull of this symbolic distance. Simon Taylor 124 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The pull of the future makes true the magical thinking by which the drag of information—of the only (memorial) continuities where we might find protentions, types of knowledge equal to history and kinds of reasoning not given already into the element in which we swim— becomes the pull. This pull is that of consciousness making concrete the medium, communication, and so working an inversion, ideal, but, as we have seen critical, since it is that also of the aestheticisation of the whole field—of research. Then, necessarily, how it works the inversion demands to be addressed. We have said the inversion consciousness works is from its position of survey. Critique would make this a relativistic issue, of relativisms in different fields, encountered as such; whereas judgement would continue to compartmentalise and claim the point of view to change according to context, institutional or departmental, in the bureaucracy of rationality. Here we see the importance of the aesthetic survival of brains preceding, and we are now able to say that the inversion, both ideal and critical, of consciousness, since this is where we have attended to it having been put, takes place from the point of view of the network, the network brain. Consciousness concretises because it is concretised to be a network from the position of survey of the network brain. Now we get the part about which brain is first to go, about the human brain being lopped off, because it is in communication and from its element brains now originate. Being propagated from communication entails that they are there in solution, not that they necessarily communicate. We glimpse in the tracery of networks movements too vast for statistical aggregation, only their periphery can be read; they can only be generalised on the basis of localised instances, giving no more than an apparent and approximate indication of where thinking is going on: still, they engage the whole brain. That is the movement communicates and is communicated, not the thought. Ideal, critical inversion, the inversion which begins critically and is technically crucial, is no exception. The movement of course has a pattern as the points of one network transform into those of another. Like a greatcoat with stars sewn on the inside relative to one another the points do not change their position when it is turned insideout to become the firmament. The network Simon Taylor 125 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing brain has the characteristic common to all networks too that it is scalar: any part of the great firmament comprising the points of law and judicial precedents is as capable of transforming the values it holds as the whole; and each part is able to be extended to the whole, under the point of survey that we have said constitutes primary consciousness, that is, formal consciousness. In turn, the position of the brain doing what we may call thinking communicates—is in communication. So we may better say that the transformations of the network brain are those of networking, where its complete inversion—the whole network going insideout—consists in communication: the compartmentalising brain now networked because originating in the sensuous element of communication communicates with the networked social brain; even the monkey brain as well is networked because so originating. This act of origination is aesthetic; of course it relies on what we become insensible of, on the general anaesthesia of its active part, that is the art of it—in this case materiality itself, the painting unconscious of its material support. Or, using its material support as aesthetic material, the artist puts it in communication with formal organic attributes of the painted surface. Or the paint is absent— or the canvas is: the rip remains, or just the thought. The outside communicates with the inside. Our study would begin with these transformations, caused in their element, by movements in it: points in their relative positions would be reversible, invertible, and the part would communicate with the whole, be commutative. A moving in in which a depth opens up giving a new sense of scale would be initiated, and a moving out by which a depth becomes a height. The points would correspond to the values and in price-points express themselves economically, so you would think, from a marketing perspective. From a managerial perspective they would express themselves as points of capitalisation, capital points, with social, organisational and institutional dependencies. Being one myself, you would consider my transactions in communication and in the commercial network, where one would be commutative to all three: communicative; neural and social, or neurosocial; and commercial. These are the three network brains; it is their interexchangeability as network-effects which gives the final and full explanation of the institution’s silence when it is a question of the truth Simon Taylor 126 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing claims of art and of the knowledge or epistemological claims research is able to make through artistic media. The value of art as knowledge comes from the power of information, where information is no more than a memory leaving a trace and the network, in whole and in part, for all of network thinking and for its parts in network-effects, that trace. But the power is from the discourse of technics, technology—the scientist’s right to an epistemology. The data banks are more literal now there is movement and traffic on the networks of information, since in banks information is shored up against the ruin we have called the catastrophe of knowledge. Here the circulation effected by networks in the element of communication aggressively continues, aggressively generates the network brain, under whose survey communication comes. No siloing is free from power relations; the memory banks contracting data to form habits are relentlessly networked. Speed of access to information itself is generative of the value; data in circulation is measured in cycles—a continuous strobing continually contracted by the network community. We have seen this strobing before as well as its contraction in the intermittencies which coalesce according to the temporal schema of network time. What concerns us here is how to arrange the transformation of one set of values into another. The value art research brings to the institution has in each instance a value that may be monetised but it is its power or what we may call its force of address over the transformation of which a certain anxiety presides in case of fixing its value, price-fixing. Art research addresses the realm of the sensuous, not that it has, should have or ought to have a special sensitivity, but that its discourse is aesthetic—an aesthesiology. We recall the aesthetic mode of survival of brains to which the force of address of art research is addressed. The institution exercises sleight of hand that resembles a kind of noblesse oblige, only proper for a patron of the arts, in producing the realm of freedom for art research, freedom from final utility and application: the institution turns slightly away, turning our attention to its generosity in the fact of its official permission, its dispensation to courses in art research of formal accreditation, while turning the network of communication it has now established between researcher and academic apparatus, supervisory panel, faculty, school, over to the network brain. First in line is the commercial network, as we have Simon Taylor 127 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing indicated, then the neurosocial liaison—gathering the individual to the organisation—and finally the communicative itself where what takes place is communication. The individual’s networks are hooked up in an operation called affiliation to the institution’s, and to the further individuals composing that organisation. What traffics over the network is commerce in data. The value, force, price and sense of art research—we might say its significance—is turned into data. Because they communicate, the networks networking, what is networked is assimilable to the world of data, but we need not think this to be any one of these things: the totality of a whole symbolism, of a wholly symbolic world, an absence of the aesthetic, unapproachable by aesthesiology, an absolute, a world absolved of its humanity. As desire is said to have, the world of data has its economy. It has rules and algorithms and a symbolic language, and consciousness; and for this reason it is conscious of the particularities, empirical, sensible and aesthetic pumping through, draining into and expressed from it in concrete terms. Neither is the world of data abstract nor ineffable but most real, so real it is inseparable from the reality with which it communicates. In the element of communication is where its economy is chiefly conducted. The turning of one thing into another is not a trick but a fact of what happens under the survey of the network brain, lately lopped off from the human. It is what happens to knowledge, fiction to facts like this; false and fake and true, all are communicative empirical, sensible, aesthetic and even emotional. They are like knowledge a renewable resource—a technology. We ascribe to the monkey brain—somehow left behind by evolution but still in contact with brains that because they know better are called higher; we ascribe it because of the monkey brain’s connection with the brains below—the calculating reptilian biding its time that is subjacent, and the distributed nerve centres of the body, because of their direct and unmediated stimulation and demands for fresh stimulation, subjacent to it—we ascribe to it actions giving the social brain cause for censure and exclusion—from the social organisation, the society corresponding to it. We ascribe to the inner monkey what the compartmentalising Simon Taylor 128 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing brain seeks inclusion of because it recognises it in all of us and as only human; we ascribe it to the monkey in us when it breaks out or ruptures the pipes and entering into communication comes within the purview of the network brain. Not only does the rupture make us spasm with laughter—and we are longing to laugh for the feeling of community it brings—but it is also the occasion of kneejerk aggression; not only do we punish, we attack. The social organisation corresponding to the compartmentalising brain understands; it can even place our little judges and their microfascisms on the network, where they are able to multiply and build to statistical censure, to a sense of responsibility given a social sense which has been impugned, insulted by the actions of the monkey brain. The politician who sends pornographic images to young women is also sending them out into the element of communication where they can be picked up by the network brain—the social organisation corresponding to it. The media pick up the story, the so-called traditional media—not quite sure where they sit on the network; but before they have got to it their operatives have already unleashed the story that is no more than 40 characters long, including his name, onto new media platforms. But, you ask, are they not journalists and professionals or protected sources? You see the problem. Their titular prerogative—to break the news—and not to muddy it, not to leak stories before they have broken, when all sorts of other wishes and moral judgements can get swept up in the flood of information, as spokespeople for media and communications corporations, is gone, has been taken away. Often under the contracts signed to the same corporations, organisations they represent, journalists, professionals, are expected to have accounts on new media platforms, no less than private individuals, under theirs, signed to the professional organisations, communities they represent, even as democratically elected representatives; they are expected to have followers and among them influencers: of elected representatives and candidates hoping to be we can say that it is not just expected but mandatory; and that their circle of influence constitutes not a private community of well-wishers and supporters but a public constituency, in despite of the private ownership of new media, sufficient to sway the will of the people as well as the public good. So politicians who have left public office may have given away their prerogatives Simon Taylor 129 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing of title but in influence remain political operatives—and are now in fact called that in public media. But the breakdown of public and private realms—or that of democracy—do not concern us so much as their uptake as points of view in networked society, as opinions which can neither be generalised to the newsfeeds carrying them nor to the communities informed by them: the communities of information. One media commentary has it that only a bad man sends porn to young women, another, in its newsfeed, says only one who is mad acquires the habit of sending such unsolicited images to young women or anyone. The images were not of him. He is not fit to hold political office and perhaps the media beatup is a pre-election diversionary tactic? Perhaps he is a dispensable member and has being readied for sacrifice by his party, to be cut off? Despite a responsible media outlet weighing in on whether there is a mental health issue any moral standpoint is quickly overwhelmed: this is not because mad cannot be seen to be in company with bad, although it may be rumoured mental health issues keep company with moral ones. Neither is it because of political ramifications, or because of the ramifying effect on the networks of political speculation in media; nor, because they are not responsible for the deluge, in the profligacy of output, the general abundance of opinion, are media to blame for it. However information tries and to whatever extent it manages to remember and reassemble from the filigree traced by graph relations a consecutive narrative—that is in the networks which are that tracery; however much the stories are in conflict, or contradict themselves, neither their overproduction nor the overproduction in information brought about is the flood that floods the good report of the city—the good reporting—with fake news, reflecting the wishes of some, the interests of others, and mixing false opinion with true. The relativism of points of view is not the issue. Even when they are on points of law, taken up by some—a sort of muscle memory of media having a public function of critique, the way a dogs barks—the positions come unstuck. This is the case of the writer refugee applying for asylum at a writers’ conference as the law permits whom media—traditional channels—called out on the timing of his application and the potential collusion of high office. Such narrations summon calls of beatup or pass on by unless they gain traction globally and are remediated—putting New Zealand, as is said, on the world stage. Simon Taylor 130 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Neither is it the truth of the relativism of the points taking in the whole network, whether scaling upwards or downwards, that is in contest. It is that these claims, moral, personal, professional and political, are made and can be made, meaning both manufactured and fabricated. It is that any bloc of opinion is so made as to have in its genetic makeup a predisposition to being pushed, like the words of a predictive text. A thing is not so much data that exploding, radiate and multiply around it. A story is not such a thing. Its afterimage does not give us, in the pattern relations form on the network, information. The information recalls relations the pattern installs. Latour likes to think of the information as opening onto the negotiation that establishes the pattern and of the relations as enabling their translation.93 Things are in this way irreducible, including values, institutions, objects of manufacture, subjects of concern, and of nature, but that they are translatable is because they form networks of relations.94 In the networks of relations things are, Latour recognises they do not persist. The information, as we have said, remembers. Then we would say it informs nothing. What should persuade us of its existence—the existence of a value as much as of a photograph, persuading us of the truth of a report as of any information—is given to the relations in which it ramifies, with the ramifications being as much speculative and productive of relations as critical and destructive of them.95 That is the effort to rid us off magical thinking ends up assisting the magical thinking—which can be said to invoke the whole realm of falsity—, affirming it in its positive relationality—since there are only positive relations in a network—by linking it to a negative viewpoint that is itself actualised and made true96—since there are in a network only positive points: no nonexistents. 93 Graham Harman, The Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, (Melbourne, Australia: re:press, 2009), 15. Harman writes that for Latour the “world is a series of negotiations between a motley armada of forces, humans among them”, ibid., 13. Cf. Latour writes to Harman that any “argument” about his “philosophy” has to start with Irreductions. At ibid., 12. And: Bruno Latour, Irreductions. Trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 162. 94 “Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else.” This is Latour’s first principle in Irreductions—a prince, he writes, “that does not govern since that would be a self-contradiction” making it a purely positive principle. Irreductions, 1.1.1, 158. 95 Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Enquiry 30 (Winter 2004), (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2004), 225-248. 96 The term privileged by Latour covering both fabrication and manufacture is “engendering.” See “Issues with Engendering,” Latour interviewed by Carolina Miranda, trans. Stephen Muecke, Revue de crieur, 14, La Simon Taylor 131 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing We can go further than this by saying what overwhelms such a view as comes from a moral or even a scientific standpoint, that sweeps the ground out from under it, is its becoming true and being engendered as a point, a datum, or bloc, in a network. Because of the reversibility without negation—from market to brain to social organisation—of a network the value of any truth is overwhelmed, whether moral, scientific or political, whether middleclass or for the people. What prevails, we might say, is neither any truth nor any relativism. It is neither in their relations nor in the constellations of their points, nor is it after either, post-truth or postmodern, dragging its entrails behind it, where we might like to read the pattern of history or the law. What prevails linking the briefest moments to the shortest distances is not relations but their possibility. It is relatability. The relatable is the sensible threshold of the things themselves. They do not acquire anthropogenic appeal, aesthetic allure or obduracy above it. Things rise to it already so constituted—to be pushed as objects of speculation and orientation and ramified in the relations, the relation comprising relations that is both the relation under which they exist and internal for this reason. Opinions, values, lightbulbs are not shaped and massaged into existence, they already have the shape and form of their relatability. They come already acclimatised to the anthropocene. They chatter in their diffidence, communicating even their unwillingness to communicate. The talkativity of things is for Latour from the fact of the relations which they are, the irreducible babble of the minerals in the glass as much as the discourse of technics allowing the extrusion of the filament, the machinic muttering of the lightsocket and the burble of socioeconomic interests, performances and utilities. Where we depart from Latour is to say real things are not relational. It is not their relations that make them real. It is that they are relatable: the relatability of things buys for them their reality. But it is at the cost of it being a human reality. The proof of purchase of humanity on the things that is their relatability concerns an anthropic principle at work in the network brain no less than in the network of objects. It Décourverte/Mediapart, 2019, 1-10. Retrieved 27/7/2020 from http://www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/167-TROUBLES-Engendering-GB.pdf. Simon Taylor 132 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing invokes a principle according to which relations are universally possible. Anything can connect with anything in the universe. Although it need not, that it can leads to the universal interconnectedness of all things that is magical thinking. What is hidden in the possibility of relations that are universal, in the relationality of universal interconnectedness, is relatability and relatability is always about the possibility of human relation. Information, like lightbulbs and city councils, is not massaged and shaped to make it relatable. Rather the constitution of viewpoints under the anthropic principle of relatability makes it possible—without it necessarily being so—for us to link, to feel out the links, between the notion that one is a sexual predator and the sickness besetting institutions, to get the feeling the sickness that an institution has diagnosed is entirely relatable to this case in this instance. Relatable, like Latour’s things, are bodies of institutional knowledge, alleged acts, forms of behaviour, images, ideas and moral precepts. We can note that the theoretical knowledge has a body and the actions of bodies are more carriers of this information, formations or relays. Our own body—as we feel out the relations made available to us—is just as much a carrier, a formation or aesthetic creation of this working out and its relay. Our own body participates in the composition and is part of the network with which it makes cause. Our own body is cause of that which it relates for it being relatable. Our own body is no less a pointstop, a depot, than any other on the line of causation, a resource—technology. This more adequately names the catastrophe of knowledge: that it is