Information Absorber

What is the relation between art and the actual? Every form of “aestheticism” seems to loosen this tie or – as it was in case of Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life” – at least provoke a search for another, timeless aspect of the Beauty, behind its fugitive appearance resulting from circumstances or fashion: an attempt to „distil the eternal from the transitory”[1]. Going “beyond time” may, however take a different form, closer to the Nietzschean untimelyness: “acting counter to our time, and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come”[2]. In that case, it is not a question of aesthetic “sensation”, but one of strategy towards one’s own time, a mode of art’s being-in-time, and… counter to it. Most of all, it means being against the present, and “thereby” with something that awaits in the future, but doesn’t simply result from the present tendency, something that, in opposite, may only be won in a battle, appear thanks to an unexpected declination of the world’s fatal trajectory.

Unlike in aesthetical model, the artist is, here, not the one who experience and make others experience or sense, but rather a diagnostician. In the history of Western culture, at least since the romantic revolution (even though the figure is older), we give much importance to the coincidence of creativity and sickness. One of the reasons for that is the primacy of sensation. Sickness, madness is something that facilitates “vision”, or even makes it possible. It is not very often that we speak of an artist as of doctor, meaning not a healer (the figure still close to the romantic or – wider – idealist tradition), but someone who is able to diagnose the patient’s condition and then to conduce the process of self-healing. And yet, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to refer to art in general the words Gilles Deleuze once wrote on literature: “the writer as such is not a patient, but rather a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The Word is the set of symptoms, whose illness merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of health […]”[3].

This kind of strategy implies the imperative of critical art, under the condition, though, that we understand the latter in etymological sense, as referring to crisis. The crucial element of every diagnosis is the seizing of a turning point, a critical point that may become decisive in the process of recovery. After Kant, it is trivial to say that the critique, in a deeper, philosophical meaning, cannot be reduced to a simple rejection, that it is a kind of examination, but only the common etymology of critique and crisis sheds new light on the nature of such an examination, on its differentiating and discriminating function, different from the Kantian demarcating (limits of the justified use of Reason).

The Information Absorber is not an aesthetic phenomenon. It is a critical machine or – to be more precise – a meta-critical device that serves to problematize critique and criticism as such, in the field of art and beyond. In its functioning, it poses a fundamental question: how can the critique be decisive, how can it make a difference? If the traditional (Kantian) question concerns the conditions of possibility of our experience in general, the actual question concerning art is the one of the conditions, under which the art may become critical – distinguish, discern and, possibly, favor the bifurcations or crisis phenomena. This question may, of course, be posed in purely theoretical way, but it may also be formulated by means of art. And that is how Aleksandra Hirszfeld does it – the objective is to think, problematize, question with art. Information Absorber is a meta-critical machine producing (or being able to produce) the effects similar to those produced by theory. Only that it functions rather than argues or explains its reasons.

The effect consists in questioning of an important conviction, which builds the fundament of the ideology of “information society”: more information means more emancipation, more participation – more democracy. We may complain about the “tabloidization” of media and the plague of “infotainment”, but the principal belief in saving, critical power of information has never been seriously undermined, also in the realm of art. Critical art has long been identified with acts of unmasking – its critical function was supposed to lie in revealing of what was secret, hidden by the agents of power, capital, power etc. The time has come, however, to rethink those axioms. In theoretical field, it was Jean Baudrillard who tried to initiate such reflection, speaking of the “implosion” as elementary mechanism that annihilates or neutralizes the reality of late capitalism, or even reality as such, and makes it persist as a mere simulation: „Institutions implode of themselves, by dint of ramifications, feedback, overdeveloped control circuits”[4]. “What if the modern universe of […] hyper-communication had plunged us not into the senseless, but into the tremendous saturation of meaning entirely consumed by its success […]?”[5]. Where everything becomes information, the latter implodes and becomes its own simulacrum. Where the rule of reference or meaning loses its binding force, information can no longer deny or contradict one another. They just sediment, according to the principle of unlimited accumulation. The critique, conceived as unmasking of the false and bringing the machinations of power into light, is no longer possible, at least if the unmasking, as such, should make a difference, contradict the ideology of power, the discourse of its self-justifications. Our answers to the question: “what is wrong with this world?” are absorbed, grinded and spit out in form of information noise. They have no more power, even if they are “heard” in the public space, inscribed in the “public debate”, etc. Already the fact that we are permitted to speak out, should awake our suspicion, make us think that, our speech, our participation in the debate, the traditional critical discourse, together with traditional critical art, has been absorbed and neutralized by the integral system of simulation.

