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Pond-skater Race
// Sergey Khachaturov, Vremya Novostey
24 november 2006
The conference titled Creating Thinking World s organized by Joseph Backstein, the Commissioner of the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, in cooperation with his co-curator Daniel Birnbaum and the Interros Publishing Program provided a theoretical platform for the event. The conference was a sort of a brainstorm to deal with the theme of the Biennale: FOOTNOTES on Geopolitics, Market, and Amnesia, sophisticated and unstructured for the mentality of art public.
The conference gathered the best representatives of the Russian and Western Post-Classical and political philosophy, such as Chantal Mouffe, Bernard Stiegler, Valery Podoroga, Jacques Rancière, Saskia Sassen, Mikhail Ryklin, Boris Kagarlitsky. Quite expectedly, the main polemic developed around the space and borders of contemporary philosophy. Reports presented at the conference covered the themes of Philosophy and Formation of Notions; Universality, Cause, Accidence; The Borders of Aesthetics .The leftist discourse of post-structuralist philosophic tradition promoted by such famous ideologists as Derrida, Deleuze, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Girard, Simondon was the guiding star of the dispute. The French tradition of contemporary humanitarian thought and linguistic criticism ruled the ball. It is funny, but listening to reports delivered by respectable philosophers (politologists, culturologists, sociologists), I suddenly thought of the main and most charming characteristic of French culture, its ability to test the tension of the surface of Being.
Neo-Marxist ideas in some direct or indirect way flickered in the reports of Bernard Stiegler, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, Mikhail Ryklin. Bernard Stiegler’s report dealt with the concept of “individuation” adopted by sociologist Gilbert Simondon. Individuation differs from individualization in the fact that it stores the memory of universal, generic abilities of the human being which have not become individual. It is the potential for the existence of language without private speech. Simondon and Stiegler believe that individuation helps prevent the consumption of the individual by the collective. “It is precisely the conflict with the collectivity that helps to chisel out the singular, to bring individuation to its potential limit. Unlike the centripetal collectivity of the “people”, the collectivity of sets means a higher level of individuation making it impossible to transfer the authority to the sovereign (the state)”. Jacques Rancière reported how the Marxist concept of the universal commodity operates in the contemporary world explaining its horrors and evils. The consumption society has long appropriated the most radical methods of fighting itself, including the leftist discourse proper. “The protest against commodities is modeled as the sale of commodities.” Artists also received their portion of dirt slinging: the universality of protest is absorbed by the idea of the universality of commodity, involving, besides other things, the sphere of art. Rancière applied a new notion of “democratic terrorism” to the contemporary world: there is no freedom, but there are the freedom and the rights of the consumer.
Chantal Mouffe defended her project of “radical democracy” based on the recognition of the inherent gap, of the antagonism of the social, impossibility of symbolization, of making this notion total. This must result in the recognition of the insolubility of conflicts with the only conclusion being that tolerance in respect to opponents is necessary. Mikhail Ryklin spoke of the problematic characteristics of the most important property of actual art, of its “eventfulness”. Eventful performances staged by politicians and broadcast by mass-media (here one couldn’t but remember The Society of Spectacle of Guy Debord, a French Marxist, where the performance is directed and monitored by the system of commodity consumption) outpace the eventfulness of intellectual artistic actions in their effect upon the viewer (quite often inhuman, criminal and cynical, but extremely powerful and full of passion).
So I listened to the stars of leftist discourse, and suddenly pond-skaters came to my mind. These wonderful insects race over water like over the ground testing the strength of the surface tension of the universe with their amazingly accurate balance of forces. The French aesthetical thought had long measured the surface tension of the universe. Take the structure of Gothic cathedrals with their ribs of paws that disembody solidity and affirm the energy of the touch. The same refers to Neo-Classical philosophic tradition. Gliding over various doctrines, the thought measures the extent of their surface, checking on the way for cuts, cracks, holes, faulty constructions and garbage layers. Both Deleuze and Derrida wrote about the primary importance of the surface in the topology of the universe. Derrida eliminated the borderline between the surface and the depth. Deleuze claimed that any science moves but along the curtain, along the borderline. Simondon believed that living beings live at the borders of themselves, at their own borders; the poles of life exist at the level of the membrane: “The content of internal space is in topological contact with the content of external space at the borders of the living” (L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, 1964).
So the conference unraveled the most sophisticated and masterly surface tension of existing numerous philosophic, economic, sociological, linguistic paradigms in the attempt to measure this very semiotic velum which is going to cover the space of the Second Moscow Biennale soon. The great pond-skaters have done what they had to do, but some representatives of the Russian art community were confused. The reason for it was perhaps in the fact that Russians are not accustomed to the study of the surface tension of philosophical particles of the universe, they are used to “getting at the roots” of things and speaking “to the point”, to the Biennale budget, for instance.
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