networked. How then is the catastrophe of knowledge reversed if it cannot be averted with the advent of the network brain? Before we answer this question we need also note our own body in having its point being on the network can hide its relation through the work preparatory for the network done by the compartmentalising brain. The body’s implication in the brain under the anthropic principle of relatability is hidden for being compartmentalised. This is as a rule what happens with technology: the hidden resource is the human body. What it means here is that the technology for the network brain is provided by the body. Being in provision of its primary resource in this way enables the lopping off we have discussed of the human brain and its replacement by that which, having tooled the terms to their sharpest edge, we can properly designate the technological network. Simon Taylor 133 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing We have considered knowledge from the viewpoint of the technological network that has the body as resource. We have stated it to be the point of survey over the element of communication as if the network, the brain, the market, and corresponding social organisation were the end of communication—and technology’s end as well. There are in fact three endings. The first is of science, so it goes back to the first essay. The second ending is for method and returns to the second essay. The third goes to the end of knowledge and so completes this third essay in answering, of course, the question above but also by answering the question of why we should care. It may seem late to be stating the problem we began with but the problem art research presents us with, because, as we said, it may not appear to be one, depends on the significance of where it arises—where and we may add when. Because of the state of knowledge, it is difficult to say what significance art research has; and the same for the state of science as knowledge; and the same for the discourse of method. In other words, the problem of what significance art research has because of the state of knowledge that surrounds the contribution to knowledge it makes, without which there is no question, either way, of its significance, comes to us by way of a regress of problems, a cascade. Through it we have attempted to cut a path following what has seemed at the time and at the place we find ourselves to us to be most interesting, remarkable and of greatest intensity. The attempt then comprises these three essays and the following three endings. Simon Taylor 134 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing conclusions the science ending Science has to find a market for the knowledge it produces. But the knowledge it produces takes the form of the technological network. Knowledge takes form in and as this production: knowledge is data, which does not have the network or use the network as medium, as media for distribution, towards a finality based in utility and application. So the terms market or Simon Taylor 135 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing commercial reality are not endpoints where scientific knowledge finds utility and application and from them derives its value. The market is not constructed in view of commerce but in view of science. Its value is scientific, its reality not a factor of economic or commercial reality but a factor of scientific reality: the technological network with the body, necessarily human because held in relation and in reserve as resource, is produced in all three of its aspects by science. The three aspects are those of the network brain, its three brains: the commercial network or market, the neurosocial liaison, connecting the individual as well as the corporation of the multitude to the market, and the network of communication. All three are technological. They vary in the data they take up in relations of connectivity but all three are the sum of scientific intelligence. This is not simply to say because they comprise the network brain as one they are the sum. Neither is it to speak of a supersession of the monkey brain by the network brain or of the social or of the compartmentalising brains. The network brain neither gains status or value for being the eminent condition of brains. But the reason for this is simple: it is because the preceding brains are networked that the network brain is informed by them, that it is in touch, as we said, with them, indicating their aesthetic survival. They survive as information recalling the traces left by the network brain in its technological advent. As with any memories they are faulty and crises occur, failures in institutions not sustaining the values that are the inheritance from the monkey, social or compartmentalising brains and from the social organisations to which they correspond. Crises of values not only comprehend their communication but go all the way to the sleeping organism. It awakens to discover its organs arranged differently, its fluids technologically altered: there is a fluid transposition of values across the network which changes the appurtenances of bodies, of the bodies in standing or recumbent reserve. What are the values according to the intelligence of science? They are points of relation—and may keep their position relative to one another while undergoing larger transformations, like the stars sewn on the inside of a greatcoat; a value is also a relation of relations: it is a bridge, Simon Taylor 136 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing a gathering—about this Latour is right.97 Not a door out of the network, a value is a datum of the data it includes, at a higher scale included in, say a brain and its network, at a lower scale including the relations internal to it—without either endpoint or any change of level. This is its in-touch-ness or communication, which takes us to the larger transformations that are its complete inversion. The simple liberal idea of the market being constituted as one or global is complicated by the network brain under its three aspects, which are the three scientific areas of research. So liberalism accedes to the scientisation of the market, which, in the first area of research, the physical sciences, maps the connections of things onto its constitutive network or brain. Neoliberalism is not then the marketisation of science but, in the second area of research, the life sciences, relates the living brain, through its relevant fields and discourses, psychology, biology, ecology, to the aspect of the technological network we have, for the reason it performs the liaison of neuronal cerebral matter at the level of the individual to the social level, called neurosocial (hence neuroliberalism). The third area of research concerns the breaking down belonging to the social sciences and human sciences of the social onto communication for the study of the empirical data constitutive of culture and language. Politics, economics, advertising, education, information and communication theory apply practically what is statistically proven from the aggregation of data broken down by the social and human sciences—accounting for use of statistical models and methods of quantitative research in artistic research as well as the humanities which subsist at the periphery of anthropological, sociological and philosophical study. There is as we see no edge to the network brain that cannot be so broken down. Each scientific area of research, study and practice is no less a technological network. Each area is informed by the empirical particularities it observes which it confirms in their existence. By inform we mean it reports on the relations connecting actualities but is not structured by them, rather there is the diagramme of connections in communication traced by the network the information recalls. It recalls it as data. 97 Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” loc.cit., 234. Simon Taylor 137 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Although we can call it scientific capital, data are value neutral. Neither can we consider an area of scientific research, a network or aspect of a network, a context that might be productive of value and meaning; nor is the technological network a system of differences, the value of any of its aspects, areas or of any one datum relational and not intrinsic: the differences themselves are the relations that connect values and meanings; intrinsic to each is another open set of values and meanings with which they are in communication and possible connection. The possibility of connection marks the whole network process. We need note that this possibility remains communicative. We can neither say the inversions from any one point of view to another is of a higher value or more significant and meaningful than any other; nor, for the same reason, can we say of microscopic aggregates—those addressed in particle physics; those pertaining to individuals or cells; or the data supposed elementary—they are, for being at a lower scale, of less importance than the empirical particularities systematically investigated at higher scales for science. Molar aggregates of universes, bicycles or computers, of species, cities and brains, or of trading patterns, language protocols and Big Data have as much weight, whether research in the field has or has not provided all the data, for science. But to say it is for science is to privilege the scientific inversion over the brain’s inversion of what it relates and over the market’s of what it communicates, the three types of commerce in data, labour and capital. It would also be a mistake to claim that points connect them, as if stitches stitching them together through the fabric of the technological network, or spacetime. Stitches however do come into it but as the work of a hook and not a thread. A price point hooked, a datum—the smallest unit of scientific currency that is its smallest communicative unit—or a value or truth have this in common: they are each reversible into the other; and each is a point of survey on no more and no less than the entire network. The universe hangs on this point as much as the tattered drape on which we project our culture. We understand from this science not to be a privileged discourse. It is least of all a privileged discourse of knowledge. Science is not capital: that data have value as capital is not a function of capital but, since data are products of scientific labour, of science. For the value of Simon Taylor 138 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing information we can say that it is momentarily recalled in data under the point of survey of a possible value or truth, where it is to be had at a price which is in turn not a datum; or is a datum of economics. Then for economics to call itself a science is no longer a pretension. In view of the network process the technical discourse of which produces economic aggregates as well as scientific as well as aggregates of fact, economics is the science of sciences. The discourse upon the bodily support of which—including its human bodily support—such a view of economics can be sustained is technology—inasmuch it pertains to this human support as to those of capital and science. There are then three expressions to the eternal modal essence of the point which is in survey: as labour, as capital and as data. Data has here to constrain itself to its scientific meaning, else it explodes out of the frame, at any one of the points it relates, either to invert the whole or include it (under the relation of its datum). So we might as well say the three expressions of a modal point of survey are as labour, capital and science. On the sea, the endless ocean, composed of its troughs and peaks, with depths only speculation can reach but that they are drillable depths, it is no surprise if we should send down a hook and pull up a good fish or a good gumboot—or a good government: all are good. All have the positive value of truth, the true, the false, the fake and artificial. What is surprising, although at its conclusion really it should be no surprise, is that a system of knowledge should come to confirm the existence of all its empirical particularities at once in the possibility of their relations to constitute scientific reality, to say everything is possible as is said of all data in the infinite connectivity of the technological network: the sea. That science should confirm this possibility over any necessity cuts the system, the market, science, the brain from knowledge. What it thinks it will from now have to think for itself, and, working by itself, as self-supporting reason, support itself. We must consider what happens to knowledge from this event quite separately from what happens to science—as point of excession from the values of use, truth or trade.98 We must consider separately the fate of knowledge in what Lingis calls the time of fate.99 98 Banks deals with such a point being beyond the Culture in: Iain M. Banks, Excession, (London, UK: Orbit, 1997). 99 Lingis, “The Pageantry of Things,” 70-74, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, op. cit., 74. Simon Taylor 139 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the method ending Simon Taylor 140 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Knowledge begins its journey by leaving the universe of the possible. The possible is communication. The possibility of communication determines the universe of the possible. Communication is not an underlying possibility of the universe and that we are overhearing it is only partially true. The representatives of the different fields of scientific research are not mediums through which the universe speaks to us. Neither are the technologies that we have, that they use, its media of communication—as if the universe had chosen these means either to express itself in or representatives of science as its, to convey its message and, sending out its signals, had somehow made it clear that these representations should represent it. Hearing the background static at its birth, or seeing it, observing its composition, consistency and rates of change, and speculating on its death, we are not children eavesdropping on the conversation of the adults, we are participating in it. We are part of a conversation that does not go back only as far as the archefossil, but involves all of time and all of space, from the beginning to the end. 100 But our right of participation is not because we are privileged somehow, as stakeholders, or as having a role to play in the universal plenitude. It is because of the privilege accorded communication. The universe of the possible is the scientific universe. It is the universe supposed by astrophysicists, theoretical physicists and cosmologists to be a multiverse. In a multiverse, everything that can happen does and is happening. It happens in another universe parallel to ours. In another universe I completed this sentence without once looking out of the window. In another universe, the word continued was not replaced with the word completed. Mum and dad did not meet in another; or it was in a different London railway station, under a different clock that they did, with an altogether different outcome in which there was no I and no outcome to follow the one nine words before. In another universe mum and dad lived to enjoy old age together. There is also the sense in which the problems of the universe—and this must be thought the impetus for its 100 For the archefossil and for what it means for philosophy, see: Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Trans. Ray Brassier, (London, UK: Continuum, 2008). Simon Taylor 141 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing supposition—are answered by the multiverse, that it is not all wishful thinking. At higher dimensions than are currently available to empirical observation, so far impenetrable to technology, outside of spacetime, but running through it, are cracks or strings, in a webwork or a crazing of the face of the universe, which solve problems with the theoretical model—that there is not enough matter to account for the speed of its expansion; that at its outset the universe jumpcut forward, exploding at a rate higher than the speed of light, and suddenly slowed;101 that forces exist unaccounted for explaining the high degree of textural consistency of the background radiation left after the Big Bang audible and visible to us, as if spread on a loom or lattice in a carpet of crystalline indications.102 So underlying the universe we are said to dwell in is the possibility of the communication of universes and of us overhearing it communicating with and talking to itself, telling us its secrets, murmuring, whispering and muttering. The overarching universal possibility obtains that the end of expansion is not a step back to the beginning of the multiverse but the point of inversion from which it begins. At the startpoint is neither crunch nor bang but fold. The universal face creases into itself. Following the creaselines the lattice shows neither shrinkage nor expansion: each track traces another as higher dimensional filaments combine and of our spacetime take up less and less until only a thread, a pinprick, singularity, a possibility. The spread we see, hear, having its high degree of textural consistency is that of the relations of every point in the lattice, neither preceding nor, entailed by inversion, following it, but happening all of the time, at every point in time, or, at every temporal juncture as well. The universe of possibility is then composed as a multiverse through self-explication. It is as network we see it traced observing at macroscale the laws of classical physics not because of molar forces and big bodies and fields of force but due to the maintenance of positional and relational integrities despite the inversions happening from every point of relation in a universal consistency that is an explicit grid. For this reason at microscale we see inversion itself, at each point of observation noting the switch 101 João Magueijo, Faster than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation, (London, UK: Arrow Books, 2004). 102 For the subsistence of the lattice as supratemporally composing the universe, see: Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe, (London, UK: Phoenix, 2003). Simon Taylor 142 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing of implication to explication, which is as a background hum: and we can say that this quantum shifting is the mechanism of communication itself by which one universe is now another and passes through its point to enter into another which is the full expression itself of the universal plenitude of relations—but it is also a universal transmission, an observable pattern and passage of the communication that composes the universe and that the universe explicates. There is no inconsistency between particle physics and the physics of relativity. But neither is there conformation to a determinate pattern. One passes into another through the relation of entanglement. The switching in and out is a fact of superposition. So the relativistic universe comprehends quanta as being the data it explicates. Possibility is the necessary condition of this universe. Why is it not probability? Why is it not the probabilism of the combinatory—or that of quantum physics in handling of the probabilities of quantum function? It is not because the universe comprehends all of the possible data, which, because it communicates, it explicates. The possibility entailed here is that of communication. Every datum is known, is understood by the universe, in every possibility—in every possible, not probable, combination of quantum functions—and unfolds from each. That science also knows and understands the same is where its knowledge is universally comprehensive and where it leaves knowledge. Where it departs from knowledge is where knowledge leaves science, we have said, and it does not leave science’s universal comprehension any the less for it. The reason for this is that purview afforded by the technological network on the plenitude of relations in which the scientific universe consists. It is a purview from any point, so then it is everywhere at once. Holding every possibility, inclusive of indeterminacy, amounts to scientific determinism. Science—as universal comprehension—answers the combinatory which, as we earlier said, puts every roll of the dice on one, with scientific determinism, that puts one roll on every one each time. Every single roll is determined by its result. It is not predetermined and not predetermined in the sense of already existing. But being determined neither can it be indeterminate and so present us with indeterminacy or randomness. We can say it is Simon Taylor 143 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing determinate in communication. What allows it to happen that even a random result of indeterminacy, so to speak, is determinate is the result is not a fact but a datum. A datum is any result and can be determinate without being an object of knowledge. This is why the buildup of quantum functions occurs as relativities: the datum is a positive presence in relation. We may say a datum is a pure modal essence for which it is not necessary to exist. It need not even have this tendency.103 It is either true and false, a number for any number and measure for any intensity of which it is the quantum for any quanta. Although it express itself under the terms of a relation, it is not one, but points to a multiplicitous and comprehensively singular universe. Other universes are simply rolls of the dice it articulates. What this means for scientific research: whether into the brain or the universe it is all bodies and their organisation, this, and, as we have said, their management, which equates with species management. Say we set aside a place for apex predators in political anthropology or for the viral carrier mechanism of malaria in tsetse flies in biology, or that of COVID-19, it does not matter if that species shows up, neither does it matter if the panther or cannibal did once, now is no more, extinct, and we have set a place for it in remembrance: each holds its function. In the case of the memory, we have the information and extrapolate from it relevant data. In the case of what biomedicine shows up in the future it is more a matter of how that plays out in relation to interests which concern the economy of the technological network and are only indirectly those of science. That is: the place is full and empty but determinate. This that we may call a positive, whether a true or false positive, need not be thought a determination or constraint of science. Rather for speculation, for critique and for practice, in the emptyfullness of the place consists a freedom, a freedom to do the speculative, critical and practical work of building up a network of relations through which the point is able to express itself. This work is to enlarge relational capacity to the universe over which the point is point of view, in which it is univocally explicated. 