Does the meta-critical examination of the conditions of possibility of critique show, then, its ultimate impossibility ? The diagnosis posed by Information Absorber seems, once again, resemble that formulated by Baudrillard. The epoch of critique as unmasking, along with the moral and epistemic primacy of critical discourse, has come to its end. The critical discourse imploded in consequence of its own hypertrophy. “Having no more victims to devour, the critical illusion has devoured itself. [… ] The present world exceeds the grasp of criticism in that it is caught up in a perpetual movement of disillusion and dissolution, the very movement which is pushing it towards order and towards an absurd conformism, the excess of which creates much greater disorganization than the opposite excess of disorder”[6]. And yet, the statement of this impasse is not the last word. Even though no further words may be spoken, since they have all been absorbed and sent back as non-significant noise, the whole operation still produces a certain surplus. This surplus refers not to the simple uncovering, but to the search of critical point, which may be understood as the point or the moment of implosion itself, the point where the surplus of information turns into its antithesis, but also as something that – repeating, performing, staging the process of absorption – reveals or announces a sort of crack-up. Integral reality seems to have no cracks, in its informational aspect it appears as a pure ecstasy of communication. But what if we perform this ecstasy to the very end, where every meaning is being annihilated? What we might (without any teleological guaranty) confront, then, is another turning point, where the absolute positivity reveals its negative reversal. This is exactly what Baudrillard suggests, when he speaks of a new type of thought, the radical thought that outdistance the traditional criticism just as it outdistance the simulated reality: “A thinking that goes beyond the end, a thinking of extreme phenomena”[7]. Hirszfeld’s thinking with art (or by means of art) aspires to such radicalism: it doesn’t really unmask, it searches the turning, critical points, it tries to provoke them. Already the Information Absorber has shown it clearly, but the next two parts of the triptych inaugurated by this work may turn out even more rigorously radical. For, is there anything more positive than desire and money, building, together with information, the postmodern trinity of power? Neutralization of meaning in the information noise, extinction of desire, irreversible annihilation of virtual money – are these still acts of critique, or rather acts of poetic terrorism?

Michał Herer

[1] Ch. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life And Other Essays, transl. by J. Mayne, Phaidon Press, University of Michigan, 1964, p. 13; see also ibidem, p. 3: “Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions”.
[2] F. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, transl. by R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press 1997, p. 60.
[3] G. Deleuze, Critical and Clinical, transl. by D.W. Smith and M.A. Greco, Verso, New York, 1998, p. 3.
[4] J. Baudrillard, Simulacra And Simulation, transl. by S.F. Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 70.
[5] Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, transl. by B. & C. Schutze,, Semiotexte(e), New York, 1988, p. 103. See also J. Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, transl. by P. Foss, P. Patton, J. Johnston, Semiotext(e), New York, 1983, p. 36: “For us an untenable hypothesis : that it may be possible to communicate outside the medium of meaning, that the very intensity of communication may be proportional to the reabsorption of meaning and to its collapse . For it is not meaning or the increase of meaning which gives tremendous pleasure, but its neutralisation which fascinates”.
[6] J. Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, transl. by Chr. Turner, Verso, New York, 1996, pp. 27,70.
[7] Ibidem, p. 65.