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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Theory Redux
- Sprache: Englisch
Modern history is a history of aesthetizations - and every aesthetization raises a claim of protection. We aestheticize and want to protect almost everything, including Earth, oceans, the atmosphere, rare animal species and exotic plants. Humans are no exception. They also present themselves as objects of contemplation that deserve admiration and care. For some time, artists and intellectuals struggled for the sovereign right to present themselves to society in their own way - to become self-created works of art. Today everybody has not only a right but also an obligation to practice self-design. We are responsible for the way we present ourselves to others - and we cannot get rid of this aesthetic responsibility. However, we are not able to produce our own bodies. Before we begin to practice self-design, we find ourselves already designed by the gaze of others. That is why the practice of self-design mostly takes a critical and confrontational turn. We want to bring others to see us in the way we want to be seen - not only during our earthly life but also after our death. This is a complicated struggle, and the aim of this book is to describe and analyze it.
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Seitenzahl: 123
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
1
Notes
2
Notes
3
Notes
4
Notes
5
Notes
6
Notes
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Notes
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Notes
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Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
Pages
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Theory Redux
Series editor: Laurent de Sutter
Mark Alizart, Cryptocommunism
Armen Avanessian, Future Metaphysics
Franco Berardi, The Second Coming
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld
Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things
Boris Groys, Becoming an Artwork
Graham Harman, Immaterialism
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism
Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love
Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction
Eloy Fernández Porta, Nomography
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics
Becoming an Artwork
Boris Groys
polity
Copyright © Boris Groys 2023
The right of Boris Groys to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5198-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935232
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
1
Our culture is often described as narcissistic. And often enough narcissism is understood as total concentration on oneself, and lack of interest in others, in society. However, the mythological Narcissus is not interested in the pursuit of his desires or contemplation of his inner visions but in the image that he offers to the world. And the image of our bodies is external to us. We cannot see our own face or our body in its entirety. Our image belongs to others, to the society in which we live. The moment Narcissus looks into the lake, he joins society, rejects his own “subjective” perspective – and for the first time looks at himself from the outside position, sees himself as others see him. Narcissus is enchanted by his own image as an “objective” image that is produced by Nature and is equally accessible to everybody.
Narcissism means understanding one’s own body as an object, as a thing in the world – similar to every other thing. In our post-religious, secular epoch, humans are no longer considered to be containers filled by spirit, reason, or soul, but as living bodies. But one can speak about a body in at least two different ways. The body can be understood as living flesh that manifests itself through different kinds of desire: hunger, thirst, sexual desire, “cosmic feeling,” etc. Here, the difference between spirit and flesh, or thinking and desire, is not so big as it often seems to be. In the first case, one experiences evidence by solving mathematical problems; in the second case, one experiences the intensity of desire. But in both cases, one remains within the “inner world” of subjective feelings and thoughts.
The body can be discovered, though, not merely “from within” through the desires of the flesh, but also from the external, social, public perspective. From this external perspective, life does not manifest itself in the body as energy or desire, but is established by means of medical examination. The narcissistic desire is desire to appropriate this public perspective on one’s own body – to look at oneself through the gaze of others. Or, in other words, it is a desire to bridge the gap between the inner experience of the body as living flesh and the public view of the same body as a particular thing, an object in the world.
In our culture, the objectivation of the body by the gaze of others has a bad reputation because the object seems to take a lower position in the value hierarchy compared to the subject. That is why Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that Hell is other people – their gaze makes us mere objects. The object is mostly understood as a tool; the objectification of humans means subjecting them to use by others as tools. However, Narcissus does not offer himself up for any use – including the sexual one. Thus, he rejects the seduction by nymph Echo. His “no” means “no,” indeed – and the poor nymph loses her body as a result of disappointment. The image of Narcissus in the lake also cannot be used in any way. It can only be looked at. And Narcissus himself becomes identical to his reflection. One can say that Narcissus’ “inner world” becomes a lake – thoughtless, desireless, quiet. There is nothing hidden behind Narcissus’ face: you see what you see. Narcissus sacrificed his inner world for his external image, which is accessible to everybody. At the moment at which Narcissus saw his image in the lake, he rejected all worldly seductions and all the chances and rewards of practical life in favor of pure contemplation. In this respect, the difference between narcissistic contemplation of one’s own image and Platonic contemplation of the eternal light of the Good is not so big.
However, there is also a difference between these two scenes of contemplation. In the parabola of the cave, Plato describes a philosopher who leaves the cave of human society and contemplates the eternal light alone, unseen by others. On the contrary, Narcissus immerses himself in contemplation of his image in the middle of nature – potentially visible to others. Narcissus is like a living dead – still living but already dead, turning himself into an image, reduced to a pure form. That does not mean that Narcissus chose death over life. He contemplates his reflection in the lake in a state of self-oblivion that no longer differentiates between life and death. Narcissus does not want death – but nor does he want to prevent its coming. Narcissism is the opposite of self-preservation, of self-care. It produces the body as undead form that exists only in the public eye.
