Art and the Technosphere [1 ed.] 1527584844, 9781527584846

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Art and the Technosphere

Art and the Technosphere: The Platforms of Strings By

Žarko Paić

Art and the Technosphere: The Platforms of Strings By Žarko Paić This book first published 2022 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2022 by Žarko Paić All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book 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 copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-8484-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8484-6

Dedicated to Luc Tuymans

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................. viii Introduction ............................................................................................... ix Chapter One ................................................................................................ 1 Picture—Sign—Event: Contemporary Art as Time without History Introduction: Aesthetic thinking and the technological circuit ............. 1 1.1. Signs with no meaning: The picture in the age of the technosphere ................................................................................ 29 1.2. The image as an event: The end of information and the beginning of life............................................................................................ 55 Conclusion .......................................................................................... 70 Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 74 The Silence of Duchamp: Time without Event 2.1. Signs of emptiness and the spatial turn ........................................ 74 2.2. “Historical avant-garde” vs. “Neo-avant-garde”: Peter Bürger vs. Hal Foster and others......................................... 91 Epilogue ............................................................................................ 116 Chapter Three ......................................................................................... 118 If Language Is No Longer Spoken: Aporias of Conceptual Art 3.1. Time as destruction: From “wire” to “wireless” ........................ 118 3.2. A question of language: Two approaches to conceptual art— Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth ................................................... 138 3.3. “Post-conceptual condition”? ..................................................... 161 Notes....................................................................................................... 172 Bibliography ........................................................................................... 175 Index of Names....................................................................................... 186

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book tries to represent my theoretical credo and reflections on the relationship between the position of aesthetics in contemporary philosophy, the theory of contemporary art, and the notion by which I seek to understand contemporaneity as a whole—the technosphere. Over the years of exploring this complex relationship, the thought has matured that the new technoscientific epoch, devoid of metaphysics and fundamental ideas of beauty and the sublime, has confronted us with a zero point of radical turn. We are hovering over the abyss of technological nihilism, and in this position, we are abandoning the human dimension of rootedness in the earth. Therefore, it should be imperative to see how to preserve the trace of the presence of great art that has adorned the historical heritage and to open up access to the age of hyper-reality. The assumptions that I outline here contribute to understanding the ontological and cognitive discomfort that the world is no longer subject to aesthetic enchantment-disenchantment but to the computation, planning, and construction of artificial reality and artificial life. Dealing with the rule of the technosphere in life without the metaphysical additions of “sense” and “dignity” to art signifies the openness of the last station on the path to the singularity of thought-life. I hope this book will inspire others to think even more deeply about what no longer has any depth and to develop completely different thinking on the relationship between the technosphere and creativity without the unnecessary phobia of the technological challenge of the posthuman condition. I owe my thanks to friends and associates who have followed my research for all these years, and particularly to important thinkers with whom I have built in dialogue, at least I hope, in my way of talking and arguing about the aesthetic construction of the contemporary world: Prof. Dieter Mersch, University of Zürich; Prof. Giorgio Agamben, The European Graduate School; Prof. Wolfgang Welsch, University of Jena; Prof. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, John Cabot University, Rome; and Prof. Krešimir Purgar, University of Osijek.

INTRODUCTION

In the analysis of the relationship between aesthetics and contemporary art, this book goes through the theoretical paradigms of hermeneutics, phenomenology and semiotics when it comes to the notion of the image and its new ontological status concerning the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art of the 20th century, going in the direction of the analysis of the posthumanism/transhumanism of art today. Showing that we must begin to think of the aesthetic construction of worlds, rather than presenting and representing the idea in its eternal splendour, I conclude that synaesthesia requires a new form of cybernetic sensitivity, and contemporary art leaves the avant-garde procedures of shock, provocation and experiment and enters the uncertain area of the metatheory of visualization of the event. From the caves to the temples, the cathedral and the museums of contemporary art, and, finally, to the self-reflective event of creation and enjoyment in a digital simulation, a cycle of the historical development of art is closed. The problem is no longer “what” art is but “how” we should determine the difference between the aesthetic object and artificial life. With the technosphere, Western metaphysics disappears in the autopoietic system of thought. Instead of the continuation of philosophical aesthetics in another modern sense and form, and instead of an apology of the ideas of contemporary art that have spread to the worlds of life in the global world, I would like to state the main assumption that we are leading the synthesis of “integral reality,” which means that aesthetic-artistic performance no longer applies to humans. Instead, we are encountering cyborgs and technologically dematerialized practices. Post-conceptual art deals with these issues. In the first chapter, the new theory of the image is explained in the era of the technosphere. There are, consequently, two possible paths for that historical distinction and a multitude of images in an age that no longer has any spiritual need for art: (1) the path of the ontology of the sign as the substitution of meaning in semiotics/semiology, phenomenology, pragmatism and deconstructionism; (2) the path to the event of becoming (Werden, devenir) by transforming the condition within the image so that it becomes mobile and is corporally transformed into the construction of a new media reality in image science (Bildwissenschaft) and the digital aesthetics of visualization. Following the principles of cybernetic

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Introduction

management, the worlds based on the feedback system and the environment take place in the process of translating the language in the signal as a message. The sign always presupposes the existence of a “Big Other” in the form of reference to which it refers. The event, however, represents the emergence of the case (contingency) that cannot be explained by the initial cause(s) and ultimate end. In both cases, the sign of communication and events as information—which also means that the event has a hidden primacy in a non-ontological sense, just as it was formulated by early Derrida in Of Grammatology that writing preceded speech—pose the question of the image as a metaphysical issue about the meaning of Being. And there is no more an a priori form of the language, only the visual code. The second chapter discusses the relationship between the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde concerning the question of the extent of the basic ideas of shock, provocation and experiment as secularized concepts for the metaphysical notions of beauty and the sublime. The invocation of chaos and freedom with which the new art of “historical avant-garde” has opened up space for a paradoxical relationship of aesthetics and technology seems to have ceased to be the guiding principle even today when contemporary art seeks inspiration in the research of technoscience and “artificial life” (Alife). What denotes the loss of faith in history? It might not be a symptom of indifference towards political events. After all, without the world wars, civil wars, and the revolutions of art in the 20th century, it would have remained just an empty plate. The reason lies in the fact that after the death of God, what remains is to seek justification in politics as ideology and aesthetics as a mystical-technical way of exposing the Being. The turning point is yet to occur in the 21st century. Why? Simply put, art “today” is no longer witness to any other mission than the re-politicization and reaestheticization of the world. At the time of the dominion of the technosphere, passages of time without events and spaces of contemporary art are devoid of content but become the pure form of the architecture of absolute deterritorialization/reterritorialization. We can see that the inadequacy of contemporary art is strongly related to the impossibility of “revolution” and “utopia” in an already altered modern world in which the only true “revolutionary utopia” has been realized in the technological construction of the “Real.” This primarily refers to the experiments in “A-intelligence” research, from which “A-life” is now being created. Instead of events that are awaiting both the neo-avant-garde movement called Situationism and fundamentalist messianic theologians, all that is on the agenda is the order of change in the technological environment itself. All that, with heavy

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acceleration, might produce the preconditions for the emergence of the posthuman condition. The third chapter opens the complex problem of conceptual and postconceptual art today. Does contemporary art need the incessant proving of “revolutionarity,” “libertinism,” “subversiveness,” “critical participation,” “solidarity-in-community” and all the other features of re-politicization if the early avant-garde already solved the issue of God by searching for the anthroposophical, theosophical and mystical dimensions of the “tertium organum,” as was the case with Marcel Duchamp, Kazimir Malevich and Joseph Beuys? This question can be answered in the following manner. The detritus of history always ends up in a new museum. There is no need for cynicism here on the part of those arriving tardily. This is simply what it is. Rebellion against order and the preservation of order, change, and steadfastness have been inscribed into the essence of contemporaneity. Consequently, the combat against the end of art, in the age of the pseudo-synthesis of cultural needs for excess and experiment, should be understood merely as the other side of its necessary aestheticization. And yet, behind all of this, there is nothing more than the technosphere and its platforms, made of strings. It would be improvident to underestimate the role of conceptuality in this process of the transfigurations and transformations of the condition. However, it appears that the exit from aporia of contemporary art primarily presumes the destruction of what is the impossible mission of art in confronting the essence of technology today. This is about abandoning the use of any prefixes and suffixes in the future such as post-, neo- and re. What is philosophy left with if art becomes a concept? Have we truly reached the point of realizing that after such an event, both thought and production (logos and poiesis) lose their essence in a collision with the historically powerful negation of being, one that assumes authority over the occurrence of an actual event as the construction of worlds? The concept is information, and information—starting with logos and poiesis—ends up in the void of the technosphere’s endless rotation. Téchne is the last word of philosophy and art in the indifferent era, téchne as tertium datur beyond language and the image. We will see how the realization of metaphysics in cybernetics is reflected in the historical development of art from caves and temples to museums and information files. The question of the essence of art today transcends the boundaries of what the meaning of art was: to open up the possibility of a new horizon of the world. We are at the end of historical time. Art, as well as aesthetics, becomes a part of the technosphere that calculates, plans and constructs fascinating worlds created to seduce and attract but also to think differently from a human being who had historically

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metaphysical attributes and can no longer be as such. So, this book represents a thought journey through time that is disappearing in its entirety and leaving the question of how to preserve the dignity of art, without which one cannot fulfil an existential mission on Earth and in space. We are approaching a state of immediate immersion in the technosphere that lures and swallows us and without which nothing can exist.

CHAPTER ONE PICTURE—SIGN—EVENT: CONTEMPORARY ART AS TIME WITHOUT HISTORY

The magic of painting is exactly in its eternal mystery we are trying to decipher, without asking for hidden reasons in everything we see, and therefore a multitude of meanings come from wooden canvas panel, drawing, copper, fresco. With one word, it’s a picture that constantly sends the signs to us. José Ortega y Gasset, Revival of the Image (Ortega y Gasset 2002, 367)

Introduction: Aesthetic thinking and the technological circuit Is there a picture of a metaphysical secret key that language cannot unlock? When we have moved away from the time when we at least have a reliable concept of the picture in close connection to the beauty that comes from art as an event from which arises the autonomous work, something very uncanny pervades our thoughts. Removal from the primordial sources means bringing the end of its impact closer. Plotinus came up with the stance of emanating the idea. The emergence or outbreak of something out of nothing, and in this emerging the upheaval work does not stop, has its resemblance with the picture in a volcanic crater. When magma breaks through directly from the burning crater to the land, traces just like geysers break out on the fiery surface. The emanation of the image that still inspires the idea of beauty can be found in the Baroque paintings created by Diego Velázquez. However, as José Ortega y Gasset correctly pointed out in his analysis, the problem of that form of painting is really that it was “painting for painters,” or, in other words, the form of painting that established the modern autonomy of the art.

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The picture without a secret—it is as though it no longer deserves the name “image.” But what specifically is going on with the word “secret” as such? Is it just a mere expression of the mystic art, unlike in philosophy and science (and in harmony with myth and religion, without which it loses the reason for its survival), or does it operate with concepts, prospects and functions, only with percepts and feelings as expressed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1991/2005)? Secrecy denotes an attribute of Being. It is not, therefore, just the wonder of existence that reaches its deepest foundation of “life” with its spell. The miracle refers to the fact that something exists as such. When the world in its disclosure of light opens up the wonders of all Being, we need secrets. We must be mindful of the fact that the mystery of Being is closely related to the human need for beauty. There is a need for the fulfilment of Being. When something unconnected with the need for unity, harmony and integrity inspires the movement to the goal that exists from the beginning as the purpose of Being all alone, then a moment occurs that maintains metaphysics. To paraphrase one wise contemporary theoretician of architecture who said that without beauty, a human is dying, we will add that without the mystery of the image, there are no reasons to continue to exist as we have for centuries. It could not be a matter of revealing the secrets in the understanding of the world as a miracle. However, the modern age has been technically secularizing the notion of the miracle. It becomes more and more recognizable in the mystic of life created by technological engineering and the manipulation of the genetic resource instead of in the mystery of elevation in architecture. From that viewpoint, it becomes clear that mystery belongs to the communion of Gods and people as ethos, while the descent into the underworld of the soul signifies the decadence of the mystic of the subject. Sculptural art, therefore, should be understood as having quite a different task than the aesthetic need to decorate our inner space. Accordingly, the miracle demands its “public secret.” It differs from the secret, but the logos in the apophantic style of speech did not derive from the rationality of a thinking machine that chaotically reveals the riddle of the Sphinx. However, the secret of its own life remains very opaque. All the problems that are present in “nature” should be solved pragmatically-constructively thanks to the skills and knowledge of empirical nature. But questions about “history” cannot be answered without preliminarily opening oneself to failure, even to the danger of falling into chaos without the hope of returning with the eternal cosmic order. In terms of disclosure, simultaneously, the necessity of the occurrence of Being lies in the possibility of “Being” and the possibility that the act of

