Shane Smith

Film

Disturbed Images

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Lamia Priestley October 1, 2024

A roll of belly fat melts into a makeup-caked face; a bag of chips morphs into a family portrait; a butt cheek transforms into a policeman’s bicep. Gross and sickly, loud and pink, Frank Manzano’s collection of video works, Current Value (2023), uses AI imagery to depict the grotesque in everyday scenes of American suburban life—fistfights, plastic surgery, arrests. 

Still from Holistic Consumption Challenge (Current Value), Frank Manzano. (2023).

Rapid cuts between faces result in pile ups of interchangeable characters. An endless treadmill of trash, plastic consumer products, and open mouths, the videos’ choppiness creates what the Chicago-based artist describes as “the human parade”—a crazed illustration of people as stuff. Manzano describes his work as an exploration of “consumerism, massification, the loss of the self.” These themes are felt not just in the works’ subject matter but in the evidence of the mass market AI tools Manzano uses to make many of his images. 

Manzano has a fondness for corpulent characters, big butts, cellulite, stretched thighs and teethy smiles. Outside of his focus on flesh, the videos themselves exert a materiality in their reference to the aesthetics of consumer visual culture and their artefacts. There’s the digital lines of security footage, the jacked up saturation of reality TV, the studio lighting of an 80s sitcom, the low res crunchy feel of camcorder home videos. The images look either consumer-grade (camcorder) or like something used to capture consumers (CCTV). But amongst the visual styles referenced in Manzano’s work, one can distinguish something entirely new, the artefacts of AI images.

To create this pastiche, Manzano uses a combination of his own photos, sourced images and ones he generates with AI image tools like Wombo. On a visual level, the artefacts of AI images—the airbrushed smooth skin, confused edges between fingers, gibberish logos and half-baked eyes—contribute to a feeling of the uncanny in these illustrations of the American underbelly. More than just a formal contribution though, these artefacts place the images into a context. Viewers who, over the past few years, have developed a familiarity with AI generated images online, will recognise them here and have some understanding of the process by which they are created—using a dataset of preexisting images. It’s clear that although Current Value’s images have the trademarks of documentary or recorded reality, many of them aren’t real. 

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“There’s something profane in the limitation of a finite dataset. The images have no hope of transcendence.”

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The disturbing nature of Manzano’s videos is due, not to this irreality, but rather to the images’ self-aware embrace of their artificial generation. The AI artefacts are significant because of what they mean in the context of Manzano’s unaspiring video world. Not only are his subjects debased but so too are the images—a perfect marriage of subject and form.

Origins of Fetishization (Current Value), Frank Manzano. 2023.

The philosopher Hannes Bajohr offers a useful framework for understanding this earthbound quality of AI images in his article Algorithmic Empathy: Toward a Critique of Aesthetic AI (2022). Bajohr advocates for interpreting AI arts on their own terms, looking at how they’re made—their “technical substrate”—to develop their aesthetic critiques. Bajohr draws a parallel between artificial neural networks and the ancient aesthetic principle of mimesis—the attempt to imitate or reproduce reality in the creation of art. He outlines two opposing concepts of imitation as it relates to AI images. The first he attributes to the philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s explanation. It describes imitation as construction, which sees “the approximation of an existing state through the inference of the rules that bring it about.” The second concept of imitation, which better describes AI image making, is “imitatio naturae” (imitation of nature). A classical idea that was repopularised in the Renaissance, “imitatio naturae” sees imitation as a mere repetition of the real without the “procedural insight” of imitation as construction. In the case of AI image making, “nature” would be the dataset, and so that from which all representations are derived. 

This first approach to imitation, that of construction, implies the possibility of depicting something new. Bajohr emphasises that with the knowledge of a thing’s creation—of its building blocks—moving beyond that thing is possible while in “imitatio naturae”, the representation derives directly from the thing itself. Nature, and so the dataset, is the absolute resource. An artificial neural network can’t truly imagine anything beyond its own dataset, never something outside of that which has already been represented.

There’s something profane in the limitation of a finite dataset. The images have no hope of transcendence. Image generators are so far unable to replicate the mysterious process by which a great artist goes about transforming an ordinary landscape into an image that might produce ineffable revelations in its viewers. The artist—studying how light falls, the relationships of colours, the phenomenon of perspective—might inexplicably assemble a few strokes of paint to reveal something much greater than valleys, woods, hills and streams, much greater than nature. 

