THE WAR ON TERRA

TERROR IS THE PIETY OF THE REVOLUTION
Ian Hamilton Finlay

Some days you wake up and wonder what is the purpose of art. . .

. . . and on one too many mornings, there is no defence for the intellectually shoddy, morally incompetent, ill-made and irresponsible activities that pass under its name.

What's the purpose of it, what's the good when they have attacked with aircraft, bombs, guns and secrecy, with disease, drugs and genetically modified foodstuffs, toxic waste and ecological warfare. They have taken covert control of the mass media and the micromedia. They are in the universities and the streets, without uniforms, without shame. They are Empire (1) and their greatest fear is that they do not rule the universe.

Those who speak of freedom without signing up to Kyoto; who talk of meshwork, flux, turbulence, complexity and emergence as qualities of 'the market' (2) reveal in its splendour the ignorance for which an uncomprehending North American public is now being punished. Unregulated freedom is tyranny, and market freedoms generate only cartels and monopolies. 20th century oil and electricity cartels of almost indefinable power and wealth instruct, inform and inscape the 21st century's global interchange. George Bush Jnr's Florida election scandal is the thinnest of thin edges. The genuine scandal is that a man so obviously in hock to the most dangerous pollutant industry in the history of the species might be allowed to stand for office. The USA was wrong to refuse Mugabe's offer of electoral observers.

As it is wrong to have assaulted Mugabe's land reform in Zimbabwe (to have invaded Grenada, to have manufactured the coup in Venezuela) when it has no ideas whatsoever on how to bring about social justice in Southern Africa, Latin America or the Caribbean (or any of its client states or neighbours), or to oppose Shariah law and the Ummah in the name of a democracy it has never practiced and human rights it has never recognised. The government of the USA is so deeply involved in the genocide of African America that it can no longer recognise the genocide
of the Palestinian people.

Do you need me to draw you a map?

Because, if you do, then you need art.

If there is some activity that is worth pursuing, then it is communication. Everything in the universe communicates (3), except the human. Our uniqueness was once the ability to communicate across time, but
storage media have become hoarding media: money has become debt, science property, beauty commodity. For the ability to speak across time we have substituted the chance to chat across distances.

And while certain artists congratulate themselves on subverting the previous mode of decoration, the dominant visual regimes do what they have set out to do - dominate. This is not the era of narrative and perspective: disrupting and resisting novels and paintings was entertaining for a few decades around 1914, but novels and painting scarcely dominate the mediascape 2003. Nor, aside from the leisured few, did they 'dominate' in 1903 or 1803. For five hundred years, we have been living in the age of the filing system, double entry bookkeeping and cartography. These media of the baroque bureaucracies remain scarcely acknowledged in the world of art. This is why it was necessary first to invent and now to dismantle the distinction between work and leisure.

Today a professional who does not enjoy their job is a failure.

The only qualities worth paying for are muscle, skill and creativity. Strength, craft and invention drive education, advertising, media and software industries alike. Tree surgeons and plumbers too need to enjoy their jobs or we think of them as diminished. Work is a tool for extracting surplus creativity. Work is play.

Some days you wake up and say: Art Is Play! Art criticism certainly is - getting the joke, the 'Hah!' of amused appreciation that let's everyone in the gallery know you're in on the planted gag.

The art of leisure, leisurely art, even getting the joke has become work: the necessarily disciplined consumption of the right media at the right time. Teens know how strictly disciplined their consumption is, how definitely thewy have to signal who they have to be by what they have to do, how circumscribed their disgusts as well as their hero-worship. TINA (4). They know they must not, on pain of social exclusion, refuse oil-slicks, taxes, asthma, skin cancer, road-kill, cripples and speed zombies, tarmacking half the planet and decimating the rest; know they must desire the pink VW beetle with the chrome alloy wheels.

Truly it is equal to living in a desolate country to live in a desolate time (5).

++++++++++++

Some mornings you wake up and you shriek - 'I am a poet. Self-expression is the need of my soul'. With neither a self nor the means to express it. To communicate is not a right but an aspiration.

No one speaks face-to-face anymore, or if we do, only as a favour. Face-to-face is the most precious expenditure of time, 'quality time'. It has to be scheduled. Where it isn't scheduled, where 'we' and 'no-one' don't apply, the communication is only part-ways mediated. The other part belongs to reality.

