This article was revised from the lecture "The Power and Knowledge of Art in the 21st Century" given by Professor Bernard Stiegler on March 27, 2018, at the The National Art Museum of China in Beijing for the 90th-anniversary celebration of the China Academy of Art, as part of the event "Panel 21: Front Lines, How Might We Talk About the Future? ". The article was first published in the May 2018 issue of Journal of the China Academy of Art, New Art under the "Thought" section, titled "The Crisis of Man and the Responsibility of Art Education".

 

 

What can art do today — that is, in the Anthropocene? How is an artistic education still possible in 2018, particularly in China? In what should such an education educate?

I ask how an artistic education is still possible in 2018 inasmuch as China was for a long time protected from the calamity to which the culture industries and consumerism gave rise in the West and on the aesthetic level (and on many other levels). The Kulturindustrie and the marketing of which it is an instrument [organe] cause a true aesthetic disapprenticeship, a process of unlearning, by assigning to ‘culture’ a new function, that of modelling behaviour assigned to consumption — which is also to say behaviour that is alienated in that it is assigned to the destruction of the arts of living, in the sense that Whitehead gives to this expression, and where these arts of living correspond to what Gilbert Simondon described in terms of processes of individuation that are always both psychic and collective.

This development, which was partially analysed in Henri Lefèbvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, then in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, has in recent decades reached the shores of China itself. This cultural destruction amounts, dare I say it, to an anti-cultural revolution by the market — and it is effected through industrial systems and devices that capture attention and that, to an almost inconceivable degree, extend the opportunities to sculpt behaviour by destroying the social: this anti- cultural revolution is an anti-social sculpture.

The questions of knowing what art can do, of knowing how an education is still possible, and of knowing in what it should provide an education, must be understood in terms of what we call sense-perception or sensitivity [sensibilité], and the way this evolves over time, such that, for precisely this reason, it does indeed require an education, and such that it expresses this time that transforms it, and that it at the same time trans-forms, which it does by saying it, by showing it, by allowing it to be heard, to be seen, sometimes to be touched, or to be looked at while walking, as is the case with architecture and city works: such that it per-forms time by opening it [ouvrant] and working it [oeuvrant], by working on it — by sculpting it, cultivating it (as a gardener cultivates that of which he or she takes care).

Contrary to what one might be tempted to believe about what Kant called the ‘lower faculties’ — which are intuition (that is, sense-perception, sensitivity), the understanding, imagination and reason — sensitivity is not a faculty given once and for all to this being whom we call ‘man’, who is both the technical form of life and what Aristotle called the noetic soul. Sensitivity develops — just as do the understanding, imagination and reason. This development, this elaboration, occurs over the course of work that continues from generation to generation — something that Edouard Manet allowed us to understand when, discussing the poor response he received from his audience in the second half of the nineteenth century, he declared:

Their eye will be made [se fera]...[1]

In his early writings, Karl Marx, like Manet (but twenty years earlier), posited that sensitivity is a social construction. This is well known — but what does it mean today, and what obligations does it imply for artists and art schools, particularly in China?

Manet’s statement, if we interpret it alongside those of the young Marx, allows us to understand that art is the improbable, unexpected, each time new and unparalleled (singular and incomparable) adjustment between one or more endosomatic organs (particularly sight, hearing and touch) and one or more exosomatic organs. The history of these adjustments falls within the domain of general organology.

If it is true that sensitivity is in this way a social construction (as the adjustment of endosomatic organs and exosomatic organs via social organizations constituting social relations), just as what Walter Benjamin will say concerning mechanical reproducibility is true — and just as what Adorno and Horkheimer will say about Hollywood is true, not hesitating to refer to a barbarism to come, having heralded the advent of television, which, in their Dialektik der Aufklärung, does not create [fait] sensitivity, but defeats and undoes it [défait], echoing what Benjamin had himself already described as the possibility of this anaesthesia that is anti-social sculpture — if all this is true, what becomes of sensitivity today? What can and what must art do in this becoming?

 

*

 

Being able to do and having to do raise two questions that, in Western metaphysics, also involve questions of causality: they are the questions of efficiency and finality — which is also to say, of freedom and its constraints, which mark matter and form, which is also to say that they are the questions of material cause and formal cause. This lecture is an attempt to explore these questions from the perspective of what constitutes the specificity of our time, namely the Anthropocene, which is the concretization of what Heidegger called Gestell. This is why we will ask ourselves how art opens up a perspective and constitutes a point of view on what Heidegger also called the Ereignis.

I will not be able to fully develop these points of view until a lecture that I will give on April 9 in Hangzhou — and indeed these two lectures, this one in Beijing and the one coming up in Hangzhou, along with the seminar that I will also give here at this academy and for its students and researchers, form a whole from within which each lecture or seminar session will open up a particular angle — and which will be articulated with the lectures by Yuk Hui on the stakes of cybernetics for our time, which are the stakes involved in what he has called ‘cosmotechnics’.[2] Cosmotechnics in the epoch of cybernetics amounts to the question of Gestell and Ereignis considered from the perspective of what Heidegger called the Fourfold (Geviert), which constitutes the cardinality of Gestell and of that to which it gives rise as Ereignis, produced and sculpted within it by cultivating the time of a new era.

This sculpture and this culture concern the plasticity of which the plastic arts are an expression, just as are all works and everything that is manufactured or fabricated, both in terms of arts and in terms of crafts, trades and skills [métiers].

 

*

 

It is because sensitivity is plastic in a specific and distinctive sense that the so-called plastic arts, for example, can affect it. This affection constitutes a specific affectivity in that it is not reducible to the circuit that Jakob von Uexküll described in terms of the sensorimotor loop of the tick[3], and which is characteristic of all affectivity of living things endowed with a nervous system — however rudimentary it may be.