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disclosure did not reach the interpretation of its visible and invisible features. Hence, time has a significant role in upholding the truth. Otherwise, modern archaeology, with all its technological theories of “secrets,” for example, allegedly dating the period of the Greek Dark Ages to the end of the century, would be as utterly unnecessary as any other forensic science to examine the age of an object excavated from the depths of the earth in the light of day. The possibility of misunderstandings about the meaning of an object and its cultural use in “our time” inevitably emerges when we try to interpret its meaning and go beyond the time in which it originated. Hermeneutics assumes that there should be something like universality in the judging of things, regardless of the timing and distinctions in the notion(s) of the meaning of the substance of the things. The statue of the goddess Athena in the Parthenon during the Age of Pericles and its reconstruction today in the age of digital aesthetics are certainly not quite so different events if we look at them as observers and without the further education acquired by art history. The significance of this statue affirmed as the uniqueness of the experience of artistic creation is an event in which the work and its understanding of the historical space are acquired. The statue’s time belongs to the time of the mythical-religious cult as a feast. Hence, the meaning of something from antiquity is lost in the depths of history. Certainly, given that, there could be still some substitute for that source in the present time. On these issues, the most significant insight into the relationship between hermeneutics and the philosophy of art as well as aesthetics is certainly given by Hans-Georg Gadamer. He showed, for instance, that, based on Plato and his thought about art as imitation (mimesis), there always exists something else that belongs to the metaphysical organization of fallen history. And we can add that this is also true for all high cultures outside of the West (such as Indian, Chinese, or Japanese). To put it simply, the idea of imitating the originals, without which art as a depiction of beauty in Greece would not have cause for survival, is based on the persistence of Being. Its immutability and divine order (taxis) in the world order witnessed occasional changes. The order in the cosmos determined order in nature (physis) and, consequently, order in the state (politeia). No other order, as a perfect model of the world, divine and human, would be possible without the mystery of the art with a cult-religious event, which appears as the “imitation” of Being in its eternal and immutable order, being manifested as the appearance of the beauty. What, then, denotes art as mimesis at all? We can find the answer in Gadamer’s assumption at the end of his discussion in his essay “Art and Imitation”:

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Chapter One The testimony of order seems to be valid forever and ever, because every piece of art, even in our world that is increasingly changing into uniformity and seriality, testifies to the spiritual power of the order that constitutes the reality of our life. In art, what we all do is exegetically what we are doing here: the constant construction of the world. In the middle of this common and intimate decomposing world, it stands as a pledge of order, and perhaps all the forces of maintenance and preservation that bear human culture are based on what we exemplify in the artist’s work and the experience of art: by always re-arranging what is falling apart. (Gadamer 1993a, 36)

The miracle is not just about the persistence of the world, regardless of its changes. On the contrary, the miracle is happening as a secret of Being itself. And that event might be magnificent because nothing is guaranteed in advance to answer the question of the meaning of Being. There are at least two miracles, and each would always be amazing in its singularity. Some, however, will say that it could be yet another wonder even more wonderful than the last. First, it is a miracle that Being might be open to existence, and it is another miracle that what we can see, hear, touch, feel and think of in its fullness of time has its meaning precisely as a remembrance of the past in the present with a view to the future. What happens thanks to the thinking of saying has never lost its meaning. Undisclosed in the time of the present, the length of service again breathes other life memories. The secret of the relationship between Being and thinking can never be released until someone appears who will tremble by thinking and lives like those of Pascal’s “bulrush in the wind.” Yes, it always has its own Antigone, and, at all times, the need for its own Oedipus also exists. The paradox of modern art, which completely belongs and adheres to the idea of the scientific construction of Being, thus assumes for its “established foundation” the idea of the experiment and the method instead of the beauty and exaltation of the work itself in seeking the redemption of the beginning of the sovereignty of the new. By the way, this is nothing more than a possible mimicry of the religious-social mystery of Christ’s sacrifice. For Christians, art at the end of history, as Georg W. F. Hegel perfectly described, has lost its prophetic content. Consequently, the spiritual need for art, once so respected, has disappeared forever. Art, thus, has become only a conceptual tool to “preserve the past” (Marquard 2003, 64-81 and 113-121). Was the sublime sacrifice not thus ultimately useless? Without the historical sacrifice, without which the art of the image of the Western circle could not have been justified from the Middle Ages until its condemnation by Impressionists and Paul Cézanne, the aesthetic sacrifice turns into an act. That sovereignty of the body assumes what Georges Bataille called the “solar economy” of the non-capitalist exchange

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event (Bataille 1989). It seems that the image of the miracle and mystery of grace and helplessness has been left from the very beginning for something that goes beyond its pictorial meaning. Those images were revealed by Plato’s concept as mimesis, but the ordinary meaning of the term as an imitation of nature or ideas that allow the image its existence will not satisfy us. Mimesis might not be a mere imitation but a possibility of creating the world as a semblance and as beauty. What seems to be just another medium of “creating” the idea of the divine God from Plato to St. Thomas Aquinas when it comes to the idea of “art” should not mark a map and some ideological “nature” of things. Instead, it should be presumed that mimesis in its essence works like the generative principle of placing art into the technical production of appearances as “truth.” In the image that marks and conceals the traces of what is depicted in the illustration-representation as “truth,” we are presenting a dispute between two lines that should be almost the same. In other words, mimesis has historically marked the emergence of art as something that in principle means much more than “truth.” Therefore, what Martin Heidegger spoke about in his lectures concerning the essence of space and the idea of art in the sharp differences between the Greek and the Modern seems appropriate. He said that the Greeks did not require the theory of the fine arts such as modern art given what was necessary at the very beginning of philosophical aesthetics. So, the reason lies in the fact that in Greek statues and paintings, we recognize the polis as being inhabited by living gods, not chimaeras and illusions, the fictions and the substitutes of the divine. The lively presence of the gods in the paintings and their mere representation, therefore, signify an essential difference in the essence of the art. The immediacy of spiritualbodily singularity must be vivid, and what is “dead” is what lies behind the scenes of the idea of a divine representation in the image (Heidegger 2010, 193-195). Heidegger’s approach to the history of Being as the history of the Western thought called philosophy in the early days of Greece came to the standpoint of Being as truth in un-concealment (German Unverborgenheit, Greek aletheia) (Heidegger 2000, 263-288). The wonder and secret of Western metaphysics is that truth is always “here,” not “there.” It belongs to the delusion of Being itself. The event—as seen in the epochs of the history of Being from Greek and Roman antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages to the modern age of science and technology and the planetary era— points out the possibility of interpretation based on its disclosure. Searching for truth cannot be the core of the mental research that someone selectively undertakes, such as with the secrets of Gnostic sects. Quite the contrary, Hermeticism is represented by the feature of secret knowledge as

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knowledge of the secret itself. It swears by the name of the god Hermes. Traditionally, he had a significant role as the messenger of the gods among humans. Understanding the meaning of the essence of the world seems to pinpoint that he is placed on the verge of symbolizing truth through the indirect speech of the symbol and by concealing what its fracture might be by seeing into the “other nature” of the things. Hermes was, therefore, truly represented as a mythologically performed God and, of course, as understanding and mediating meanings that are not accessible to the one whom they addressed. Therefore, every single notion of an attempt to interpret the signs in speech or imagery had to take a form in which it could already appear. Given the inflation of interpretative modes of speech is still inevitably coming, we are almost largely thrown in the world of that original thinking. However, the eclectic periods in the history of Hellenism were synthetically driven by the delirium of many interpretations of the world. That surely means that the world in its complexity can no longer understand itself, either directly or intuitively. One of the key features of such a world lies in its hybridity. It cannot be further disassembled without a deconstruction of the whole range of diverse knowledge that is compulsory for special tools to retrieve the very core of reality. What is the term aletheia that Heidegger draws attention to in his thoughts on the paths of philosophy as metaphysics and matches to the “second beginning” (andere Anfang)? It should suffice to say the following. The un-concealment of truth does not only happen as a consonance with the thinking of Being, as it was “rightly” logically judged by the medieval definition of truth by setting an adequatio intellectus ad rem. If that were the case, then we could say that thinking already has a hidden primacy over Being. The miracle could not exist without its excitement in the sense that it can then be argued that the subject of truth has determined the object of its knowledge as truly what exists as such. Nor is it even important that the mind determines boundaries, as in Hegel’s remarkable definition of philosophy. Kant’s metaphysics of idealism started from the conception of Being as positum. Therewith it might be set by the act of thinking and what should be already connected as thing-in-self (Ding-an-sich) (Heidegger 1976b, 445-480). We know how much such a form of ontological “subjectivism” as solipsism in the sense of George Berkeley’s esse est percipi is credited to the nominalism of medieval ontology. In Heidegger’s turn of the road to the truth as the fundamental words of Western metaphysics, it is about instilling the very thing that, mysteriously and miraculously, hovers before everyone in front of their eyes. And because of the fact that everyone might be

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currently present, somehow it immediately disappears from the perspective. In the un-concealed place, everything becomes a semblance of things as such, like the scene from The Odyssey when Athena, the patron goddess of Odysseus, made him not known to the people until he reached the court of King Alcinous, even though he was very familiar to them. The truth in its disclosure cannot have its “objective validity” simply because it happens that, in the historical-epochal moments of the events of Being, language as saying is determined by boundaries. Or, to put things differently, it is true that, in its apophantic event, the encounter between the source of emanation of the image and its mediation in language has already been addressed to someone in the historically one-way street. It might be called the secret of its singularity and contingency, but not of its eternity and necessity. In Hegel’s thinking, the decay of the absolute spirit was, among other things, in the breakup of “objective validity.” When it comes to knowledge in the subjects of exact natural sciences (mathematics and physics), there must be a sign that the subject became the substance. The reflection on nature simultaneously becomes a self-reflection of nature’s cognition. The end of rationalism, hence, conveys Friedrich Nietzsche’s view of the perspectivism of truth, which, thanks to art, reveals the truth and the lie of “Being” in the sense that goes beyond the moral. And that means that with a sublime cycle of Being as becoming (Werden, devenir), in its necessity, it takes place in the freedom of glory as the eternal recurrence of the same. It is no longer a matter of subjecting man to overcoming “goals” and “purposes” as values in the service of that alliance. What humans generously bestowed upon the gods throughout Western history has been coming back, and so the beginning of the truth of “that” world now has the character of the inevitable illusion of the eternal “truths” because, metaphysically speaking, “God is dead” (Heidegger 1977, 209267). What, then, represents the image (eikon, icon, Bild) in that miracle of Being if not some mysterious sign of gods as the imitation of the true world or, indeed, an event that tells what the image reveals, whether something or someone, nothing or anyone, until the very occurrence of the dizziness of the signs constructed as an illusion of conceit, as a pure illusion of the reality? And does that happen just in the way that the image gives a new meaning that it could never have had before, even for such a picture, despite the massive remnants of the fantasy? In any case, the image as a sign indicates the emanation of an idea that language cannot express in its logical-historical possibilities. The picture as an event, however, announces the upcoming one that lies beyond language and the picture. In both cases, it might be evidence that the image did not have its autonomy, although

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modern art cannot be established without the modern idea of a selfconceptual mind. What, consequently, is meant by the expression “the autonomy of the picture”? In analogy with the “autonomy of art,” which becomes a condition for the possibility of emancipating an image from language, it is necessary to show that it might be an autonomy that has the same metaphysical status as, for example, Antonin Artaud’s performative-conceptual art, or in Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry, where language could not be in the service of metalanguage to “make sense” of, for instance, medieval epics and Baroque descriptions but rather releases its own logical and rational shackles and becomes a pointless picture of its auto-referential meaning. Just like “painting for artists” in the manner of Velázquez, Mallarmé also created great symbolic poetry for entirely excellent educated poets. Art without foundation in the divine revelation of the Absolute regarding plain and visual art such as painting, sculpture, and architecture must necessarily be found in something “inward.” How could we take that operation quite seriously? The transmission of the underdetermination principle from Werner Heisenberg’s theory of quantum physics must be transferred to the uptake of theoretical reflections on modern art doomed to the emptiness of its own self-determination. That is the way in which one could reach the final goal (Rancière 2011). Art in its “autonomy” as a language needs to pass down the path to liberation from the rational grid of senses. In the case of an image, it might be obvious that, in theoretical terms, it is the abandonment of the notions of historical iconology whereby the image cannot itself impose rules of meaning even when there is no longer an “iron law,” such as the central perspective used from the Renaissance to Cézanne (Belting 2009, 9-20). That crucial assumption had to be witnessed by an act of radical art practice as a way of overcoming the differences between life and art, technology and production. But, as Friedrich Schelling had long been aware regarding the event when the art is determined by the destiny of God’s son, it was necessary to fall into the abyss of the technical idolatry of all ages or to open up the possibility of a substitute strategy for the creation of the sacred for art to save humanity from transformation into a non-human machine. This was probably the reason why modern philosophy was so fully trusted with art, although the art itself, regarding some of its “excesses” and “nonsenses” in the 20th century, did not deserve it. Many distinctive artists of the 20th century, with the avant-garde stamp, were searching for a substitute position in the divine image as a sign and/or the event—Malevich, Duchamp and Beuys, to name a few (Paiü 2021). There are, consequently,

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two possible paths for that historical distinction in an age that no longer has any spiritual need for art: (1) the path of the ontology of the sign as the substitution of meaning in semiotics/semiology, phenomenology, pragmatism and deconstructionism; and (2) the path to the event of becoming (Werden, devenir) by transforming the condition within the image to make it mobile and corporally transformed into the construction of a (new) media reality in image science (Bildwissenschaft) and in the digital aesthetics of visualization. The sign has been reduced to communication and information. In the discourse of modern science, it is called reductionism. Hence, it should also be kept in mind that there are tantalizing and inescapable areas of Being to which the reduction categories can be applied. What is fundamentally inescapable could be ultimately reduced to itself, such as life that cannot be exhausted in the way that biology determines, where it begins and ends its life in the singularity of the species and its mutations. According to cybernetic principles, the worlds based on the feedback system and the environment take place in the process of translating the language in the signal as a message. The sign always presupposes the existence of a “Big Other” in the form of reference to which it refers. The event, however, represents the emergence of the case (contingency) that cannot be explained by the first cause(s) and ultimate end. In both cases, the sign of communication and events as information—which also means that the event has a hidden primacy in a non-ontological sense, just as it was formulated by early Derrida in Of Grammatology that writing preceded speech—pose the question of the image as a metaphysical issue about the meaning of Being. And there is no more an a priori form of the language, only the visual code (Paiü 2013, 484-520; Paiü 2014, 11-61; Derrida 1967). From the previously stated lines, something seems obvious. We encounter two miracles and one secret. The secret lies in its paradox. But it can be considered inaccessible because it exists on the horizon of historicalepochal evidence that always requires a new interpretation and, of course, understanding. That interpretation is in giving the right direction. With the arrival of monotheistic religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all that becomes so-called dogma that is related to close readings of the books containing everything that has always existed—from primordial arché to the end of the world. It should be obvious from the preceding assumption that there have been two ways of understanding the image in the history of