103 Spinoza’s definition of modes differs from Leibniz’s, since the latter gives them a tendency to exist, while for Spinoza a mode can have essence in substance without existing. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, op. cit., 230. Simon Taylor 144 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The discovery of research is from that point of view of value or intensity the construction of the point now in the element of its strongest and most vital connections to the information communities the science feeds, those economic, social, humanitarian, environmental, political interests which may be summed up as institutional. The positive value of data gathering is to organise relations according to a capacity to be affected. For science it expresses the freedom to form relations and organise networks with the communities it connects and freely to communicate with them. The state of knowledge the network makes possible entails that all previous knowledge is no longer necessary; that it is possible entails the endurance of that possibility in the relational capacity—the capacity to be affected—given in a point of value or intensity. The points a network connects and distributes are exactly the empirical particularities of research and discovery: they are not numbers. Neither are they things nor abstract functions. If we say they relate it is because they express themselves in relation and through relations gain competency and amenity. Their competencies are to inform, to stimulate, to join. Their amenity is not as empty tokens of signification but through their affective and relational capacity in the affect they wield, the affect they have on company where they are amenable—or where they find themselves unwelcome and unable to relate yet remain in communication. Their accord is unnecessary with one another; and is their accord unnecessary even as it relates to the truth, to accordance with it. Just as their presence at a place set aside is not required neither is their conversation nor consensus in any degree. The company that they find themselves in where their competencies have full reign, in full complement to their affections, exceeds that of scientific culture. Scientific culture is throwing the party, since science and scientific media are the means of exchange of all culture. The dilapidated screening-room with the threadbare curtain and its stuttering refrain of images is not the preserve of science alone. Underlying it are the circuits of trade, of social labour, capital, and the networks of information. The economy of desire where data are affective capital may not be the desired one; only from the point of view of communication, the privileged viewpoint, is it a party: from the point of view of desire it is a factory. Simon Taylor 145 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing While what we seem to be saying applies only to science, in what we may call the desiringproduction of the technological network, it applies to culture in general, but not because cultures labour under some kind of scientific hegemony—or its pretence. Cultures are very specifically information communities, from which are produced data amenable and not, with the competencies to inform the partygoers, stimulate them to join in and participate in the conversation. This is otherwise known as performing their roles; and those who do not are not stigmatised. Critique has the character of turning its object against itself. The critique of desire follows this critical method: it incites to blockages, stoppages, blackouts—dysphorias and dissent. That is pathology in general, in which we hear, however sick, the chatter of those who have only their infirmities for company. Art research does not follow the critical method that turns the object it produces against itself. We recall by critical method the compartment in which the subject’s hold on herself becomes untenable. We recall by it the compartmentalising brain, which for the judge in the room set aside made tenable his role. We recall that for the critic the survival of the compartmentalising brain in the network brain was not an aestheticopolitical protention as it was for the judge, and as it is in part for the politician and political representation. We said the compartmentalising brain was the last truly political brain and it is on this truly critique went to work creating the dysphoria of what has been called a cultural turn in the social sciences—dysphoric for political science. Critical cultural theory did not confuse the true and the false but, operating on the same level, in the same room as its object, the same operating theatre as it were, prepared the way for the network brain, by confusing the levels, rooms, compartments—all now confused with aesthetic and desiring production. The significance of this confusion is not projection, at the level of polities, cultures or of psychopathology, but the aesthetic survival of brains, and, as we may say now, sciences, including the survival of politics as the aesthetic category it has become. Their survival as categorically cultural is relative and, as relative, is to be networked. We see here the concurrence between the technological network and science in the brain: the Simon Taylor 146 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing membranous hold it has coming out of the critical fog, the soup of life, to be clear, transparent and diaphanous. For dealing in the stuff of life, affects and bodies, we cannot say the hold—of science in sciences, or of brains in the brain, or networks in the network—whether as a membrane, tissue or type of suspension, is unconscious. The network brain does not exercise its hold on the monkey brain, the social or compartmentalising brain aesthetically; it could not, neither could it culturally—availing itself of the tattered curtain to keep up the pretence of culture there are social ends beyond species and information management. To say the hold of science is similarly cultural and therefore that we are unconscious of it replays critical method. Its results are confusion; or, it effects a regression, through the corridors and rooms, down the hallway, into the annex, never finding a window to throw open. Life, affects and bodies, are the stuff of an unconscious dependency on the part of an uninhibited and affirmative desire—a material, silicon and sarcous unconscious. What this means is not the keeping in reserve of the element that feeds it but the feeding of that element to those kept in reserve. The feeds of science are the hold it has. Each previous compartment, discipline and department of knowledge is in communication and is kept in communication. This is how we know knowledge is gone. It is also where human species are privileged enabling the liquidation of others in the management of species. Science is not a privileged form of communication. It enjoys no such freedom even at its own party. Although scientific culture throws the function, science itself is not a function of culture—why we say the hold exercised is less that of information, the giving and receiving of its gifted insights, than the connectivity itself, than its fact, if fact were sought, the achievement of a technological network, the condition of which is both the silicon unconscious and the life, affects and bodies that are human. Science is their brain in so far as it is embodied in the technological network. So there is no basis for it in the body as such; neither is there in the senses, either in a sensitivity extended from the human, or in the impersonal affects of a general humanised affectivity expressed in the relations of affective data. There is basis for Simon Taylor 147 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing science in the oversupply of information—according to its demands, leading to the overproduction of data from inputs to outputs. Science is then the processing power, the engine of consumption in a scientific economy, the plant treating the raw data, into data on all possibilities of data, metabolising it as information, and thinking. What science thinks is a process—self-organising in the same degree it is formal: a network process and an affirmative thought in the sense of thinking the positive possibility of all possibilities for expressive relations—the competencies—of the data—and their amenity. For what it thinks it is reliant not on good or bad feeds but on the productivity of what we earlier called the factory noone leaves: so, the party and the factory. We call it a party because underlying what the science brain thinks are interests in culture, from high to pop, from primitive to traditional, and all the stages inbetween, concerns which are environmental, are formed in mathematical problems and are found in public toilets and operahouses, on savannahs and in rainforests, among migrating populations, in crowds and individuals, in love, in war and in death, locked up in the solitary psyche and unleashed on the megacity. But by these science does not secure its hold and over them it does not exercise control. The party has any politics, includes every taste group for every idea, ideal, belonging to all information communities. The industrial biochemist is talking to the social anthropologist who studied sacred and shamanic practices in the villages of Burma. We need not think the sharing of information to be exclusively Western, a privilege of developed nations and not also to apply to developing and underdeveloped regions. Here we meet the managerial supply chain statistician and a group of experimental subjects undergoing testing for antibodies as an alternative to a vaccine. The sex therapist is talking to first nation informants. The historian of economics is talking to an educationalist and an aidworker, both from sub-Saharan Africa. In the presence of the climatologist who is talking to the futurologist the past world is as present as the future in its recollection of the contemporary, of the mundane details belonging to the phenomenology of the everyday. Simon Taylor 148 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing We ought not either be surprised some of those present are not actually here, or that the consensus we should listen to the science does not generally obtain. What the science thinks is for itself. Those present, like those would be, whose presence is a possibility, like those who were and like those who will be present, are here at the convenience of an autonomous body of knowledge, science—except that it is not knowledge, and it is not a body, but a brain. So, like us, the formula the partygoers use to speak for science is to say, they think: they think that a vaccine will soon be found; they think that the sarsens, for the uprights and lintels of Stonehenge, originated four and a half thousand years ago in the West Woods of Wiltshire 25km to the north; they think that the zoonotic transfer of disease to human populations will only increase in frequency given the depredation suffered by natural environments and the pressures placed on their animal and plant populations by human activity and climate change. Because they are not speaking within their specialisations, they find it difficult to speak for science any other way. Sometimes the connections are too small, like those of the unconscious. The field has expanded far beyond what any one or any series of specialisations can encompass. The competencies of human-technical actors have been transferred to the data themselves and it is science that thinks the relations whether small or at the limits of speculation in which they express themselves, science that is the self-sustaining reason of the technological network to which that thought belongs. The specialists cannot make sense of it except in their microinformation climates, they say they say, because the thought does not belong to them and cannot be held or entertained in common. But this is not the disappearance of knowledge into arcane minutiæ, neither is it some compensatory swing for the generalities which were said to be the trade of science and of speculative theory. The microprocessing as well as the molar treatment of solids is by the technological network, the body or form of science, which causes division into relations without surcease and which is the effect of the oversupply of data inputs and its outputs. The technological network of science thrives on the relations of the body, which we may now call affections, that bodies of relations hold in reserve as their affective relational capacity. But science is famously unfeeling so these affections are as so many things in the universe. They Simon Taylor 149 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing are, we have said, where interests meet. They are not then matters of identity but of difference, meetingplaces for different interests, concerns, intentions and desires, ones as if coming from different sides of the universe, or, different universes. Their diversity is expressed in their division, their difference in their diversity. Where it was essential to the compartmentalising brain for the other brains to talk to each other, communicate and work out their differences, forming ideas in common—like the social organisation corresponding to cosmopolitanism—, in the network brain they need not talk to each other but it is essential they talk: that the chatter of the possible universe is kept up, that the talk is unconstrained and free. A physical law however acts in restraint of the free exchange of information constraining it to the expression of difference rather than the communication of the different parts. Individual differences are not crowded out—although there are the politicoaesthetic vestiges of the compartmentalising brain for bodies to contend with, in their relations, to which racist, sexist, classist or moralist cause the compartmentalising brain rallies the social brain (of us and them) and the monkey brain (of violent and aggressive sensuosity); and, as we have seen, to our critical confusion, even these brains and parts of brains are relative and to be networked in the production of their differences. Individual differences, in their division and further division, are not undergone in their privative aspect, but another rule than their sociality or their social mobility, which we may call a rule of desiring economy, is posited. Desire is here the motorforce of difference: it does not mobilise to too much but to the infinitesimal, to an excess of differences, each one of which is given room to express itself, as a body of relations. It moves within a differential space, not a negative space. Such a space is affirmed of the network, such a structural economy of desire, and confirmed by science, for which the positivity of the points of difference that are data cannot be suppressed. Points of difference cannot be expressed in negative terms but, only in the plenitude of their relations, of all possible relations, can come to expression. We should note, in contrast to the utopian compartmentalising of thought, this plenitude comprises not the best of all compossible worlds but the universe of the possible, the universal one of their univocal Simon Taylor 150 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing communication. However the physical law concerns us that our differences set us apart. They are the differences in affection of the relations in which single points of difference are expressed. But we are set apart into different zones of the possible not into other compartments of the real: the rule of the desiring economy takes over as a physical law from the psychic one that has the role of repression. So we inform on the spectra of our affairs and for every possible one there is another adjacent to whom we need not communicate our affections in their full range but to whom we relate, are relatable and related, if not in relationship, through its expression. The expression of our affection is the expression of our point of difference, of an individual difference: it is the show of an affection as much as wearing a political or gang colour. It expresses belonging to an information community. Neither the information need be communicated nor the affection expressed for it to be communicated because this is a matter of physical adjacency. We are subjects of interest and labour under the subjection of being the concern of science for the sake of scientific interests and concerns according to which individual differences are the data to be recorded, reported and recalled as information: the management of species is data management; as is the liquidation of species. But most species do not communicate in the way that they readily inform science of the nature of their affections and relations as we do. Forms of negation have come to be seen as political acts: of resistance, of refusal, withdrawal and giving the finger to the information network—as if it were separable from the scientific brain. The point to make is each datum we emit, either through a shopping decision or the millisecond we linger over a photograph expressing the commission of a distant atrocity, as an act of relation or affection that is individual, is an act of desire effected on the three networks, commercial, communicative, neurosocial or neuroliberal, and linking them. So it is a matter of commitment, if not commission, of personal labour, adding social capital as well as producing a physical item of trade, in the element of their communication, to the technological network. It is as a body of work that you individually form and inform yourself. The personal identification in which an affection is expressed will for the most part go unnoticed by you, will be unconscious, but is communicated to the network, is that by which the network is in Simon Taylor 151 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing communication and contributes to the desiring economy. It is that of which the science brain is conscious. Each datum we emit is a point of capital, our price-point, a point of difference in our neurosocial outlook or makeup and one in connection and each is ineradicable. It is that by which each one of us is undetachable from the species. How then should critique of the management and liquidation of species proceed? To express oneself in affections is to join in adjacency with others in a space which has obviated the need for critical judgement because it proposes itself as the differentiated space of informants. We are related in our disaffection as much as in our affection, in our desires as much as in their repression. But the function of negative critique changes: it does not permit us of the space we would require for our negative differences. The lack that marked desire, the same we might say as turned the object of critique against itself, changes to the multiple refraction of the spectra of difference. It undergoes a second negation overcoming the distance kept by the critical object, at which it was being held by the first function of critique which was either to repress the sensuous knowledge of its object brought about by adjacency, contiguity, or to repress the attractiveness of its object, turning it against itself by the very lasciviousness with which it reached out and probed. The second function works to negate the negation of distance through division. It is as if each bit of the repression and of the lack it took in its inverted form were being stamped in positive relief along the productionline of the unconscious, not for desire to stand out in itself but for the relations of difference between each of its terms to come in to communication. Disaffection undergoes fragmentation: refusal and defiance become the emission of data they would suppress, in the relations they would sever. The multiplication of positions of privative critique never has the mass of agency except to further divide and multiply; and data never work to their erasure. Every datum posits possible relations, expressing possible differences and divisions of desire. But division does not fill up the space of difference. The problem of occupancy occurs by the adequacy of the refusal, the resistance and denial, even if undertaken Simon Taylor 152 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing in an unconscious act or entertained as no more than a possibility, only to the datum in which it is expressed, that proposes, projects or posits it. The weapon we pick up cannot be communalised; and our flight is not the precursor of another. Neither does it follow another’s, perhaps one who demonstrated the exit to exist. Our negative differences, our critical desires (of the first function), since they agree only in privation, cannot be held in common because to hold in common that which each one does not have is to have nothing, to agree on nothing and be informed of nothing.104 Neither is the room there where we might share the dissension of our dissensus but that it is nextdoor and nextdoor again; and lacking it now its lack is not deferred onto a future fulfilment: it is rather donative and refers endlessly to its direct and positive adjacency. As to whether we are simply confusing levels, that in fact it is on a higher or lower floor, to which we go, to which we will be eventually referred, we can now consider a much more amenable situation, obviating the requirement of judgement coming from either above or below and giving us a mobility, wherein we are, we might call a freedom of the senses, of our sense of direction and of survey and selection. The situation comes from the affirmation of the small relations set in play by the second critical function of desire as positive differences. This movement will be recognised as being that from transcendence to immanence, critical theory’s greatest achievement, the greatest resting on the smallest, of infinitesimal difference, as well as its greatest gamble. Now it looks like there is dual occupancy of the system of differences initiated in the production of the unconscious: one is of the unconscious; two is of the conscious, of the differences science is conscious of, the brain. But the one is the condition for the other. The unconscious is the condition for science, the brain, and the possibilities it is conscious of, because it is their source. This is why we say affect and bodies that are human, the silicon or machinic unconscious, are the resource of science not its objects, in that they produce the 104 ...