Such a circuit has its own relative plasticity, which is very limited in the case of the tick, but much more open in the case of the fox cub, for example, or the jackdaw, which von Uexküll also discusses, or in the case of the chimpanzee, which everyone discusses. The sensitivity of the living animal insofar as it is the condition of its mobility, whether kinetic or metabolic (since it is part of the evolutionary dynamics of the ‘life struggle’ and of natural selection), is what constitutes its plasticity. But in the case of man, the circuit formed by the sensorimotor loop is exosomatic, and this is why:

1.     this circuit is social;

2.     its plasticity is total;

3.     this motor function becomes itself a fabricator of organs;

4.     these exosomatic organs can themselves be motors and fabricators in highly varied ways;

5.     this manufacturing motor function constitutes a pro-duction — in the sense given to this word by Marx, but also in the Heideggerian sense.

This is how total plasticity is formed — the name we give to this total plasticity is freedom. But this total freedom is also the freedom of self-destruction: exosomatization, which necessitates the arrangement of endosomatic organs and exosomatic organs, can destroy sensitivity, which is also to say freedom.

It is because it fights against this destructive possibility that art, like all other forms of knowledge, must be conceived above all as a therapy, a therapeutics, a care — in the sense that therapeia refers in Greek to attention given to that which may always lead to hubris, that is, to excess, madness, crime.

This circuit of freedom, which is therefore also a circuit of excess, is exo- somatic in the sense that it is escapes the body and its limits, as Georges Canguilhem says, and such that it passes through works [oeuvres], in the sense that Ignace Meyerson gives to this word. These works are ‘productions’ in the sense that Marx gives to this word — and after him many others, such as Alfred Sohn-Rethel. (What is the relationship between production according to Marx and production according to Heidegger, and as it relates to poiēsis? This is an issue that we will try to clarify in Hangzhou.)

The exosomatic circuit is the circuit of a production that is always primarily that of works — including in the sense that Henri Lefèbvre gives to this word, in particular to describe the city and its exosomatization, and this is worth emphasizing in a context suffused with discourse on ‘smart cities’.

All production, in all its forms — from the making of the first artificial tools right up to the metropolises that have now become megalopolises, and via works of art — all this constitutes the set of facts brought about by exosomatization, which Protagoras discusses in the eponymous Platonic dialogue.

 

*

 

Such exosomatic pro-duction is the issue at stake in what, after Joseph Beuys, we should call ‘social sculpture’, it being understood that:

·       this is also what makes everydayness and everyday life possible, in both Heidegger’s and Lefèbvre’s sense;

·       it can be negative, that is, destructive of everydayness itself: the latter, which constitutes an experience, is now increasingly often replaced by the an-aesthetics that Benjamin anticipated a century prior to its current advent.

The sensori-fabricative loop is also a sensori-poietic loop, which is also to say sensori-noetic: the freedom that confers and constitutes the fabricative ability that, in the Nicomachean Ethics, is called poiēsis, is that of the mind [esprit] oriented by and towards what Rainer Maria Rilke called ‘the open’ (as did Bergson, Heidegger and Deleuze, and as Ludwig von Bertalanffy discussed in his theory of open systems).

In Symbolic Misery, Volume 2, I attempted to describe the conditions in which this sensori-noetic loop, as a sensori-fabricative loop, and as a sensori-poietico-ex-pressive loop in this sense — that is, always already exo-somatizing itself by working dia-logically, and across the generations, this dia-logism being also understood in Bakhtin’s sense — I tried to describe in that work the conditions in which this sensori-noetic loop that is sensi-tivity is constituted, after having been destituted, and even, the way in which it is constituted only on the condition of having been destituted: this destitution occurs through circuits of successive defunctionalization, then of successive refunctionalization, this destitution being primordial and originary, and this origin being in this way a default of origin, and an originary (de)fault, which is equally an originary violence — that of tekhnē. This is the very meaning of the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus laid out in Protagoras.

As for this violence, and as for its actuality in the modern and contemporary world, we should here read and discuss Jonathan Crary’s work on the future of attention under capitalism[4], but unfortunately there isn’t time to do so now. If I did have time, I would have tried to show that the numbness discussed by Benjamin in terms of anaesthesia and anaesthetics is also a destruction of sleep, sleep being the condition of the faculty of dreaming that must be added to what Kant called the higher faculties of reason as the faculties of knowing, desiring and judging.

There is good sleep, that of the dreamer, and this is what, according to Crary, contemporary capitalism destroys. In so doing, it destroys the faculty of dreaming, that is, the sensori-noetic faculty that art typifies more than any other human activity. The artist dreams while awake, and he awakens and stays awake on the basis of his dreams, by realizing them. There is also a bad sleep, that of reason that engenders monsters. And there are bad dreams, which turn into nightmares. What this implies is that there is a pharmacology of sleep and of the dream, which at the same time means that there is a pharmacology of rest and of the unconscious. These questions occupied the young Foucault during the time when he was interested in Ludwig Binswanger, who himself treated Aby Warburg.

The circuits defunctionalizing and refunctionalizing what Kant discusses in terms of the lower and higher faculties, which constitute the faculty of dreaming as much as they are constituted by this faculty (where this is something that Kant does not discuss, and of which art is the emblematic because dia-logically inexhaustible manifestation), these circuits arise from exosomatization in the sense that Alfred Lotka gave to this concept in 1945[5], and inasmuch as, over time, and since the onset of noetic exosomatization — which began some three million years ago — it provokes what I have called the doubly epokhal redoubling.

