In a rather mediocre film from the early 00’s, Kevin Spacey’s character, an American university professor lecturing freshmen, states: “You get Lacan’s point? Fantasies have to be unrealistic, because the moment, the second you get what you seek, you don’t, you can’t want it anymore. In order to continue to exist desire must have its objects perpetually absent.”
Desire associates, through Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis in general, with lack. An unfortunate relation as it implicitly proposes that you can only want something that can be identified, which means that desire consolidates the world as we know it. Desire from this point of view is normative, and in addition, the perspective is excellently compatible with modern day capitalism, or perhaps psychoanalyses created the perfect conditions for societies based on supply, demand, production and consumption?
Related to work, domestic labour and general maintenance of society, for Freud desire is understood as an anomaly, a disturbance or bump in the road that the individual is assumed to deal with efficiently and swiftly get back to work.
Others have argued against lack and instead proposed that desire is a form of, although soft, machine that generates forms of change. Desire as productive imbalance or rhythmic irregularity that most of the time is resolved through conventional means but at times end up producing breaches, collapses of the symbolic order and forces a re-articulation of reality and the world. Lack oriented articulations of desire are at the end of the day a concern about property and ownership, whereas desiring machines implies that making oneself available for desire equals becoming vulnerable, putting oneself at risk. The dynamics of psychoanalyses identifies desire as private and engaging with it as acts of privatisation. Desire understood as a machine instead are engagements with becoming public, or common, thus encounters with desire unsettle the subject, making it a productive availability that offers or forces the individual to generate a decision instead of simply making a choice between accessible alternatives.
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A girlfriend once told me that she just wanted to care for me. Chatting away on the couch of my psychoanalyst years later I realised that that was the moment I left her.
One can generally speaking identify two forms of care. Care for something or somebody; directional care is crucial to conduct and share life but in being directional it cannot not be charged with value, expectation, debt, gratitude etc. In short, conventional forms of care although given with heart and soul are always an actual or symbolic economic form of exchange. Care’s relationship to desire is evidently complex, in particular relating to lack alternatively being unsettled.
A different form of care has by the philosopher Karen Barad been named indifferent care. It’s care “given” for no reason, without expectations or other investments, the problem is just that it’s a kind of care that cannot be practised in societies grounded on a capitalist mindset, Christian theology, private property and so on.
“We can try, maybe it can be a little indifferent,” but no and a little bit of indifference is certainly not an option. So why if impossible is indifferent care important? Because it doesn’t determine an outcome, it doesn’t support or dismiss anything, which is how its outcome is contingent on its practice, contingent also, according to Barad, to the individual being cared for. Conventional, direction care is not farfetched to align with lack. Many forms of care suggest catering for the needs, wishes and desire of the cared for, which when exaggerated can result in apathy. Indifferent care instead opens up for desire as generative, as a machine that can be engaged partially because of the “safe” space offered through care.
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is not using the notion of indifference but indicates similar strategies. Whatever, he argues has not always signified a lack of care, indifference in the negative sense, “as if could care,” but did in the Roman tradition rather imply whatever it is is always of importance. Referring to love, Agamben proposes that although you might not agree, to love means whatever it is is always of importance. Whatever or indifference equals the absence or suspense of judgement, value, expectations, payback or debt in favour of being attentive to whatever it is. We must just not forget that this form of attention is incredibly demanding and makes the person particularly vulnerable. Love implicitly is a deliberate engagement in making oneself weak.
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Repetition is ordinarily understood as a means of perfecting something. The familiar: after decades of devoted practice the artist managed in one brush stroke to capture the rooster’s essence. An almost Confucian attitude suggesting that fulfilment or perfection is verified to on the basis of established regulations, and hence conceive of essence as a stability, coagulation or permanence.
In regard to so called conceptual repetition the concept, in this case the rooster, remains identical and each drawing differs only in degree, hence they can be compared and considered for example in respect of level of success. This kind of repetition is a reiteration of the identical, however, what happens when repetition is situated instead at the level of the existent? When what is repeated is not the same but something different, this rooster, that rooster, another rooster, some rooster etc., thus moving not in the direction of essence but particularity. Here, comparison is not excluded but rather than forming a kind of statistics what occurs is how comparison or value is always violent. Instead of considering repetition in regard to fine-tuning, perfection or essence, non-conceptual repetition proposes a strategic, however indifferent, departure from judgement, consistent with Agamben’s whatever, Barad’s indifference and a post-Freudian comprehension of desire, desire as an apparatus generating indetermination.
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The imaginary of the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s assumes that people had a lot of sex all the time. The narrative created regarding free or liberated sex appears in hindsight naïve and to predominantly reflect quantitative levels. A more rigorous consideration would be not just to take “advantage” of a novel liberty, so to say more of the same, but instead examine both the sex and free part with the possible result that free doesn’t necessarily mean more but differently, even contingently different. It’s not the “user” that needs to be freed, it’s sex and how sex is political and practised in relation to power, institutionality and accountability that must be reconsidered and possibly freed.