“things which agree only in a negation, or in what they do not have, really agree in nothing.” Spinoza, Ethics, op. cit., 130. For the notion of art research enjoying the privilege of an exemplary refusal in constituting a line of flight, see Mick Wilson, “Something Along the Lines of ...”, in The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research, Ed. Paolo de Assis & Paolo Giudici, (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2017), 526-543. Simon Taylor 153 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing possibility of difference. It is this possibility science is conscious of which is why difference and repetition, the repetition of difference, become the condition for science. Much as we saw the positive force of confusion subjecting critique to the same level as its objects in the first critical function, in the second we see a nonprivative form of negation, a broken negation, open onto the outside. Immanence is achieved through this nonprivative form of negation, which the unconscious is, since it goes by way of the outside. So we can stand on oblivion and have resources of silence. From it we get the hallucination that is art and the mistake that is language, for going by way of it. Art and language, theatre and writing, are mistakes and hallucinations for communication. Science has the same source in desire and in the repetitions of difference and the same resources in the unconscious. Science research simply does not regard as necessary either the mistake that opens onto writing or the hallucination that closes in in theatre. Art research is their record, its method informed by these conditions. Difference, repetition, the repetition of difference, becomes the condition of science but not as a system of knowledge. The reason for this is the internalisation of the critical method, we have given the name of functions, critical functions, or functions of desire, which in the first instance turns the object against itself, forcing the mutual parting of ways both of the object and of the scientific knowledge of it. In the second instance, science becomes the object, the brain or technological network, self-contained: its answers suffice and are adequate to the questioning mind, necessarily human, in which critical thought is inaugurated. So the critical method is sustained from immanence to immanence, from one immanence to every possible immanence, and sustains that movement. This would be regression but for communication, the human element or anthropic principle. Another curious thing has happened: we have been allowed to make common cause against oblivion, even as it is on oblivion that the stage is set for the scientific subject by her innocence. She is not guilty for wanting climate change to stop; she is not lacking something. But can critical actions really turn to science? Simon Taylor 154 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing His refusal of the status quo is no longer the expression alone of the datum he is. His negation has a nonprivative aspect to it. We might say this is the nondonative admission of the unconscious, that what is not conscious is not by nature negative; his consciousness does not admit of a lack belonging to the unconscious that is his. It is more like fate, or we would say it was were it not for the predictives of the speculative project always at work somewhere on the data he makes, shaping it, pushing it, until he does not. The weapon is a weaponised silence. It is of the resources we have on which the technological network brain relies. A man stands. A woman covers one eye. An umbrella, figures play dead in the street. Then perhaps it comes as an unwelcome interruption, like an illness, a forced suspension of duty, a lockdown of activity. Then it is a constraint imposed and you note your subjection with resentment. Or the time of fate, the time of silence, is time spent in disenchantment, disillusioned, and, in defiance of the system, feeding your resentment. It is killing me is your negative avowal. You are he who in an act of opposition to the killing machine withdraws from it; you are she who chooses lockdown as a way of life. You reckon staying very still to be the most affirmative critique in breaching the political subject, turning its object, which is your subjection, against itself. The constraint placed on me by lockdown is like a prison: it exists to hide the fact I have always been held there. This is your thought. Or it is like Disneyland; an enchantment that awakens you from your earlier enchantment, which on awakening you cannot escape; must live on disenchanted, disillusioned. Still, the fact there are vacuoles carried in the element of communication means there are places to get away from it all—and not necessarily to retreat.105 You come across a small silent 105 “The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.” Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, Trans. Martin Joughin, (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995), 175. Simon Taylor 155 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing spot—but it is more likely that it was no action of your own which led to the encounter—and you disengage. Perhaps you are he who is fearful and who resists the surrender of his goals and intentions, as if they were rights. Or you have bought this time. You are she who takes up the offer silence makes, to refocus on her plans and projects: she who is on but not in retreat. She uses gratefully the time paid for—perhaps her workplace has arranged things as a bonus, hoping to recuperate on the investment in her health and wellbeing when she returns fully restored and ready to tackle anything. For her the space is useful, to evacuate the detritus accumulated over days and nights oncall, to sweep out the old me while retaining its cellular walls. For him as well it is an apparatus, the Golgi—a vacuum into which to put unnecessary stress and anxiety, a void of insensibility to enter into mindfulness. The vacuole has then the sense it has in the cell of a reserve or repository not to cancel but to void waste, a lysosome. It is time spent in the body. Time spent in madness, in magical thinking, in dying, in sickness, in attending to those who are; time subsisting, in fear, at sea, in camps; time in exodus, going bush for a while, locked up, or, under the imposition of public measures to stop the spread of plague, locked down: these are communicated to the relevant authorities, without whose authorisation—this is the meaning of a fair and just society—there would be no communal cause to be made with the plenitude of social relations or in the oblivion of their rejection. Scientific management of species means always to have the attention of the authorities, to be always in their thoughts; so it is their communication being sought, not their control, and not that of our dreams or desires, except the control of communication. Entailed by the control of communication by current species management are exactly the forms of negation spoken of, nonprivatively affirmed, nondonatively admitted, in relation to the functions enumerated as two, one of transcendental, one of immanent critique. The first works a rejection that is then a disjection from the element it bears, bearing it out, where it turns against itself the object it expels. This is an initial phase before critique is confused and becomes its object. The second function leads to the materialisation of the whole field and objective immanence. For science we saw it come at the cost of knowledge; for the Simon Taylor 156 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing brain, it was the price of its independence, self-sufficiency and containment, to the cost of the acephalous body, without consciousness. Current management practices tend correspondingly to the nonrepose of nonworking bodies and their maintenance as reserve or production capacity serving the technological network. We formed an identification between the technological network, the brain and science, in turn, correlating these to the three brains which the network brain comprises, the last being first in line: communicative, psycho- or neurosocial or neuroliberal, and commercial. Our final critical move was to call on immanence but it is here immanence to the element of communication understood to be what communicates to the managing species. We can stand together in protest staging our negative critique, we can overthrow at the cost of enormous sacrifice the system, but who is going to set up the next political compartment from our network? How will we take to being in it knowing the physical inconstancy of the relations and the temporal intermittency of connection in which they are formed? How will we take to being of it knowing we act at the convenience of our time? How can we do otherwise knowing our situation than refuse it, and I, knowing yours to be killing you, shall I tell you your silence or your stupidity is the way to elude it? There would seem to be something missing. For the critical functions to work there would seem to be something required, some inspiration or plan for the treatment plant, or cell, looking to turn the waste to good use, for the system of differences, some small effort already expended. From it we might want to pass on quickly, too quickly, as if intuiting from it a use, because we are the subjects of it. In the premonition of our subjection occurs a kind of faultline which we pass over if we simply affirm that it is there, a tremor of what is to come; and in what state should it be affirmed, either in its completion or as incomplete, as systematic and methodical or chaotic and useless? The choice never arrives. At least, it never arises in this form. But that the chaotic will be for something, as if this is what we had in fact been looking for; the useless will not be for nothing, it will assist the method, to make work, to set our purposes and carry forward our intentions: Simon Taylor 157 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing its state of incompletion will be affirmed by our own state of incompletion in completing the project; and the privation we had not looked for that was inflicted upon us will be thought constitutive. So the lack also in the game the cannibal plays to hide evidence she is a cannibal and he himself a cannibal, when in fact a critic, one hiding the bones from the other, or both from themselves, the bones meanwhile in plain sight, on the bureau or the mantel, this lack will be given purpose. It will become the original crack of the world. What is most obvious we pass over, in favour of what, bad luck? Do we do so out of love of movement or of staying still? It would seem from the ground of negation we are forced to move on, to grow, as they say, finding in this sour field, this almost desert, in these sick and expensive times no purchase for our seed, an unwelcome place. What we might discover in the immediate vicinity seems however to offer shrinking advantage. But let us leave these shaking volcanic islands. To live here has become a punishment so I go on like a kind of exile. No, it is staying still I want, just not here. The cutting off from what I know and recognise about this place will come as a boon. But is this not what we do with every surge in the temperament of the earth, of the ground which wants to punish and negate us? We will not miss it, we say, but we do; and we force from the ground of our dismissal the movement that in fact moves us, driven by lack, deserving lack, condemned to wander. Our desires appear to lead us but in fact they produce us. We get what we deserve. So we are born, we say, and die. But so we are born, like this, never intact, already cut, having taken for granted the act by which it was made. Conversely, because this is in the nature of conversion, we are born to strive because we suffer, into pain, depression, isolation, the disaffection of youth, the disillusionment and disenchantment of the middle and the abjection and alienation of the old, because so it is we come to love, vulnerable and naked, so it is we come to joy, relieved and thankful, and so it is we come to live, not noticing the rest is without surcease. We will not be forgiven, yet we forgive; we will not harm others, yet are we injured; yet we pay off the debt for that which was taken from us by adding more to it. Simon Taylor 158 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Then we must look at what the debt is for because it is not for our angelic or mindful circumstance but something else. The debt is to the generosity of the punisher whose punishment is for a better version of ourselves for whom acceptance will be easy and require not the slightest effort on our part. The debt is then a gift and we will cease to see it as a wound or loss; and if a loss it is of what we never had in the first place; and if a wound it is inflicted on a part that is missing that also was never ours the first time. So the gain will be greater the greater the debt and we will subsequently have moved on without knowing our acceptance to be the downpayment. To make negation for something: this is to live in it as if it were our element; it is also that of which we have not the slightest memory of doing. In the refusal leading to escape we make it for us. If the gift of the world is the wound, the wound is the most useful gift in the world. The act that is subsequent to granting its utility, that precedes it, is looking for its use, this use which will be particular, peculiar to the affirmation made of it. The positive use afforded it therefore has the characteristic imputed to negation: to share in it is to share nothing in common, because it is a different name for something else, at each point in the series, up or down, or back and forth, along it, which exists positively, at any one, initiated by that negation of which it is affirmed. The stage or phase preceding affirmation appoints a single use to the memory in language that is useful to go back again. So the mistake of language comes to have its purpose and so the hallucination of art has its utility. We can see this in art research which looks for the good it does but does not find it in the practice. Art research, whatever good it does the researcher or the institution, may be said largely to be the search for the good it does. It is much harder to negotiate formal requirements placed on practice, for a start that of significance and of signifying at all, and much easier to attach value, meaning and utility somewhere else. The reason for this is that a practice is individual; the affirmation made from the point of view of looking for a purpose, again a use, value and meaning, with this purpose, cuts off, except to be usable, meaningful and a valuable resource, what one might call the body of the work: but it is this body, no other, Simon Taylor 159 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing this art, no other, which is affirmed in its negation, so effecting a definition unique and peculiar to it. We can then see how subsequently a critical function arises that would take this cutting off for granted—what we earlier called turning the object, whether of critique or of desire, against itself. We also see how the acceptance of loss, through the second critical function, acts as part downpayment on enlivening the whole field, materialising it for all, aestheticising it through the practice. In the first instance, the access of research is denied and in the second is the movement from its transcendence, for the good it does, that we might call its dogmatic transcendence, in line with the dogmas of utility, signification and inherent value, to an immanent reality. It is a price worth paying. The switch takes place at that moment we affirm not its abyssal waste of time but art for the good it does. We can then talk of the second critical function as enacting a deferral, a deflection or displacement, onto the whole field, so constituted as to be a subjection to the endless repetition of desire where we must keep wading through the excess we produce—so much waste—for the good it does. We desire it so much to be this way that we can with Lingis call it an abyssal love. 106 We throw it away for the sake of the teeming multitude of things with which we can confirm the field now to be full, the plenitude of possibilities with which it presents us—in the presence of which, we might even say, in whose presence, we are indebted: but to whom and for what? One by one we pick through the field making our connections according to a methodology that is essentially dogmatic in the same way we said the transcendence was, since it is according to the dogmas of the useful, the meaningful and the valuable, of the practice, art transcended. Is this not the same with the human brain? Its price was raised first for its value, so that it had to be lopped off—as the thing itself, responsible for the relations forming things—to continue its rise above any ordinary thing; and then, from its utility was formed its identity: it identified itself in the field of all relations to be the element of their communication. It filled the universe with the chatter of the possible by allowing, at any point, up or down, back and forth, in their series, the entry into 106 Lingis, “Love Junkies,” 418-430, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, op. cit., 429. 160 Simon Taylor 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing communication of one universe with another, enabling the affirmation to be made, we are in this particular one, the one investigated by science. We see here coincide the three dogmas with the three brains making up the network brain, the communicative, following the line of meaning and significance, the neurosocial line, connecting individuals to communities, belonging to utility, the management of species, and the commercial, which is first in line, establishing the level of debt by way of speculative valuation. A price is set on the affirmation unique to the brain, for its subjection to the debt it owes to that smallest of efforts: to look for a use, meaning, value for the brain is easy and it becomes the reason for the lopping off, taking for granted the act by which it is made. So each human brain is affirmed in its individuality, for the negation of the human being peculiar to it, at the same time as its communicative lines are being put in place, according to the dogmatic ones, which further coincide with those of the network or science or the communication of human possibility. We can then talk about the debt owed to science: for the transcendence of the human element of communication; in subjection to the immanence of which the human is held in reserve as a resource of productive desire that is endless for carrying over into immanence the endless debt it serves. The debt is accepted as the cost, at source, of individuality, at the individuating moment borne by negation: a price worth paying—or, should we say, the cost of a brain, after hyperinflation, is that we pay by the work of the body, from which it is removed. We pay for loss, labour to pay, through work, because the loss is accounted to our gain, so that it always increases. It is the rule of competition to make sure the structural and systemic integrity of the speculative economy is maintained by the method that negation is for gain: so it is dosed out in small amounts in order that as little effort as possible is required to affirm it. This is the law of pay but also that of value. It is also the law of accumulation. The loss of the brain—for the sake of the human—is placed in competition with the loss of brains and faculties, with all of the losses it mirrors, against which cumulative debt its price is calculated: a spike in value that is exactly for the sake of the human, a gift, a donation, you and I are appointed to accept on its behalf. Simon Taylor 161 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Where we earlier considered the points on which relations are founded, and the data to express difference, here difference in itself is the significance forced from the ground of its negation, forced because it is not freed from the element carrying it. We might even say that what is donated to difference in terms of small gains in its systematic attribution by infinitesimal degrees is of the same order, and accumulates in diversity by the same method. It is a titrated not extravagant negation of this for that in order to arrive at more choking supply that increases demand while stopping major revolutionary change and insures we do not have one universe crashing into another. Each individual, as we saw, presents this possibility. So we stay in this one, in reserve, its plenty affirming the debt we owe it. Debt is its working backwards, the promise its working forwards, the carrying over of the remainder, loss, indefinitely within the finitude of a single possible transcendence and salvation, a destiny that is ours alone—and we are, you and I, because of it, each of us permitted to differ in the slightest degree. At least, we are, within the limits of our reserves; but it is out of the mobility of the singular appointment by which those limits are made definite, and against those reserves, they individually define, that infinite debt can be placed and that the unlimited soteriological promise can be pitched of eternal salvation. These gain their mobility as effects; that is, although the donation may be little by little by which provision is made for them, debt for what was not ours, the promise of what is, remorse and resentment, guilt for what was not ours we took, and the grace, compassion and pity advanced to us, the hope we are given, are as effects secondary to the primary appointment which entails their wholesale acceptance. Meeting the happy appointment, accepting that what is taken away, although we never had it, will, in the long run, be to our gain, it