This article is based on a lecture given by the author at the forum held by the China Academy of Art "Century: A Proposal," Strasbourg, France, 2017.12.02

I will first talk to you about 1945—I am going to slightly deviate from convention here: I will connect a few dates together, one after the other, and then step backward in time a little.

1945—the end of the war, Hiroshima—leads to the United Nations replacing the League of Nations, but it also leads to the publication of a short text by the biologist and mathematician Alfred J. Lotka, which I will speak to you about in a moment.

But before that I would like to talk to you about 1989, a year that saw a combination of events which, while apparently very heterogeneous, nevertheless seem, in retrospect, and performatively ushered in via these après coups and the unexpected links between them, to reveal a unity that perhaps heralds a new era. Hence it is that the fall of the Berlin Wall proved to be contemporaneous with the commencement of the program that would eventually lead the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which is based in Geneva, to set up the World Wide Web. As for the significance of what has been called the Beijing Spring, it is yet to be fully understood—no doubt it played a part in the great transformation of China.

Between 1917, the year in which Lenin promised power to the Soviets in Russia, and 2017—November 13, 2017 being the day on which a text signed by 15,364 researchers from 184 countries was published in the journal BioScience, sending a final warning to humanity before it is too late, a real distress signal launched in a so-called “post-truth” context—then, 1989 represents a turning point on various levels that would only later become clear, and only on the condition that we consider them in the following way:

First, and going back further still, starting from 1968 and 1969, by giving consideration to the emergence of the “May 1968 movement,” which began right here, where we are now standing (as Gao Shiming reminded us wonderfully today), and then developed further in Paris, echoing across “the continent” (as would be said in England and the United States) in a typically French way and by claiming that it bore a relationship with the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in turn echoed in Californian counter-culture and at Berkeley (where in 1983 free software would be developed), before spreading to Prague, Tokyo, Germany, and so on, while in 1969 the ARPANET network rolled out the TCP-IP standard, now known as Internet. So much for the years leading up to 1989.

After that, it is necessary to turn to what leads to so-called platform capitalism, and to the constitution of what Benjamin Bratton calls “the stack,” where economic and technological power “disrupts” (as we say today) political and state power—thus organizing one of Lenin's objectives: the dissolution of the state. Nevertheless, the situation that presents itself in China is quite different, and this confers a great responsibility upon the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party in 2017 (the year of the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party).

Why? Because between 1989 and 2017, in the year 2000 in Mexico, Paul Crutzen proposed bestowing the name “Anthropocene” upon what Karl Marx had earlier described as the age of industrial capitalism—while Jason Moore prefers to speak of the Capitalocene. Redistributing all historical analyses, all dating and all scales (which poses a fascinating problem for geologists), the Anthropocene compels us to rethink the very nature of the scientific itself.

In 1945, Alfred Lotka put forward the concept of “exosomatic evolution,” as that which characterizes human history insofar as it represents a bifurcation in the history of life. Having already published a fundamental text on entropy and destruction in 1922, that is, after the First World War, he returned to this theme after the destruction of 1945, that is, after Hiroshima and Auschwitz, publishing a short text in the journal Human Biology, which extends, by means of a scientific thesis, the perspectives first opened up by Engels and Marx in The German Ideology.

China's immense and ongoing transformation has taken intelligent advantage of the ultraliberal policies pursued by the United States since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it will in the near future undoubtedly become the foremost power in the world. But the task this confers on China is more than historical: it is archi-historical or meta-historical.

China must initiate a new policy with respect to the global scientific community, and with the worlds of arts and literature, philosophy and law. It is obligated to do so, and it is also up to us to oblige it to do so—I say oblige in the sense of the Portuguese obrigado, meaning “thank you.”

In 2017, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, and in a period of political desolation in the major industrial countries of the West, the entire planet is now constituted as a “unity of consciousness”—but also as a unity of the unconscious and thoughtlessness [d'inconscience et d'inconscient]—not only through the development of networks, meaning digital media, but also through the development of the catastrophe awaiting the biosphere. This question was raised, this year, by the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China, when President Xi raised in these terms the question of China's place in the world of tomorrow.