 

*

 

The doubly epokhal redoubling is what occurs in the course of the evolution of those technical systems that characterize the condition of human life, systems that are produced by man insofar as he is an exosomatic being, systems that are composed of fabricated objects — that is, technical, artificial and sometimes artistic objects, in which case the artifice becomes true and as such a work [oeuvre], which means that it opens [ouvre] that which, in all artificiality, tends to close up and to wither without bearing fruit, like a flower deprived of water.

In the doubly epokhal redoubling, when, in an epoch’s dominant technical system, an evolution of the system itself occurs (and not just the evolution of one of its components), which is the first stage of this redoubling, this evolution of the technical system defunctionalizes a state of sensitivity, which is also to say, of what confers a value upon what is perceived (and which confers this value precisely by making it perceptible). But in a second stage, the new technical system refunctionalizes sensitivity. Such a view, which is functionalist in the sense of Whitehead’s The Function of Reason, concerns the understanding, imagination and reason as much as it does sensitivity.

In the second stage of the doubly epokhal redoubling, a new sensitivity is constituted, and new values: new rules of the understanding, new schemas of the imagination and new ideas of reason. These new sensori-noetic and sensori-poietic circuits are produced by artists as well as by jurists, scientists, philosophers, citizens and all contemporaries of the technical system as it elaborates new rules of life, new forms of everyday life, of everydayness, and which is also to say that it elaborates what we call a new epoch.

Such questions can be conceived only by passing through Nietzsche and his critique of nihilism — and where, on the basis of this critique, it becomes possible to understand what Hölderlin meant when he referred to philistinism. If this is a point worth making clearly, it is because the time we are living through is in this regard quite singular: it fails to constitute a new epoch strictly speaking, instead amounting to what we are calling a process of disruption, and the latter is the accomplishment of what Nietzsche called nihilism — which it accomplishes as what Heidegger called Gestell.

Gestell is the epoch of the absence of epoch, the non-epoch of an anti-social sculpture. What I would like to persuade you of now is that what the art of this emptiness can and must do, what it must know how to do and want to do, is participate in the accomplishing of what Heidegger called the Ereignis.

 

*

 

What characterizes the age of disruption is the im-possibility of redoubling the first stage of the doubly epokhal redoubling that is Gestell qua planetary deployment of cybernetics that has become reticulated digital technology, operating everywhere and simultaneously within an everydayness that is thus totally reconfigured, and to a large extent disfigured — a disfigured configuration characteristic of so-called platform capitalism, which purports to establish the age of transhumanism.

Deploying this technology leads to disruption, and, in this disruption, the techno-logical shocks are permanent, whereas previously they had succeeded one another in an intermittent way, at increasingly brief intervals yet always interspersed between periods of relative calm. The latter would enable the second stage of the redoubling to occur, through which the knowledge proper to the new epoch of exosomatization could be established — for example, that epoch referred to in the West as modernity, to which the painter Manet and the poet Baudelaire bear witness through their works, works that prefigure what in the twentieth century will become the avant-garde, which, after having engendered, notably, surrealism and expressionism (in the sense of Klee), will lead to what we call contemporary art, which itself both culminates and withers in and with disruption.

This is the case for art as it is for everything else, and the reason for this is that the second stage has become impossible, with technological shocks following one after the other without respite and at the extreme speed that results from exploiting the possibilities of intensive computing founded on feedback loops operating in real time — which takes anti-social sculpture to the extreme, as the accomplishment of an anti-cultural revolution and the destruction of noetic plasticity: this computation operates at two thirds of the speed of light, that is, twice as fast as lightning, twice as fast as the lightning bolt of Zeus, and on the scale of the whole planet — something made possible by a satellite belt thanks to which exosomatization now occurs on an exospherical scale, which Jean Baudrillard anticipated in terms of what he called the orbital.

What can art do in this global condition of the human species as it extends into an Anthropocene that is itself arriving at its furthest extremity — if we believe the appeal of 13 November 2017?[6] What can art do in the final period of the Anthropocene, that is, its eschatological period in the strict sense — when it reaches a cosmic eskhaton amounting to an insurmountable limit? And in what could such a limit consist?

 

*

 

In two weeks from now, at the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, I will try to show why and how such questions must revive the concept of social sculpture as it was put forward by Beuys, and why we must do so in order to model what I call the Neganthropocene — not in the sense of geo-engineering, but in the sense of the Ereignis — and to do this we must first of all reconsider the theory of four causes expounded in Aristotle’s Physics. I will not elaborate on these points here, but perhaps we can go into them a little further if we have time for a discussion.

 

*

 

Let’s now try to understand what is entailed by the notion of social sculpture, which is also a social culture, that is, a social education and a socialization of what is not yet social.

To do this, we must first understand how an anti-social sculpture has emerged as an anti-cultural revolution, which leads to an unlearning of everything that makes possible a poietic and noetic sensitivity derived from a fabricative sensorimotor capacity.

First of all, let’s recall what I showed in Hangzhou three years ago, namely, that Marcel Duchamp, in his transition from Nude Descending a Staircase to Fountain, wrote in his notebook that the camera, the photographic apparatus, proletarianizes the artist just as the apparatus of production proletarianizes the worker.[7] Let us also remember that in 1934 Bartok said that it is indeed possible to listen to music on the radio, but he specified that this is so only on the condition that at the same time we follow along by reading the score of the piece of music being broadcast. Bringing these two discourses together, what can they jointly tell us?