is a small thing we do. It is an act of good will, you might say, and from it flow the gifts of all the elements of the earth and the blessings of the beyond— but not yet. What it bestows is, as we said, eked out but it is also available in mad profusion, because what is bestowed is endless possibility. Then we are forgetting that, although small, it is an act and we are attributing to negation a power it does not have, a power as magical as that we attribute to communication, which by Simon Taylor 162 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the same act puts us in touch not only with our own but with every possible universe. Then again, we are always listening to those who are not there. It is when we turn to them for advice they are not. I hear my mother playing up the effort that went into her moussaka when I follow the recipe and you read my words, small things. She hears voices in the wind. He sees a pattern in the symptoms of the sick. Following relations with the unseen and its forces is how empirical research proceeds. If negation leads to the proliferation of difference in diversity which we can confirm in the plenty surrounding us, even if arrived at by evolutionary increments, of what is the negation? What is the problem with this method when the use of force looks so much like liberation? That every step, every act—standing, covering an eye, holding another’s hand, delivering oneself limp as an obstruction to make it difficult for the police to remove—every gesture of resistance, however tiny it is, as long it is in the right direction, that every word and every silence when the word has been corrupted and falsified, that every step forward in the struggle ought to be affirmed, is this what is negated? Have we not seen, again and again, the failure of negative thinking and the triumph of positive action which allows for inclusion, enables and encourages participation? Have we not seen the failure of the critical method’s nihilism? We have seen its failure to propose, to form a positive proposition of what should follow critical destruction: our best dreams for a better future, for a future at all, for our children and their children, have met with disappointment. The experienced are exhausted. The young either recognise their place or not accepting it seek incremental change. Even if the struggle is no longer ours, should we not applaud their efforts and lend support to them? The problem is an affirmative method, but a different one, one that does not take the easy route of affirming the right to disagree, that refuses it. What is known by this method is a point of view, a position in relation, a capitulation to the wound being a gift, the gift its communion, to communication and the right to speak of the victim. The known is the knowable, inclusive of diversity, with the participation of differences affirmed in their negation, to their total Simon Taylor 163 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing inclusion: they are, however opposed, whatever contradictions they have, all possible; they are, as we have seen, all positive. What is negated is this possibility. What is negated is inclusion in diversity, the plenitude of the knowable and the thinkable refused. What is negated is forced participation in the plenitude of possibilities and what is negated are the effects of negation, additive debt and cumulative promise. What we never had deferred and displaced onto what we never will have, this is what we refuse. But how do we have a method of affirmation based in refusal, resistance, the resistance of control and the controlled doses that dripfeed the continuity of the present making it immune to change? How do we have a method of affirmation if not by affirming that it is for our own good? How do we discontinue with the negation which is affirmed? The answer is individually, through the affirmation which individuates, which we might say is its virtue, or power: the individual is not quite, no longer and not yet complete or continuous with itself. All these negatives conspire, as they might in one of Kafka’s stories, where space is the completion of time and space in its completion and time in its entirety coincide. They would seem to set us back in the order of things—if not for an intimate break which is that of negation.107 What we negate in negation are its effects taken for positives. Before, it was a matter of relations and the points on which they are founded; here it is differences and the diversity in which they are positively expressed. The action is the same. The first effect uses negation positively to identify an object or individual, affirming of negation a use that has value and is meaningful, since the second effect is to relate that identity to a field with which it is continuous and materially consistent. What we need is the blade to cut this relation. While we cannot affirm negation what we can affirm is the cut and the act by which it is made. Rather than returning to the critical juncture, 107 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, Trans. Robert Hurley, (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2012), 76. This section owes much to Dubilet whose reading of Bataille engineers a rapprochement without concession between Deleuze and Bataille, through a kenosis of the subject in which immanence is irrecuperable either to control or to completion. Alex Dubilet, The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern, (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2018), 148ff. Simon Taylor 164 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the rupture that individuates; rather than difference forced from the ground of negation—by the joy of spring—to join the garden of diversity, the points in relation one to another and to us—the talking flowers and the trees—in the technicolour fields of science, where all things possible are carried and bound in the element of communication; rather than the communication of the possible, the communication we said has to be human; and rather than its repetition or reproduction we have cellular division, the edit-point, the break in transmission and the break in the transmissible and the no longer humanly possible as powers of opposition. In each relation is the blade that cuts it. This is not the same as saying for every affirmation there is a negation, since the small affirmation recognises the individual, is an affirmation in recognition and it is for the individual it is made. The easiest thing to do, as we have said, is confer value, meaning and sense on what exists. What comes to exist is seen in the light of the eternal essence of the datum but in fact is outside it. So it is not a process we are affording the title of individuation. What comes to exist in its individual particularity does not derive from the particle, a singularity from which the process starts or point at which it ends. Neither does it come from its addition, to form an aggregate, in the sum of which we see it, nor from catalysis, a function which it would be for or which it would perform. In these cases the first relation is affirmed, in a time and at a place, and then the process takes over—from the cellular division, the splitting atom—in a cascade of effects that is not the individual’s. We might say that it is in apposition or adjacency and not in opposition that the relation or bond is formed, but for the fact of what is the individual’s which individuates. Any possible regress is halted before it has a chance to take hold—even as it precedes any progress which is cut off—by the power of opposition, that is an individual’s own. The power of opposition an individual or object owns is not the bond that is affirmed of it, or the relation, and it is its not being it of which the affirmation is acknowledgement.108 This is 108 Nietzsche shows the artist is the opposite of an antagonist. ... “the subject, the individual who wills and furthers his own egoistic purposes, can be considered only the adversary and not the origin of art.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, Trans. Shaun Whiteside, (London, UK: Penguin, Simon Taylor 165 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the juncture at which critical objectivity is secured and we should recall in it the smallest affirmation that took but the slightest effort to make. It is also the point at which to reverse the situation, to say that it is the negation, the critical negation. It would fix things, fix the cut, the break in the ground, cover it over, give it a cause to work for, make it an institution. It would fill in the gaps to complete the negative economy, filling the gaps in against any future imbalance and so indebting the present to the future. It would save up the answers, comprehending in science every possibility, as if in a multichoice or on a scorecard. Negation cannot be turned over to affirmation simply by acknowledging the contrary to what we acknowledge in negation by making it for something, a promise for the future on which our hope in the present is downpayment. Neither can we take this on as either a light shone on the darkness or as the darkness itself. The unthought, the unthinkable, the unknown and the unknowable are not so easily converted: to make them so reinstitutes that opposition which the break opposes between one thing and another. It reconstitutes the relation of opposites and affirms in this relation the possibility of reconcilability, mutual participation—mediated by a process and it may be long and expensive of reconciliation.109 Neither should we think it is enough simply to perform negation, by acknowledging formerly it had been for something that we now deny, cutting off access to worth, purpose or sense— this is to put it beyond, to cast it behind a curtain snickering—nor is knowledge or gaining knowledge of its dark purpose enough, as if in conspiracy behind the curtain of the night, or outside, beyond the outside; nor is it enough to expose its part, cause before, in the precursory darkness, before what is given in the possible, making it possible and the subject of universal chatter, because making it possible for the audience to see. There is a whole poetry, a 1993), 31-32. Against Žižek’s preference for internal conflict and struggle, we prefer to oppose: an opposition, maintaining neither any antagonism to that which it opposes, nor a struggle or agonism directed at the self or other, which the opposition would then express. Contrasting his dialectical materialism (DM2) with Stalin’s caricature (DM1), Žižek writes: “Contrary to DM1 which interprets antagonism as opposition, DM2 conceives antagonism as the constitutive contradiction of an entity with itself: things come to be out of their own impossibility, the external opposite that poses a threat to their stability is always the externalization of their immanent self-blockage and inconsistency.” [emph. added] Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute, (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 5. 109 Cf. Lingis on the Truth and Reconciliation process in Vietnam: “Truth in Reconciliation,” 432-445, in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, op. cit. Also: Mishra on this process as performance in South Africa, Age of Anger, op. cit. Simon Taylor 166 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing theatricality to negation, a tradition with its connoisseurs, who discriminate in it great obscurities. What we can bring to light is the cut and the blade which made it. That the body is the blade—which makes the cut—and bears forth the act by which it was made, this is the anorexic’s insight. He acts to take control not of the body but of the control that negates it: so the controlled doses of poison as food and food as poison. The cutter as well, it is not to deny her body that she cuts or to refuse, reject or hate it. The body is affirmed in the blade which cuts it. A Hunger Artist asks to be caged just as a suicide asks to be medicated and put on watch. We can see here negation’s long association with evil, which is also its association with the management and liquidation of species, and, in human social organisation, with control. Control is always a matter of dosage: the higher the dose, the more negation, the more care that must be taken. This is the reason care is given on an industrial scale. Human social organisation is the crystal of the critical method. It is facetted with the negation it affirms. Evil was expelled to the edges of human community where there is a threshold of negation, then entrapped, detained in segmentarity. Now it is laid down in adjacency, atom by atom, each layer guarding the flaws that cause the vertices to form and the points connecting them. It spreads by networks coextensive with those of human communication where it is a constant risk to be monitored, managed and controlled. So the possibility of evil holds an attraction as much erotic as thanatic: it is passed body to body like a contagion, a drug, in the dark, underground, but it is as well a distortion of community and a perverse use to which existing networks are put. Actual forces of negation have been neutralised and normalised in the wholly positive method of affirmation with which they are fused and confused, but it is confused and surprised by them, as if by the emergence of a different form of time. The excess in security, that is risk, and the production of value, that is debt, result from this confusion. If we are to say it is a crystal, it is one of fluid relations, because when it cracks, as it intermittently does, it is restored from the supersaturation of an internal element. An internal fluidity of communicative capital Simon Taylor 167 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing restores and network time—which is the time of intermittency—is resumed. This other time is of what has to happen, of necessity, the time of destiny or of the event which, despite its dayto-day mundanity, breaks into our lives. It is as mundane even banal as death—why, perhaps, we have not mentioned it: death is a break not only in the transmission of the familiar, but in the communication of its possibility—its pain and splendour. A whole economy of possibility is being opposed that is reasserted by daily statistics on the number dead of COVID-19, by the projections for its spread, and the speculative laying out of options for a cure, a vaccine; but equally is it in the habit of checking, updating those statistics, by those who are said to care. It is opposed in the strange freedom of mourning when it is no longer possible to resume our habits or to synthesise and connect one thing to another. The time of destiny, is it not, when you think about it, the time it takes to do this, to be done with it? Although it is called a working-through, when friends say get over it, get over yourself, and family says she is working through her grief, her anxiety, her love, and, he will get over it and come out the other side, you will see, although understanding is shown, a time allocated, and although both understanding, compassion for suffering and the time be unlimited, it is work’s evil twin, the absence of work, the meaninglessness of it, having a negative value, this time spent in the body. The time that is necessary is of unlimited duration and of a singular intensity. It closes in and pins me down; I am enveloped in it; it is an illness, a psychosis, in which I may be lost forever. It is even a state in which I do not fear this, in which I seek it—the most intimate of intimacies. So we also look to be free of it, this task to which we are set: we look to free ourselves of its intimacy in our envelopment by what is closest. What it encloses is what is closest in to us, is an outside in us, such that we may want to be rid of it. Perhaps it is what an other sees in us and that brings love and friendship and dies in us that we do not see die. Perhaps also it can die when we are still living. Simon Taylor 168 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing If it dies while we are still living it will be because what medical science calls the body is still alive. There are two excesses. There is the excess of the possible that is made to stand guard over the excess of the outside. There are two differences, those forced from the ground of negation to make a difference, and those freed from it which form at every instant, as a wave on the shore, a ridge on the sand. There is an affirmation made against what it affirms, so it is a negation, since it denies the dissimilarity of the two, in league with the guard. There is an affirmation which goes by way of the outside, which stops short, and is overwhelmed by it, surrenders to it, in laughter, in sexual abandon, in the force of the instant, in ecstasy and oblivion. There are then two affirmations, just as there are two bodies and one is a blade the outside holds against the throat of the other. Perhaps this means the body that medical science calls one can die when the other is still living and that this can be called dignity.110 We need an affirmation of this sort made within the separateness of the thing not to announce two universes, the one of science, the universe of the possible, the other of art and what is impossible for it. We do not need it to stake out a position for art research in distinction from the empirical method of science but for it. Since such research is into the humanly possible, it is in league with the guard. We do not need an affirmative method to affirm our opposition to the ends to which the scientific interest or spirit directs the labour of its efforts, so as to assert new or different values, meanings, efforts of labour are required, in the pursuit of new or different possibilities for humanity—a new affective capacity, a new or restored sympathy for all life or empathy for each other, for instance. We need an affirmation made within the separateness of the thing to be the choice of an affirmative method which chooses it, finds for it and is the signature of a radical avowal. It does not finalise, finding in the object its end, or forcing from it a cause, finding for the individual its completion, but affirms in it, from within the subject, the cut of which it is the body, the necessary freedom, the noncontingent problem to which it is a continuance, indissoluble in the human element of communication. 110 The dignity in death Lingis finds for would seem to support our view here: “Dignity,” in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, 400-402, op. cit. Simon Taylor 169 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing It is his most intimate possession, his cellphone. Imagine being phobic about the dimension in which it operates: imagine seeking to cut it out of your life. She is in contact with the sum of human knowledge, in touch with even the most remote corners of the globe, and beyond it, from the latest Hubble images to the Vatican library online, or is said to be, but although she scans the news, she got sick a long time ago of asking herself to care about distant events and people she will never know. He accepts they have trials. He accepts he could be in their shoes. It does not take too much imagination to put himself in their predicament—but he prefers the whales, she, the polar bears. These days she cannot actually let herself look. It is too upsetting. The expansion is of possible knowledge which the students do not have to work to get: it is just knowledge; and there is no threshold at which to stand for it, that, having put the effort in or whatever, you can say, I have arrived. It is not that it is easy. Parts of it are difficult. Reading is difficult but mostly the ideas are easy to understand when they are clearly explained. This is not the fault of the writer. If you could somehow accommodate them in a sensuous element quite apart from writing, if they were not so preciously treated, could stand alone outside of words—the most robust cannot lift its own weight and the slightest melts away—if it would melt in my hand; if only ideas were not so significantly symbolic, so composed and abstract, so compact and self-satisfied, it would not be so confusing. Modifications, amplifications, simplifying them to what is implicit in them or to their applications, explanations, even clear explanations, are more ideas. If only the transfer of knowledge were more like the brief patterns of illumination which intermittently sparkle over the surface of the network brain. Science being concerned with all of the possible, the calculable, does not see, has no feel for the events or intensities from which the possibilities come. It studies the relations but not what forms them. Its outcomes are their outcomes, on the grounds of which the information is aggregated, but what informs them are instances of contact. This is the reason all knowledge is close at hand: it is a touch away; but if the ideas fly away it is for the reason they are not contacts. So the amassing of data for study, the amassing that is study, miss the point. Critical rationality finds a deficit in attention and, in the absence of contemplation, no depth—of thought or Simon Taylor 170 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing knowledge—only the surface, the most superficial coruscations. These, which are taken for formal display, are formal contents; and, as usual, the display is taken for the demonstration, the secondary information is mistaken for the primary—that which relates, that which is in affective communication, or has affective momentum. We might say affect is taken for effect, but not the inverse: affect, that is from the subject’s point of view, is not mistakenly called effect, because it is disregarded. Even as it goes on above consciousness, like fireworks, where the subject is split, fractured to every point of an exploding star, where it goes on exactly for show, it is not for show the myriad points are mapped, their placements calculated and relations coordinated—a technical nightmare to achieve, but possible: this overlay of a phantom consciousness that by the exploded view displaces the thrill of explosion is the simulacrum of possibility. The rest, the excess that we know to exist, is consigned to the silicon unconscious—why we are calm in the face of it; and this is how we can treat any knowledge, since it comes without risk. We are not interested in the reduction to a technical model, to a simulacrum that anyway fills the same sky with points of wonder and