Manzano’s images are trapped. His subjects lead unambitious lives, marginalised by a cycle of consumerism, greed, lust, violence, and vanity; they're governed by their instincts, unable to escape themselves. So too, AI images exist only in immanence. Image generators simulate master artists’ styles from the past, merely recycling them, destined to make unambitious copies.  

Current Value’s images are provocations. They’re affective, disturbing representations of the gutters of material culture because they themselves belong there, unable to dream themselves out.

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Lamia Priestley is an art historian, writer and researcher working at the intersection of art, fashion and technology. With a background in Italian Renaissance Art, Lamia is currently the Artist Liaison at the digital fashion house DRAUP, where she works with artists to produce generative digital collections.

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

Propaganda

Questlove Playlist

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Questlove has been the drummer and co-frontman for the original all-live, all-the-time Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group The Roots since 1987. Questlove is also a music history professor, a best-selling author and the Academy Award-winning director of the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.

The Nine of Wands (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Strength, the Nine of Wands
Number: 9
Astrology: Moon in Sagittarius
Qabalah: Yesod of Yod

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Chris Gabriel September 28, 2024

The Nine of Wands is a card of perseverance through darkness. It represents the indomitable will of the lone survivor, who has the strength necessary to make it through to the end.

In Rider, we find a bandaged and raggedy man, standing with the help of one of the nine wands. Yet he is standing. This is a survivor who bears the marks of his struggle. Around him are 8 wands stuck in the ground. While the rest have gone or died, he remains.

In Thoth, we find the 9 wands as arrows. 8 Lunar arrows coming down. The central wand is connecting the Moon below to the Sun above. In many ways this is the most ritualistically significant card in the Thoth deck. It symbolizes the ritual of the Great Work of Thelema, that of Samekh. The movement past the Psyche and toward the Dæmon or Genius. This is the Mysterium Conjunctionis of the Alchemists, the marriage of the Sun and Moon. 

In Marseille, we find a similar arrangement to Thoth, as 8 wands cross one another and a central wand is beneath them. Through Qabalah we find the name of this card to be “The Foundation of the King”. The Foundation of the King is Strength.

In some ways this is a dark card, concerned with immense struggle and difficulty, but here Nietzsche’s wisdom of “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” is affirmed. This is the path necessary for greatness.

This card makes me think of Apollo 11 and the “Moonshot”, mankind making the terrible and difficult journey through space to reach the Moon and the achievement of the impossible.

It also calls to mind the Star Spangled Banner: 

Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?
And the Rockets' red glare, the Bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our Flag was still there;

The flag still standing amidst the chaos of war.

This is Nietzsche’s will to power that has brought man through the darkness of time. Even more, it is the will to dream and to achieve what is beyond - it is the best in us. Nietzsche even symbolized it with archery; in Zarathustra he feared this tendency could cease: Alas! there cometh the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man—and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whizz!

The Nine of Wands is the arrow of our longing, the rocket to the moon, and the golden thread in the Labyrinth. It is what keeps us going.

When we pull this card, we may be faced with struggle and difficulty, but we must and will come out of it stronger. We may also be inspired with a great goal, a dream that we must achieve. It may be that this great dream helps us through the darkness.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

On the Grasshopper

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees, 1889. Oil on canvas, Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City.

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Ale Nodarse, September 26, 2024

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“And the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden.” — Vincent van Gogh¹

“Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of things both great and small.” — Annie Dillard²

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In November of 2017 a grasshopper was found lodged within the depths of Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 Olive Trees.³ Conservators celebrated the quiet revelation. Such an insect, they suspected, might finally divulge the season of the painting’s completion, the month — within that most productive, and final, year of van Gogh’s life — in which turbulent oil had come to rest. Further searching through pigment ensued. Tracing the most minute of ripples, as if to follow the insect’s final movements, proved futile. No such eddies emerged. The grasshopper, they concluded, died before it had been sealed in its oily envelope. 

