Author Archives: Smetnjak
Art Police Baby
“Art has replaced the police in the universal dispositif of mind control /…/”
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody
Even if art replaces police, it still has to be guarded by the latter. What is guarded? Like the girl says in the video: “You make yourself art! That’s amazing!” So this body becomes art, but not any art. Body as corpus, corpus as corporation. An asset gliding towards pricelessness.
Probably Jay-Z’s lyrics should be – for any redeeming value – read as an instance of overidentification (with the so-called 1 percent or as Berardi succinctly puts it “the criminal class”). It’s also a sign of how exhausted, standardized this strategy has turned out to be. Nevertheless, Jay-Z recurrently lapses in the ludicrous; in Picasso Baby it is stated: “My Mirandas don’t stand a chance with cops.” What could be worth more, more imperatively protected, than a piece of the American dream, of business expansion from a crack dealer to a CEO?
Outside of such a frame of sharing & caring, of love, of community (Brooklyn!!!, gentrified), there can only be a threat, danger coming from the envy, the ressentiment, the hate of the non-included. Emancipation (of women, Afro-Americans etc.) is thus understood as a victorious “subjection to the circuit of capitalist production”. This is the ugliness, the paranoia, the cynicism of every “let’s-be-positive” ultimatum.
The withdrawal, the non-participation, is something to be nurtured and cherished.1
- And we’re back to protection. [↩]
Tags: Gentrifiksacija, We are Trash
The Prince, the Pope, the Ideologue, the Booger
V knjigi O glasu Žižkov sidekick Mladen Dolar detektira “srečno okoliščino”, po kateri je besedo pojem v slovenščini mogoče prebrati na tri načine: pôjem – pójem – pojém. Potem ko smo se spoprijeli s prvim (The Great Pretender) in iznašli drugega (montaža distrakcij), triado zaključujemo z razširjenim, a omaloževanim prehranskim dopolnilom.
So Smetnjakove Žižek Studies s tem pri koncu? Nič ne obljubljamo.
Tags: Zizek Studies
Guy Debord: The Role of Žižek (a few excerpts)
“In ‘radical theory’ Žižek currently represents formal pseudofreedom and the pseudocritique of manners and values — the two inseparable manifestations of all fake, co-opted contemporary thought. Everyone does everything to present him as a misunderstood and unappreciated thinker, shockingly audacious and unjustly despised; and everyone praises him, from Purple Fashion magazine to London’s Royal Opera House. Despite the absence of any real critiques of Žižek, we see developing a sort of analogy to the famous theory of the increase of resistances in socialist regimes: the more Žižek is hailed as a brilliant leader of modern philosophy, the more people rush to his defense against incredible plots. Repetitions of the same clumsy stupidities in his books are automatically seen as breathtaking innovations. They are beyond any attempt at explanation; his admirers consume them as confusedly and arbitrarily as Žižek produced them, because they recognize in them the consistent expression of a subjectivity. This is true, but it is a subjectivity on the level of a graphic designer educated by the indie media. Žižek’s ‘critiques’ never go beyond the innocuous humor typical of nightclub comedians or The Daily Show.”
“Žižek is a Slovenian from Ljubljana who envied the chic of the French of Paris, and then the radical chic of Park Avenue, and his successful ascent up from the provinces is most exemplary at a time when the system is striving to usher everybody into a respectful production/consumption of culture — even ‘avant-garde’ culture if nothing else will do. We are not referring here to the ultimately conformist exploitation of any thought that professes to be innovative and critical. We are pointing out Žižek’s directly conformist use of ‘radical politics’.”
“Žižek is to philosophy what Tarantino is (or was) to film: both possess the appearance of a certain freedom in style or subject matter (in Žižek’s case, a slightly free manner in comparison with the stale formulas of writing theory). But they have taken this very freedom from elsewhere: from what they have been able to grasp of the advanced experiences of the era. They are postmodernism for dummies.”
(Debord’s integral text can be found here.)
Tags: Revisionisms, Zizek Studies
The Power Display
This is a WW2 bunker made into a home of media mogul Christian Boros. It is also a fortress of corporate art, the Sammlung Boros aka Boros Collection. Yet another communications empire in the mode of Saatchi & Saatchi which does not even speculate, it simply determines what the next big – and it’s all about big – thing is. There was already something imperious in Duchamp’s gesture “this is art, because me, artist, says so” and thus he is the progenitor, the fountainhead1 of this situation. The circular reasoning (plus argumentum ad auctoritatem) that corresponds to the vicious circulating of power as capital or capital as power (not to mention the libido). The gesture was this year most omnipresently repeated by Daft Punk: “Random Access Memories is an absolute masterpiece, because we, the machine, say so.” You’re not saying it’s not, you’re just saying it has to be no matter what.
Curator or rather curatrix, the usual bespectacled prettiness, looked as if she knew her beuyses, weiweis, rancières, žižeks, however, what followed was the worn-out collage of metaphors, symbols, big notions (mirrors, time, parallel universes, “it is a comment on overproduction and overconsumption” etc.), the convenient mischung of over-explaining and as-if-mystique. The main category, indicator of value, remained the ne-plus-ultra adjective of “famous”, uttered somewhat ingenuously, as if it being famous had no connection with it being here, in the Bunker, or as if it being here, in the Bunker, had not every connection with it being famous.
In any case, the whole set-up has but one goal: the numinous effect (or affect that blends into numismatic), the collection, the Sammlung wants to invoke fear and trembling, fascination and compulsion, it demands, decrees to be held in awe. Furthermore, for that singular variety of corporate, Christian Boros must exhibit his own discoveries, household names, darlings, pets. Here comes the underdone, the unaccomplished, even provincial part, the part where work and thought never click. Even curatrix felt more than a hint of embarrassment when she was compelled to vindicate the off-handedness of some of the pieces as wilful work-in-progress. Moreover, the argument of non-corresponding correspondence between matter and form already sounds déjà entendu enough, but can look even worse. “This seems like diamonds, but is just worthless stones.” But it actually does look just like worthless stones. “This seems like a mirror, but it’s only metal.” But it actually does look only like metal.
So, what about that awe? Clearly, the only formidable, groundbreaking thing is the frame, the building itself, the Bunker built not under-, but overground, with a deliberately lame reasoning (grounds) that ground was too time-consuming to dig. The intended plan of covering it in marble possibly proves this was just an excuse. It was the only Roman thing to do, but, in the end, they truly ran out of time. Who were this imperial jokesters? Hitler and Speer.
Shamed, bored, amused you exited the Bunker, you had no business being there. It’s that world of (a supposed or less) 1 percent, with which you’ve got absolutely nothing in common. There, you can only enter as a tourist, someone that would want to belong but can’t, and you must insist you are not of that mould. As a sort of penance you headed to that other (either) side, the high street of Friedrichstraße. There was a man, a curator of high streets, standing tall and talking aloud, almost howling, that “almost” being very relative with the noise of hi-street and all. A crazy, they call him, a nut, a wacko. But he was very precise, oh, so very articulate. To repeat his exact words, exclaimed in English with a German, Herzogian2 accent: “I am not a rrulerr. I don’t want any powerr. I keep myself away from powerr. Why don’t you leave me alone?”
You deplore a world in which this man is deemed crazy.
Tags: We are Trash