To answer this question, we must return to the question of time and space that arises in and as sensitivity. In Kant, the latter is composed of what he calls the forms of space and time, and it is above all the arrangement — in time and through the spacing in which it consists — of what Husserl called retentions and protentions.

You are listening to me right now, and, as I speak to you, I am trying to sculpt your attention — the attention that you want to lend me, as we say in French, or that you want to pay me, as they say in English. But to understand this, we must lend and pay attention to what Husserl said in taking up Saint Augustine’s analysis, which led him to distinguish, in the passage of time, two types of retentions: primary retentions and secondary retention.

Retention in general is what is retained. And what is retained contains chains or concatenations of possible potentials, that is, expectations [attente] contained in what is retained, which Husserl called protentions. The play of retentions and protentions, where the latter are the expectations contained within them, constitutes attention. In this play of attention, we must distinguish between primary retentions and secondary retentions. Primary retentions are retained in the present and by the present, which presents itself only through these retentions where it is maintained, and which thereby constitute a now [maintenant]. So, you retain what I have just said in what now presents itself to you as what I am in the course of saying — for otherwise, you could not com-prehend, or main-tain through this com-prehension, what I am saying.

This primary retention, Husserl says, is not something that belongs to the past: it constitutes the present insofar as it passes presently and now, insofar as it is passing. As for the past, it consists of secondary retentions, that is, retentions that once were primary, but which have since gone past, and have therefore become secondary. If we now ask ourselves what each of us here in this room, on the basis of my discourse, understands, retains and maintains as the meaning of what I have said, we will undoubtedly discover that not one of us has heard or understood or maintained the same thing as anyone else, in what presented itself to each of you through my discourse.

This is so because each primary retention retained during listening is a primary selection. The latter operates according to the secondary retentions specific to each of the listeners. Secondary retentions in this way function as the criteria of selection, and thus of retention, and what this really means is that everyone hears what I am saying with a different ear. If, however, my discourse is sensible, or even necessary, and so, in one way or another, true, it will probably provoke, in the audience that you constitute through your attention, a common, shared, perhaps inaccessible expectation, but one that is nevertheless sensible, and constituting sensitivity and sensibility from this perspective that opens up that which remains to come.

If this is what happens, I will in some way have sculpted and cultivated within you something necessary, something that we call the social. This culture and this sculpture, however, are possible only in the artificial but concealed conditions that must be reconstituted and brought to the clarity of the circumspect gaze: these conditions are, in addition to hearing us in a language that is not necessarily our own, those of more or less sharing a fund or background of collective retentions and protentions, which has been bequeathed to us through what I call tertiary retentions, that is, through being inscribed in the exosomatic and spatialized fabric that constitutes our time and our common memories, from reference points such as Plato, Marx, Manet, Benjamin, Beuys, Duchamp and so on — via a hypomnesic background where there is also Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zhuang Zhou, and, closer to us, Mou Zongsan, Cai Yuanpei and Mao Zedong, whose little red book has been a planetary hypomnesic retention.

 

For centuries, tertiary retentions have been objects of worship [culte] and culture, of sculpture in this sense, for organisms and instruments of power and knowledge attempting to constitute in this way a common will, that is, a society, a social milieu composed of retentions and protentions that are more or less shared, through which what we call culture takes care of what, as the process of exosomatization, requires artifices to be turned into arts and contingencies and accidents turned into necessity and truth.

For the fact is that our psychic, intimate and singular retentions and protentions are founded on and supported by collective, shared retentions and protentions, beginning with the words we speak and listen to, and which were coined before us. All knowledge and all works are such crafts, sculptures and cultures of collective retentions and protentions bequeathed by a common past, more or less anonymous and ancestral, projecting a common future that is always indeterminate, inaccessible and improbable, but which insists and remains open through works.

A work [oeuvre] is the spatialization of a time that never ends, and this is what presents itself to sensitivity through works of art. Such a time is the fruit of a social sculpture in precisely this sense — accessible to everyone because, in one way or another, everyone is a sculptor or a cultivator. If, for example, a work affects you, or if the speech I am making right now affects you, it will have effects. And these effects will be reflected in reality by an exosomatic expression, in one way or another, on your part, that is, by an inscription in the space of time that will be formed in you as new retentions and protentions, which you spatialize in your turn, whether in words or in works.

This affection by works, however, is what was radically thrown into disuse [désaffecté] when the culture industries appeared, by depriving consumers of their capacities for psychic and collective individuation, that is, of their knowledge of how to live together by collectively sculpting and cultivating their social time and social space — and where this occurred after the proletarianization engendered by machinism had already deprived workers of their work-knowledge, their knowledge of how to make and do things, that is, of the retentions and protentions associated with their crafts, trades and skills, which were instead transformed into mechanical tertiary retentions.

 

Translated by Daniel Ross


[1] Translator’s note: This might also be translated as ‘their eye will yield’, as it is in Bernard Stiegler, ‘The Tongue of the Eye: What “Art History” Means’, trans. Thangam Ravindranathan with Bernard Geoghegan, in Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (eds), Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 231. Cf., Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 2: The Katastrophē of the Sensible, trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), p. 154.

[2] Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay on Cosmotechnics (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016).
[3] Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, with A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

[4] Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 
[5] Alfred J. Lotka, ‘The Law of Evolution as a Maximal Principle’, Human Biology 17:3 (1945), pp. 167—94.
[6] This is the date of publication of William J. Ripple et al., ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice’, BioScience 67 (December 2017), pp. 1026-28, available at <https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/67/12/1026/4605229#100528775>.
[7] Translator’s note: See also Bernard Stiegler, ‘The Proletarianization of Sensibility’, Boundary 2 44 (2017), pp. 5-18.