Our meeting concerns a manifesto for the future of art and media—in an epoch that has at times been referred to as a post-media era. Here, it should be emphasized that, as we have known since Socrates, “the media,” which have since become digital (now incorporating artificial intelligence as well as social media), are the exosomatic and pharmacological organs of noesis. (Noesis, that is, thought, but where, for me, this is synonymous with such acts as dressing wounds, cooking, and bringing up children.) It is these exosomatic and pharmacological organs of noesis that can thus always lead to its very opposite: denoetisation.

Here, we must make no mistake in identifying our opponent: the adversary is capitalism qua the hegemony of calculation, as the elimination of the incalculable, that is, of negentropy and neganthropocene or in other words, of any chance of producing a bifurcation towards a future, an avenir, in the flow of becoming, devenir.

Today, the media participate in a process of systemic and planetary denoetisation, a proletarianization of the mind [esprit], in the sense referred to by Marx—and before him in other terms by Socrates: it was Socrates who first described proletarianization, that is, the loss of knowledge. Donald Trump, the “tweeting president,” is the global incarnation of this process.

This means that if the arts, literature and sciences, as manifestations of what has long been called “truth,” are what produce inalienable bifurcations—that is, bifurcations that, as producers of wealth, are irreducible to use value and exchange value—they must work to critique these exosomatic organs of noesis, whether they are artificial intelligence, social networks or any of those numerous dimensions that we cannot even perceive. They must work to produce a therapy, a therapeutics, so as to rethink structures and architectures, and to respond to the distress signal sent out on November 13.

The arts, humanities and sciences must assume this meta-historical or archi-historical task, and they must do so with China and within the framework of what Marcel Mauss called the “inter-nation,” in responding to the debate that was held in 1920 at the initiative of the League of Nations and President Wilson, which took up, on the one hand, Immanuel Kant's expression in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” and on the other hand, Marxist and Marxian internationalism.

Marcel Mauss spoke of the inter-nation as the future of the 20th century, calling for a globalism that would generate singular localities and respect these singularities—in order to combat what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the foul or the unworld, the immonde.

Thank you for your attention.

 

Translated by Daniel Ross

This article is based on a lecture given by the author at the forum held by the China Academy of Art "Century: A Proposal," Strasbourg, France, 2017.12.02

I will first talk to you about 1945—I am going to slightly deviate from convention here: I will connect a few dates together, one after the other, and then step backward in time a little.

1945—the end of the war, Hiroshima—leads to the United Nations replacing the League of Nations, but it also leads to the publication of a short text by the biologist and mathematician Alfred J. Lotka, which I will speak to you about in a moment.

But before that I would like to talk to you about 1989, a year that saw a combination of events which, while apparently very heterogeneous, nevertheless seem, in retrospect, and performatively ushered in via these après coups and the unexpected links between them, to reveal a unity that perhaps heralds a new era. Hence it is that the fall of the Berlin Wall proved to be contemporaneous with the commencement of the program that would eventually lead the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which is based in Geneva, to set up the World Wide Web. As for the significance of what has been called the Beijing Spring, it is yet to be fully understood—no doubt it played a part in the great transformation of China.

Between 1917, the year in which Lenin promised power to the Soviets in Russia, and 2017—November 13, 2017 being the day on which a text signed by 15,364 researchers from 184 countries was published in the journal BioScience, sending a final warning to humanity before it is too late, a real distress signal launched in a so-called “post-truth” context—then, 1989 represents a turning point on various levels that would only later become clear, and only on the condition that we consider them in the following way:

First, and going back further still, starting from 1968 and 1969, by giving consideration to the emergence of the “May 1968 movement,” which began right here, where we are now standing (as Gao Shiming reminded us wonderfully today), and then developed further in Paris, echoing across “the continent” (as would be said in England and the United States) in a typically French way and by claiming that it bore a relationship with the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in turn echoed in Californian counter-culture and at Berkeley (where in 1983 free software would be developed), before spreading to Prague, Tokyo, Germany, and so on, while in 1969 the ARPANET network rolled out the TCP-IP standard, now known as Internet. So much for the years leading up to 1989.