I've been to reality. You wouldn't like it there. People are poor, ignorant, crushed by 'the idiocy of rural life', as Marx and Engels, shockingly, put it in the Communist Manifesto (6). Their only purpose in the global economy is to be mined for their exotic creativity. Of course no one ('no-one') despises them - their sweat is our salt. To be excluded from the circuits of global communication networks is simply to be excluded. Where there are nothing but minerals and biomass to extract, populations are supernumerary. Now there is no chance of securing de Beers' monopoly, the diamond miners of Angola can be left to slaughter one another for the drip of aid.

To communicate is not a right but an aspiration.

(The only rights we own are those we have fought for, or that someone at some time has fought for and that we have inherited and stand to lose. Rights are what those poor bastards we left behind in reality haven't got)

And yet the aspiration of so much of art (and communication) is the incommunicable, the sublime. Goal of poststructural neo-Heideggerian philosophers (7) as it was of the Nazis, satirised by Ian Hamilton Finlay (8) to the chagrin of those art-bureaucrats who mistake his eccentric hardline moral assault for the sublime it criticises. From The Matrix to neo-metal, nihilism mixes with the ineffable to engulf the communicable in the dimensionless and unspeakable passions of undying love, love of the undead, instrumental irrationality - sublimity. So much so that the only real scandal the artworld has had for a decade came when Documenta showcased art that communicated and took a moral stance (9). Where once John Cage could announce 'I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry' and signal something exceptional about the necessity of silence (10), now to be silent is a crime.

But then what is moral and whose morality is it anyway? Cui bono - who benefits? That which enables the aspiration towards communication, which enables communication's coming into existence as a possibility, is good. That which analyses and better still dynamites the blockages to communication is good.

Some days you wake up with the fuses lit shouting 'We gotta blow this joint!'

There is a 'we' because no 'I' that can communicate, because communication needs more than one - of us. Then there is the work of LeWitt and Judd, not to say that of the media arts from Maya Deren to jodi.org: a work in which there becomes visible another dimension of communication between human and technical orders. Goldsworthy, or the immense importance of listening also to the ecology (11). Not human, techne nor nature are inviolate (12). Communication begins in the recognition that we are not alone and we are not pristine. If the doctrine of Original Sin has anything to teach it is this: that there is never essence or purity (and for this very reason there is history as there is not sublimity). The 'we' that communicates, the collective world of communication, embraces the three orders or it is impossible. As impossible as a city without language.

Because 'no-one' speaks face-to-face anymore, it is no longer wise to found philosophies on speaker's intention or hearer's interpretation (13). The less we meet, the more, when we do, we voice our meanings in catchphrases, fashion statements and media memories. To communicate implies neither to speak nor to hear but to mediate. The meaty acts of love styled after MTV, hip gestures and poses from movies and magazines, and the flip emoticon that flares through celnet and drowns in its own ubiquity alike are mediation's. The debate over whether these mediations are material or immaterial is immaterial. What matters is the dimensions. Mediation takes place, and it takes time. There are no immediate media.

Thus:

To make art is (should be) to make possible, not communication, because that is too far away from us now and too deeply compromised, but to make possible the dimensions in which communication might become. To make space, to create time. . . and to distrust and deny any attempt to pass time or abbreviate space.

Responsibility, ethics, beauty and ugliness: these are spatial, historical, mediated categories. Sentiment, which takes no responsibility (14), removes the sentimental from its networks of origin and destiny, of reciprocity and influence, to enjoy as though the thing had no connection to the world or the sentimentalist. The sentimentalist contemplates evil and the sublime because they are indisputable. The moral artist disputes the bad and the good because they face each other in dialogue. Good and bad a communications. The sublime is a sentimental category and the sooner it is excised from the critical lexicon and the practice of art, along with Jeff Koons installations and Hannibal Lecter movies, the better.

The alternative is all too thinkable. It is to wake up and abandon art.

Because some of those dippy Christians are after all right to warn that all the arts of the sentimental and the sublime, the arts of wilful gazing into the abyss, are bad for the soul, a sin against the Holy Spirit, the one sin even God cannot forgive - the sin of despair.

There are many good reasons to dump the concept and the institutions of art. There is one over-riding reason why not. Where victory is neither possible nor desirable, the enemy must be tempted into desiring defeat. Only defeat, and voluntary submission, will be enough. We need art still, perhaps even more now that it is, like God, a posthumous haunting. There can be no abandoning of any space or time that remains to be struggled for, not because it can be won but because what follows is not its loss but its annihilation at the event horizon of the commodity.