This article was revised from the lecture "The Power and Knowledge of Art in the 21st Century" given by Professor Bernard Stiegler on March 27, 2018, at the The National Art Museum of China in Beijing for the 90th-anniversary celebration of the China Academy of Art, as part of the event "Panel 21: Front Lines, How Might We Talk About the Future? ". The article was first published in the May 2018 issue of Journal of the China Academy of Art, New Art under the "Thought" section, titled "The Crisis of Man and the Responsibility of Art Education".

 

What can art do today — that is, in the Anthropocene? How is an artistic education still possible in 2018, particularly in China? In what should such an education educate?

I ask how an artistic education is still possible in 2018 inasmuch as China was for a long time protected from the calamity to which the culture industries and consumerism gave rise in the West and on the aesthetic level (and on many other levels). The Kulturindustrie and the marketing of which it is an instrument [organe] cause a true aesthetic disapprenticeship, a process of unlearning, by assigning to ‘culture’ a new function, that of modelling behaviour assigned to consumption — which is also to say behaviour that is alienated in that it is assigned to the destruction of the arts of living, in the sense that Whitehead gives to this expression, and where these arts of living correspond to what Gilbert Simondon described in terms of processes of individuation that are always both psychic and collective.

This development, which was partially analysed in Henri Lefèbvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, then in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, has in recent decades reached the shores of China itself. This cultural destruction amounts, dare I say it, to an anti-cultural revolution by the market — and it is effected through industrial systems and devices that capture attention and that, to an almost inconceivable degree, extend the opportunities to sculpt behaviour by destroying the social: this anti- cultural revolution is an anti-social sculpture.

The questions of knowing what art can do, of knowing how an education is still possible, and of knowing in what it should provide an education, must be understood in terms of what we call sense-perception or sensitivity [sensibilité], and the way this evolves over time, such that, for precisely this reason, it does indeed require an education, and such that it expresses this time that transforms it, and that it at the same time trans-forms, which it does by saying it, by showing it, by allowing it to be heard, to be seen, sometimes to be touched, or to be looked at while walking, as is the case with architecture and city works: such that it per-forms time by opening it [ouvrant] and working it [oeuvrant], by working on it — by sculpting it, cultivating it (as a gardener cultivates that of which he or she takes care).

Contrary to what one might be tempted to believe about what Kant called the ‘lower faculties’ — which are intuition (that is, sense-perception, sensitivity), the understanding, imagination and reason — sensitivity is not a faculty given once and for all to this being whom we call ‘man’, who is both the technical form of life and what Aristotle called the noetic soul. Sensitivity develops — just as do the understanding, imagination and reason. This development, this elaboration, occurs over the course of work that continues from generation to generation — something that Edouard Manet allowed us to understand when, discussing the poor response he received from his audience in the second half of the nineteenth century, he declared:

Their eye will be made [se fera]...[1]

In his early writings, Karl Marx, like Manet (but twenty years earlier), posited that sensitivity is a social construction. This is well known — but what does it mean today, and what obligations does it imply for artists and art schools, particularly in China?

Manet’s statement, if we interpret it alongside those of the young Marx, allows us to understand that art is the improbable, unexpected, each time new and unparalleled (singular and incomparable) adjustment between one or more endosomatic organs (particularly sight, hearing and touch) and one or more exosomatic organs. The history of these adjustments falls within the domain of general organology.

If it is true that sensitivity is in this way a social construction (as the adjustment of endosomatic organs and exosomatic organs via social organizations constituting social relations), just as what Walter Benjamin will say concerning mechanical reproducibility is true — and just as what Adorno and Horkheimer will say about Hollywood is true, not hesitating to refer to a barbarism to come, having heralded the advent of television, which, in their Dialektik der Aufklärung, does not create [fait] sensitivity, but defeats and undoes it [défait], echoing what Benjamin had himself already described as the possibility of this anaesthesia that is anti-social sculpture — if all this is true, what becomes of sensitivity today? What can and what must art do in this becoming?

 

*

 

Being able to do and having to do raise two questions that, in Western metaphysics, also involve questions of causality: they are the questions of efficiency and finality — which is also to say, of freedom and its constraints, which mark matter and form, which is also to say that they are the questions of material cause and formal cause. This lecture is an attempt to explore these questions from the perspective of what constitutes the specificity of our time, namely the Anthropocene, which is the concretization of what Heidegger called Gestell. This is why we will ask ourselves how art opens up a perspective and constitutes a point of view on what Heidegger also called the Ereignis.

I will not be able to fully develop these points of view until a lecture that I will give on April 9 in Hangzhou — and indeed these two lectures, this one in Beijing and the one coming up in Hangzhou, along with the seminar that I will also give here at this academy and for its students and researchers, form a whole from within which each lecture or seminar session will open up a particular angle — and which will be articulated with the lectures by Yuk Hui on the stakes of cybernetics for our time, which are the stakes involved in what he has called ‘cosmotechnics’.[2] Cosmotechnics in the epoch of cybernetics amounts to the question of Gestell and Ereignis considered from the perspective of what Heidegger called the Fourfold (Geviert), which constitutes the cardinality of Gestell and of that to which it gives rise as Ereignis, produced and sculpted within it by cultivating the time of a new era.

This sculpture and this culture concern the plasticity of which the plastic arts are an expression, just as are all works and everything that is manufactured or fabricated, both in terms of arts and in terms of crafts, trades and skills [métiers].

 

*

 

It is because sensitivity is plastic in a specific and distinctive sense that the so-called plastic arts, for example, can affect it. This affection constitutes a specific affectivity in that it is not reducible to the circuit that Jakob von Uexküll described in terms of the sensorimotor loop of the tick[3], and which is characteristic of all affectivity of living things endowed with a nervous system — however rudimentary it may be.