The plein-air painter knew intimately the grasshopper (or sprinkhaan, in the artist’s native Dutch) and its kin. He complained of the travails of painting “on the spot itself” in a letter to his brother Theo, four years before Olive Trees was painted (July 14, 1885): 

“I must have picked a good hundred flies and more off the 4 canvases that you’ll be getting, not to mention dust and sand etc. — not to mention that, when one carries them across the heath and through hedgerows for a few hours, the odd branch or two scrapes across them &c. Not to mention that when one arrives on the heath after a couple of hours’ walk in this weather, one is tired and hot. Not to mention that the figures don’t stand still like professional models, and the effects that one wants to capture change as the day wears on.”

The grasshopper of the Olive Trees, one suspects, arrived in such a bout of flies, or with a wind of dust and sand, or perhaps by a branch depositing the insect’s carcass upon wet canvas. In any case, the painter’s not to mentions, his niet meegerekend — or, more accurately, his “not counted (any)mores” — disclose, like the grasshopper, unanticipated revelations. For after a concession to his reader he does indeed count: a good hundred, 4, a few, or two, a couple.

Van Gogh rendered the canvas a thing which absorbs. Flies (living, or like the grasshopper, already dead) are drawn to it; dust and sand (and the innumerable particulates residing in his “etc.”) cling to it; branches scrape it. Its centimeters of oil testify still to each of these touches, depositions and engravings. But between the first and second not to mentions a change occurs. The painter describes himself absorbed, as if within a landscape that will, regardless of resistance, enumerate: that is, bring itself to his attention and to his counting. He, like his painting, transgresses dimensions. In oil as on ground, he moves not only “across the heath” but “through the hedgerows” (door de hei in Dutch). While recent exhibitions have cast Van Gogh’s images as flat, albeit immense, projections, to speak of the artist’s paintings is inevitably to speak of this movement through and to trace the former carrying — the dragging resistance — of his own body and brush. 

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“The ground that was painted and the ground that was tilled became increasingly one and the same.”

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In the third not to mention the artist turns to his body — tired and hot — before moving a final time to the bodies of others. “The figures don’t stand still.” His complaint formed a critique of those who, like the painter Gustave Courbet, predicated their realism upon a return to the studio. (Of the figures within Courbet’s 1849 Stone Breakers, a work perennially invoked as foundational to the Realist movement, the painter wrote nonchalantly: “I made an appointment with them at my studio for the next day.”)⁴  Whereas Courbet conceived of the figure — of the peasant — as a transferable image disposed to the economics of the studio, Van Gogh insisted on his own absorption within the life of another. “The more I work on it,” he continues in the same to Theo, “the more peasant life absorbs me (me absorbeert).”⁴  

Vincent Van Gogh, Women Picking Olives, 1889. Oil on Canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Through his work, the ground that was painted and the ground that was tilled became increasingly one and the same. The elements which Van Gogh would characterize as not mentionable –– flies, dust, and detritus –– would become, if at first paradoxically, proof. Proof of being there. They mark him and his canvases as they mark the laboring bodies to which he bore witness (which included women at work amidst those very trees.) The not mentionables insist on paintings not just as images but as objects. They make a proposition, too: that beauty lies in the counting and in the keeping hold of fragments which, however small, remain singular. Beauty, of such a kind, insists on the insolubility of seemingly dissolved parts; on the ribbon which may be picked out, to draw from Dillard’s analogy, from the greater weave. Beauty is an insistence on presence. 

The painter, and his canvas, hold space for the ‘not to mention’ to be mentioned still. And since questions of recognition become questions of ethics, its insistence ought to weigh on us. What would it mean, the painting asks, to consider the grasshopper? What would it mean to be burdened by that which appears — all but — gone?

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¹Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh (Amsterdam, September 18, 1877. No. 131). The letter was composed after van Gogh attended Rev. Jeremie Meijjes’s Sermon on Ecclesiastes XI:7–XII:7. For the original and translated letters, see vangoghletters.org.
²Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974), 24.
³ “Grasshopper Found Embedded in van Gogh Masterpiece,” on the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s site. Link: https://nelson-atkins.org/grasshopper-found-embedded-van-gogh-masterpiece/. 
⁴ Gustave Courbet, Letter to Francis Wey (November 26, 1849), translated in Marilyn Stokstad and Michael Cothren, Art History (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2011), 972. See Linda Nochlin, Realism: Style and Civilization (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971), 120–1; and, T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 79–81. 
⁵ Van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh (Neunen, on or about Tuesday, July 14, 1885. No. 515.). 

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Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.

Film

Head, The Monkees and the Search of Authenticity

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Micky Dolenz falls from the Gerald Desmond Bridge, Head (1968).