possibility, or to a reflection, a representation that occurs on the dark surface of the harbour, in which relations invert along the axle of the night—or in the retinal display of liquid crystal. The objective reduction, of intentionality, to instrumentality, in the field of operations, does not interest us as much as the subjective one, to the utility of the thing as a relay—not to an end—but in the unlimited communication of ends. We are interested in the technical element in which we are and which is subsumed to our humanity. Contacts then are not things—and this is the fact that is missed, in the results forced from the ground in which they are breaks: the fact of contact is taken for the contact and is mistaken, not because it is a copy; as we have seen, copies can be cause for contact, leading to a critical confusion, from which follows their oversupply. It is mistaken in its positivity, its position, whether on a line or arc, and for being a possible difference in the plenipotentiary of relations. We have also said, and based our affirmative method on it, that if permitted in encounter, it is that negation which is affirmed for having a purpose, for making a difference, and encouraged—an incitement to their fullest expression and encouragement to relations of Simon Taylor 171 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing desire in all its diversity that is policed. There are three reasons for this, naturally interconnected, in order that: expression take place in data; data in possibility; possibility in divergence, kept at a managed constant or varying held within the parameters of control. The silicon unconscious runs the global economy; its unconscious is in turn the human one: it does not run things autonomously, neither does it in complicity with a global élite, nor in that with an alien intelligence. Networked computation cannot take place autonomously, independent of the human componentry—of a discourse of technics, technology. Then technology does not run things for humans, but with them: it is where they plug in, although we should check first where that is. We might like to say it is scientific rationality which extends its tragic faultline from the Enlightenment to reach a kind of technoscientific zenith in subjugating the toolmaker to the tool, which is science fiction. The componentry plugged into the technology is so insofar as the human brain is lopped off, which is all the other brains. This happens for the sake of their connectivity, their communication, in and with the network brain. Scientific rationality is part of the human brain, which explains why it is thought to have conceded to technology and therewith to the market serving technological interests. Affective data still determine decisions, giving the monkey brain, the reptilian brain that is closest to the body, the social and compartmentalising brains the role of production. What we understand of these brains comes from the network, which, in effect protects us from them, protecting us from ourselves. Critical intelligence might make a weakness of this abrogation of rational decision-making, and of decisions being made in line with the science. But the calculation is, as it is that wager made by scientific rationalism, on disconnecting the individual and individual interests—a disconnection the critical view might advise—from those of the collectivity, with the interests of which the individual’s will never coincide. The individuals whose interests are being served not only have no reason to alter things they have no power to do so apart from the affective collectivity, the affective data of which provides what we might call creative capital for decisions affecting the collectivity to be made. Simon Taylor 172 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Earlier we asked whether there could be a power of collective refusal, of opposition but found too quickly affirmed by critical consciousness a negation at the level of the individual, meted out as a measure of control, which now we see is for the sake of the collectivity, and as a measure to manage difference and divergence and to include diversity in it, to the exclusion of other species. Differing is encouraged to a level exceeded by the individual—an excess causing breakouts ascribed to the animal minds, the monkey brain or owing to a human deficit, for which individuals are collectively shamed, having as a species not grown up, not evolved. The species somehow carries forward this flaw in its development, that an individual as the instance of embodies, which calls for species management, as we have said, but is a genetic principle, as well as a mortal one, a sin, we might say. Because of it there is individuation but it is always brought back to relation, to relations—and to an endlessly deferred human potential as the possibility of the use of reason. Now reason grants every possibility; for as long as it is in the element of communication it need not arrive: its appointment is made by speculation. This results in an infinite expansion of the speculative realm—occupied by reason. But it is what is contrary to reason so defined that is shared in the human collectivity. What is shared in the human collectivity is not shared by it, not common to it. Desire is too small a word for it; libido already too calculated—and not calculating enough; the drives— multiple—are the pushes—multiple and statistical, pushed by the category of statements we called predictive, having too readily their oppositional element channelled, sublimated in libidinal economy, and, as Deleuze and Guattari have it, Oedipalised; sex or Eros, too opposable, is not opposable enough—but an unopposable sexuality, a drive that is not deathlike but too full, full to death, of the languor of erotic sensuality and in surrender to dismemberment as memberment, ravishing, defiling, sacralising and profane; the love that is also love-sickness and the passion that is active and is as much in obsession as surrender to it where one is most vulnerable and not vulnerable enough: these, that we may call intensities, we find for in propelling another knowledge, giving another reason. 111 They are what occupy 111 I am indebted in this thought of such a collectivity to Lingis’s The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common and of such desire as he terms ‘libido’ in the work of that name. Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994); Libido: The French Existential Theories, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985). Simon Taylor 173 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the computational network—by its own arrogant ends, for reason, knowledge, data, otherwise preoccupied—with passional insistence. It is called waste, this social expenditure that lights up now here, now there, in flagrant wastes of personal effort, to connect, make contact, be liked or accepted. As waste is it reticulated, treated and converted into data, but only after having been secreted as data, fired up by passional energies, perverted to other ends. As this fire, it bursts out briefly, seemingly uncollectable. But it is captured in the tracery of the network and in its transience, having the suddenness, the spontaneity of laughter, or the buildup of an infectious convulsion that comes like a collective orgasmic wave and goes viral, its intensity is recalled as the sort of information supposed previously to have been the reasonable expression of a social and political will. Now each datum refers to a contact of which it is the product—but not the project: the tracing of contacts is as that done for a pandemic. Here the flare-up has the erotogenic force of touch: the knowledge is of what turns you on; the reason is the charge you get and I from you. Reason then reaches the edge of our collective interests, it bounces back in attention to the local, going for the aesthetics, the politics of a group the existence of which it affirms. It does not follow, in fact disobeys the rule of compassion and exceeds it, we might say, now-here, and turns utopic. Having reason bounce back from the shell of a rule of compassion that commands production, this production, in contact with intensities which cause assemblylines to form moment by moment, that are contracted atom by atom as the matter of production, laid down in lasting sheets of inconsequence, is an anti-production. It is for no purpose other than existence and extinction, in no place other than in the cutting and breakage it carries on, composing by sudden and spontaneous decomposition: in it not only do we find affirmed a power of opposition that can be collective, we find an affirmation of the transitory, unravelling. It does not occur at the edges of economy but against it. Then the data produced are not for consumption, for information or news; the value of these is turned against itself: they are to no other use or function than to the glory of their own element. Their time cuts between the two Simon Taylor 174 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing of network time: thickening in its spatial inconstancy the root-structure of existing time with the threat of instantaneous extinction. This is the risk if there is a thought of the network brain that it takes. Both knowledge and conspiracy are attempts of reason to catch up with impulses which have the pulsation of thought. If the silicon unconscious runs the global economy, these are the dark veins that run in the crystal light. Simon Taylor 175 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the knowledge ending The system seems to be fixed, from the universal commonplace of possibility, to the atomic structure of the social crystal, in a grid or grill of communication. It seems to be fixed in the brain or that the fix is the brain and only at the surface would there seem to be movement. But movement or stasis, the roots are moving, while the air is static: a storm seems constantly to be on the horizon and time stands still. The dark veins run. The crystal shatters. A new one forms according to the great arc of difference which is also in communication, at every point determinate in its possibility, and each the entryway and foyer to another it would enclose, would enfold, would repeat. No datum actually says no, so the system seems to be fixed in its measure of negation, not in oversight of opposition in order to exercise on it control, but flowing through it, finding it useful and, giving it this value and significance, incorporating it, even for a use, a purpose or a people to come. The system seems fixed in its speculative infinity and in the science of this speculation that is its wager, which, despite the cracking of its face, the splintering of its facets, is on the next room, the new annex, being in communication with the last, and sharing all of its points, information that might be called atomic memory of the universe. But it is from this consistency, this coincidence and univocality of what is and what is set out in relation to us that knowledge began its journey: it left science, scientific knowledge subsisting only in a world of speculation, eternally present to itself—a self-supporting reason.112 The system cares for us, thinks for us, and protects from the stuff that is our own oversupply of data, but it seems fixed insofar as it draws an outer limit. How does this too much tally with the you have reached the limit of your use belonging to such a limit? There is no limit on the data based on points, on the differences engaged, in the folds of our multiverse: there are no physical limits and no, it would seem, psychic limits—except human. No limits pertain to possibility; and we have said the points are shared, so the scorecards should concur, those 112 “What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation.” From “Burnt Norton,” in T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962, 189-195, (London, UK: Faber & Faber, 1963), 189. Simon Taylor 176 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing held by us and those by science. Human-usable data is speculatively infinite, but this only in the domain of its positivity—that is, its position. What allows point-sharing has an internal limiting factor: one universe cannot come crashing into this through the portal, the doorway that is the song of singularity, unfolding, because it is deemed already to connect. Every universe at all points, according to that dominion of position we can call superposition, is in communication with every other, which differs from it, by one singularity, comes preentangled with it. Communication is the control to infinity, but based on connexion. The rule of compassion connects you too. Although reason is not averse to excess, since it is reasonably grasped through adequate computation, it is to confusion. We see here the second critical function, which, having gone against its object now identifies with it. So the entire field manifests out of this confusion and identification—the confused identity—with its limits: any limit that has been present from the first functioning of critique occupies in the second the field in its entirety—and does so because it is mad, not from the magical thinking turning real, the simulation or the compromise, that which cedes to humanity its basic failure and inadequacy confronted with the grandeur of the universe, which, like any disability must be managed, while ceding to technical means that management. This madness of reason, we might even say of desiring-production, which becomes human principal, is passed over quickly then fixed by the means of our management: the system is fixed for our security in the element of communication extending indefinitely debt owed to the managerial techniques of the network brain; extending infinitely the limit of science that sings to us in one for all the voices it hears that speak to it our salvation, for all the choirs of possibility of the many. Perhaps this is why humanity is so far alone. It makes itself so not for seeing itself the lonely exception but for entering into gregarious intercourse with the universe. Locked in the prison of a jewel or gene, it permits itself to dream, while having given up understanding what it means that neither has the hallucinatory qualities of art nor the mistakes of language we are thought to speak in, but is the mathematical description itself, the demonstration, of what is outside human reason. Simon Taylor 177 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The system seems fixed for the many by the few in whose grasp it lies. The two critical functions seem to relate to two truths that diverge along the lines of too much and too little— those with too little oppose those with too much who are the beneficiaries of the way the system is set up, who therefore are not opposed to it. But as we have seen with negation so far, although more can always be taken, it is calibrated to just enough: the two truths are thought to be key to the ratchetting effect—the more debt, the bigger the promise, and the more desiring-production it inspires. A third critical function is needed to show this is not the case, although we can already see that truth is neither the preserve of those with too much nor of those with too little—that it is no longer a question for politicians but for economists: the problem of having too little is solved by the economic inspiration of connectivity. This is the fix for the social organisation corresponding to the network brain: give the poor computers. Knowledge leaves the universe of the possible—how we can affirm it, and, by knowing something else by it, affirm in it another knowledge. Like reason, in bounceback from the rule of compassion, knowledge returns to its origin. Unlike reason, that causes it to crack with the violence of its return,113 knowledge escapes the global shell of communicative possibility: what is known is impossible not because it is unknowable but because it is the no longer, not quite and not yet knowable that can be known only from a single point of survey and only in the act of knowing. Affirmed as such, knowledge goes to the reason of the group it informs, is its aestheticopolitical reason. So it goes to forming information communities which may coincide with institutions, in particular cultural institutions. There are worse things than the error of concretisation—of knowledge, of the neoliberal market, of the brain: the madness that the world is a network organised to communicate. Reason rebels against this confusion. Worse than the catastrophe of knowledge is the mad thought of its totality. This totality, science, for which research is no longer originator of knowledge but confirmer, is based on human-relatable data. Behind then the relationality of all data is its relatability. The question we started with—how does art research contribute to 113 What Lingis says of warriors participating in the Mount Hagen Show who are “transfigured with a splendor that closes in upon itself and expands with its own logic” gives a sense of the movement here of reason. Lingis, “War and Splendor,” in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, 466-477, op. cit., 473. Simon Taylor 178 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing knowledge?—goes with science through this catastrophe: it loses touch with empirical particularities; the problem is, how cut knowledge loose from science? Secondary it may be, but we tracked the problem to the cut and to the act by which it is made that the system of the network fixes, heals and anneals. What differs does not depart, but is enjoined to remain in the element of its origin. So also the human brain, the human from the brain, lopped off does not leave, is not solved, but linked. The survival of the brains, animal and social, are relatable, if disturbing local insurgencies, insofar as they emerge from within the network—irrupting as an always possible recidivism, the curse of a human surplus. The collectivities they set in motion follow old atavisms like the cult of personality which from the outset scientific rationalism had the job not simply to surveil but to supplant by—and this not simply from the point of view of probabilising or asserting statistical likelihood—a discourse of technics, the summation of which is the network brain. Yet here the cut occurs in the human-technical or the organo-silicon compound. It is effected by an act of knowing in which it avows that knowledge. The final critical function is one of affirmation which differs each time. This is the act of love which does not join or enjoin us to participate in the group, even the group of one, but comes as a force of affect from the outside: I know he is rotten to the core yet I cannot help but love him. At this point I can choose to surrender or rebel. The matter in her hands, recalcitrant and solid, is hateful, not in the petty way it resists her feelings, rejects her wishes, but goads them. She is seduced by the mineral properties of paint. The pigment in her eyes reduces to its element, expresses nothing, no colour, no form—a pure minerality. An actor steps out and it is as if the stage is empty in the gaze that falls upon it. Pure object, in it every ground is ungrounded. The voice will not reverberate in its space. An actor steps onto the void. One minute is severed from the next, lost. I am that part who is imperceptible. To you I am impossibility itself. Then this is the limit the silence that meets you which act cuts you off at the instant of knowing it from being able to communicate that point of view. Yet it is what communication is—an element of breakup, of narrative and representational ruin, loss of Simon Taylor 179 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing historic continuities, catastrophe for knowledge and origin. How then is it held, as another datum for the organo-silicon unconscious? This is exactly where we find it, since data compose a field in which sensibility is decomposed; since data production, utility’s opposite, opposes production, opening a world of sensory immanence even if only to other senses than human, since intended for them. Data names knowledge at its most mobile, at peak acceleration. To open to senses other than human a world of sensory immanence follows the serial function of critique in drawing an horizon for knowledge in the second place, having in the first taken a point of view which already exceeds it: the third and final critical function neither sets up an impossible point of survey nor sutures together the two at the point of abruption. It goes back and undoes synthesis: it breaks communication. To open to the senses and probes of computation the world in which data are sensorially immanent signals the break of data from reference: the datum becomes the empirical particularity with no other reference than to itself. A sensibility in expertise, we have said, may be cultivated that is in contact with the level so constituted. A culture may develop that is under the spell of a framework of reference. Noone need know the framework is that which refers not the points—that it is the other way around: the framework is not an illustrative device but a system of reference. The points are not fixed in position or fixed to it. This is the role of the support in painting, that which does not support, or the stage in theatre—a means of ungrounding the action, which can be anywhere, even absent; and this is the role of knowledge, of such knowledge as needs to be selected each time for the change which it initiates in the points that it mobilises—or sets free. The notion of embodied knowledge mixes up two frameworks of reference, so that knowledge cannot settle there, since the body’s physical framework of reference is outside it. Once it is established the cut is this opening to the outside, we can see that what differs from itself is not subject to force, that difference is free. Clearly what a body does contributes to knowledge, but it is not free to differ from itself without the support of a physical framework of reference. An element of void intervenes too easily passed over in favour of what can be gained that is Simon Taylor 180 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing useful, valuable and meaningful or can be used to represent what is—the representative utility of the symbolic framework that puts display before apodictic demonstration and experience, where data are shown to compose a state of affairs (datum) not experienced to be one.114 The notion of