Such a circuit has its own relative plasticity, which is very limited in the case of the tick, but much more open in the case of the fox cub, for example, or the jackdaw, which von Uexküll also discusses, or in the case of the chimpanzee, which everyone discusses. The sensitivity of the living animal insofar as it is the condition of its mobility, whether kinetic or metabolic (since it is part of the evolutionary dynamics of the ‘life struggle’ and of natural selection), is what constitutes its plasticity. But in the case of man, the circuit formed by the sensorimotor loop is exosomatic, and this is why:

1.     this circuit is social;

2.     its plasticity is total;

3.     this motor function becomes itself a fabricator of organs;

4.     these exosomatic organs can themselves be motors and fabricators in highly varied ways;

5.     this manufacturing motor function constitutes a pro-duction — in the sense given to this word by Marx, but also in the Heideggerian sense.

This is how total plasticity is formed — the name we give to this total plasticity is freedom. But this total freedom is also the freedom of self-destruction: exosomatization, which necessitates the arrangement of endosomatic organs and exosomatic organs, can destroy sensitivity, which is also to say freedom.

It is because it fights against this destructive possibility that art, like all other forms of knowledge, must be conceived above all as a therapy, a therapeutics, a care — in the sense that therapeia refers in Greek to attention given to that which may always lead to hubris, that is, to excess, madness, crime.

This circuit of freedom, which is therefore also a circuit of excess, is exo- somatic in the sense that it is escapes the body and its limits, as Georges Canguilhem says, and such that it passes through works [oeuvres], in the sense that Ignace Meyerson gives to this word. These works are ‘productions’ in the sense that Marx gives to this word — and after him many others, such as Alfred Sohn-Rethel. (What is the relationship between production according to Marx and production according to Heidegger, and as it relates to poiēsis? This is an issue that we will try to clarify in Hangzhou.)

The exosomatic circuit is the circuit of a production that is always primarily that of works — including in the sense that Henri Lefèbvre gives to this word, in particular to describe the city and its exosomatization, and this is worth emphasizing in a context suffused with discourse on ‘smart cities’.

All production, in all its forms — from the making of the first artificial tools right up to the metropolises that have now become megalopolises, and via works of art — all this constitutes the set of facts brought about by exosomatization, which Protagoras discusses in the eponymous Platonic dialogue.

 

*

 

Such exosomatic pro-duction is the issue at stake in what, after Joseph Beuys, we should call ‘social sculpture’, it being understood that:

·       this is also what makes everydayness and everyday life possible, in both Heidegger’s and Lefèbvre’s sense;

·       it can be negative, that is, destructive of everydayness itself: the latter, which constitutes an experience, is now increasingly often replaced by the an-aesthetics that Benjamin anticipated a century prior to its current advent.

The sensori-fabricative loop is also a sensori-poietic loop, which is also to say sensori-noetic: the freedom that confers and constitutes the fabricative ability that, in the Nicomachean Ethics, is called poiēsis, is that of the mind [esprit] oriented by and towards what Rainer Maria Rilke called ‘the open’ (as did Bergson, Heidegger and Deleuze, and as Ludwig von Bertalanffy discussed in his theory of open systems).

In Symbolic Misery, Volume 2, I attempted to describe the conditions in which this sensori-noetic loop, as a sensori-fabricative loop, and as a sensori-poietico-ex-pressive loop in this sense — that is, always already exo-somatizing itself by working dia-logically, and across the generations, this dia-logism being also understood in Bakhtin’s sense — I tried to describe in that work the conditions in which this sensori-noetic loop that is sensi-tivity is constituted, after having been destituted, and even, the way in which it is constituted only on the condition of having been destituted: this destitution occurs through circuits of successive defunctionalization, then of successive refunctionalization, this destitution being primordial and originary, and this origin being in this way a default of origin, and an originary (de)fault, which is equally an originary violence — that of tekhnē. This is the very meaning of the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus laid out in Protagoras.

As for this violence, and as for its actuality in the modern and contemporary world, we should here read and discuss Jonathan Crary’s work on the future of attention under capitalism[4], but unfortunately there isn’t time to do so now. If I did have time, I would have tried to show that the numbness discussed by Benjamin in terms of anaesthesia and anaesthetics is also a destruction of sleep, sleep being the condition of the faculty of dreaming that must be added to what Kant called the higher faculties of reason as the faculties of knowing, desiring and judging.

There is good sleep, that of the dreamer, and this is what, according to Crary, contemporary capitalism destroys. In so doing, it destroys the faculty of dreaming, that is, the sensori-noetic faculty that art typifies more than any other human activity. The artist dreams while awake, and he awakens and stays awake on the basis of his dreams, by realizing them. There is also a bad sleep, that of reason that engenders monsters. And there are bad dreams, which turn into nightmares. What this implies is that there is a pharmacology of sleep and of the dream, which at the same time means that there is a pharmacology of rest and of the unconscious. These questions occupied the young Foucault during the time when he was interested in Ludwig Binswanger, who himself treated Aby Warburg.

The circuits defunctionalizing and refunctionalizing what Kant discusses in terms of the lower and higher faculties, which constitute the faculty of dreaming as much as they are constituted by this faculty (where this is something that Kant does not discuss, and of which art is the emblematic because dia-logically inexhaustible manifestation), these circuits arise from exosomatization in the sense that Alfred Lotka gave to this concept in 1945[5], and inasmuch as, over time, and since the onset of noetic exosomatization — which began some three million years ago — it provokes what I have called the doubly epokhal redoubling.