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Ana Roberts, September 24th, 2024

In 1968, Micky Dolenz jumped off the Gerald Desmond Bridge. Some eighty minutes later, he did it again, this time joined by the rest of The Monkees—Peter Tork, Davy Jones, and Michael Nesmith. Head, the 1968 film penned by Jack Nicholson and starring The Monkees, was the vehicle for this bridge jump—a filmic suicide that served equally as a career one. Not that there was much life left in The Monkees by 1968; the final episode of their show had aired in March, and their latest album, The Birds, the Bees & the Monkees, had failed to top the charts in America and didn’t even break the top ten in the UK—their first to miss both marks.

The Vietnam War, the assassinations of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, riots in Chicago, and Soviet pressures across Eastern Europe all contributed to a waning optimism, within which there was hardly a place for the naïve antics of the Prefab Four. Yet Head is far from naïve. It is a psychedelic experiment—intentionally mind-numbing and academically stimulating—serving as a fourth-wall-breaking political critique of everything from the American collegiate sports system to dandruff commercials, with war, media, and reality thrown in for good measure. The film flopped spectacularly. It made just $16,000 from its $750,000 budget and was derided by Monkees fans, hippies, academics, and critics alike. It was too conceptual for the core fan base, mostly teen girls, and too Monkees for anyone else the film was aiming for.

Yet Head has prevailed. In the years following its release, it built a cult following and achieved a niche but significant level of critical success, regarded as a cornerstone object of the era that encompasses the themes, politics, and feelings of the late '60s. It was entered into the Criterion Collection in 2010 and hailed by Criterion critic Chuck Stephens as “arguably the most authentically psychedelic film made in 1960s Hollywood.” Stephens is right—Head is a staggeringly authentic film in so many ways. Much of the joy of watching it lies in seeing The Monkees, unable to play anything but their teeny-bopper TV show selves, juxtaposed with legitimate, psychedelic social criticism. It is within this brilliant contradiction that the question arises: How did the era’s least authentic band create its most authentic film? And why was it so readily rejected and ignored as a false work, with no authentic merits, by the contemporary counterculture—among whom authenticity was a primary obsession?

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“They were inside the wrong thing and outside the right one. This strange combination, teamed with the genuine rebelliousness and otherness of Jack Nicholson, uniquely positioned them to make the most astute criticism of their time.”

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There are simple answers to these questions if we want them. Nesmith’s affinity for Nicholson and the hippie scene, paired with a studio believing that combining a cultural zeitgeist with a teen phenomenon would be financially viable, accounts for the creation of the film. Sgt. Pepper’s had been released to critical and commercial success the year before, proving that boy bands could be both psychedelic and successful. This explains much of the film’s genesis. As for the rejection of Head by the counterculture, it feels wholly logical—the only quality the counterculture valued more than authenticity was “cool,” and The Monkees, for all their possible genius, were achingly uncool. Yet these answers do not hit at the crux of the issue: that of authenticity.

Authenticity was not a problem solely for The Monkees; it was a primary concern for almost every post-war artist who tried to shape a public image that wasn’t always in line with their true selves. Regardless of where they started, most were to some extent manufactured by a team around them. The Monkees are discussed in terms of authenticity not because they were the first or only inauthentic band of the era—arguably, they were neither—but because they were among the rare few who acknowledged their own inauthenticity. Later, with Head, they acknowledged their own attempt toward authenticity.

Frank Zappa and Davy Jones in Head (1968).

At its heart, Head is a film about freedom, and the failed attempt to achieve it in a world that wants not just The Monkees, but all public figures, to be a shiny, televised version of themselves, sanitized even in their rebellion. After the opening suicide, each of the four band members kisses the same groupie and is told that they are indistinguishable from one another. They race through various genres and films, moving in unrelated vignettes as if they were aliens dropped randomly across a film studio lot. They fight in the trenches of war, ride horseback across the great American West, and solve a murder mystery in ominous, decadent housing. In each scenario, they try to prove that they are four real, individual people in a real band that makes real music that real people listen to. Yet, at every turn, they find that this pursuit is meaningless—everything they are doing is sanctioned, fated, directed, and written by the producers of the film they are trying to escape. They break the fourth wall repeatedly, intentionally flubbing lines, acknowledging actors, and referencing the flimsy walls of the set they are on—only to find that this, too, is in the script that Jack Nicholson, appearing as himself and playing his actual role as producer, wrote for them. From start to finish, it is a wild ride—a kind of Ouroboros that eats itself in its meta-reflective analysis. It digs through philosophical ideas again and again, only to find that it has dug so deep it returns on the other side, no closer to the surface than when it began—with a synthetic boy band playing their hits to an audience who don’t truly know them, and would rather keep it that way.

