The art of critique in the age of precarious sensibility

Our task is to investigate how ultimately corruption can be forced to cede its control to generation

Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

In a lecture hold in 1978, Michel Foucault addresses the question of critique as follows:

“Critique is the movement by which the subject grasps the right to question truth in relation to the power it gives rise to, and power in relation to the discursive creation of truth. From this point of view, critique becomes the art of deliberate escape from servitude, of reflected non-conformability. In the realm of the game which can be described as the politics of truth, critique would thus function as an act of desubordination.” [1] [1]

In the contemporary biopolitical realm we have to face the question if the subject, as well as the collective brain, still has the capability to perform the illuministic gesture of cognitively extrapolating truth from an intricate dimension of biopolitical power. Would this move still have any effect in this late stage of corruption we are traversing? The devastating news of the last weeks have painfully brought to light the open surface of decay, the wide wounds tearing apart the collective skin. However, what are its invisible capillary mechanisms spreading through the social body at a cellular and molecular level? How is it possible to grasp the multiple defragmentations which are in act, the imperceptible mechanisms shattering the channels of perception? What are the deep cuts dissecting the emotional from the cognitive sphere, which the grids of our cognitive understanding are not able to grasp? How can the idea of truth as depicted by Foucault be conceived, if our language has been transformed into a frantic self perpetuating machine, void of any relation to the field of forces de facto governing our existences? And finally, which are the directive trajectories enabling us to experience de-subordination, to bring us back towards an empowering state of performative critique?

This is a complex set of questions which cannot be reached by loud, rational and belligerant gestures, but is better addressed through careful, subtle and emphatic processes of mutual encounter. By reconnecting sparse fragments of cognitive and emotional material, it might be possible to set in action a molecular transformation of the actual, corrupt and reactive state towards new forms of generative affirmation.

That is, more than concentrating our attention on Foucault's conception of truth, the challenge would be to think truth with Foucault, that is to undergo, on the basis of our singular and collective experiential realm, the process that the philosopher himself has performed. This movement would consist into affirming the experience of the self in terms of its symptomatic and transformative condition. It would result into an analytical process of crisis and modification, a continuous and persistent practice of tearing the (social) body from itself and transforming contemporary sensibility in its deep roots [2] [2]. If the present realm is demarcated by complex and multilayered patterns of skizoid cuts operating between the perceptual and the cognitive, the organic and the rational, the medium and the message, the political question of truth cannot be posed solely in terms of a geneaological analysis of its discursive creation. Instead, the generative conditions of truth have to be examined by grasping the deepness of the dissections traversing society, by clinically reconnecting scattered experiences, sensations, flows and concepts towards a process of collective recomposition.

I start by outlining a brief and fragmentary attempt.

      1. Diagnosis: blockade of perceptual membranes

In his novel The Cristal World, James Ballard has provided a strong image of living conditions being kept frozen by the voracious assault of an ongoing crystallization. The life of a whole forest is immobilized, blocked by sparkles of distorted beauty. Time passes by, while life is immobile. Endlessly, without any change. It is only the crystallized surface which is in continuous dreary expansion.

Dragged by a vortex in constant acceleration, contemporary society seems to move to the opposite end of the scale than the immobility of Ballard's forest. But this form of hyper-velocity actually prevents the creative formation of any idea which is not repetition of the same, the genesis of a relation deeper than standardized patterns of communication, the onset of an affect stronger than shallow emotions.

The opposites of zero- and hypervelocity meet up in the collective brain, as a sort of limit point. In both cases – the absolute calmness or the ongoing repeated hyperactivity - the electroencephalogram registers an average flat pattern of white noise. This is the double side of depression. Time floats in in an endless linear way or is capsuled in a vortex of entropic waste. In both scenarios any sort of event is made impossible, any possibility of becoming is censured.

      2. Process: tearing apart

Ballard`s book describes one person who reluctantly experiences the painful process of escaping the immobility of the expanding forest. It is Radek, a military colonel who, after having been affected by the process of crystallization, gets discovered and dragged into water in the desperate attempt to dissolve the crystals which enclose him. A latter glimpse on his status shows his body as transfigured, torn, imprisoned in a painful condition between death and life.

The attempt to dissolve the patina of blockade goes along with a process of beginning to feel the bodily holes which the parasitic crystals have produced. Becoming aware of breaches in the inner organs, sensing multiple scars on the skin. When the world impinges again onto the nude complexion, an aching and fearful estrangement permeates the body. Conglomerations of void fill visceral and soul cavities. And while the body experiences disintegration, it craves for an other form of shelter, less hard and aggressive than the former impermeable patina. The desire for a soft membrane allowing for transpiration, for a tender exchange, starts to penetrate in the capillaries of the soul. Novel reconnections emerge in a germinal state.

      3. Re-composition in the collective

There is no way out in Ballard's book. The crystal forest expands quickly onto a planetary dimension. While the physical process grows entropically, human souls become pathologically attracted towards the cold stiffness. How is it then possible to escape the inevitable, if the entropic forces of destruction are not only propagating in nature, but occupy remote psychic corners as well?

The disintegration of the sharp and angular envelope delimiting the borders of the body, has left loose molecules. Open valencies which are not anymore fitting within the organic structure of a pre-constituted and pre-determined anatomy. Material fragments in search of new patterns of aggregation. Synapses getting shaped outside of standardized patterns, in the empty leftover space. Extension which cannot be grasped by the common dispositives of solidification and standardization.

It is in the abandoned realm of nowhere, that sudden flashes of now-here, aggregations of an other form of life, are capable to appear.

Back to the question: What is critique?

There is a subtle force traversing the scattered language void of emotional content, the fragmented feelings which, detached from the cognitive headquarters, are virally spreading all over. It is the ability to generate new energetic patterns, produce micro aggregates of emotional matter which haven't existed before. No voice is arising from there yet, but a different way of collective feeling is getting constituted. Novel gestures, different perceptions of otherness. It is in this altered affective plane, that broken fragments of a new language are formed. It is through such a development that escape from servitude might be experienced. It is there where an other kind of truth, a truth from the outside, can be finally spoken out, firmly and affirmatively. A truth whose generative force does not lie in discourse, but into a reconfiguration of the deep spheres of organic matter and collective sensibility.

Notes

[1] Michel Foucault, “Was ist Kritik?” Berlin: Merve 1992, 15 (my translation)

[2] See Michel Foucault, “Remarks on Marx, Conversations with Duccio Trombadori”. Translated by J. Goldstein and J. Cascaito, New York: Semiotext(e) 1991, 27- 42.