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Western metaphysics. The first starts from the above statement about the viewpoint of the Absolute in the determination of God, and the second is derived from the aforementioned intervention by Nietzsche, according to which the first and last “truth” concerning the axiom of the death of God must be negative. The former belongs to the metaphysical assumption of the transcendental notion of history as a universal law. The latter assumes, however, what Deleuze, in his book Difference and Repetition, called human evolution tendencies in life itself to be the main principle of difference (Deleuze 1994). Why did we begin by saying that leaving the source in the sense of emanating the meaning of images increasingly leads to a return of beauty despite the matter of fact that indicates that its disappearance is essentially a path of contemporary art? Undoubtedly, we are exposed to the aesthetically producing reality everywhere. Rather than encountering a miracle and secret beauty, its “actuality” can hardly be experienced elsewhere except in the memory of the “great painting” of times that disappeared forever. It is not the 20th century anymore. In a true sense, we may share a common attitude about the previous century not as the golden age of painting but as the production of images created technologically by the construction of the reproductive reality of photography and film. Walter Benjamin’s paradox of losing the aura of the artistic image was determined by simultaneous departing from and approaching the original and, in all of that, referring to the metaphysical tradition of God, the first cause, or the transcendental signifier (Benjamin 1996). When we spoke of emanation in the meaning of Plotinus, we had the persistence of Being in all epochs in mind, as imagined in the term philosophia perennis, but simple necessity creates some of them by fictionally generated thoughts. Language, of course, has its special ability to distinguish the past from the present and the future. For that reason, it should be assumed there is something permanent beyond the passing of time. Something must be set as unchangeable and eternal so that we can reach the shores of change and finality. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes distinguishes the existence of God, and the human soul and body have already been introduced into the problem. The metaphysics of the mind cannot exist without the assumption of the infinity of the universe and the eternity of the idea of God. Hence, any evidence of human thought as the initial subjectivity has been derived from the idea of the infinity of the spiritual substance. A subject in contrast to material or physical substance (res extensa) thinks of its infinity in the world of ideas. Taking all that into account, we can say that the relationship between the mind and the body, or the two different substances, is already shown

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through the connection of rationality as infinity and sense as finality. It might be obvious that analogical thinking prepared a path for a digital apparatus in advance. The true reason for that is based on the similarities and differences between the first and the second, the original and a copy. The same goes for the main part of contemporary art—the picture is articulated in two distinctive ways of showing: event or information and sign or communication. But what precedes their relationship and destroys any credibility of ontology related to images in modern times that derived from selfconfiguration techniques? The answer lies in Being transformed into the assemblage of beings in the constant process of transformation and the essence of man in the existential project of deconstruction without a first cause and ultimate purpose. It is not necessary to specifically mention the end of metaphysics in the onto-theological sense. When language no longer stands for its point of reference in Being as nature and the cosmos, it remains to paint its imagination and to turn it into an information system. The technical prerequisite of language in contemporary art might be one of the consequences of the aesthetics of beautiful art. The term no longer corresponds to actuality. Nobody is talking about “beautiful art” anymore, except philosophers and classical humanists when they want to warn of the distinction that emerged in the duality of high culture and the massive need for imitation and decoration at the end of the 18th century. What did not come out of the Being and does not emanate a sense of beauty must be replaced by the aesthetic construction of reality. For such a thing, it would be necessary for science to claim the throne of religion and use a technique of travesty for its own sake in the seduction of the audience. The truth of the modern age is indeed just what, in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, comes through the flash of insight in A Season in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer). Beauty was subjected to insults because it was afflicted. In addition, labour takes the place of the honour and pride of nomadic beauty. Ultimately, the industrial production of the machine and the techniques of aesthetic design combine and homogenize modern society and its hunger for new artificial shapes (Danto 2003). In my next endeavour, I would like to talk about the end of all metaphysical possibilities for the image to come from the “highest levels” and “from below” and to consign contemporary art and its sovereignty to history without returning to what “lost dignity” means at the end of its path to nothingness. At the same time, this will mean that we have tried to think of the image as the “essence” of contemporary art from its orientation to the primacy of illumination and darkness, loudness and opacity, explosion and implosion. When an event becomes information and a sign becomes

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communication, then all that remains for the idea of art is that it might transform the digital code. That could be a prerequisite for the existence of the world in the network of events and the network of meanings with tendencies of the infinite circle of the same in differences. What connects the possibility of one of the initial sources (arché) as all beings with what happens as the “objective” and “purpose” (telos) of all history might be nothing other than the idea of infinity. We encountered the paradigmatic expression of this in Gottfried Leibniz’s concept of the monad. It is about the idea of a singularity in the cosmological uniqueness of Being. Leibniz once said that monads do not have windows. Everything can, therefore, be framed by the limits of the human ability to think with the model in the exactness of the mathematical points, but in their infinity, they remain eternal and unchanging differences and can only be thought to start from the perspective of metaphysical points (le points métaphysique). The heterogeneity and insatiability of the substances they represent relate to their infinite production due to the desire or metaphysical need for God as the source of the creation of everything that exists. Hence, the image can be understood from two mutually contradictory and at the same time related philosophical concepts of infinity—mathematical or rational and metaphysical or intuitive. Rationality refers to materiality and objectivity, the immateriality and unpredictability of the frame within which it is defined in its three-dimensional appearance, while intuition refers to the visualization of the emergence of a new reality from the technological construction. In Spanish Baroque painting, intuition had the metaphysical character of the “spiritual eye.” To see directly into what might not be visible and belonging to the usual human experience of rational knowledge represented the culmination of mystical experience. It is by no means accidental that the thinking of great German mystics like Angelus Silesius and Meister Eckhart and the great mystics of Spain like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila was directed towards the overlapping tendencies of the event inspired by interconnected networks of language and image (Stoichita 1997). What does the notion of aesthetics mean at the end of philosophy as metaphysics? The question has an excess of Heideggerian “pathetic” thoughts of the end and the new or “second/other beginning.” It is therefore necessary to re-address that issue in its new context. Firstly, if philosophy were to be realized in cybernetics as a completion of the technical possibilities of philosophy, the one at the height of Hegel’s signification of absolute knowledge in Aufhebung, then its ability to continue within the bounds of cyberspace could be set precisely by becoming a techno-genesis as the aesthetics of communication. In the calculation in aesthetics with the

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brave new meaning given to it by its “inventor” Alexander Baumgarten between 1735 and 1750, it is assumed that the two types of knowledge must be reconsidered. Both are included in what Baumgarten thought about when he introduced a new discipline into the development of philosophical thought within Western metaphysics. The rationalism of the 18th century and its cult of science and technology contributed to the concept of a beautiful divine Being created by God from being effective as practical doings (ethics and politics). But the form of that self-preservation is not the one developed in Greek philosophy in the ancient days of Plato and Aristotle. The Being belongs to a place in which beauty in the spiritual life of humans spread in the 18th century to the “natural” area as a result of the progress of the natural sciences. It may already be obvious that aesthetics appeared through the modern construction of “nature” in the sense of the subject’s knowledge of beauty. Subjectivity, therefore, cannot be located beyond aesthetic knowledge. It means its entry into the idea of the object’s construction. However, it might be precisely determined by the scientific approach to Being as the whole and related to beings. The two kinds of insights that Baumgarten had in mind are (1) cognitio sensitiva and (2) ars pulchrae cogitandi. As Gadamer once precisely wrote, there is a sense of consciousness—a sensible and beautiful thought—in the concept of the mind that unites logical and practical abilities in the understanding of the world: Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline only came into being in the 18th century, in the age of rationalism, apparently induced by the very novelty of rationalism, which rises on the foundations of constructive natural sciences, as developed in the 17th century, and to some extent the shape of our world, so that it is all converted to dizziness in technology. (Gadamer 1993a, 107)

The emergence of aesthetics from the source of a technically designed mind must be taken seriously. It is a “science of beauty” based on the traces of the rationalist utopia of the world. The aim of that utopia could be realized in contemporary art as the outbreak of the historical avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century. It is about the visualization of the Being as a thing marked by technology and the aesthetics of the world. What the avant-garde thinkers had for their project were Russian constructivism and the Berlin School’s dadaism, the connectivity of the structure and corporeality in the idea of bringing art to life as a social event, realized in an assemblage of ideas related to posthumanism/transhumanism as the main paradigms of the rule of technoscience today (Biro 2009). Their revelatory character is thereby assumed—just as the modern mind should be guided by a sensitive arrowhead that today goes further towards re-politicization and re-

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aestheticization—since they might be the only remaining alternatives concerning the scientism of posthuman conditions in which they are destined to be “involved” even in the operation of planetary technology and when they are opposed to that rational viewpoint concerning that matter of fact. If we get even closer to the problem on the trail of Heidegger and his thoughts on the technology and destiny of art, as Gadamer turned his attention from a hermeneutic perspective—which does not help too much in the penetration of the puzzles of the performative-conceptual turn from Duchamp to post-genomics—we would be able to effectively see something uncanny. Art almost no longer differs from the aestheticization of the world if, by the latter term, we were to understand the process of designing the surrounding world (Umwelt) as a technologically arranged network of interactions between the system and the environment in the digital age. What does that mean? We assume that distinguishing art and aesthetics from those of Baumgarten, and especially from those of Kant, might make something of a mockery of the notion of an image that will be extensively dealt with here. The art whose traces we explicitly have in mind her is related to the fine arts (beaux arts, in which belles lettres take primacy because poetics is represented as the culmination of rhetorical art, referring to the French language of high culture that belonged to the aristocracy in the hierarchically divided feudal society) and was determined in the 18th century by nature. In that sense, rationalism and romanticism are paradoxically linked in an almost occult alliance. The nature invented by Baron d’Holbach’s mind structure and nature as an aesthetic experience of elevation, which is similar to Caspar David Friedrich’s aspiration, has united inhumanity and humanity. The machine and the uncanny sensation of human suffering (Unheimlichkeit) link poetry and science to a technological mediation apparatus. Using that condition, Lyotard redirected his attention in an attempt to justify the drift deep inside postmodern aesthetics (différend) that lies between the mind and experience of the sublime. Where we should search for a place of reconciliation against power, knowledge will be nothing more than a place of the immateriality of information technology. That is, indeed, exactly what might appear to be displaying the ineffectiveness of the technological event, such as the effect of laser technology on the human body and its environment (Lyotard 1983; Lyotard 1991, 78-88 and 89-107; Paiü 2014, 261-302; Zima 2005). The aesthetics of genius, as is well known, are the aesthetics of Kant and also of the paradigmatic figures of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and William Shakespeare. Therefore, art cannot be determined as merely

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decorating and ornamenting the high lifestyle of a decadent class, motivated by the aristocracy and its habits with which modernity achieved the complex phenomenon. That can be called the production of works and creation in language games and, ultimately, in the image. Thanks to what has been mentioned above, the world has welcomed the rational nature of human literacy. But beauty did not become a concept without the slightest help of the extravagance with which nature at the beginning of the 18th century entered into the space of the uncanny power of the unattainable point. The difference between art as a work of creation and the creation of aesthetics as a (scientific) sense of the world, and, within that, the beaux arts, emerged as a result of the frenzy between emotion and the notions of that sense and rationality. That space in between the experience of creating the world and its contemplation, which is undeniable to logical and ethical-political knowledge, is determined space from which the technological form of the world emerges. Like the freedom of artistic creation and the freedom of experimentation in science, it should be necessary for that bargain without which both were reduced to mere craftsmanship or rhetoric, as in the era of Rome in replication of the Greek spirit, or at the expense of the utopian field of the future, without which it could be doing more than the power of imagination (Einbildungskraft). The aesthetic origin was evident in the emergence of modern technology, as it unites the creativity and inventiveness of scientists to elevate themselves to the highest degree of sensory perception, no longer in contemplation of what it is (quidditas) but in the productive synthesis of what is “going on” (quoddittas) (Mersch 2015, 131-186). That “ontological difference” between analogue and digital seems to be crucial for all further considerations of contemporary philosophy and art as such. When we no longer have “Being” in the sense of its persistence and substantive truth, the time of the transformation and mutation of becoming or eternal Being is emerging. History is accelerating. It disappeared, in a crumpled contour in a black hole without a bottom, along with time as a set of past, present, and future. Only time has no starting point of its “own” within the circle of open possibilities. It seems that the time of the closed structure has appeared. If the upcoming has no more secret experiences or expectations of miracles, what is left? Instead, we have a container, a gentle field of the emergence of the new in the process of becoming. And it is not associated with the optimal control condition. Thus, chaos might be predictably deterministic on the fundamentals of physical-cosmological order variables. Entropy, in the two ways of understanding it—the statistical and informational, Boltzmann’s and Shannon’s—, takes up the place that occupied teleology a