The film was released at the tail end of the capital-S "Sixties," before the killing at the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont turned the whole decade into a bad trip. Despite the turmoil in the world, there was still a tie-dyed, tune-in, drop-out, mind-expanding, world-changing hopefulness that believed art, youth, truth, and rebellion could really change the world. The Monkees, for most of their career, had been a distillation of this attitude—neatly packaged by executives to be sold for syndication on TV channels across the world and played relentlessly on every wavelength. They were able to operate as both insiders and outsiders, feeling less shame about their participation in the system that everyone else was pretending not to be part of. They were inside the wrong thing and outside the right one. This strange combination, teamed with the genuine rebelliousness and otherness of Jack Nicholson, uniquely positioned them to make the most astute criticism of their time. That this critique is seen to come from the most unlikely place is, perhaps, incorrect—they were the only ones who could do it so explicitly.

Head is bombastic and exaggerated, but it cuts through to something that everyone else was too scared to be honest about. The Beatles danced around the ideas on Glass Onion, Dylan nodded to them with Ballad of a Thin Man, and even Elvis, in his countless motion pictures, tried to comment on them. But all cared too much about their artistry to acknowledge that they were participating in a system they claimed to be outside of. It took The Monkees, the least cool of all, to truly speak truth to power, and they paid the price for it. In the closing minutes of the film, as the final Monkee falls to his watery death, the director wheels their soaked bodies away in a large aquarium, the band struggling as they awake, and stores it neatly on a studio lot—to be used again whenever deemed fit.

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Ana Roberts is a writer, musician and culture critic.

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Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

The Love Poems of Rumi

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

The Hierophant (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Hierophant or Pope
Number: V
Astrology: Taurus
Qabalah: Vau

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Chris Gabriel September 21, 2024

The Hierophant is the materialization of divine wisdom and power. He is the embodiment of spiritual authority. He speaks for God and gives out his edicts to the bishops, and they spread it down the hierarchy.

In Rider, we find a young pope with a false beard sitting on a throne. He is adorned in scarlet. One hand raises a staff, his papal ferula, while the other is held aloft with two fingers to God. He has an ornate papal tiara. Beside him are two pillars, and beneath him are two tonsured clergymen and the Keys of Heaven.

In Thoth, we have a statuesque Hierophant. His bearded face is a mask and he is adorned in orange. One hand raises a Borromean staff, the other points down with two fingers. He wears  a simple mitre on his head and on his chest,a star with the Aeonic Child inside.  Beside him are two elephants and a bull, Taurean symbols. Before him is the “woman girt with a sword” as described in Liber Al, The Book of the Law. All around him are the four elemental Cherubs, and above is a five petaled flower encircled by a serpent and 9 nails.

In Marseille, we have an old pope sitting on his throne in a scarlet cloak. Both his bare and gloved hands are marked by crosses. His gloved hand raises the papal ferula, while the other raises two fingers to God. Beneath him are two tonsured clergymen.

The Hierophant or Pope is the head of the Church. He metes out orders from God and rules through hierarchy. For each church under his rule, he ensures that they function and share his dogma.

As Taurus, this is a card concerning stubborn commitment to the set way. It is also about simplicity and comfort. In this way, fast food, soda, and comfort foods are similar to the Church. Warhol describes it well: “A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good.” This is the Hierophant, he creates a spiritual doctrine made available to all. 

The Hierophant makes that possible through a set of clear methods. He oversees the structured, accessible, universal path to God. His wisdom is standardized, not ephemeral. The Magician and High Priestess are spiritual forces as well, but they don’t follow dogmas in the same way; they have direct, personal routes to the divine. The Church and the Pope, on the other hand, have a grand and strict purpose.

Through the Hierophant, we are given the invitation and rules to the tarot. The old doctrines hold the truths tighter than we’re used to. What Thoth shows freely is hidden deep within Rider and Marseille. The Hierophant is in no rush to save the world, he is comfortable patiently and diligently following the divine rules set millennia before.

