Circulation and Creation - SO CLOSE, TRY AGAIN
Circulation and Creation
Art has moved past representation, desires now overwhelm it to the point of action. No longer is art “about” politics, it envelops the living world. Every piece, every gallery, every aesthetic movement carries within it a potential to infest capital, to disarrange it from the moment of its creation. The artists believe they are fabricating an image, a space, a performance, wholly unaware of their creations abilities as sigils. They have become a conduit of sigils, existing long before they were ever dreamt, written through their bodies. Like the transmutative steps of the alchemists, the artwork is a desiring production apparatus, channeling the collective libido of the left into a future that has no right to exist, but wills itself into reality nonetheless.
The artworks must break free from regimes of recognition, muscles twitch not at the call of a slogan but at the sight of a color that burns with passion, a space that refuses any functionality laid for it. This is not commodity, it is rupture, a wasteful expenditure, useless and catastrophic because it creates nothing but impossibility of return. All this goes to say that this art of hyperstition is dangerous, it cares nothing for intention. Channeling a collective libido is awakening a flow that can spiral out of the control of the individual and the group, slipping back into capitalist capture or erupting into an excess of itself which burns its own makers. The artist doesn’t create a revolution, nor do they conduct the orchestra which plays over the sounds of war, but without knowing they may build the engines. Whether those engines implode or overtake is not up to the artist.
But sadly this is not the case, this logic risks mistaking creation with existence. These thoughts have the confusion that wraps up the intentions of the contemporary left, blending art and politics into a thing between production and prophetic scripture. It is driven to life by a desired urgency that dreams of collapsing the aesthetic and the militant into one indistinct machine. But we must remember that the event does not arise from the thought. It is not enough to release a machine who we hope will exceed its makers, the event requires subjects who will sustain it, who will continuously construct it across time for it to endure.
What I called a sigil operates not as an act of force but as a situation, it remains trapped in the field it was designed to escape. Infectious transmission, desiring production, libidinal currents, all cross back and forth as vectors across capitalist spectacle but stop short of cutting it into the jagged pieces which can be reconstructed into the material reality which we wish for. This hopeful logic is that of the simulacrum, not of the event. This is the weakness which we must face, the conflation of the circulation of signs with a rupture in being.
Art is a procedure of truth, but not a process for truth. Its task is not to produce effects but to bear witness, to exist with, the truths that are universal, beyond market and spectacle. The critical obsession with disappearance, contagion, excess, is a temptation to abandon truth for intensity, it substitutes the discipline of the subject for a frenzied desire.
But what of politics? It is too often thought that revolutionary becoming can emerge from aesthetic excess, from a patch of grass that has grown wildly in an overgrown lot, but this is a dangerous fantasy. The political event we hope for requires organized lucidity, a militant subject who can construct a truth through time, not only across it. The hyperstitional art in leftist mythology lacks fidelity, it becomes phenomena, a swarm of love, beautiful and full of meaning but directionless, incapable of sustaining truth. It offers an appearance of rupture without the labor of transformation.
This is not to dismiss the desire of a new art, it will always be admirable, often taking a grip around the heart in its refusal of representation in the demand that it intervene in the real. There is beautiful dissatisfaction in the stasis of our world. For centuries art has been captured by capital, reduced to luxury objects for the aristocracy, to social fodder for the cultural industries. To insist that art can intervene in reality, that it can produce autonomous effects and create futures is taking a claim to its emancipatory potential. But it must be ensured that it distinguishes between the circulation of intensity and the creation of truth. One is what the world already knows, the latter is what art must propose.
To make leftist art is not to predict or simulate revolution, it is to testify to the possibility, to give shape to that which as of yet has not had a place in this world. In this proposed work lies the real hyperstition, not the infection of reality by fiction, but the manifestation of what reality deems impossible, the truth of emancipation. Art does not create the future, it makes the future possible.