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long time ago. The purpose and aim are shifted to the infinite movement towards the future like on a linear line with increasing acceleration and an increasing implosion of information (Bailey 1990). If it has become difficult to distinguish the inscrutability of art as the creation of a new world of aesthetics as a sense of knowledge in its determination of beauty with the concepts of taste, harmony, experience, perception, beauty and sublime, it becomes clear that the disappearance must be aesthetically replaced by categories from cybernetics and technical sciences. That also applies to the language of aesthetic thinking, which has become almost scientifically shaped as of today. The loss of difference leads towards the two concepts of art and science—creativity and inventiveness— used synonymously or, in turn, in the substitute games of pragmatic knowledge. Let us not think it is a mess and utter confusion or that we are presenting a comedy of confusion. Not at all! The process of the aestheticization of the world truly synthesizes the power of imagination and productive innovativeness. From technology, it follows that three fundamental concepts—namely calculation, planning and construction—have translated the analytical operations of thinking into the synthetic activity of artificial intelligence. Since synthesis denotes a process of creating a new reality from the network of events as a transformation of energy and transferring information to a virtual update, one can conclusively agree with Heidegger’s diagnosis of aesthetics and technology from the late 1930s that modern art has not only become a fully aesthetic experience or “experience” of the world as a technical object but is also on the road to disappearing in the loosing of the need for art. The time of the aestheticization of the world as a planetary technology takes place on the cybernetic principles of the system and environmental relations. And that means how the system has to be able to control the environment. It is no longer face-to-face or human-to-human communication. Instead of that, we are facing the interface constructed by the posthuman condition. Techno-genetically created selfhood produces and constructs itself in the act of aesthetic configurations of functions and structures. Just as writing precedes speech and the simulacrum becomes true in the media structure of the event, so, in the cognitive sense of observation, things will come to the last turn. Metaphysics will end in cybernetics when the dualities between Being and beings disappear in the constant production of the numerical logic of things. The binary code is thereby represented by the condition of the possibility of the conversion of languages into the image. The latter denotes the turn of metaphysics into cybernetics, hence the radical substitution of the former with the latter, the knowledge and the sense of the work as a self-

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reflective event of connection between artists and scientists. So, aesthetics can no longer be considered a mere cognitio sensitiva but explicitly as ars pulchrae cogitandi. Consequently, sensitivity can no longer be an empty body ruled by a higher instinct like the Cartesian life machine. Instead of that, the aesthetic experience might be effective in the aesthetics of the cognitive construction of reality. A place on the metaphysical distinction of categories and concepts for rank and hierarchy are introduced to non-linear contingent connections between condition and state. In other words, aesthetics no longer observes the essence of beautiful art to give it the foundation of religious-philosophical justification through experience and the sacred reflection and the notion. The digital aesthetics of the non-linear order of events in the network of events is represented by the synthetic “logic” of the emergence of the new in an emerging environment. It connects nature and culture, traditionally, “the sublime” and “beauty.” From that viewpoint, the synthetic “logic” could not appropriate the logic of the presentation-representation of Being in its stability and order, of which Gadamer spoke in a glorious and nostalgic manner when he was contemplating the possibilities of Plato’s and Aristotle’s concepts of mimesis in the time of the dissolution of the metaphysical worldview. The construction and deconstruction of binary oppositions that emerged from dialectics and phenomenology began in its place. And when it is no longer “here” or “there,” or a temporary suspension and neutralization, we must find a completely new categorical apparatus for a changed situation in which old words and a relatively new philosophical discipline no longer have their place and justification. Aesthetics no longer points to the world as the horizon of meaning, which, even for Heidegger, in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), had “more meaning,” starting from the understanding of primordial time. However, alongside the conception of Being as technology derived from Gestell, even the fundamental ontology through the idea of the destruction of history was rooted in the “bad infinity.” Setting the technology by which “Being” not only opens up understanding but also closes it at the end of the possibility of philosophy as such, it becomes obvious that computing, planning and construction decide a world in which, instead of primordial time and Being as an event, the sovereign rule of planetary mobilization sets up the constellations of technical relations between naturally and artificially created things. Aesthetics, therefore, no longer contemplates the order of nature and culture in which art is displayed or represents the world as “will and representation.” Rather than contemplation and observation, the passive synthesis of time in the idea of the sensitivity of beautiful has nowadays

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become something that Nietzsche in his thinking and Rimbaud in his poetry announced in the “darkness of the 19th century,” as Heidegger once pointed out. It is new and radical emancipation, new and radical autonomy, and new and radical sovereignty. But the mind cannot be separated from the body anymore and is traditionally superior to its performativity. The new aesthetics as technology has become the experience of the self-reflection and self-production of the artist himself as the world’s emergence of the “central perspective” of the body and its power to structure the system and the environment. That categorical change has emerged as a calling of revolutionary rebellion. But the turn was nothing without the turn of metaphysics itself, and hence it remained locked in its scheme. It was an “immanent transcendence” with which the aesthetic mind became the aestheticizing world as the constructed-deconstructed body in its neurocognitive unity. There is no doubt that it was perfectly described in the new concepts of movement-image and time-image by Gilles Deleuze in relation to the contemporary aesthetics of the cinema (Deleuze 1989). Aesthetics survived its breakdown of meaning. Of course, it was not a unique and special case. Some might say that there have never been so many recent philosophical attempts at ethics for the information age. It is interesting, however, to consider what all these ethics are based on. It is no longer a rigorously carried out process of the legitimacy of the mind in history within a politically constructed community. Without the previously acknowledged rules of communication, the ethical principle of action requires that ethics can no longer be founded on the transcendental principle of moral law. But in its way of constituting a good life and common action in its specific culture, with its historically defined customs and norms, it takes the pragmatics of the situation or, in turn, the indivisibility of the decision that alters the law and the norm into a different order of culture. In general, the significance of a signifier in symbolic communication in the community is determined by the context and situation; for example, the acts of shock and provocation by contemporary artists, such as the submersion of an image in urine or orgasmic sexual acts in a public space. Here, performative art shows the goal/purpose of transgressions in the patriarchal society of modern liberalism within the limits of their prohibition; consequently, ethics are thus articulated in what has been related (for thousands of years for the Greeks) to the aesthetic experience of the art of tragedy—in sympathy or compassion (Mitleid) (Jonas 1984; Lévinas 2011). The paradox of a modern ethic lies in the fact that the idea of “aesthetics” seeks to be ontological, but it cannot be realized as was expected. On the other hand, the paradox of contemporary aesthetics lies in its plurality and heteronomy, even though not only its field of validity but also and above all

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its focus on the productive power of the scientific construction of its “essence” are not revealed in the representation of the already existing world of “beauty” and the “sublime.” Aesthetics creates its worlds by designing them. In that process of the emergence of the “new,” it replaces transcendental illusions with immanent illusions. Therefore, the aesthetic illusion (Schein) in the digital age creates the greatest possible power that emerges from the technical construction of the picture (Flusser 1997, 202-215). It produces its system and environment. And that subject is no longer but in the idea of a living machine of self-creation in the world at all. When there is no more “natural” in the foundations of what emerged as the secularized rational theology and aesthetics of Baumgarten and with the true philosophical foundation of Kant’s metaphysics of transcendental subjectivity (mind), then it is self-evident that everything becomes “culture.” From that standpoint, Kant’s aesthetics in the digital age has lost its foundation, and contemporary art in the apotheosis of the inhuman or “second nature” as the technosphere have a good practical reason to construct the entire artificial reality. Therefore, we are faced with an open void in which it could be very exciting to start from the reflection between the sign (communication) and the event (information). The body becomes a legitimate object of aesthetics, but no longer a merely sensuous one in a rationalistic configuration but rather the beginning and end of the aesthetic reconfiguration of the world. The notion of the image in the semioticperformative environment of its appearance in its two modes of existence— as an aesthetic object (Duchamp) and as a conceptual event in the space and time of an interactive network—means the entry into the uncertain field of the metatheory of visualization. What meaning does this term hold? Firstly, cybernetics has already been introduced into discussions about the aesthetic status of the object, from Max Bense’s thinking through to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of image science (Bildwissenschaft). In the 1990s, it became quite clear that the time of “big theories” as spiritualhistorical orientations was perceived as a spiritual need for art. What Richard Rorty named the linguistic turn during the 1960s was, by analogy, followed by the iconic or pictorial turn in the works of the American school of visual studies founded by William J. T. Mitchell (Mitchell 1994). The problem is found in introducing cybernetics as the end of metaphysics. As Heidegger formulated in his texts in the late 1950s and 1960s, the “new” seems to be quite impossible. Theories blossom like mushrooms after rain. But their “newness” holds the same rank as all the neo-movements in contemporary art that have existed from the 1960s to nowadays. The NeoDada movement in pop art should be taken as the best example of that because it shows the exact fate of poststructuralism. Neo-Dada is no longer

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a movement in which art as a shock of living bodily is enrolled in the dead body of the aesthetic object (ready-mades). Now, the self-manufactured object itself became the self-reflexive picture of the degree zero of meaning, to paraphrase Roland Barthes’ famous book title. There is no doubt that in the aesthetic sense, things have gained new meanings thanks to the change of context and nothing else. Ultimately, art is defined as the rational drive of institutional legalization that a work of art differs from the world of art just as that differs from the world of life. The museum does not replace the cathedral, just as modern art does not replace the traditional religious cult. All of that has, of course, some similarities in its essential difference by analogy. Well, that is the story about changing the inner flywheel of modern capitalism. It started in the 19th century. Then, capitalism, in its scientific-technological-social character of an abstract machine, established itself as a complete work-event of art (Gesamtkunstwerk-Gesamtkunstereignis). Peter Sloterdijk has ingeniously combined aesthetic modernity with the scientific-technological form of “beauty” and the “sublime” with the idea of capital. The end of the art spoken about by Hegel was the beginning of the rise of capitalism as a substance subject. This is best illustrated by the musealization of events and the idea of a world exhibition. The Eiffel Tower, built in Paris in 1889 in honour of the centenary of the French Revolution, is the true paradigm of the modern art of construction. The essence of technology as the enframing (Gestell) in the social context of the rule of capital can appear only in consequently articulated forms. They inherited from the very core of contemporary art and follow this to develop even more intensively. The one great idea was the museum as a repository of historical memory, and the second idea was the world constructed once again as a monumental exhibition. The cores of both are the same—the rule of technology as the aesthetic appearance of life (Sloterdijk 2007, 387-397). This must be down to simply changing the context or, in other words, the new situation in the development of technologies and out of a derivative language of visualization, as the progress in terms essentially boils down to the transparency of something which is not visible—the loss of the metaphysical worldview. And that, ultimately, has the meaning of the disappearance of the secrets and puzzles of the very new reality. Nothing has its ultimate reason in the transcendental source of reality anymore. Language becomes know-how, and pragmatic knowledge becomes knowledge of the context of the event provided by the possibility of temporary communication. It assumes the function of maintaining a human community in some condition of sustainability of a democratic consensus on fundamental ideas such as human rights, civil liberties, and tolerance within

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culturally plural societies. When cybernetics manipulates all areas of life in the information age, real communication might explicitly be only visual communication, and information might be a pictorial letter or digital recording in the format that fits the technological performativity of the language that is comprehensible for community users. Changing the format does not also signify a change in the frame in which that process performs the interaction between Being and the event. The image, therefore, is understood, read, transmitted and decoded, starting from the conditions of its existence in telematic or information societies at the global level. That condition of possibilities, precisely the condition of Being in between the becoming and the event that is displayed occurring simultaneously in the synchronization of all local time, is represented by the internet or technical finding of the network of all networks. It might be clear that the image as information no longer disapproves of any “ontology,” “phenomenology,” “semiotics,” “realism,” or “constructivism.” These are all outdated words/concepts for theoretical schools and theoretical lessons that, like Neo-Dada, are based on the underlying assumption that the contemporary era is the one based on the rule of the technosphere as the assemblage of information, communication and life in its infinite process of becoming the difference and the multitude (Paiü 2019). What follows will be “shocking” and “provocative” for all enchanted by the spirit of innovation that impelled the period of the new era and its tyranny of reality to begin. The term “new” in cybernetics and informationcommunication theory “today” belongs to an obsolete system of “renewal.” Of course, obsolescence does not refer to the level of the problem we are discussing here. It occupies an “ontological” level. When newness no longer determines the whole of the world of production, then what is new always and only “re-actualizes.” That is why the expression of a counter-cultural “lifestyle” such as retro-futurism can best describe that situation that resembles nomads found on a one-way street. Nothing can be truly “new” any longer because there is nothing more to do than to activate the spirit of reproducibility. In a digital environment, it can only be “new” in relation to the “old” analogue environment. Even the scales are significantly different. The digital picture is “calculated,” as the new media theoretician Friedrich A. Kittler said in his texts dedicated to the problem we are discussing here (Kittler 2005, 186-203). It is an immersion in a virtual space. However, it can be “sampled” or transformed into a multitude of forms. The format measured in pixels is quite the opposite to the analogue picture measured in centimetres as well as traditional artwork, such as Vincent van Gogh’s