Freedom from and freedom to, all good but it’s still free in respect to something, for example some kind of lack. Perhaps it’s needed, in relation to desire, care and artistic practice to examine freedom not in the direction of “right” but instead as a zone in and during which conditions are suspended.
Contemporary popular ecology is often suffering from a similar naïve narration. Not only will humanity fix it but without considering how we are humans and inhabit the planet. It’s the world that’s supposed to be saved, our world, not the earth, and the planet is rarely taken into account. Humans without further questions entitle themselves to be in charge seemingly having no problems with the possibility that there are creatures and other capacities on the planet that have no interest in saving the world as we know it, but are happy to move to the next level. And from the perspective of the planet humanity might not even be worth mentioning considering the bigger picture. Zoom out and humanity is nothing more than a mishap, a moment’s irritation like when you for an instant hesitate before recalling your password.
It’s evident that no other species, in fact nothing else, has managed to out-strengthen nature and tip the balances of our planet, or the powers labouring on the crust of Terra Firma. So, although quite uncomfortable, the first thing to fix is not the planet or earth but humanity. The problem is that humanity cannot transform in any prominent way through conventional tools because as much as we made the tools, the tools also made us, and one of those tools is imagination. The worlds and conditions humanity can imagine might be weird, scary or utopian, but they are still and cannot otherwise than be constructed in regard to the mindset of our presence.
Politics, argues the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, first and foremost is the maintenance of the police, our society. Right or left wing is different but in principle, the job is to sustain and enhance living conditions. Politics’ first responsibility is not to generate change but to keep up and household with what we have, but does that not also mean that politics is powerless in respect to transforming in any prominent way our relation to the world, the earth and the planet, even to ourselves? If politics primarily is a matter of managing and protecting it also means concerning the subject. In conclusion, politics consolidates how humanity relates to the world.
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No art whatsoever escapes being co-opted by capitalism. There’s no way out since omnipresent global market economy simply is the foundation of experience, value, exchange and participation. But, what if in parallel art also is a machine with which the viewer, reader or listener engages and is entangled with? The art machine, however, is not a conventional machine such as toasters, toothbrushes, a forklift, map or search engine, because contrary to other machines the artwork/machine has no purpose except being and performing artwork. Its objective is not to implode meaning into an abstract void of empty signifiers, but the concern of intention concerning an artwork degrades it to the futile task of fulfilling a function instead of being an open-ended exploration. It transforms the artwork into a design object, and it would be ridiculous, although not unusual, to critique an artwork for how effectively it concluded its function or to consider its reliability. Artwork/machines bypass probability, the likelihood of something’s occurrence, in favour of contingent outcome, which cannot be considered a result but implies the possibility of the emergence of something previously unthinkable. Contingent outcome and the art machine introduce a realm that’s beyond although not excluding what is possible and impossible, in other words, what can be identified and sanctions potentiality.
Commensurate, the difference between the production of another one, another ballpen or even a new iPhone (after all it’s just another phone) and bringing something into the world, the production of something altogether otherwise. A complex consequence for good and bad, the price to pay, is that the artwork/machine cannot control what emerges, and even more interestingly neither the artist nor the viewer can know what the outcome indicates, signifies or simply what it is. A discrepancy opens between appearance and what it is, or the artwork is a smokescreen or pathway into engaging with the machine.
Under those terms the artwork/machine does not equal, at least not only, forms of representations of the world, mimesis, imitation, metaphor, symbol etc., but grants art the capacity of making or even creating worlds, small, big and overwhelming. In parenthesis, albeit significant, the artwork/machine doesn’t only generate contingent outcomes but is also contingent to itself, ensuring that each engagement is singular, and that contingency doesn’t coagulate into probable outcome.
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It’s conventional to distinguish between two forms of forgiveness. Certain things are already and others cannot under any circumstances be forgiven. You miss out on opening the door for somebody and the apology is accepted before you open your mouth. There are also occurrences that must not be forgiven, because, as we know, to forgive is to forget. Genocide is a used example but unforgiveables are not about size but irreversibility. Importantly, they have nothing to do with payback or revenge, nor with the insurance of not forgetting but about insisting on keeping something open, of not transforming the act into a thing or object but insisting on keeping it open, a happening, a form of machine.
Without comparison perhaps there are also two kinds of kisses. The ones on the cheek or when departing from a lover, partner or spouse, all those whose meaning is already established before, during and after they are executed. They are deliberate, nice, confirming, largely without consequences, alas they operate within the realm of the probable. Then there are those rare ones, really rare, the ones to which the outcome is contingent, those that take place a millisecond after surrendering oneself to the possibility of absolute irreversibility, of being totally blown away, catapulted to another world or, simply, getting genuinely fucking lost.
At that moment the kiss is not a thing but a machine producing the future. Not a future that relies on lived experience, not a projection of the past into what is to come, but a future without conditions. And mind you, this form of being lost isn’t like being lost in a city, forest or desert, it’s being lost in regard to oneself, self-referentially lost.