embodied knowledge seems to bind and ground knowledge in the body, to bear forth from that ground difference by force. In contrast, we affirm in the body that it ungrounds knowledge—itself the blade’s edge of knowledge—to free what differs along the faultline of the problem which it bears out, always wanting to extend it further. The system seems fixed because of the five assumptions made about it according to the questions: who, where, what, why and how? How the system is assumed to work is to open possibility by engaging it in the conversation, from which pooling of ideas, along reasonable lines, and unselfishly, the new is meant to emerge. The new is possible because reasonable, consensual, positive by consensus, and communicable, even if not yet realisable: what the system is is fixed beforehand by the anthropic principle. What it is assumed to be is a creative process—the human ingenuity or genius leading to the products in which these are embodied, when we have seen data, the measure of production and product, to be a type of antiproduction, being without utility, useless, except as a mechanism of control internal to production by requiring output measures and external, for its management, by calibrating outputs. Why it is assumed to exist is as the system of knowledge and systematisation of knowledge, both product and means producing knowledge—science. What it is actually is a system of communication taking in both technical means and the discourse of technicity. Its existence however has the criterion of data, finds in data production, we might say, liberal criteria, and, this being the case, frees data for another kind of knowledge, which, for the sake of the empirical particularities in which data (liberated and without reference except to themselves) consist, as we said earlier, means the practice of science as an artform or its nonhuman practice. What it is meant to be is the body of knowledge systematically accumulated, the process of its accumulation and its open-ended progress. Where it is assumed to be is in the brain, for the brain that knows, as itself an open-ended instrument of knowledge. The system seems fixed in 114 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, Trans. Mark Lester. (London, UK: Continuum, 2004), 16. Simon Taylor 181 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the brain but not in its sensuous element, not in its sensibility. The points which it would bring together, with which it would be brought together, are no longer here. They are the data of a self-sustaining reason, for which the brain is less a system of knowledge than a framework of reference. The data themselves are in their sensuous element unfixed. For the system that appears so the brain is the ultimate fix not because it is where the system is fixed, but because it is assumed it is human and remains human, even after the human brain has been lopped off, because of who the system is assumed to be. This is not a simple matter of representation, correlation or analogy: the interconnectivity of the possible universe is not for science an analogue for humanity, made in its image, corresponding at all points to a human organisation, of the social, or institutional, and neither is it this correspondence that is the basis of communication, its human element. This is a matter of the displacement and replacement of the human brain by the network: an act of disembraining as, we might say, disempowering. The human is the object of the act and the brain the subject. The assumption persists that the system fixes the human—we might say crystallises it at all its points—because it is for the sake of the human, of its value, none higher, and special significance that these are set on its utility, of which there is none greater. In other words, the human as critical object is turned against itself and set up in occupation of the entire field: then this entire field, like a camp, or native reserve, is, as we know, full of bodies. Here they comprise an element, of support, a void, needed to support the element of communication: negation of the human is needed for its freedom, which, if in speech we might include the chatter of the universe, we could say is the freedom of speech. The system seems fixed but this is not the case: it is neither, as grid or grill of communication fixed, in the brain—the brain is also mobilised in the effort to displace it, nor is it fixed here in the information system, which posits data as its determinate condition, but in which data are not determined but determining. The as if of the pre-entanglement of data gives away their position. As if they wanted to be sociable with us, they are connected to us; yet we have said human negation is necessary for the necessity of human connection which is given as the meaning, value and utility of data: they are bound in the element of communication, facilitated Simon Taylor 182 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing by the discourse of technics, traversing both technical and human fields. This is their social role and institutional utility. From the social role and institutional utility of data the system contrives politics, a political will to what has been called technocratic dominance, and, in economy, neoliberal governance. Political economy is a contrivance of liberal criteria derived from an unlimited—and free— supply of human data: the talking to itself of the system. Its right to science is grounded in this element which is human. What is occluded in human freedom—apart from the passing on of objectification we have linked to a primary critical function—is that it relies on a physical framework of reference, the control of a stock of bodies, their self-control enacted in the free emission of data. This is not to occlude a physical frame associated with biopolitics, which retains the system while calling it out on its hypocrisy, on its carceral component, but an aesthetic one, which acknowledges and affirms in human negation its dehumanising aspect. As we have said such negation is passed over for the sake of the good or principle of freedom, not on the ground of morality but that of rationality, embodied in the network brain, where it is part of the humanising project of science. We would call the contrary historic project of the humanities in acknowledgement then inhumanities, affirming a physico-aesthetic frame and an empiricism of data. An empiricism of data pertains, in the sciences, to their practice as artform, forming sensibilities, styles, methods of research, and cultures. The empirical particularities data in themselves comprise are objects of sensible apprehension. An empiricism of data pertains in artistic practices not to the humanising project of presenting what exceeds any human capacity for sensible apprehension in the form of an idea—an image, a symbolism, a model, on whatever level, or a representation—that would make it legible or intelligible. This is the aestheticopolitical function of data-processing: the researcher, the scientist, the pollster, the analyst, the teacher is presented with data in the form of an idea—symbolic information, a model, at whatever level of abstraction, an infographic, a slide—embodying data, making it legible and intelligible, more or less. An empiricism of data obtains in art research because Simon Taylor 183 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing artistic practices refer to the physico-aesthetic frame where data have bodies and are felt as intensities. This frame is not the screen. The screen introduces that element of support we saw in the canvas or stage, an element of void which frees intensities or differences. (We also saw it to be the cut the body bears forth, which it enacts, and in which a critical function can be affirmed undoing the preceding synthesis, which sought to use the body as bridge or bridgework.) The screen frees the empirical particularities belonging to states of affairs—for their individuation—to differ from themselves. It does not reduce or filter data. This function is reserved for the system of intelligibility, and we might say legibility, itself—and is a reduction of the trace to the tracery, of language to its utility in bearing meaning and establishing the facts, of sensibility to perception, and of the element of communication to its human component. Intelligibility that comes under the form of the idea is not reduced in the expression of an idea—for its abstraction, symbolic or imagistic content—but by intention. In this there is no conspiracy apart from that of the spell of the sensuous of which the science that is applied to communication—for persuasion, to speculative ends—to pass like a drug in its element from the brain into the blood—is no more than proof: since it has to do with human things, projects and intentions it directs attention to them.115 The informed sensibility becomes one of a narrow band of information, part, as we might say, of the fix. For the pull of the landscape, of the material-energetic resources engaged by artistic practices, liberated in their first step to risk the void; for the overwhelm of the technological sublime as much as the void of the display-screen; the push develops its art of predictives in the digital articulation and exploitation of the material-energetic forces of intensity data are—no less an art than a science applied to communication. But it is one reductive through intentionality to the intelligibility of its own project. Reducing being human to human being, this takes up the field of its operations, is its theatre: and the spot that is sensitive to inversion—where that 115 David Abram takes the angle of an interconnected world from which humanity, conspiring against its own better interests, has cut itself off, with greater or lesser success. He does not view it as the spell it casts over itself except inasmuch as the bewitchment of the human world is effected by language, and, in particular, writing. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2017), see chapter 4, “Animism and the Alphabet,” 93-135. Simon Taylor 184 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing calamity of knowledge that is human relations inasmuch as it is their negation can be affirmed in its catastrophe. We have said the knowledge of acting, formed in the act and informing it, is the knowledge true to art practice but this does not make it intelligible. The idea remains ungraspable: it would be in the description of practices alone that art research could claim significance. If this were the case art research would be a bit-player in the calamity of knowledge communications is—a field for the rhetoric of images, casting the spell, in the art of persuasion, and one from which material-energetic forces are absent—except as means, media. Neither is the knowledge art practices contribute the know-how of manipulating the media of material energies—either for their successful integration in management programmes or for—the same thing—successful communication, called by those programmes messaging. The knowledge embodied in artistic practices is the thought of energies-materials which is not human but is the thought for nothing. It is this not human thought art research makes intelligible, graspable in the form of ideas and legible in writing. The problem of writing— being a practice and so an artistic subject—has yet to be encountered. The inversion of what we earlier called the catastrophe of knowledge does not come from humanising it—a knowledge, say that of art research—but from dehumanising it, affirming the catastrophe of human negation. The catastrophe overturns the human as knower or thinker, hands over the agency of holding ideas to the discourse of technics—is that handing over of thought and knowledge to the network brain. This network brain is itself not human and this is the little bit of negation always being passed over too quickly, siphoned off to be reintroduced later, and overstepped. This network brain is the silicon unconscious that holds the data overwhelm at bay—the sleeping body into the eyes of which we peer, in our screens thinking to see to its soul.116 116 Cf. if for the title alone, Edgar Pangborn, A Mirror for Observers, (London, UK: A Star Book, 1977). Simon Taylor 185 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing The significance of art research is to break communication that is human with the mineral thinking of paint, a marmoreal and elemental thinking in sculpture and architecture—shaping a nonhuman space for human dwelling, a thinking of data as self-differentiating organon; and in writing, a spatial sonorous thought, an echo, precursory, of the thought whose territory we enter to track—a tracking that follows, which has to learn patience, stay upwind and motionless.117 Artistic research is pursued on the same level as the practice, attending to the demands of the practical discipline’s space and time, which are individually made and go to form a sensibility, that is an expertise, a particular sense of taste—a style, and to inform a method of affirmation. The further requirement is that of the space and time to pursue these in the institutional setting—of the inhumanities, from which a culture may derive, affirmed in practices and the ideas in which they are expressed. The catastrophe of knowledge is not that such institutions as can support cultures do not come to pass but that that they are like the rest of us thrown off the central hinge of time by the network’s temporal condition, which is not, as is often assumed, of the transitory, a product of the short attention span. Economies of attention are practiced to break attention but loop and are hooked up by it again—for continuity, as is said of edits or cuts in a film. Neither however is continuity the temporal condition of universal connectivity: hookups or pickups are for the cause of accelerating production, intensifying the scene of control and increasing its amplitude, so that you ask, Is anybody else watching this? The breaking away is registered, as is the finding out, in the metadata. The network’s temporal condition has this underside of affective momentum, and momentary refusal or indecision, or disbelief, which are transitory. On top, any event can be connected to any other at any moment and at any instant, point in time, may invert, collapse and refresh, but only—as we saw with the multiverse—if able to take the whole of things with it. Underneath lies the anthropic principle of communication. So we can see with the degree of control exercised by this principle the network is installed as something like eternity, an 117 The phrase is from Rupert Thomson, tracking Rilke’s thought in the poet’s Letters on Cézanne of 24 June 1907. Rupert Thomson, This Party’s Got to Stop: A Memoir, (London, UK: Granta, 2010), 138. Simon Taylor 186 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing eternal present—something like it because of the impression given underneath, which is of speed, intensity and totalisation—and transience. The ground is no sooner gained than it slips away. Hooked back in again in the pickup, this goes for total knowledge at peak speed and greatest intensity: feeling the ground shake and slip, we lose our grip, awaken for an instant; indecisive, in disbelief, we ask the by now tattered screen, improvised out of an old sheet, Is anybody actually seeing this? The speed, intensity; totality and transience are actually its appeal. If we are caught in the communication matrix it is by the discursive aspect of technology that casts its spell on sensuous reality which stutters, restarts at any point—and slowly as a reinstall unfolds in the craze and madness of universal connectivity and unlimited possibility that provides more evidence of its power. If we can—and do—still speak of knowledge in relation to science it is because of a nonhuman knower whose knowing we end up affirming as human (it is not), whose knowledge is confirmed by the data—and the data instantaneously in reach. It would be better to say the knowledge is simultaneously in reach and add that this is the catastrophe—a temporal one, but that it carries on with the aspect of a religiosity, as a time to come, anticipated, belonging to the soteriological, that will save us. It has already (saved us from ourselves). A space infinite for the participation of an infinite number of universes concurs with a present eternity, except that it is to come, and so is, in this aspect, manageable. The curious thing here is that the function of the tools and techniques of knowledge is preceded by the fact of them: not, one day we will have the means to know, but, that we know from this point of view now already—we know what will always be the case; and this is not a matter of faith, in what is or has been communicated by revelation, in its contingency. It is a matter of its immediate necessity, revealed in communication, in the communication of intelligible data. For this we do not need the machines yet to determine such data will be intelligible. The idea suffices, of a symbolism, a model or an image. There is no thought of the human brain’s collapse—of the knowledge catastrophe—under the weight of the data but that this is a physiological evolutionary fault—able to be compensated by powers of dataprocessing made available to computation; no thought then of the prophylactic role, for the organic, of what we have called Simon Taylor 187 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing the silicon unconscious against that which the human libinally plugs into, and of which it is unconscious—and none of that availability being to any other embodied intelligence than ours. Under the religious aspect of eternity, human power is identified with computational power— as it is with the religious powers of faith, revelation and salvation, except that they are not matters of belief—and under this aspect come all other times and durations including those corresponding to the brains preceding it, of which the network brain is evolution and compensation: the social, compartmentalising, reptilian and early primate brains. Under the same aspect comes the posthuman. That is, the posthuman comes out of a time already now one of catastrophe—in a religious advent. From the viewpoint of eternity, the time of catastrophe is always—a castrophisation of time. But it is limited. The posthuman names that limitation, not for being human, having a human brain and physical existence, but for communicating over the negation of the human, and, over the technical break in its transmission, continuing the discussion. We might say that the protention of knowledge is the catastrophe for knowledge. The catastrophe is not that empirical states of affairs and particularities are presented in the form of data but that knowledge workers, who profess to its maintenance, as archivists, librarians, its acquisition, as researchers, scientists, and its promulgation, teachers, writers, professors, have become, in the form of data, its managers, gatekeepers and scientists: they have become datamanagers. This is at the same time an interim form, an i-form, where a perverse pleasure may be had, where we may move freely through the fields of empirical particularities data are, experiencing the states of affairs of the levels, and undergoing the intensities of the reliefs that impose themselves on us, they also are—and understanding them. The knowledge ending is in the beginning an understanding of what imposes itself on us in which we affirm ourselves. Or we do not, but act in affirmation of what negates us to undo the synthesis or dialectic in which we are bound. This means breaking with the eternity of communication. Using the resources provided by the controlled negative, we show it to be limited by what is in excess, what is excessively imposed, the violation. In doing so we do not Simon Taylor 188 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing claim knowledge to affect, in either a positive or negative sense. We acknowledge it to be a channel for the transmission of information: we understand affect theory in the terms of information theory, so that we inform ourselves of the imperative of information imposed on us, the demand that calls each of us out individually, as if by name. We understand by affect the form of the proper name, the idea in which we are intelligible, informing us, which expresses us. Affect theory would have us declare for it not as a framework of knowledge except as testimonial to its own efficacy, in personal affliction and autoethnography. Affect is given in the element of communication where it cannot be turned off or stopped. Except that it is. The insight of hikikomori is to use a method of affirming that which is imposed against itself. Like the cut for the cutter the shut-in controls the power of control to which she is subject. The power is felt in the body and in the excess of its affect which responds to the imperative of an impersonal affective level to enter onto it by taking up the call as its own. To be subject to that power is to be shut in to it and to open out onto it; to choose to be—as if there was a choice—is to be shut in so as to open out onto it. The answer to the social problem of hikikomori has the cynicism—without experiencing it—to redouble the call, for him to go out, make contact and socialise, when it is a social imperative that is being followed. Can the moving online of contact services, of education delivery, of networking, of the human conversation, be seen any other way? We should note the swapping in of a moral imperative in the answer given to the problem of hikikomori, which answer contains the stronger restatement of the problem: the cutting off to control connection must be reconnected. In a similar site of what appears to be involuntary refusal—the response of hikikomori is often associated with affective malaise brought about by feelings of inadequacy and shame: these are thought reactive but as we see it they are active, motive forces, however involuntarily experienced—are the NEETs, in Japanese nitto, those Not in Employment, Education or Training. They are in an opposition equally as passive as hikikomori, but is their rejection of the social values of work and education, the acquisition of skills and knowledge, or the cultural? The question here is not of the isolation of either Simon Taylor 189 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing hikikomori or nitto. We know they are not: they are so imbricated as to be thought