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famous paintings. The problem with a “new picture” lies in the digital image in close relation to all the historical forms of painting, from cave painting to Malevich’s emblematic image of the avant-garde—the Black Square. This can be evidenced by a name that was troublesome from the very beginning and hence, in a very unusual manner, has come to be unpolitical—new media (Münker and Roesler 2008; Paiü 2008, 145-226). The novelty of “new media” derives from the pragmatic definition of “new” as usage in the sense of applying some technical equipment. Their useful function has historically marked shorter periods. That was borne out by the sociological analyses of the consumer society. All that shows how the difference between objects created in the sixties and eighties in the 20th century and those created to challenge the effect of aesthetic perniciousness at the beginning of the 21st century is in the fact that the cult objects of the analogue age have higher quality and durability compared to today’s logical “gadgets.” Designs “today” should replace not only the decline of a product’s quality but primarily its ever more serial production. Walter Benjamin was right when he spoke about the loss of aura in the technological reproducibility of modern art. It was the keynote for understanding the condition of the media in general. Newness, innovation and novelty obtain their meaning from the temporal dimension of the present as actuality. The present is, however, determined by the technical dimension of time. The essence of novel-like understanding comes first as the reality of the new. Thus, the past is far from the modern age, and the future becomes only an extended present. New media function as the technical capabilities of their performance are continually upgraded. That thing that gives them newness might be nothing other than the emergence of information as a signal for use in the digital environment. The communication that occurs with the logic of “new media” is based on a pictorial representation of the true thing. In the transformation of the condition, it is no longer a matter of the stability of a pre-existing reality. We know that electric light was invented and constructed and holds together only a temporarily created environment. The technological “nature” of the novel structure of reality can be infinitely innovative in synthesizing the senses. It would be normal to expect that every new generation of owners of smartphones and other applications must be more focused on what the research of transhumanism attempts in the visualization technologies of space and time—the cyborgization of the body in the artificial environment (Hansen 2004). Can we approach the notion of the image and suspend the power of the art that, in its metaphysical history, determined meaning, the framework of action, and the spiritual essence of the complexity of the drama of human

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life? In contemporary anthropology, such as in the theory of Hans Belting, images are based on an expanded concept of the visual and visuality (Belting 2005a; Paiü 2021, 49-54). It does not include a field of art in which images are effective and beyond Western civilization. The reasons for that extension are found in, for example, the attitude of some archaeologists and scientists that what is attributed to the cave paintings of Altamira and Lascaux in Europe about 10,000-12,000 years ago could not concern discoveries of the same occurrence in Australia in the Aboriginal area despite the latter being far older. Drawings on the caves of that world culture, unjustly neglected with manifest traces of Eurocentrism and also proclaimed as “primitive and wild,” are approximately 25,000-30,000 years old. That is one of the reasons for looking at pictures in a quite different way. The second one comes from the postcolonial perspective and the plurality of understandings of art in everyday life. The third reason derives from the mass media “demand” for a world of images for advertising purposes, which would relate to admirers of Andy Warhol and pop art, as the art philosopher Arthur C. Danto was convinced that the image is more than life and that it has a secularized magic in the pernicious features of the consumerist society whereby it should not be left to theories that only carry out its communication features of the relieving of the coercion of life activities. The next paradox involved in contemporary art in its processes of musealization of history seems to be indicative of this consideration. As we move away from the origin of art in ancient times when myth was a core reference system, there is a growing need for understanding the very occurrence of what we usually call “art.” Achieving at the beginning has always been at work when a historical era is faced with the threat of its weakness. In the case of what Arnold Gehlen called post-history as an eclectic and synthetic assemblage of neo-styles in the technically created industrial society of the West, the issue is still manifest. Exquisite traces of art challenge the digital age in all aspects. The reason derives from the fact that information comprised the “essence” of the digital images in its implosion, or in other words, it was the disappearance of meaning and the loss of secrecy in the circularity of the linearity of the event. All the images in their visual reality of digitization are not the same but homogeneously irrational since they are immersed in the surplus of reality, in something that might be only contingently called “real,” and that is, in a way, related to the technological simulation of Being in its visualized transformation of the entire reality. The essence of the information age lies in the telematic presence of events.

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We shall see in the analysis of the “epistemology of the picture” how wrong it could be to approach the true trajectory of human adventure in the world with the prejudices of evolutionism, according to which all that evolves in time carries the seeds of ever-greater training. The difference in the concept of development must be related to the two modes of the term: (1) teleological and (2) pragmatic. The former relates to the rounding up of history as the “goal” and the “purpose” of what is latently present in the idea of the beginning of the foundation (arché). In that sense, training is an elaborate process within itself. History has a sense in its development from the beginning to the end. But the latter meaning is the one that refers to the ephemeral frame of something that has a technically distinct superiority in various manifestations, but in the end, it cannot be measured by the effects that follow. The Roman civilization was perfectly technologically capable in all areas, from architecture and urbanism to road construction and military machinery. At the end of its epochal power, it could not go further with something that had lost its faith in it but constantly developed its inner facets. Gadamer, therefore, was able to say that any piece of art, whether it is a Greek mythical human or the pictures or atonal music of modernity, not only speaks to its own time and ends with a network of meanings. It also overcomes the change of time by perhaps sometimes speaking to other epochs than its own. Otherwise, the revival of Greek tragedies in the modern theatre would look like a non-historical jolt, rather than an experiment that often sees greater openness from the work before a new audience, to appropriate the concepts of Umberto Eco, rather than the work itself in our age of a pluralism of styles. If something fatal was related to Hegel’s philosophy of history (of art) as history, then it certainly did not exist in its system and the method of speculative-dialectical representation of the development of the idea in history. On the contrary, the problem lies in Hegel’s notion of “progress.” If the absolute, in a cold and rationally calculated manner, can recognize that every historical epoch itself is closed, replaced by another and forcefully expelled into oblivion, then, in the end, it should be all reconciled in the identity of the absolute and by overcoming the great historical era. From that viewpoint, it is not difficult to conclude something that Walter Benjamin did in the seventh of his Theses on the Philosophy of History: the documents of the progress of each new culture are also the documents of its barbaric violence against the former culture (Benjamin 1974, 692). What comes after that bitter sense of the violence that history takes in the form of spirals of evil? To conclude that the history of the theodicy of the world spirit for which sacrifices are needed would ultimately end with a striking of the “divine violence” of justice, without which there is no end to

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the circle of suffering and misfortune? We are not only thinking here of the way in which “image wars” have emerged in modern times as a politicalideological iconoclasm, such as in the case of the Islamic State’s destruction of Nimrud or Palmyra, which was done in the name of radical fundamentalism. Religious wars have always been “image wars” because the image in its profane meaning might be merely a representation of a broken power that unites the economic, political and cultural dominance of the Empire (Sloterdijk 2005, 333-348; Weibel 2002, 570-670). Art did not arise from the birth of the “first man” in a mythical-religious sense. Let us recall that neither the biblical testimony about being a man of the Book of Genesis who was created on the divine’s image nor the opportunity to glorify God justifies the view that every creation should always be the reproduction of Oneness in the infinity. The image in the ontological sense, as we have already said, is represented within multiple problematic concepts. This was best known to Plato when he determined logos as a mere compilation of Being with language as compared to the picture as mimesis. Logos is not a picture, but it can be pictured. The Egyptians created hieroglyphs precisely to combine the secret of creation with the miracle of telling the world. Writing precedes speech, but in a very precise manner—as the event precedes the sign. Of course, without knowledge of the letter, we can still speak, just as there are probably opera singers who have not learnt to read the notorious musical notes of Tosca. Writing precedes speech as a sign system that allows language to rise to the materialized things in the idea of the Book. So, the Bible would remain without a narrative only within the narrative chaos of legends recounted by the fire, but not by the faithfulness of the faith itself as the testimony of God’s presence in history and its signs, which have always been read in the same way as the living interpretation of the sources. If we look at things in that way, then the ontology must always be the metaphysical organization of thinking of the Being. Anyway, this cannot explain the condition of image creation in the mythical world or the information base. What is, thus, always missing in the ontology is the question of the history of metaphysics, namely the question of the emergence of thought as the thinking adventure. We assume that the images and language in the constellation require a determination of what it is generally located in a relationship with and how that relationship is determined by the structure of kinship and differences in the community. If that implies historical settings, then it is obvious that Being, beings, and the essence of a human can be interrupted so that no more than one of the three concepts within it has autonomy, whereby the one who has the advantage and the form always has the real advantage. What happens then

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signifies that the image no longer has the spiritual meaning of the occult world. It can only get the meaning of local culture. So, it is necessary to know only its customs, the material signs of communication, and the symbolic language of the sacred and profane interaction in the world to “observe” its activity without participating in the acts of life and death. But the real aesthetic experience has always had its ultimate reminder in viewing images of Pompeii after the terrible eruption in antiquity. The images truly relate to the history of the world’s events. However, that event cannot be reduced to human self-production without the participation of the gods and what the community gives durability to, in which the image has its cultural meaning. To put it simply, the ontology of the image always starts from the perpetuation of something that must be metaphysical, such as the relationship between God and the created world, and, within that, man as a distinguished being. The human, therefore, as Hans Jonas articulated, was homo pictor, and the possibility of painting Being thus had its first-order ontological feature.1 As outlined above, the picture here is not approached phenomenologically from the viewpoint of consciousness, the object viewed, or the observation process (perception). The awareness of having the opportunity to look at something like that—which means that, considering the image of a bull on the wall of a cave in Lascaux, the mythic human not only saw the singularity of an animal species but saw Being in its perceptible integrity—signifies the possibility of subjectivization. In Jakob von Uexküll’s fundamentals of theoretical biology, for example, the decisive shift from anthropocentrism to the openness of the world to all living creatures, especially animals, derived the conclusion from that whereby the human perspective is replaced by the possibility of looking into the Other. Everyone has a sensitive “image” of the world because we all have worlds, regardless of their differences. But only humans must be able to present that world “once more” in artistic creation, to give it another light of meaning, to artistically create what has never really been before, even when the representation of some things in a cave’s environment remains almost primitively “realistic”: We must never forget that element of newness when we try to locate Lascaux in the perspective of history. Lascaux is away from the art of the remaining societies. It brings us closer to the art of the most beautiful and most cultivated cultures. What we can feel in Lascaux, which excites us, is something that moves. Before those acts that feverishly, without routine, radiate beauty, we have the feeling that the spirit is dancing, that man is free to agree with the world around him, to free himself, harmonizing with the world of whose wealth he reveals. This daring dance always possessed the power that art lifted above the lower tasks imposed by religion or magic.

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[…] In that respect, there is a hidden affinity between Lascaux’s art and art from the most memorable, most creative periods. The deeply sensuous art from Lascaux is once again revived in the arts that are suddenly born in abandoning the colonial. Sometimes this happened without a sound: I mean the art of extravagance (French classicism in the era of the Empire), the Greek art of the VI century…. Altamira and Lascaux had nothing left of the wheelhouse: it was the first step: it was the beginning. (Bataille 2003, 750)

For the picture to be called insight or a view of “Being” to be alone, the historical constellation of the myth of mankind must be free from attachment to the uniqueness and immediacy of the surrounding world. It is necessary that, in its metaphysical significance, the picture of the image of the Being becomes the same as the Being and the essence of it. What follows should be that by disconnecting the directness of the relationship between the image of something and an image that allows the representation of that thing, object, or impurity, it carries out the frenzy with which the new world enters. That rupture between the image of something and an image that displays something more than the “image itself” is in its image and is represented in the emergence of an art event. We have seen that Georges Bataille, in his essay dedicated to the Lascaux cave painting, simply called that event “the beginning.” And what is even more intriguing is that art is beginning to free itself from its reduction into religion or magic. When the free spirit of art in the image of a mythic human dances in the play of our fears, happiness and dreams, we have encountered a realistic play with no purpose and goal. The art is only preceded by the possibility of Being and the time of the painting itself. And the essence of the art is happening in the very event of that play, from which its meaning radiates as it exemplifies the meaning of the image, moving beyond the boundaries of historical epochs. The history of something of an ineffective meaning begins with the “art” of painting. The world is signalled as the world when it is painted as a communion of beings with which the Being and the essence of humans are revealed to it in communion (ethos). The event, which we have called “art” (Kunst), establishes a meaningful horizon of appearance. In it, the image not only shows what the world “is” (mimesis) but also represents how the world is revealed and hidden in its manifestations (repraesentatio). The meaning of the world in the narrow pictorial sense should simply be the symbolization of the language. Thanks to that condition and for the sake of the onslaught, we can speak to others. Certainly, we belong together in the attempt to act in a reflective way with confidence and monstrous anxiety, knowing in advance that we are mortals, that the finality of the world is determined as a factual limit, and that we cannot go beyond the idea of the infinity of the new creation.