 

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The doubly epokhal redoubling is what occurs in the course of the evolution of those technical systems that characterize the condition of human life, systems that are produced by man insofar as he is an exosomatic being, systems that are composed of fabricated objects — that is, technical, artificial and sometimes artistic objects, in which case the artifice becomes true and as such a work [oeuvre], which means that it opens [ouvre] that which, in all artificiality, tends to close up and to wither without bearing fruit, like a flower deprived of water.

In the doubly epokhal redoubling, when, in an epoch’s dominant technical system, an evolution of the system itself occurs (and not just the evolution of one of its components), which is the first stage of this redoubling, this evolution of the technical system defunctionalizes a state of sensitivity, which is also to say, of what confers a value upon what is perceived (and which confers this value precisely by making it perceptible). But in a second stage, the new technical system refunctionalizes sensitivity. Such a view, which is functionalist in the sense of Whitehead’s The Function of Reason, concerns the understanding, imagination and reason as much as it does sensitivity.

In the second stage of the doubly epokhal redoubling, a new sensitivity is constituted, and new values: new rules of the understanding, new schemas of the imagination and new ideas of reason. These new sensori-noetic and sensori-poietic circuits are produced by artists as well as by jurists, scientists, philosophers, citizens and all contemporaries of the technical system as it elaborates new rules of life, new forms of everyday life, of everydayness, and which is also to say that it elaborates what we call a new epoch.

Such questions can be conceived only by passing through Nietzsche and his critique of nihilism — and where, on the basis of this critique, it becomes possible to understand what Hölderlin meant when he referred to philistinism. If this is a point worth making clearly, it is because the time we are living through is in this regard quite singular: it fails to constitute a new epoch strictly speaking, instead amounting to what we are calling a process of disruption, and the latter is the accomplishment of what Nietzsche called nihilism — which it accomplishes as what Heidegger called Gestell.

Gestell is the epoch of the absence of epoch, the non-epoch of an anti-social sculpture. What I would like to persuade you of now is that what the art of this emptiness can and must do, what it must know how to do and want to do, is participate in the accomplishing of what Heidegger called the Ereignis.

 

*

 

What characterizes the age of disruption is the im-possibility of redoubling the first stage of the doubly epokhal redoubling that is Gestell qua planetary deployment of cybernetics that has become reticulated digital technology, operating everywhere and simultaneously within an everydayness that is thus totally reconfigured, and to a large extent disfigured — a disfigured configuration characteristic of so-called platform capitalism, which purports to establish the age of transhumanism.

Deploying this technology leads to disruption, and, in this disruption, the techno-logical shocks are permanent, whereas previously they had succeeded one another in an intermittent way, at increasingly brief intervals yet always interspersed between periods of relative calm. The latter would enable the second stage of the redoubling to occur, through which the knowledge proper to the new epoch of exosomatization could be established — for example, that epoch referred to in the West as modernity, to which the painter Manet and the poet Baudelaire bear witness through their works, works that prefigure what in the twentieth century will become the avant-garde, which, after having engendered, notably, surrealism and expressionism (in the sense of Klee), will lead to what we call contemporary art, which itself both culminates and withers in and with disruption.

This is the case for art as it is for everything else, and the reason for this is that the second stage has become impossible, with technological shocks following one after the other without respite and at the extreme speed that results from exploiting the possibilities of intensive computing founded on feedback loops operating in real time — which takes anti-social sculpture to the extreme, as the accomplishment of an anti-cultural revolution and the destruction of noetic plasticity: this computation operates at two thirds of the speed of light, that is, twice as fast as lightning, twice as fast as the lightning bolt of Zeus, and on the scale of the whole planet — something made possible by a satellite belt thanks to which exosomatization now occurs on an exospherical scale, which Jean Baudrillard anticipated in terms of what he called the orbital.

What can art do in this global condition of the human species as it extends into an Anthropocene that is itself arriving at its furthest extremity — if we believe the appeal of 13 November 2017?[6] What can art do in the final period of the Anthropocene, that is, its eschatological period in the strict sense — when it reaches a cosmic eskhaton amounting to an insurmountable limit? And in what could such a limit consist?

 

*

 

In two weeks from now, at the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, I will try to show why and how such questions must revive the concept of social sculpture as it was put forward by Beuys, and why we must do so in order to model what I call the Neganthropocene — not in the sense of geo-engineering, but in the sense of the Ereignis — and to do this we must first of all reconsider the theory of four causes expounded in Aristotle’s Physics. I will not elaborate on these points here, but perhaps we can go into them a little further if we have time for a discussion.

 

*

 

Let’s now try to understand what is entailed by the notion of social sculpture, which is also a social culture, that is, a social education and a socialization of what is not yet social.

To do this, we must first understand how an anti-social sculpture has emerged as an anti-cultural revolution, which leads to an unlearning of everything that makes possible a poietic and noetic sensitivity derived from a fabricative sensorimotor capacity.

First of all, let’s recall what I showed in Hangzhou three years ago, namely, that Marcel Duchamp, in his transition from Nude Descending a Staircase to Fountain, wrote in his notebook that the camera, the photographic apparatus, proletarianizes the artist just as the apparatus of production proletarianizes the worker.[7] Let us also remember that in 1934 Bartok said that it is indeed possible to listen to music on the radio, but he specified that this is so only on the condition that at the same time we follow along by reading the score of the piece of music being broadcast. Bringing these two discourses together, what can they jointly tell us?

