From the upcoming AU discussion -- with enhancements regarding
openness (which, per Negarastani, domesticates -- it's merely a form of soft dogma!?) vs. closure
(which turns itself into a good meal).
"Why has the concept of contingency taken on a marked importance both in contemporary philosophy
and in contemporary art practice? And if
this simultaneity derives from parallel problems met with in the two
different fields, what are their common roots?
At its simplest
'contingency' refers to the attempt to think events that take place
but need not take place: events that could be, or could have been, otherwise.
Why does such an apparently simple concept lead us into a rich new
vein of speculative thought?" (R
Mackay)
The Medium
of Contingency was published by Urbanomic in 2011
around an art exhibition and discussion that occurred at the Thomas Dane
Gallery in London. The exhibition was organized by Miguel
Abreu Gallery and Urbanomic.
TMC
includes four short talks and a discussion that engages political economics,
philosophy and artistic production. Video here.
____
I find Negarestani's notion of
closure particularly provocative. Emphasis added below.
Complicity exhibits this necessary shift from the inhibitive role of
commonalities to the role of closure as a focused engagement with contingency,
its intrusions, twists and suspensions. Whilst openness domesticates the thought
of contingency through affordable
states of interaction, commonalities and other forms of soft dogma, closure, on the other hand,
turns itself into a 'good meal' or
a 'genuine prey' for the real expression of contingency and its unrestricted
play: the more closed a work, the more radically it is subjected to the
interventions of its contingent materials, the wider it is broadened and
butchered opened to the outside. Therefore, we can say that closure realises
openness in its radical sense: not as openness toward the possibility of contingencies
from the outside, but as a 'being opened' by the contingent materials that form
the work. This is why complicity is a twisted form of embracing contingency,
because it has an inverse mechanism: through closure, complicity seeks to twist
the soft dogma of 'openness toward contingent materials' into a 'being-opened
by contingent materials'.
...
Complicity reformulates the
rigorous closure of the work as a narrative plot where contingent events
unfold, where unpredictable twists take shape and where the work becomes the
subject of experimentation of its own materials. It is essential for the artist
to see the artistic production as a conspiracy of contingent influences; as the
work proceeds toward completion and coherency, the plot thickens. In this
conspiracy, the plot twist is that so-called 'creative
openness' turns out to have been a distraction all along: the closure of the work is the only way
to participate with and uncover the conspiracy of contingent materials, by
luring the forces of contingency to play their weirdest games, and in doing so,
to reveal themselves. To this end, when it comes to the thought of contingency, the artist must recognise herself
as the conspiracy theorist of her materials. But we must first realise that
the work of contingency is neither horrific nor suspenseful; it is subtly
twisted. In thinking the conspiracy of contingent materials, one can think of a
continuum where everyday superficiality, horror, reason, comedy, suspense and
seamless uneventfulness are all fuzzy gradients of the same contingent universe
that might be brought in and out of focus without respect to any necessity
whatsoever.
____
Introduction
by Robin Mackay. Reza Negarestani: Contingency and Complicity.
Elie Ayache: In the Middle of the Event. Matthew
Poole: Art, Human Capital & The Medium of Contingency.
MORE
Selected text from Robin Mackay's introduction:
"...contingency
cannot be thought through neo-romantic concepts of openness, chance, and
process: it demands instead a special sort of discipline. As Reza Negarestani
argues ...this practice must dissolve certain cliches that have crystallised
around the artistic engagement with contingency. We always risk relapsing
onto models that fail before contingency: models that return us to the
metaphysics of chance and calculation; or which re-affirm the privilege of
meaning-making over material contingencies. Negarestani... asks what sort of
rigorous conceptual preparation is necessary in order to make one's work - or
oneself - a 'good meal' for these anonymous [contingent] materials.
"Ayache argues
that we must rethink our image of the market by understanding that, in
practice, traders do not calculate price on the basis of probabilistic tools,
but directly and effectively wnte price as the contingent reality of the
market, now. The market is therefore not a set of probabilities, but the very
medium of contingency. ... Its events are effective without prevision or
reason."
Ayache compares the
act of writing options contracts with literary creation, as a material
inscription of difference directly in the real, creating a future that is in
principle unforeseeable.
These [artistic]
works [can be] written in the hope and knowledge that the interaction of their
anticipations will create in the now the reality of an exchange of art and
thought. They can thus be considered, in Ayache's words, 'technologies of the
future [ ... ] but only insofar as we wish that the difference they will make
in the future may make a difference today'.
... Ayache's
characterization of the market as the site of radical contingency will also be
read alongside another claim: that contemporary art's coming to terms with its
own implication in various forms of exchange can be read as a synecdoche for
fundamental sociopolitical changes wrought by neo-liberal capitalism. It
is within this process of adjustment that Matthew Poole's work locates the
figure of the curator.
Liberal economics
enabled us, as an article of faith, to distinguish between our inalienable,
sovereign self, and our 'labour capital', that part of ourselves exposed to the
contingencies of the market, to trading and speculation. In neo-liberal
capital, the distinction is being eroded, as the changing nature of work sees
the performance of the self entirely integrated into Capitalist production -
the notion of 'human capital', the monetization of social networks, the
obligation to 'curate' and present the self, and the 'experience economy'.
Submitted to exchange value, human 'assets' have now become subject to
speculation and trading, so that the once sovereign values of self, experience
and memory become subject to the contingencies of the market."
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