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The way of reflecting on the art of painting from the mythic period brought us to the beginning. It seems necessary to analyze a problem that we will try to consider in this regard with several interconnected points, which is whether it is an image of its secret that language cannot unravel. In the information age of the rule of the technical or digital image, it should be clear that terms such as mimesis and repraesentatio are no doubt unsuitable for any further investigation of its meaning. If, in image science (Bildwissenschaft), the horizon did not include more than artistic pictures but all the other “images” from the living environments of diverse cultures, some of which survive the modern tyranny of the equalization of values and their expulsion in exotic reserves for the needs of “cultural tourism,” then the question of the beginning of the emergence of art means more than any “image-ontology.” That is a question of identity and differences of attitudes. In the West, we call that path a scientifically determined viewpoint. Its source has been derived from Greek philosophy and, more exactly, from logos, named as a leading concept within Western metaphysics by Heraclitus. Therefore, mimetic pictures belong to the artistic creations of various epochs, and epistemic images emerge in the scientific interpretation of the world in the corpus of the natural sciences and technology (models, diagrams, illustrations) (Weibel 2005; Weibel 2016, 226). It should be not necessary to specifically argue that with the emergence of a digital image, the difference between art and science has become obsolete, as have the terms we have previously stated to address the two modes of “being” images. The approach of art, in Kant’s terms, has been denoted as purposefulness without purpose itself, and it has the character of a metaphysical experience of pleasure in what the image reveals, opening the world in its meaningfulness. It is scientific, though, to approach the one that refers to something intentionally to some subject of knowledge that appears mediated by a model or diagram. Epistemic images always have the function of something located outside the picture. They serve to increase knowledge. That is the reason why they do not have “excess meaning” in themselves. By contrast, mimetic pictures keep a secret to themselves. From them radiate beauty and the sublime, and the ability to cleanse themselves of non-objectivity carries an interpretative role and a reading of what should be attributed to the painting in a transcendental or immanent way. The difference between those two approaches and the classification of the image in the ontological sense has not completely disappeared. Therefore, when contemporary artists experiment with epistemic paintings as works and events, as objects and as installations, as performative body art, and as conceptual additions to events, it must be a performance with the mantle of science. All the basic concepts of contemporary art are derived from

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scientific and technical relationships with the world—methods, analytics, constructions, experiments, projects. Historically, epistemic images are the late product of the human spirit. Art is, furthermore, the oldest of all areas of spiritual production. That must be a reason why it can, entirely rightfully, be called the “beginning” (arché). The picture was at the very beginning, not language. So, the Being is reflected and becomes the possibility of telling only when the world in its openness has become a vision of such a view, perception, and sensitive retrieval of reality. In many Indo-European languages, thinking as an expression was equated with insight. That is what may be caught up in the eye, so accepted and appropriated without any additional words. But when a human becomes old, and when their memories are heavily absorbed, only the words and the void of their intakes remain in speech without relying on reality. In the final novel of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet tetralogy titled Clea, named after one of the main characters of the work, the female painter, the writeras-narrator perfectly describes that state of the mindlessness of the image and the dead language that still only invokes ghostly sounds to recall the images of a beloved. In the end, no doubt remains, just words. The secret of art and its influence on the everyday life of humans are much more than any other spiritual experience of philosophy, science or religion. But its origin had a mythical source as well as sources in all other cognitions. What is the saying about the world as an event? The concept of Being we encounter here is adapted to the idea of the narrative with which we perceive the human need to interpret a meaningful history of the traces of individual contingency, from the genealogy of the family to the cultural memory of the nation. From that come the picture of the world and language with its grammar, semantics, syntax and pragmatics. In the era of the visualization of the world, which has finally left behind art and its images, why did it become a posthuman condition whereby there is no marked difference between the living and the inanimate, the machine and the natural? Why, furthermore, in the perfection of the technical circuit, does the need arise for the substitution of beauty, such that we are increasingly leaving our mythic beginnings and approaching the transition to inhumanity with contemporary art and its aspirations for the self-perpetuation of time without history?

1.1. Signs with no meaning: The picture in the age of the technosphere One of the most prominent “definitions” of modern art is located at the beginning of Theodor Adorno’s seminal book Aesthetic Theory:

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Chapter One It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist. (Adorno 1997, 1)

Though Adorno, in his analysis of this assumption, immediately points out that such a situation has been developing since 1910 when the idea of art autonomy was strongly supported by the social progress of capitalist industry, one reason must be related to the art that we are considering here. It is obviously no longer a “beautiful art” that stood on the horizon of Kant’s aesthetics and the philosophy of art in general, from French classicism to the rise of modernism in the late 19th century in painting, music and literature. What is, therefore, indispensable for Adorno should be the same for all others (philosophers?) who try to think about why art is wriggling in the self-sufficiency of the idea at the cost of aesthetic purity and utter disgust for masses. Something so fundamental has happened to the extent that art has stopped entirely so its foundation can seek protection from “beauty” and the haven of “experience.” Both are concepts of modernity and modern aesthetics. In that sense, we agree with Heidegger’s thoughts on what is “new” in the sense of the scientific-technical period of subjectivity. It might be a metaphysical determination of the actuality of events. Modern epochs have represented the label of time and the beginning of modernity with a social transformation in the total mobilization of technology. So, beauty could be a reason for the survival of the art of the classical era. Its revival, however, is named a key aesthetic concept when an entity as an observer participates in the mystery of artistic work in the sphere of a representative civil society. It seems clear that the notion of art whereby we still consider unconsciously that it belongs to the true past follows from this, just as Hegel did with all the consequences of that testimony in his famous assumption about “the end of art.” What does it mean that the concept of the art followed by the beauty of the act and the captivated observer’s experience is no longer self-evident? Nothing but the fact that the essence of modernity and modern art has been questioned, as we have seen, in all its manifestations. The disintegration of the metaphysical framework of Being and the human being is extremely disturbing, even apocalyptic, and so it could not be conclusive from that point that this would be a good reason for the end of art. To quote Heidegger from his posthumously published book entitled Besinnung, which contains lectures from 1938 and where he is more credible about the topic: Art completes in that period its metaphysical essence. The sign of that is the disappearance of the artwork, if not even of art itself. (Heidegger 1997, 30)

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It would be easy to believe that this is a “romantic” understanding of art and that it will only replace it with something “new” following the technological advancement of modern society. But Adorno, still less Heidegger, has nothing to do with the concept of art paradigmatically established at the time of Kant’s aesthetics of genius. It is well-known as the era of French and German classicism, with Goethe at its peak. That understanding has been held up until today, even by those who reluctantly admit taking pleasure in the painters of the Renaissance, the full-scale artworks (Gesamtkunstwerk) created in the era of romanticism, or the spectacles performed by Richard Wagner. He had an idea that art as “beautiful art” must be represented as the unconscious production of a genius that unites the power of nature and the human form. What genius “draws” out of nature and exalts is the latent shaping of the power of becoming nature by art as divine and human. The paradigm of “the gift of art” articulates the power of aesthetic significance beyond the individual empirical justification. Genius creates quite unconsciously. And this means that divine inspiration, undoubtedly, produces artworks. That, of course, has a completely different “purpose” from the use of the aesthetic object. Moreover, utilization as a means for some other purpose loses the cause of art designation. Instead of that “technical” quality of the artwork, it might be the concept of the subject as an artist and its peculiar work. But the paradox of classical art lies in its aesthetics as the “passive” activity of observation (contemplation) based on aesthetic trials. Classical art presents work by the entity as a genius masterpiece. But aesthetics seeks to find “objective” criteria for judging that art is art at all and where its “purpose” lies beyond subjectivity. It would be better to say that it might be aesthetics that allows indifferent observers to participate in the spectacle of the uncanny external or objectified world. There is nothing left of the act of admiration in the encounter with artworks and artistic producers. Their concept of beauty openly takes the work of nature. In it, we can see the cult of the secularized deity. This is not just any nature, but the formation of a rational mind from the essence of the natural sciences becomes the absolute signifier. With that, the aesthetics of classical art bears a form of rational insight into what Hegel argued so radically and inelegantly, but not without shocking effect, and what was so excellently formulated by Gadamer to declare the end of art and its essential character concerning the “present” (Gadamer 1993c, 207). The notion of art as a “sensible shining of the idea,” which stands on the fundamentals of Hegel’s aesthetics, denotes the essence of Western metaphysics concerning the artistic offerings of the development of the spirit itself. It is already obvious that art—at the end of the historical possibilities of “illusion” (Schein) as a manifestation of the emergence of

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the truth—must be redirected beyond its own “Being” if it can still be a human need other than “spiritual.” However, the notion of art that was being questioned in the 20th century by Adorno and Heidegger was not just the notion of the classical or “beautiful art” related to genius. And this is not just a thread term with the support of the idea of romantic art in its sublimity and irony, which seeks to completely transform the work of art as an event of the artist himself who has imitated the process of “God’s creation.” Consequently, the aesthetics of observation should be growing more and more. Nietzsche’s turn of metaphysics as the nihilism of history seeks to overcome the creative devastation of everything that belonged to “art” from Plato to Hegel. Instead of a passive observation of the creative act, it might be necessary to emphasize an active creation-destruction of the nature of the work itself from the primordial power of life. The former assumption for that inherent turn of the metaphysical scheme of history is the insight that art is exposing the will to power as a fundamental principle of life, not the false values that could be correlated to the idealistic world. When we are talking about the art that stands in the “being” of the images of contemporary art, we have in mind the gap between worlds, since it is precisely the area in between the aesthetics of works as observing beauty and the aesthetics of the event as the performativeconceptual guidance of life itself that has become the “thing” that reconciles opposites and synthesizes differences as their “logic of sense.” In short, everything together has taken place as a project, underdetermination and experiment (Mersch 2002; Rebentisch 2013). We are not even far behind the controversy over the notion of art. There are a lot of misunderstandings and even theoretical discouragement concerning Hegel’s assumption that art is a thing of the past because the “spiritual need” for art’s practice has disappeared. If we say that every need might be reversible, we cannot say anything new that was not strictly at work in the other direction in the Hellenistic era. Let us recall in that context what the idea of “culture” as paideia signified for the Greeks. It was an expression of the determined range of the Greek spirit in extension to all other areas of the world. Despite the narratives of mixing styles, the influence of Asian art, and the occult mysteries of the Alexandrian spirit of syncretism, these first “postmodern” ideas of the cultural permeation of the worlds are still Greek in an unbroken form. Styles’ differences do not interact, but the differences constitute the idea of the decadence of Greek art. In such a plastic way, in the end, there comes the idea of the “human” as an authentic creator of all cultures. Instead of the “spiritual necessity” of art that has become past in our “present” because the religious affirmation of Christianity has gone to the absolute spirit in its scientific image of the self-consciousness of freedom, there

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comes the scene of the self-consciousness of something that was born directly with the industrial era of modern technology and, in our time of globalism, has reached the bottom. This might be determined as the age of the secularized spirit. There is no more spiritual need for “great art.” And that is the reason why we are faced with a constant staging of “cultural needs” for art that displays/represents its time in the images, as philosophy is thinking of our time in terms defined by Hegel. When culture has replaced spirit, art no longer has anything to do with God and holiness. Its mission becomes extremely “pragmatic.” In its aesthetic indifference towards the outside of the logic of the self-production of art as a sign and as an event (images), it functions as a fundamental word/concept in the world of contemporary social and economic production—capital. Information and communication in the “surplus reality” of images of contemporary art should be taken in the condition of decentralization as cultural capital. It floats in the immaturity of its worldwide setting. In the conceptual act of subverting that selfdiscernment, Joseph Beuys created the true formula of our time: KUNST = KAPITAL (Harlan 2004). Let us dismiss the possible objections that art is reduced to the social revolution of modern technology. That condition, which was already known in Russian constructivism, has been current in different strategies of the social participation of artists from the 1960s to nowadays. From that viewpoint, the social involvement of the artist as a shaman was also practised by Beuys himself. But this can be only the bizarre gesture of some sort of secularized ethical-political action of the historical avant-garde in the creation of no longer a “new society” but a truly “new world” and a “new human” derived from the spirit of the scientific and technical construction of unpredictable reality. Why is the disappearance of “spiritual needs” a reason for the possibility that art “becomes past for us”? The answer should be tautological. Art answers the question of human aspirations for perfection or absolute. The totality of this need is such that it cannot belong to someone, and the other is excluded from the division of perfection that the work of art emanates from itself. The category of “equality” in the political meaning of that word should be excluded here. So, the aesthetic arrangement advocated nowadays in the contemporary aesthetics of Jacques Rancière cannot be matched with the fundamental Hegelian idea of the totality of artistic activity without distinction in the hierarchy of social roles and their status (Rancière 2000). The art is not the sharing of the Being but the participation of the community in the glory of the Absolute. Given that, the need for art is more than a mere physical desire and less than a metaphysical aspiration for the whole of the notion of the very idea of art

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itself. But also, even when history realizes a development just like that absolute and its manifestations in various forms of art from the ancient world to the present, it might be possible to determine the place of the need for art as well as the need for the metaphysical unity of ideas and the appearance of beauty. However, after the need for the spirit in the sensitive form of the beauty of the Absolute disappeared, what remains? That must be the most controversial issue in the interpretation of the “end of art” in Hegel. Indeed, it can be said that, with that assumption, we are faced with the paradoxical articulation of contemporary art, and what is given to it just would not be presented in myth or religion anymore.2 Instead of history as the openness of the “new” possibility, we are faced with the necessity of constant renewal in two superimposed shapes. One determines politics, and the other determines aesthetics. The re-politicization of “society” has its opposite in the re-aestheticization of the “world.” And what overcomes the loss of history lies in the space between their in-between controversy over the reason or meaning of the need for art at all. If that is the reason which lies outside of art in autonomy, then all that exists is the field where art takes place as the openness of the self-reflection of the world to sovereignty and the “new” events. It comes down to the essence of information, and this means that the holder of that information should be represented in the term “image.” It no longer shows or represents anything. The technosphere defines the essence of the image in the digital age as an event of the media structure of reality. In that closed circle, there are only “cultural needs” for the visual arts. The endlessly multiplied need for a picture that realizes that reality at the same time constructs its meaning and makes it a new spectacle (Schein) without beauty. There are no longer any “spiritual needs.” It might be performed as a substitute for quite another rank. Now the centre has been deployed in the process of the total aestheticization of the entire world. From it, the limits of artificiality have been determined, not vice versa. In a programmatic article entitled “Digital Illusion” (“Digitaler Schein”), Vilém Flusser set out the most elaborate explanation as follows: All forms of art by digitization become exact scientific disciplines and can no longer be distinguished from science. The word ‘Schein’ has the same root as the word ‘nice,’ and in the future, it will become crucial. When it comes to the child’s desire for ‘objective knowledge,’ knowledge will be assessed according to aesthetic criteria. But this is nothing new: Copernicus is better than Ptolemy, and Einstein is better than Newton because they offer more elegant models. What is new is, however, that beauty must now be perceived as the only acceptable criterion of truth: ‘Art is better than truth.’