symptomatic, of an overload. But the moral demand, to connect, forcefully, takes in the wrong view of communication, assigning it to eternity—and the eternal possibility things will turn out right in the end. Even though not in contact with all, hikikomori, nitto, know there are others, there are more. Each has a sensibility—a sensitivity—of a collective culture, a taste and an amenable situation. Each one is already many. The figuration or representation by statistical aggregation of the phenomenal category as a subject of interest—one is a subject of interest, a problem and a burden—both condemns and raises a power to figure and represent: hikikomori names a collective opposition to communication—as humanised (it is not) and nitto names a categorical denial of the utility of work, the acquisition of skills and knowledge—insofar as they participate in human being. Added to eternity, debt owed to society is endless—the fix is a trap, urging us to make other choices—but not yet. From this perspective it is only under its terms the problem may be solved. These are terms limiting human being that raise being human over the limit—unanswerable guilt, imponderable burden, shame: it is in a moral eternity everything can be fixed, to settle accounts that cannot be, given the transience of time. It is as if eternity, however limited, were not the abolition of time but its suspension; as if a suspension could be willed; as if eternity were the element of void, allowing everything to slip and slide, free and mobile; whereupon the void is of judgement, the suspension of a moral type, and the limitation eternal. An affirmation pastes over the abolition of time in eternity with a negation that is less than absolute, requiring a more radical affirmation. Of what then is this abolition the negation, making negation unacceptable on its own terms? This is the question we are led to put by our method: we have so far engaged with negation—cultural, historical, social, and political refusal—to invert it, to see it inverted, with respect to knowledge. The method we follow is obvious. It is practical selection, avowing in negation not its antagonism, the antagonism of cutting remarks and wounded egos, but its force of opposition, its antiproduction, as we saw with data. We affirm in it what is impossible, which we find for in art research, not in spite of Simon Taylor 190 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing possibility, which we find against in science research, but ungrounding it, by the introduction of an element of void—negation itself? Perhaps—causing jets of difference to break free.118 In communication we find not for noncommunication or whatever is on its spectrum because it is negative. It is but only inasmuch as communication is positive and takes the position of what is limited—part of a humanising social prospect solving the human social organisation problem through its institution and institutions; for this reason we suggested inhumanities for our cultural institutions. Communication is limited, to take up our question of the abolition of time, by eternity, just as knowledge is limited by infinity, by the universe: the craze with which, against the physical framework, the universe is calculated constantly—continuously—to be folding and unfolding, but only by enfolding in the containment of a totality infinite possibility. The negation that this abolition works is less than absolute. In its eternity, it is neither an abolition of the present moment nor of the transience of time. It is not an abolition but an absolution of time: time, like the universe and its infinity, is absolved of human intervention, of the intervention of human intentionality, which takes the place of an element of void and does not interrupt. Humanity is by absolving time in turn absolved of technical creation, the Promethean crime where Stiegler stages his problem. Our staging is quite different and is where we locate knowledge, which is the problematic. The problematic of an absolution of time—why we call it religious—taken for an abolition of time—the endless present moment—defers and displaces the problem of the human—and that of its social organisation—onto a future outside of time— again we see the limitation of the posthuman, who is only ever after for the absolving of time. The discourse of technics enacts this absolution. The ending of knowledge of which we find the beginning in understanding that it is staged and bears the interruption of an element of void completes its journey in the problematic. 118 See, for the phrase “jets of singularities” at Deleuze, Logic of Sense, op. cit., 64. We are also indebted to Deleuze’s understanding of knowledge, rather than pertaining to solutions and answers, as belonging to the problematic and to questions in the same work: “The problematic is both an objective category of knowledge and a perfectly objective kind of being.” Ibid., 65 & cf. 65ff. Simon Taylor 191 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Knowledge is the subject of the problem, its formal point of view or survey. Knowledge is its statement not its proposition. So where do we posit it and how hold onto it? For each state of affairs, because its viewpoint belongs to that state of affairs, that datum, we make a selection—or, following our method, we affirm of the points selected the subject of knowledge in survey. Our choice is not the product of a suspended judgement which would absolve us of our actions; neither is it of a world in communication, where each thing operates in the modality of connection, each point connecting to the whole through connecting with everything. As we might say the whole it of the unconscious, empirical data neither represent nor enfold a whole field or level: these unfold from the formal perspective by which they are set in train, as a series. As such, they reflect the problematic: they do not represent it except through an empiricism of the data—as being these actual ones through which the problem passes. As such, they are also the energetic material elements of thought, of the thought of the problem, the thinking it through, the passage of thought, and the signs of passage. The idea here is what holds them together, making them intelligible as knowledge, which is never less than a practice. This goes for the practice of science as knowledge as well as the practice of art and art research—never less than a practice—for the production of knowledge, or, we might say, since to utility we oppose practicality, antiproduction. The time of the network brain that throws time off its central hinge corresponds to a temporal structure practically open to experimentation as much as those which it succeeds—or undermines, since the temporal structures to which the animal, social and compartmentalising brains correspond are networked and a network time is by nature one of intermittencies against a background of spatial inconstancy. We have said the one feeds the other, the formal displays of lights go to thickening the lines—dark veins invisible until lit up by the points which are selected. The network brain, after all, is not yet a crystal, but requires time and the point of view of eternity; so the temporal structure of the technical scientific network is unhinged and has these two aspects, two schemes. A slice of time might be taken by the compartmentalising brain or part that survives. A return might be made to the deep temporalities, closest in of the brains to the body, of reptilian and Simon Taylor 192 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing solar awareness. Or the lines might be reaffirmed in their social sense of including the ones we love and excluding the ones we do not, subject to message-bomb, fed by magnitudes of time felt in intensity. Or they might be exchanged, in the trolling of our feelings—the local insurgency of a temporal centre suppressed in the social crystal, suddenly illuminated in crystal light, slowly exploding, instantly imploding, and bathed in light, a new crystal slowly instantly forming—a slowness that is instant from the point of view of the whole and, from that eventuality comes to seem inevitable for being too slow to see. The crystal solution to the problem of human social organisation needs both the eternity of the possible and the infinity of the connection of points in which the element of communication is supersaturated. This supersaturation means the whole can be built up again from any one point, a state of affairs we have attributed to an atomic memory, to a memory that is information, of which the network in its entirety is the tracery or lattice. We can imagine the social crystal so: a lattice extends over the globe of the earth. We can see in the sunlight the atmosphere is no thicker than a layer of varnish over an antique globe. As on an antique, we can see the crazing of the surface where the varnish has crystallised. Unlike on an antique, but as in an animated graphic, we also see the varnish, which on the antique had been applied as preservative, slowly advance. We see it is fluid in places. In places it has hardened while in others on the earth it is already cracked and the cracks, uniform, are lattice-like. Then where the sunlight describes scintilla on the crystal surface is fluid, and where hard is a grid of lines describing individual crystals. Where the fluid had pooled it has inevitably hardened. Hard and solid, dry and cracked, liquid in pools, we can imagine the lattice extending—and only ever extending, despite its advance appearing to be frustrated—the connectivities of the three networks the network brain comprises: of labour relations, of commerce and of communications. We can further imagine, and so make sense of its piecemeal appearance, that the advance has the affective momentum of populations, that their scientific management includes the liquidation of others, where network reception is most patchy, and that it will Simon Taylor 193 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing only ever have affective momentum. These three states of varnish are, as can be expected, three states of denial of limitation, solidity, fluidity and connectivity, otherwise known as eternity, infinity and possibility: fluid possibility; the solid and eternal that endures; the possibility of connection and interrelation, relationality, that is infinite. None quite reaches the outside, but each tries: by supersaturation, the supersaturation of connectivity; and by hypostatisation—of the eternal. Hypostatisation of the eternal almost achieves the outside through endless deferral of the point in time at which lies the recuperation of all time, of all the time that has been taken or lost. Supersaturation almost does by making itself the element—the element of communication, both ends and means. We might be tempted to call them techniques however the suffusion of the technical does not reach the outside either. Each, unlike the network brains, is the condition of the other, the technical condition, the necessary condition. All are subject to network time we can now properly call technological.119 Technical time is the time of intermittencies, of as-near-the-speed-of-light-as-possible processing; while the other scheme is discursive. One is the brain, you might say, the other the blood, the barrier between them. Or one is the living present, the other that of events, which get into the blood, the veins invisible now visible.120 We notice from our globe that the space of atmosphere is that of varnish; and the void is not one but a suitably arrayed desk, with inkstand, penholder, blotter, bookcases behind and beside, and double doors with mullioned glass letting light into the fustian. If we turn now to our digital model, we notice, despite it having the advantage of showing movement, the support required—the screen, so that the effect is given of an animated and free mobility. 119 Temporalities of discourses differ, both in their structure and in the distribution of time-schemes. This is one reason each artform has—as an entitlement and a necessity—its own discourse, to have not only a history and timeline but its own time, of a grammatology for writing for example. (... “it is both an entitlement and a necessity for creative people to study and refine their craft.” Rachel Cusk, Coventry: Essays, (London, UK: Faber & Faber, 2019), 179.) For the time of the novel distinct from a history, the testament of which the latter betrays, cf. Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, Trans. Linda Asher, (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 2001). 120 “Living present” is from Deleuze, to whose account of time this bears reference. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, op. cit., 74. Simon Taylor 194 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing Where the desk is suitably arrayed, the impression here is suitably dynamic, in the absence of any other element of atmosphere that we have called the void. The limitations denied, by the eternity with its correlate in the promise of permanent solidstate data-storage, by the infinity with its correlate in unlimited data-storage capacity, by possibility with its technical correlates of fast-as-thought data recovery and the atomic connectivity of quantum computers, are those of the human. The as-if-unlimited states are in denial of limitations that are only human. Yet they retain the features that can only be human in hypertrophy and hyperbole—why we admit, in the catastrophe of knowledge, the overturning of the anthropic principle, and claim for this the significance of art research, inverted or perverted, directed not to a knowledge that has been suppressed, but which is in the process of being liquidated, as both waste and excess in the processing-plant, the dataprocessing-plant of science: that is of other species and not post- but nonhuman. Other species are not present in the same way when we return to our computer simulation showing the movement in varnish climacterics. Yet at the same time human populations are measured in the same way. This is because knowledge was on the side of the knower—they do not know us—and now data that is on the side of science, knowledge in exile, returns this earlier point of view—illegitimately but authoritatively: we study them, it says, but they do not see us. We see the forests, the taiga, rainforest, collapse of the biosphere, species living in the present on constant verge of extinction, but they are not marked on the globe. The biosphere is under varnish. Even when our migratory paths resemble theirs, crossing seas and borders that are, they are not shown on the map: animals, plants, viruses are not knowers, do not know, and their experience, in the bareness of the living, the living present, can be shown to be untrue. They cannot read the data. It does not demonstrate to them. They have no experience of truth and they have no true experiences. They, not us, are poor in world; and yet this poverty and naked life, the world impoverished of knowledge and truth, knowing only the pressures of the drives, is our inheritance from them. Since we have evolved, our insufficient brains, our breaking- Simon Taylor 195 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing down appendages, our composition and our decomposition—the evolutionary flaw that is the meaning of being human is our inheritance from them. We resent it. We resent the animal brains, the reptilian, closest in to the body, the body itself—in that oldfashioned sense, we resent. The moment of our resentment is the moment the network brain supersedes, in a supersession that is never complete, and the rest is abrogated, to waste and to a resource. It is the moment of technology’s startling intermittencies across the physical inconstancies of actual bodies held in reserve. Science again protects us from ourselves, saves us the expense of being human that we owe not only to other animals but to all the elements, by the liquidation of other species, even where this liquidation simply means that their data figures in the same way. This is its lesson: we are damaged, so justified in damaging. There is nothing in which humans are distinct from other species: no specifically human distinction. Rational, thought, reflection, tool-making, sign-using are not distinct to human species, but they are where we have staged our problem, the problematic of our problem, because these are the source of an error, a madness and grounds over which the spell of technology has its incantation—is sung.121 We should remember here that technology includes the technology of discourse which is the alphabet as much as the integer and that the song is one of a oneness in which all entities are in communication—all alien and terrestrial species—but is only for having bodies at its disposal. We should remember that brains have bodies which are silicon and organic. The silicon keeps the discussion going as much as the human in a time that is both discursive and technical and has both parts. Rational, thought, reflection, tool-making, sign-using are not distinct to human species except where these can gain or be given independence from Nature or God, from the plumbing and from evolution. Then they are free from the cause of flaw which has its source in nature. Then knowledge begins again its epic of exile, when the exception that the human is— 121 The inclusion here of “reflection” is due to the separation a phonetic alphabet effected on the written or spoken word, permitting reflection independent of the “animate environment” in which the word or concept was earlier experienced as incarnate, embodied in events, actions and signs. Abram links reflection to the history of philosophy, with: the preSocratics standing at the transition between oral and written cultures; Socratic dialectic, owing to the mobility of the concept, enabled questioning of it in independence from events and actions; and Plato part of a first literate generation. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, op. cit., 108ff. Simon Taylor 196 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing which thought is irrational and in error—is outsourced to the technical network we have given the name of brain for the reason of this flaw. Magically the universe thinks for us, through universal interconnectivity, fluidity of relations— and this can be technically achieved. It can be achieved technically that reason is selfsupporting, is the song of singularity we hear and, at once, the song of reason. The human distinction is simulacral, but it is—at the same time—a fantasy of the rational, of thought, reflection, tool-making and, of the mimicry of other species, using signs. The problem of art research is not the distinction between true and false given as simulacra, and technically and discursively so given, and not even that of human and nonhuman, but at its limit, outside, or to reach an outside, to cut the relation, outside the possible—impossible. The problematic is not what is given in representation or embodied but of the limitation of the human to being in the human community in its element, the element of communication—and here the task of art research is not to expand and enlarge communication to allow new codes and techniques to be communicated. The span of communication is already universally inclusive, but it is so only in human terms, that is, in the terms of the specifically human distinction made an independent principle, following the anthropic principle. This principle takes its independence, or is given it, by and for the exception made of the human, for the essential human element, in which it is the task of art research to organise intervals. To the organisation of intervals belongs practical knowledge in art research—how and where, and when, to find the blade every relation carries and to open it onto an outside—meaning nothing other than the outside from which it gains and which, from the viewpoint of the problematic, gives it form. It might be nice to think of this as being for its own good or to the good of the human, or to add to the wealth of its distinction. Nothing could be further from the case: it is rather to distinguish itself from communication, than to enlarge or engage its sphere, than to hear other species speak to us, that we follow the line of thought in the constellation of materials and energies, in the interrogative sense that we experience the question put to the senses by the problematic. That it interrogates us demonstrates the truth in technique or knowledge of what cannot be communicated: an elemental interrogativity. Simon Taylor 197 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing To attend only in the air to the breath in the air, or in the heat and light of the earth to their signs on the body, to the basal temperature of the human primate and its bodily climate, or in gravity to its aggregates and apples, attend to what the good is in all phenomena, the value or use of their communication, participation in them, to attend only to how they answer to our intention, reduces and limits all elements to one. The essential one is that for which human exception is made, and from which it is made independent. But it is not free. It is more a matter of force and servitude. We are limited to a last anthropocentrism of outlook, of human being reduced to the bad habit of being human. The denial of human limitation in order for its distinction limits and reduces communication—the element of breakup. The simulacral—simulation and dissimulation—is the one human distinction, mistake of language and hallucination of art. But there is no distinction. This makes all the stranger its coincidence with the world. Art is this coincidence: the encounter of the true and the false. Art research addresses this encounter, in the silence that comes after speech that is the murmur of the world.122 122 Cf. “As utterances, they slipped back into the silence immediately after they were spoken; they had no permanent presence to the senses.” Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, op. cit., 110. ... “the murmur of the world” is from Lingis, “The Murmur of the World,” in The Alphonso Lingis Reader, 294-312, op. cit., 312. Simon Taylor 198 3 essays 3 endings: art research | theatre writing References References are in order of original publication—with the exception of citations from edited volumes which are cited in order of their appearance in the text body. Abram, David. 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