After that, it is necessary to turn to what leads to so-called platform capitalism, and to the constitution of what Benjamin Bratton calls “the stack,” where economic and technological power “disrupts” (as we say today) political and state power—thus organizing one of Lenin's objectives: the dissolution of the state. Nevertheless, the situation that presents itself in China is quite different, and this confers a great responsibility upon the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party in 2017 (the year of the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party).

Why? Because between 1989 and 2017, in the year 2000 in Mexico, Paul Crutzen proposed bestowing the name “Anthropocene” upon what Karl Marx had earlier described as the age of industrial capitalism—while Jason Moore prefers to speak of the Capitalocene. Redistributing all historical analyses, all dating and all scales (which poses a fascinating problem for geologists), the Anthropocene compels us to rethink the very nature of the scientific itself.

In 1945, Alfred Lotka put forward the concept of “exosomatic evolution,” as that which characterizes human history insofar as it represents a bifurcation in the history of life. Having already published a fundamental text on entropy and destruction in 1922, that is, after the First World War, he returned to this theme after the destruction of 1945, that is, after Hiroshima and Auschwitz, publishing a short text in the journal Human Biology, which extends, by means of a scientific thesis, the perspectives first opened up by Engels and Marx in The German Ideology.

China's immense and ongoing transformation has taken intelligent advantage of the ultraliberal policies pursued by the United States since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it will in the near future undoubtedly become the foremost power in the world. But the task this confers on China is more than historical: it is archi-historical or meta-historical.

China must initiate a new policy with respect to the global scientific community, and with the worlds of arts and literature, philosophy and law. It is obligated to do so, and it is also up to us to oblige it to do so—I say oblige in the sense of the Portuguese obrigado, meaning “thank you.”

In 2017, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, and in a period of political desolation in the major industrial countries of the West, the entire planet is now constituted as a “unity of consciousness”—but also as a unity of the unconscious and thoughtlessness [d'inconscience et d'inconscient]—not only through the development of networks, meaning digital media, but also through the development of the catastrophe awaiting the biosphere. This question was raised, this year, by the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China, when President Xi raised in these terms the question of China's place in the world of tomorrow.

Our meeting concerns a manifesto for the future of art and media—in an epoch that has at times been referred to as a post-media era. Here, it should be emphasized that, as we have known since Socrates, “the media,” which have since become digital (now incorporating artificial intelligence as well as social media), are the exosomatic and pharmacological organs of noesis. (Noesis, that is, thought, but where, for me, this is synonymous with such acts as dressing wounds, cooking, and bringing up children.) It is these exosomatic and pharmacological organs of noesis that can thus always lead to its very opposite: denoetisation.

Here, we must make no mistake in identifying our opponent: the adversary is capitalism qua the hegemony of calculation, as the elimination of the incalculable, that is, of negentropy and neganthropocene or in other words, of any chance of producing a bifurcation towards a future, an avenir, in the flow of becoming, devenir.

Today, the media participate in a process of systemic and planetary denoetisation, a proletarianization of the mind [esprit], in the sense referred to by Marx—and before him in other terms by Socrates: it was Socrates who first described proletarianization, that is, the loss of knowledge. Donald Trump, the “tweeting president,” is the global incarnation of this process.

This means that if the arts, literature and sciences, as manifestations of what has long been called “truth,” are what produce inalienable bifurcations—that is, bifurcations that, as producers of wealth, are irreducible to use value and exchange value—they must work to critique these exosomatic organs of noesis, whether they are artificial intelligence, social networks or any of those numerous dimensions that we cannot even perceive. They must work to produce a therapy, a therapeutics, so as to rethink structures and architectures, and to respond to the distress signal sent out on November 13.

The arts, humanities and sciences must assume this meta-historical or archi-historical task, and they must do so with China and within the framework of what Marcel Mauss called the “inter-nation,” in responding to the debate that was held in 1920 at the initiative of the League of Nations and President Wilson, which took up, on the one hand, Immanuel Kant's expression in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” and on the other hand, Marxist and Marxian internationalism.

Marcel Mauss spoke of the inter-nation as the future of the 20th century, calling for a globalism that would generate singular localities and respect these singularities—in order to combat what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the foul or the unworld, the immonde.

Thank you for your attention.

 

Translated by Daniel Ross