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In the so-called Computer, art is now clear: What is the most delightful in digital illusion, that alternative world is projected to be more realistic and truthful. The human as a project, that formally analyzed and synthesized thinking system is an artist. (Flusser 1997, 214-215)

The picture without art? Is such an image still possible? Let us be quite clear. The concept of the picture and its origin in Indo-European languages derived precisely from the “imitation” of the original (mimesis). Therefore, the words that symbolize the image derived from the ancient Greek word eikon—the Latin icon, the German Bild, the English picture and image, etc.—refer to the materiality of the substrate (the substance of the image) and to the spiritual meaning of painting the reality (external and internal). Alongside a digital image as a technologically constructed reality, the images are no longer “in reality” somewhere in the outside world of objects. They have been immersed in a virtual environment, and for the first time in the entirety of history (of art), it should no longer be called a picture, as Flusser provocatively assumed. “Art” should no longer be given the “holy” name of the “spiritual need” for something beyond the sense of art itself and its conceptual reality. However, language has been taught as a technical or digital image, so it is linguistically “pragmatic.” That becomes the ultimate artificial creation of a simulation or a primitive reality. It seems that the question of the future of art—from Hegel and Heidegger to the media-created era of our present actuality—can no longer be answered either “affirmatively” or negatively, so the aesthetics of that social tragedy of utopia or dystopia from the Frankfurt School’s critical theory (Marcuse vs. Adorno) can no longer be calculated with what Flusser easily admits: that, of course, science, in its technical-aesthetical mode of the structure of the illusion (Schein) of reality, was the ruling paradigm of art, and that might be a necessary result of the whole history of metaphysics as such. Whatever they try to throw out in this case returns like a boomerang. Therefore, I hold the return of “beauty” and the “sublime” as the cardinal failure of art in all its forms of expression, visual and linguistic, and especially in aesthetics, which since the beginning of the avant-garde movement has had no reason to survive in what was self-explanatory to Kant and the German idealists. That is the reason why it must also take a step further in the future as the act of reviving the past in terms of retrofuturism in all possible projects of art, architecture and body design. The fate of art and its images in the age of the technosphere has represented progress in the visualization of nothingness. But the paradigmatic figure of the 20th century—namely, Malevich’s work Black Square—in both absolute ways marked by space and time beyond art, in general, becomes the “destiny” of the residual liberty in the human imagination.

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Let us start by analyzing the two paths in which the image of contemporary art is exposed in its transparency. The former is the one that already took place at the beginning of the 20th century and came to be stimulated by pragmatism in philosophical reflections on the world. It is, of course, a picture as a sign system or a communication medium (Hombach 2006). The latter must be the one that arrives from becoming (Werden, devenir), which originated in the growth of metaphysics after Hegel, especially in the works of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and which reached its culmination through the reflection of Deleuze and his notion of the image as a movement and time of transformation of the condition of the material and the meaningful horizon of its appearance. That model or paradigm of the image can be called the concept of the digital age—the informational paradigm. We are faced with two essential basic notions of the entire global order of economics, politics and culture. This could be named the network as such marked by information and communication. The former represents the condition of visual communication and replaces the notion of Being, so it could be conditional in saying that it denotes a “visual ontology of the event,” although, strictly speaking, it sounds just like contradictio in adjecto. The latter way of transmitting and ordering is the meaning of the image itself. Today, in the theory of image science, especially thanks to the theoretical contributions by Flusser and Kittler, it would be common to use the term “cultural techniques,” which implies the relationship between discourse and dialogue in that way that communication interacts of a community with the image and its meaning (Paiü 2008, 155-163). If the image takes on the properties of the event, then it is no longer reduced to a fixed term of Being and the work. Heidegger’s most deserving mention of that manner was articulated in the 20th century—The Origin of the Work of Art (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes) by 1936 came to the art of the “setting (itself) into the work” (Sich-Ins-Werk-Setzen-der Wahrheit) (Heidegger 2003a, 1-74). If the image we comprehend is the inner essence of art as work, then every future ontology is undermined precisely because Heidegger’s notion of work does not mean transgression beyond the history of Being as an event. With its first entry into the space of art contemplation during the 1930s, the possibility was open for the work to be understood not only from its “foundation” in Being as perseverance and durability, but also from its openness as a truth (aletheia) in the wandering of the worlds. In other words, Heidegger opened up two possibilities of thinking about art. And yet, though they have not completely faded away, more than anything else, they only saw the essentials of preserving the dignity of thought outside the illicit

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reduction of art in technology. The first is that opinion could be free from computation (Rechnen) as the dominant model of determining what the essence is as such and how it is necessary to determine the essence of Being and the essence of the human. An attitude of the openness of Being as a setting-of-truth-in-work meant the openness of the notion of the artwork from the future and not from the reality of the passing present. The second possibility conceals that, in reality, there exists a danger that the whole is falling into the technological abyss. Thus, the art as work is then carried out from the logic of that circuit, so, understandably, the ontology of the work must end up as semiotics of the information age in which what is meant by (artistic) work can only be understood from the decoded space of the message it refers to the community of users. That second possibility has become a necessity of Western metaphysics, which has developed in a linear sequence since the beginning of the new era and Descartes’s subject as the basis of the knowledge of the truth. Starting from that, it is apparent that the image in the tradition of Western metaphysics has so far understood the relationship between Being as information about something that exists in the world and the events of what cannot be reduced to the familiar environment in which beings are already found in the world. The other is an image as an event that changes the meaning of relationships in the present world. The event is changing the form of artworks and, indirectly, the way of understanding its meaning. Therefore, the communication that develops concerning the image and its “users”—or the community of interpreters, viewers and audiences in the broadest sense of the word—represents the open event of constant reinterpretation just as works of contemporary art have never been determined and completed in their entirety. In that way, a distinctive and communicative theory derived from semiotics by Umberto Eco reached the “open-minded” setting, taking on the paradigm of contemporary art with the poetry of Stephan Mallarmé, James Joyce’s prose, and the neo-avant-garde musical compositions of John Cage (Eco 1976, 1989, 1990; Paiü 2011, 391403). Eco’s semiotics and art theory are too complex to understand the theory of communications or a theory of culture. It consists of the languagespeaking competencies of subjects/actors of discourse and dialogue in networked text worlds. Semiotics might be going in the direction of the theory of interpretation of the text and did not set up the question of what the sign signifies for some object of consideration. On the contrary, its fundamental question consists of how to be able to interpret signs in art, literature, medicine, design and culture in general. Almost every communication has represented a matter of interpretation (Schalk 1999). In the quite other, pragmatic-interpretative view, Eco’s

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semiotics has represented the crux and the extension of the concept of Derrida’s deconstruction in the following. If Derrida argues that it was all just a matter of deconstructing the text (différance) in the production and reproduction of textual differences, then Eco’s point is that it is all just a question of interpretation of the text. In both cases, it is about different approaches and different insights into the sign as such. While for Derrida— according to Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan— the signifier is determined to mark the sign in the text, Eco’s semiotics of culture is performed as aesthetics of communication and reception, namely, aesthetics in the pragmatic horizon of exploring a quite different and another manner of Being. Each sign must be read by the symbolic code of interpretation of culture. It has its place (space) and the power of the signifier (time). Also, it should always be marked with the help of the interpretation of codified communication. That is the reason why the concept of an open work might be understood from the horizons of the subjects/actors of the interpretation. The users or observers of the artwork (readers, listeners, and viewers) form a community of subjects/actors of interpretation. They are the circle that opens a work of art in all its immanent possibilities. Eco’s semiotics considers the artwork to start from the synchronic and diachronic viewpoints. The former relates to classical artwork and the latter to modern artwork. In the first case, it is about the closed, and the latter, about the open. An act that is essentially unfinished in its procession might be open and would therefore constantly be challenged by its interpretation. The criterion problem was forced by Eco into its third phase, in which the interpretation should be derived from the immanent logic of the text/work. So, it sharpens the question of the quality of the artwork being quite open to the possibilities of different interpretations. The examples he took from the world of modern art were very paradigmatic. In literature, he took Mallarmé’s idea of the book as a metaphysical letter to perfectly structure the incompleteness of the world in general and Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake as the most radical case of visionary dreams in an open interpretation of language, which has created and destroyed worlds. Open artwork stems from its constant and permanent movement, resulting in the reflected production process. In The Open Work (Opera Aperta), Eco points to the problem of interpreting modern artwork. Starting from the closeness in the transcendental character, which guarantees the assurance that art presents the ideas of beauty and supremacy from the divine self-production of the world, we are faced here with the necessity of multidimensionality and the possibility of a multitude of interpretations. Openness does not mean infinite communication but the

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infinite possibilities of the form and freedom of accepting an artwork. Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, therefore, seeks to encompass an open work because it might simultaneously be both final and infinite in its meaning. Both sides are concerned with the work as a text, which produces the product itself by not using the artist’s (writer’s) language for either allegorical or metaphorical purposes to point to something outside the text of the language itself. The language, on the contrary, attempts to include the auto-poetical and ethical relationship with the dreams and visions of the unconscious in the chaotic nature of general communication performed by the writing. Almost everything could be an open work of art on the move. Eco is still determined by the signified, as we would like to use common terms derived from semiology/semiotics. The interpretation of the open work, therefore, presupposes dislocation and changing the context, intertwining and exposing that endless multiplicity of the indefinite nature of the work itself. What could we assume from Eco’s theory of artwork? The semiotic definition says that it could be a work that is understood by a plurality of messages and consists of many signifiers contained in one single bearing of meaning. An open work, therefore, inevitably reveals itself in multiplicity. It is well known that the concept of polysemy in Barthes and Derrida is key to the interpretation of the text. But Eco, in his theory of interpretation, recognized two degrees of openness: (1) limited openness to which the observer or user (viewer, listener, reader) gives meaning; and (2) a free space of interpretation, which is limited only by the structure of the work itself in the movement of its form and the indefinite sense of its final meaning. In the concept of the open work, the epistemological metaphor becomes crucial, allowing the possibility of mutual communication between the subjects/actors of the artwork. In Eco’s book Kant and the Platypus that looks from the horizon of interpreting works of the 1990s, that metaphor replaces the concept of the cognitive type (Eco 2000). Here we can emphasize the crucial significance of the step towards visual semiotics. In that assemblage, according to the open work concept, Eco is recognized in early modernism in the works of Mallarmé, Joyce, and Kafka and in neoavant-garde tendencies in the music of Stockhausen and Cage, where ideas appear as events of the synaesthesia. The carrier of image information becomes the structure of the image itself, which unites language and letter (text). The term “structure” refers to the relationship system in the picture.

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Just as Eco’s thesis on a painting of Art Informel as the beginning of interactivity in the art of the neo-avant-garde, so the codification of open communication structures is key to interpreting the artist’s work in all other spheres of art. Openness becomes an extremely important term in the phenomenological interpretation of the body. Anyway, it would doubtfully be wrong to refuse the “usable value” of that concept of the contemporary condition in all its verses—from philosophy and humanities through the visual arts, communication, literature, and fashion to Heidegger’s view of the event (Ereignis). In his lecture “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (“Das Ende der Philosophie und der Aufgabe des Denkens”), given in 1964 at the international philosophical conference “Living Kierkegaard” (Kierkegaard vivant), Heidegger interpreted the meaning of Being in the horizon of time from the openness of events (Heidegger 1969). Openness is not just the question of the horizon, which allows spatial orientation in time. It is the original openness of the event. This concept comes from the combination of art and life as life’s self-determination and the self-production of works at the time of the event itself. Therefore, every work of art has witnessed the openness of the transgression of the body in the space and time of its concept and performance. Thus, Eco’s concept of open work can be linked to an open body as the horizon of typing letters without a transcendental signifier. That body is open to all possible interpretations of the inscription. They come from the interactivity of authors and audiences as subjects/actors of the communication process. If the work of art ends only with its interpretation, then the judgement of contemporary art therein represents an unfinished event of the interpretation of the event itself, which is left behind by the trace of the image as a visual object. Due to the interactivity of new media, the birth of modern art is determined by the bodily iconographic code, not the linguistic text code. The visual code of communication of contemporary art, following Eco’s pragmatic theory of text interpretation (Eco 1976), can be broken down into: (1) perception codes (colour, intensity, frequency, primacy, recency); (2) recognition codes (cultural and personal schemes and stereotypes); (3) transmission codes (nature of the media: tone, taste, style, unconscious codes); (4) tonal codes (conventional “shadows” in other types of faces); (5) iconic codes (characters that are (a) conventionalized and (b) abstract models; images—painting, photography, icons); (6) iconographic codes (metonymy and “symbolism”); (7) taste and sensitivity codes; (8) rhetorical codes (conventions and signal value);