To answer this question, we must return to the question of time and space that arises in and as sensitivity. In Kant, the latter is composed of what he calls the forms of space and time, and it is above all the arrangement — in time and through the spacing in which it consists — of what Husserl called retentions and protentions.

You are listening to me right now, and, as I speak to you, I am trying to sculpt your attention — the attention that you want to lend me, as we say in French, or that you want to pay me, as they say in English. But to understand this, we must lend and pay attention to what Husserl said in taking up Saint Augustine’s analysis, which led him to distinguish, in the passage of time, two types of retentions: primary retentions and secondary retention.

Retention in general is what is retained. And what is retained contains chains or concatenations of possible potentials, that is, expectations [attente] contained in what is retained, which Husserl called protentions. The play of retentions and protentions, where the latter are the expectations contained within them, constitutes attention. In this play of attention, we must distinguish between primary retentions and secondary retentions. Primary retentions are retained in the present and by the present, which presents itself only through these retentions where it is maintained, and which thereby constitute a now [maintenant]. So, you retain what I have just said in what now presents itself to you as what I am in the course of saying — for otherwise, you could not com-prehend, or main-tain through this com-prehension, what I am saying.

This primary retention, Husserl says, is not something that belongs to the past: it constitutes the present insofar as it passes presently and now, insofar as it is passing. As for the past, it consists of secondary retentions, that is, retentions that once were primary, but which have since gone past, and have therefore become secondary. If we now ask ourselves what each of us here in this room, on the basis of my discourse, understands, retains and maintains as the meaning of what I have said, we will undoubtedly discover that not one of us has heard or understood or maintained the same thing as anyone else, in what presented itself to each of you through my discourse.

This is so because each primary retention retained during listening is a primary selection. The latter operates according to the secondary retentions specific to each of the listeners. Secondary retentions in this way function as the criteria of selection, and thus of retention, and what this really means is that everyone hears what I am saying with a different ear. If, however, my discourse is sensible, or even necessary, and so, in one way or another, true, it will probably provoke, in the audience that you constitute through your attention, a common, shared, perhaps inaccessible expectation, but one that is nevertheless sensible, and constituting sensitivity and sensibility from this perspective that opens up that which remains to come.

If this is what happens, I will in some way have sculpted and cultivated within you something necessary, something that we call the social. This culture and this sculpture, however, are possible only in the artificial but concealed conditions that must be reconstituted and brought to the clarity of the circumspect gaze: these conditions are, in addition to hearing us in a language that is not necessarily our own, those of more or less sharing a fund or background of collective retentions and protentions, which has been bequeathed to us through what I call tertiary retentions, that is, through being inscribed in the exosomatic and spatialized fabric that constitutes our time and our common memories, from reference points such as Plato, Marx, Manet, Benjamin, Beuys, Duchamp and so on — via a hypomnesic background where there is also Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zhuang Zhou, and, closer to us, Mou Zongsan, Cai Yuanpei and Mao Zedong, whose little red book has been a planetary hypomnesic retention.

 

For centuries, tertiary retentions have been objects of worship [culte] and culture, of sculpture in this sense, for organisms and instruments of power and knowledge attempting to constitute in this way a common will, that is, a society, a social milieu composed of retentions and protentions that are more or less shared, through which what we call culture takes care of what, as the process of exosomatization, requires artifices to be turned into arts and contingencies and accidents turned into necessity and truth.

For the fact is that our psychic, intimate and singular retentions and protentions are founded on and supported by collective, shared retentions and protentions, beginning with the words we speak and listen to, and which were coined before us. All knowledge and all works are such crafts, sculptures and cultures of collective retentions and protentions bequeathed by a common past, more or less anonymous and ancestral, projecting a common future that is always indeterminate, inaccessible and improbable, but which insists and remains open through works.

A work [oeuvre] is the spatialization of a time that never ends, and this is what presents itself to sensitivity through works of art. Such a time is the fruit of a social sculpture in precisely this sense — accessible to everyone because, in one way or another, everyone is a sculptor or a cultivator. If, for example, a work affects you, or if the speech I am making right now affects you, it will have effects. And these effects will be reflected in reality by an exosomatic expression, in one way or another, on your part, that is, by an inscription in the space of time that will be formed in you as new retentions and protentions, which you spatialize in your turn, whether in words or in works.

This affection by works, however, is what was radically thrown into disuse [désaffecté] when the culture industries appeared, by depriving consumers of their capacities for psychic and collective individuation, that is, of their knowledge of how to live together by collectively sculpting and cultivating their social time and social space — and where this occurred after the proletarianization engendered by machinism had already deprived workers of their work-knowledge, their knowledge of how to make and do things, that is, of the retentions and protentions associated with their crafts, trades and skills, which were instead transformed into mechanical tertiary retentions.

 

Translated by Daniel Ross

 

[1] Translator’s note: This might also be translated as ‘their eye will yield’, as it is in Bernard Stiegler, ‘The Tongue of the Eye: What “Art History” Means’, trans. Thangam Ravindranathan with Bernard Geoghegan, in Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (eds), Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 231. Cf., Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 2: The Katastrophē of the Sensible, trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), p. 154.

[2] Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay on Cosmotechnics (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016).
[3] Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, with A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

[4] Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 
[5] Alfred J. Lotka, ‘The Law of Evolution as a Maximal Principle’, Human Biology 17:3 (1945), pp. 167—94.
[6] This is the date of publication of William J. Ripple et al., ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice’, BioScience 67 (December 2017), pp. 1026-28, available at <https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/67/12/1026/4605229#100528775>.
[7] Translator’s note: See also Bernard Stiegler, ‘The Proletarianization of Sensibility’, Boundary 2 44 (2017), pp. 5-18.