In his essay about the mirror stage, Jacques Lacan describes the encounter of a child with its image in the mirror as a pre-social event, “in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before the language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.”1 Communication with others begins, according to Lacan, with language. However, this understanding of the self-image as pre-social and pre-communicative is an effect of the specific regime of communication that dominated before the emergence of contemporary visual culture and, especially, the Internet. Today, children can make and distribute their selfies before they begin to speak. There are two possible reactions to these selfies that are expected from the public: liking or disliking.
Narcissus’ image in the lake is an early form of selfie. Having been a member of the Greek cultural community, Narcissus obviously knew that he shared with other Greeks the same aesthetic taste. We are unable to like ourselves unless we assume that we are liked by the society in which we live. But does it mean that Narcissus was liked by Greek society and by himself because he had this particular body or, to quote Lacan, this particular I ? Not at all. He was liked because he was beautiful. But being beautiful is not a specific individual or even human characteristic. Beauty is transhuman. Not accidentally, after his death Narcissus was reborn as a flower. A flower has a different chemical and biological structure than a human body. The only common trait that allows us to compare Narcissus and a flower is that both are beautiful. And being beautiful means being a pure form, being not subjected to any suspicion concerning a dark, invisible space behind this form – not having any I.
Indeed, human bodies serve the goal of recognition and identification of humans in the public space, and also as coverage and protection of their “inner world” of desires, thoughts, and plans from the gaze of others. The human body creates a dark space of flesh isolated from the space of public visibility and identification. For society, this dark space becomes an object of suspicion and anxiety. It is what we call “soul,” or “subjectivity.” Subjectivity is nothing but a possibility to conceal and to lie. Looking at our face, others cannot “read it” with certainty, cannot be sure that it manifests our thoughts and emotions. Every face is, to a certain degree, a poker face. Others do not have immediate access to what we think, how we feel – and that puts extremely uncomfortable social pressure on us. We are expected to explain ourselves, but the process of self-explanation has no end. In a very spectacular manner, Narcissus sacrificed his interests and desires to become a pure form beyond suspicion – to empty this form from any “content,” from the soul, from the dark “inner world.” Narcissus bridges the gap between his flesh and his public form not only by contemplating the reflection of his body that is equally accessible to everybody, but also by demonstrating ascetic concentration on this process of contemplation. The spectator cannot any more assume that there is a lie, conspiracy, strategy, and calculation hidden behind the surface of a body. The ecstatic body of contemplation offers an image of a totally socialized, “delivered,” defenseless Self.
In the Christian tradition, this act of self-emptying is called kenosis. The perfect image of kenosis is the image of Christ on the cross. Here Christ becomes a pure image because we believe that He has emptied himself of all “subjective” desires and interests. Now, how can we differentiate between Christ and Narcissus? How can we differentiate between sacrifice in the name of total self-socialization and sacrifice in the name of self-divinization? The human gaze cannot see this difference – only the divine one. But if God is dead, only the desire of admiration by others, by society, remains. Both Christ and Narcissus became superstars. In the past when we have spoken about the Other, we meant God or maybe Satan because they had an ability to see through our bodies and identify our souls as righteous or sinful. But now the Other became others – the society that sees only our bodies and not our souls. The ethical attitude is substituted by the aesthetic and the erotic. Society is interested not in our souls but in our public image. Our civilization is, indeed, narcissistic because it only values kenosis in the name of the public image – of public recognition and admiration.
In his course of lectures given at l’École des hautes études in Paris from 1933 to 1939, under the title Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève speaks about the desire for admiration by others as anthropogenic desire; owing to this desire, humans become humans. According to Kojève, we can speak of desire of the first and the second order. First-order desire signals to us our existence in the world. It is quite a reversal of the standard understanding of the word “desire.” Usually, desire is interpreted as leading to attachment to things of this world. That is why, since Plato, philosophy and religion have tried to isolate the human soul from corporeal desires and direct it toward the contemplation of eternal ideas or God. However, today we are attached to the world not primarily through desires but through science. Modern contemplation is scientific contemplation of the world and everyday contemplation of the media – and not of an Idea or God. For us, it is therefore not the rejection of desires that opens the way to self-consciousness, but, on the contrary, the emergence of desires. Kojève writes:
The man who contemplates is “absorbed” by what he contemplates; the “knowing subject” “loses” himself in the object that is known … The man who is “absorbed” by the object that he is contemplating can be “brought back to himself” only by a Desire; by the desire to eat, for example … The (human) I is the I of … Desire.2
Desire turns one from contemplation to action. This action is always “negation.” The I of Desire is emptiness that consumes, negates, and destroys everything “external,” “given”: to satisfy hunger, one consumes food; to satisfy thirst, one consumes water.