The Black Hole where a communicative universe used to be, where time burns with fatal radiation.

Against the singularity, the multitude, as the step from zero to one implies all the other steps to 2 and 3 and on and on (15). Against the theorists of loss, lack and fading (16), the plenitude of the void, its wormhole frenzy of matter, energy and information fizzing and popping in and out of existence like quantum popcorn, foam on the ocean in which dimensions bubble, burst and breathe their impure branching conditionalities into the universe. And it is a very disciplined universe - the only one we have, and ours to build. Kant tore the halves apart and Eisenstein brought them back together into an integral space-time that, however, has become the Black Box of the storage media that will not let the light escape. The gaze into evil is never a look into a man's or a woman's soul, but always the crushing of the heart you feel when you permit yourself to stare into the dark backward and abysm of shopping.

The three great media of modern rule - filing, book-keeping and mapping - are agents for freezing and diminishing space and time into the manageable, documents that can be folded in on themselves, tucked up, a secret, a possession, guilty things that have no place in a world of energy, matter and entropy. The hoarding is chaos. The art that steals back from their digital forms - database, spreadsheet, geographic information systems - a counter-usage is not yet quite enough, only, like crypto-anarchism, a lure and a deceit to bring the administration to abase itself.

Better yet will be to unfold the map, decrypt the spreadsheet, de-link the map. There is some beauty yet in the world, and some good, and though the time and space where they can be discussed and altered is narrow and brief, there is an art, like a baby crying to be born, that opens up the inward-folded seven dimensions, that swears the Euclidean surface of the sheet that's spread is only a veil whose two puny dimensions will never catch a song or a shred.

Now the political, the social and the economic have become integral mediation (17), work at the level of communication, of its possibility, of mediation and its dimensionality are the most significant work there is. If they do not succeed, there will never be significance again.

If they do not succeed, there will never be significance again.

And on those days, you don't wake up.

FOOTNOTES

(1)	Hardt, Michael and Antono Negri (2000), Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
(2)	de Landa, Manuel (1997), A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, Swerve Editions, New York.
(3)	Maturana, Humberto R and Francisco Varela (1980), Autopoesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, (= Boston Studies in the philosophy of Science vol 42), D Reidel, Dordrecht
(4)	There Is No Alternative, thatcheritie slogan, c. 1984.
(5)	cf: 'It is equal to living in a tragic land To live in a tragic time' 'Dry Loaf' in Wallace Stevens, (1955), Collected Poems, Faber, London.
(6)	Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1972), Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans Samuel Moore, Foreign Language Press, Peking.
(7)	For example Lyotard, Jean-François (1988a), L'inhumain: Causeries sur le temps, Galilée, Paris.
(8)	see Abrioux, Yves (1987), Homage to Ian Hamilton Finlay, Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
(9)	see the debates surrounding Josephine Bosma's critique on <nettime.org>
(10)	see Edwin Morgan 'Opening the Cage: 14 variations on 14 words' in Lucie-Smith, Edward (1970), British Poetry Since 1945, Penguin, Harmondsworth.
(11)	Andy, especially the works undertaken with Coracle Press.
(12)	Among many others see Mazlish, Bruce (1993), The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines, Yale University Press, New Haven CT; Clark, Nigel (2002), 'The Demon-Seed: Bioinvasion as the Unsettling of Environmental Cosmopolitanism' in Theory Culture and Society v.19 n 1-2, 101-25.
(13)	contra Grice, Paul (1989), Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
(14)	Somewhere, possibly in the letters, Joyce cites from memory a line from Meredith to the effect that 'The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring responsibility for the thing enjoyed'. Extensive searches in Meredith's The Sentimentalist fail to produce the original of this statement.
(15)	In von Neuman's theory of the empty set, the content of the set is zero, but the number of sets with zero content is one. Once started, this chain of aggregation cannot but continue: the set of those sets whose content is single is two: the empty set and the unitary set. The number of sets whose content is less than or equal to 2 is three. Eventually this logic will produce all the cardinal numbers and their ratios.
(16)	The whole post-structural, neo-Heideggerian paradigm, exemplary among them Derrida and Lacan (the manque-â-être): see Silverman, Kaja (2000), World Spectators, Stanford University Press, Stanford.
(17)	See Debord, Guy (1990 [1988]), Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans Malcolm Imrie, Verso, London.