When you pull the Hierophant it may be that you must utilize your knowledge, or gain help from someone wise. This can be practical knowledge and spiritual knowledge. 

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

The Postmodern Condition

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Roy Litchenstein, Sunrise. 1963.

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Jean-Francois Lyotard, September 19th, 2024

Commissioned by the government of Quebec, Lyotard undertook a philosophical study on the affects of modern life and capitalist culture on the metaphysical health of the world. He finds an inivetability to a lack of consensus and sees differences and conflict as inherent in the modern world, yet he remains positive that postmodernism retains the modernists ideals of maintaining the hope for a new kind of social existence.

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Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. For example, the rule of consensus between the sender and addressee of a statement with truth-value is deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity between rational minds: this is the Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end - universal peace. As can be seen from this example, if a metanarrative implying a philosophy of history is used to legitimate knowledge, questions are raised concerning the validity of the institutions governing the social bond: these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice is consigned to the grand narrative in the same way as truth.

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements - narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable.

Thus the society of the future falls less within the province of a Newtonian anthropology (such as stucturalism or systems theory) than a pragmatics of language particles. There are many different language games - a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches - local determinism.

The decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitimation of that power is based on its optimizing the system's performance - efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear.  

The logic of maximum performance is no doubt inconsistent in many ways, particularly with respect to contradiction in the socio-economic field: it demands both less work (to lower production costs) and more (to lessen the social burden of the idle population). But our incredulity is now such that we no longer expect salvation to rise from these inconsistencies, as Marx did.

Still, the postmodern condition is as much a stranger to disenchantment as it is to the blind positivity of delegitimation. Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? The operativity criterion is technological; it has no relevance for judging what is true or just. Is legitimacy to be found in consensus obtained through discussion, as Jurgen Habermas thinks? Such consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games. And invention is always born of dissension. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the inventor's paralogy.  

Here is the question: is a legitimation of the social bond, a just society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity? What would such a paradox be?

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Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924 –1998) was a philosopher, sociologists and literary theorist.

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Jack Mallers

The New Painting

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Jost Amman, Wenzel Jamnitzer. 16th Century.

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Guillaume Apollinaire, September 17th, 2024

Guillaume Apollinaire was a poet, playwright, novelist, and art critic who inspired and was admired by the Cubists and Surrealists, movements that he himself coined the terms for. Here, he writes in strong defence of Cubism against the public disdain, and shows how despite the modernity of their style, they are applying ancient laws and ideas that grounds them in tradition. He draws a comparison between Euclidian Geometry and Cubism first in a series of lectures in 1911 and then put them into words here, in 1912.

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The new painters have been sharply criticized for their preoccupation with geometry. And yet, geometric figures are the essence of draftsmanship. Geometry, the science that deals with space, its measurement and relationships, has always been the most basic rule of painting.

Until now, the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry sufficed to still the anxiety provoked in the souls of great artists by a sense of the infinite – anxiety that cannot be called scientific, since art and science are two separate domains.

The new painters do not intend to become geometricians, any more than their predecessors did. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of writing. Now today's scientists have gone beyond the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry. Painters have, therefore, very naturally been led to a preoccupation with those new dimensions of space that are collectively designated, in the language of modern studios, by the term fourth dimension.

Without entering into mathematical explanations pertaining to another field, and confining myself to plastic representation as I see it, I would say that in the plastic arts the fourth dimension is generated by the three known dimensions: it represents the immensity of space eternalized in all directions at a given moment. It is space itself, or the dimension of infinity; it is what gives objects plasticity. It gives them their just proportion in a given work, where as in Greek art, for example, a kind of mechanical rhythm is constantly destroying proportion.

Greek art had a purely human conception of beauty. It took man as the measure of perfection. The art of the new painters takes the infinite universe as its ideal, and it is to the fourth dimension alone that we owe this new measure of perfection that allows the artist to give objects the proportions appropriate to the degree of plasticity he wishes them to attain.

Wishing to attain the proportions of the ideal and not limiting themselves to humanity, the young painters offer us works that are more cerebral than sensual. They are moving further and further away from the old art of optical illusion and literal proportions, in order to express the grandeur of metaphysical forms.

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Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was a poet, playwright, novelist and art critic.

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Film