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(9) stylistic codes (genre, aesthetics, production values); and (10) unconscious codes (use of psychological conventions to stimulate and respond to stimulation). We should be able to describe what matters here with only the potential of physical self-representation and presence in the distance as a transgression of the event itself. The work is transformed into an event, and the event is embedded in the work. Eco returned that contemporary situation of openness to interpretation in an analogous way back to the second century after Christ. In the Neo-Platonic world, there was a logic of contradiction. Instead of the basic principles of logic that assume the principle of identity (A=A), there was the law of noncontradiction and the law of excluded middle (tertium non datur) based on the logic and-and, simultaneously truth and lie (tertium datur). In that way, instead of rationality and the principles of the identity of truth in time, it established the irrationality and irreversibility of time as a mystery (Eco 1990). The god Hermes represented a symbolic possessor of the ideas of the transformation of the world. Since the transformations occur in the process of the artistic transformation of matter and form, it is obvious that, for the first time in history, we encounter something extremely puzzling, paradoxical, and seemingly impossible. Instead of the causal-teleological model of history, the spatial-temporal boundaries are now being overturned, and the consequence precedes the cause, or, more precisely, more consequences determine the existence of more causes. The triumphal victory of Hermetism shows itself, according to Eco, in the idea of general education as interdisciplinary—enkyklios paideia (‫݋‬ȖțȪțȜȚȠȢ ʌĮȚįİȓĮ). Language is freed of logical integrity, words become allusions, and the whole order is based on the syncretism of irrational events where beings can be distant. Hermetic science is based on the existence of a multitude of different religions and cults. Hence, the idea of multicultural tolerance denotes the foundation of this late religious pluralism. Herein we can say that the metaphor of the Alexandrian Library thus signifies that ontological pluralism is the Being of the universe of beings. One endlessly multiplies in its copies. Each copy, also, is not just the same as an original, but it might be more original than the idea of “original.” There should be no doubt that Hellenistic Hermetism seems to be almost identical to the epistemology of anarchist postmodernism formed by Paul Feyerabend’s famous theoretical axiom known as anything goes (Feyerabend 2002). The knowledge of nature and humans in the hermetic-gnostic concept, which Eco promotes in the broad movements of subtle analogy with our contemporary times, represented exotic knowledge. It can be characterized

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by mystery. Words do not express the logically complete meaning of the statement. They always point to something else, and the message becomes the prerequisite code of the divine transcendence. That profound knowledge starts from the assumption that the truth is not expressed but marked in something beyond the word, inexpressible and unspeakable. As the Egyptian gods spoke through the hieroglyphs, telling humans a secret message, the language of the Hermetic doctrine is manifested through the aura of holiness and sacrifices dedicated to the essence of secrecy. Only exotic symbols reveal the essence of the truth of the world and the cosmos. Their reading and processing require esoteric knowledge to decipher secret characters through employing an agent or interpreter. The truth of the text, therefore, is beyond the text and requires an interpretation. To avoid the irreducible irony of Eco’s semiotic interpretation, which is also carried out in his novels, where the allusive technique shows what I call scandalous metaphor, it should be apparent that Eco, in his interpretation of Hermetism and Hellenism, did not start from the actual and historical events of the syncretic, hybrid, and eclectic culture of the decadence of disappeared worlds. We can indeed recognize the very complex and postmodern interpretation of the history of ideas following the basic ideas of our time. Every single interpretation of the work is open only because of the inability to speak of the unspoken idea of history as interpreting the universal at all. In that respect, Eco seems very close to Derrida in the deconstruction of history. Concerning the spiritual world, the language of Hermeticism was exactly shown as the earthly ruler of the divine language. Semiotics and the semiology of the life of nature and man became the general knowledge of the interpretation of nature and man, and not of reality as such. Since human language is multifaceted, loaded with culturally coded symbols and metaphors, it is obvious that the universality of truth cannot be reached, but it could always be infinite in its interpretation of the same in differences. Almost every object has its secret, and each secret is revealed by hiding in another secret. The idea that each form of media refers to other media, which lies at the core of Marshall McLuhan’s media theory and crosses over to Vilém Flusser and Jean Baudrillard, has resulted in the corpus hermeticum being further developed in dreams and visions of becoming as opaque and inadmissible. It would be extremely important to show that the Hermetic doctrine has taken place within the world as a stage. Of course, the world becomes the language phenomenon of the theatre without speech because communication can only be possible beyond the boundaries of language. In any case, it stands at the very core of Barthes’s semiology and his culture theory. The meaning of what is shown through a linguistic, iconic, and symbolic message lies beyond language.

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The interpretation of “open work” already shows, through contemporary art, that it takes refuge within the technical circuit, whereby visual language emphasizes its position from two rational starting points: (1) it gets rid of any reference to the mythical-religious experience that could undermine its hard-fought autonomy (works) and sovereignty (events); and (2) it is based on something immaterial as its symbolic mode of constructing entities/actors, which is no longer a fixed “new society” as per the idea of the Russian avant-garde but an open culture wherein nothing is fixed anymore. The collective individuality of the spectator or the community of readers, listeners, and viewers now decide how the artwork should be disseminated, with its ultimate reaches and reversals (feedback) acting as a cybernetic model of a relationship between the signifier, the sign, and the signified. The rebellion of the “passive” subject of the artistic work in the aesthetic process in the present has led to the hypertrophy of the spectator’s interactivity (Rancière 2011). As we can see, exoticism and strangeness were the first serious attempt to postulate that contemporary art no longer relies on any paradigm of romanticism and that the image is understood from the immanence of life of art itself, not art as the transcendence of life. Those terms were created, as we have indicated, by the emergence of the linguistic turn in the philosophy of American pragmatism with the establishment of semiotics by Charles Sanders Peirce and Charles William Morris, and the linguisticanalytical orientation towards what signifies or gives messages their meaning, or, also, the usefulness of language in a material sense as the performative action (Wirth 2002). The picture as a sign system cannot be anything steady. It inherently lacks the ability to be a reference to the common being of the aesthetic work of art so that the art itself can be understood less from the openness of the work than its openness of meaning to a multitude of interpretations, but from the incompleteness of its utilitarian structure. The signs have always been provisional and disappeared in the very context in which they are interpreted. If we were to be able to redirect the expression of the contextual-temporal circumstances in which the image appears in the community as a historical creation of the culture, we would see that space left for the possibility of symbolic communication without the dictation of language in which the text remains. Moreover, the context will always be marked by the structure of cultural memory as a historical environment, something “objective,” such as a private property institution, a state, or rights in late capitalism, for instance. No written record or documentation on the relationship between the owner and the possession of a social relationship in complex communities would be exposed to chaos or what Thomas Hobbes meant by the horror and dread of

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the “natural state.” In contrast to the rule of the text in Western civilization, the image is ever more determined by the symbolic transmission of language into other structures of its activity. Metaphysically speaking in terms of the discourse of Lacanian psychoanalysis, language is the Father/Law of the entirety of history, and images automatically imply an action or articulation of language as omnipotent to human communication. The world’s pictoriality, however, must always be understood as the communicative “context” of the memory in the sense of the archetype of our civilization. When the image of ancient Egypt appears, it might be a hybrid conjunction of languages and images influenced by the mythical-religious “image of the world.” We are encountered with the environment in which art has appeared. It can never be out of that environment. Remembrance as a pictorial representation of the events of traumatic histories, such as the artistic reworking of myths in the tragedies written by Sophocles, defined ancient Greek culture (paideia) within its boundaries of memory. However, the rough separation of the image from language in favour of speech communication by no means represents an appropriate state of the thing we have discussed here. The semiotic view of the image as communication must always be “pragmatic.” It comes from the insight that language has become a meaning of imagemaking and has lost its ontological primacy.3 When are we quite sure that things are happening just as described above? The answer can be found in Heidegger’s thought. The moment when the technological interpretation of the notion of truth in medieval theology reigns—that the truth signifies the correspondence between mind and reality and not the primal openness of Being (aletheia)—represents the possibility of the relativism of truth in the paradoxical nature of its scientific “objectivism.” Every new technical device or apparatus changes not only the reality but also the boundaries of cognition. For instance, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was a true condition of the possibility of the atomic bomb, but that was completely unworkable based on the fundamentals of Isaac Newton’s physics. This might be indisputable proof that truth cannot be the only conformity of mind and matter; the openness of Being as the event that moves the boundaries by re-establishing them in the new cognitive environment of language is required as well. The technological character of knowledge is derived from the way of thinking and its conditionality as a system of signs or “cultural techniques.” If something reminds us essentially of language related to the use of language as a tool, then it should be quite pre-indicated in the language beyond its boundaries. The metaphor of a certain group of speakers, such as philosophers discussing the image, could be understood only in that

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community of speakers, just as the physicist of quantum particles remains within the limits of the knowledge of the theory of Niels Bohr and his followers. What does that mean? We can say that language has meaning because it refers to something out of the language that gives it a backward response and such meaning within the context. But the picture really cannot “mean” if it does not release the Father/Law that it is defeating and forms on the fly, as Gadamer explains in a well-known way: The art that is created today might certainly be expressed by an insight that the relationship between nature and art in it has become problematic. Art is betrayed by the naive expectation of the image. We cannot say what the content of the image is, and we all know the artist’s disadvantage when his image is to be baptized with words, and in the end, it seeks shelter in the most abstract characters, in numbers. The old classical relationship between art and nature, the relationship of mimicry, no longer exists. (Gadamer 1993b, 315)

The picture does not have any admissible meaning. It radiates something else, which it can and must say and express in its unmistakable and indecisive manner. The semiotic theories of the picture are, therefore, directed to the closed circle of the meaning of language even when, in analogy, everything that is going on with language and its grammar, syntax, and semantics is transferred to the field of the image. What, however, with the emergence of the digital age of information culture, comes to the very centre of that circle to translate language into a tool for other purposes? The pragmatism of know-how becomes the main criterion of making decisions that are no longer about what “language” is and what is mentioned in the communication process but about how language is “happening” in the real condition. Of course, the pragmatism of knowledge must be a prerequisite for the possibility of the technical operability of the language as a “thing.” That was impossible for philosophy’s analysis of classical art. Insights into the Absolute as a spirit from which the image as a symbolic language of “high culture” rises to the notion, as Hegel saw at the end of his system of aesthetic reflection on the world, and comes to the setting that the “spiritual need” for art with the romantic art of genius has disappeared entirely, as it has become “past to us,” belong to another world. In its cognitive-visual censorship in the digital age, language comes to the ultimate user as information without any meaning. Nothing in it is encoded except for a picture that, instead of a reference to real reality, has pixels as a calculated artificially constructed figure. However, this means that a technically created world of things should be decoded like a pragmatic structure of a linguistic message without universal

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validity. Is that not a paradox for paintings in technologically determined times? In other circumstances, language should be able to communicate in the pragmatic aspect of that notion. Just as Kant understood the meaning of anthropology as a new science of “the soul,” it may be necessary to universalize an understanding of the world at large regarding media. What is universally acknowledged as a condition of digital or visual communication is just and only a little fantasy, transcendental, beyond language and the picture as such. And that is to be communicated technically through media. Immediacy (like Skype or video walls) rests on the vision of medieval German and Spanish mystics (secret speech and images)—in the immediate view of the Other as in itself. Behind pragmatic language hides the image of an impersonal Being and events as a posthuman condition. The picture does not mean anything else. It shows what is happening when something is happening and, therefore, the immersion into virtual reality necessarily presupposes real-time. The paradox of technical communication is that the image of a being or an existing reality is truly consistent with that reality, though the digital image does not signify what something “is” but what is “happening” in the condition of the transformation of Being. What, then, can explain the paradox and its disapproval? The image does not mean anything “real.” It might be the epistemic way of constructing the world itself in its virtual updating. Hence, the cognition of an image produces a new reality. In the place of the mind (logos) or language as the image medium, it materializes information through binary codes. We assume that a semiotic “function” attempts to be pragmatic because, in analogy with the human body as the assemblage of mind and feeling, it should be productive and simultaneously conductive. The performative character of technical language, which includes the image without reference to something “real” in the world, marked a new path in understanding the image in advance. That is the reason why the image becomes a body rather than a language as an incarnation of the theological idea derived from the purpose of the justification of the process of the spirit entering the flesh (incarnation). John’s Gospel addresses the idea in these words: “And the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). General semiotics, regardless of how it is determined and with what categorical primacy (signifier, as Barthes emphasized, or signified, as mentioned in Eco’s theory), locates aesthetics as the distinctive art theory. The main subject became the aesthetic process of signification. Since that process always remains something that must exist as an object on its own to be a stable order of importance, it is quite obvious that this was the main

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problem of language, as Roland Barthes determined in Elements of Semiology, which applies to it the principles of perpetuation and universality, although it is a labile nature as well as a sign that determines it. A sign that regulates all relationships within a closed communication system is signified by the concept of culture. It cannot be defined differently than semiotically-cybernetically as a system of signs and the environment (objects). Indeed, if we want to understand the status of an artist’s work at the time of its immateriality and the absence of speech in the era when Gadamer named the “Verstummen des Bildes,” there is nothing left to do but reach for the sign and the technological code of culture as information. Let us recall that Adorno created the paradigm of drama theatre in the anti-theatre of Samuel Beckett for his aesthetic theory. It was still an existing theatre and some existing language in dialectical denial which made sense. But for the aesthetics of “open work,” Eco took the artists of the radical “flabbiness” of that aesthetics in general, and that means the sense of art as a relation of work and its meaning in the community as a culture. Mallarmé, Joyce, Stockhausen, and Cage, though, belong to the paradigms of language in the state of its “flabbiness” and crossing the boundaries of Being as an event. Poetry, prose, and music have been assembled in the pictorial language of immateriality, in something that art allows for the “other life” based on the openness of the process of signification. That process, however, cannot be understood either “from the outside” or “from the inside” because it presupposes the failure that Heidegger saw when he began to articulate a whole range of differently chosen concepts/words, among which was the event (Ereignis), and in 1936, the openness of Being (Offenheit, Entdeckung, Lichtung) began the adventure of the very possibility of the creation of the “new” with the turn from traditional ontology to post-metaphysical thinking. But that peculiar “materialism” in the modern way of thinking, which structuralism established by leading the disclosure of language as communication in the world of change and the transformation of Being, essentially features a contradiction. The reason is that the concept of structure is derived from the novel idea of the subject. Since the subject constructs nature as an object, it is obvious that language as a sign system constructs its environment as an object-mastering practice of the subject/master over the environment. The difference between language as a system (langue) and speech as communication practices (parole) in other narrative forms has shown the primacy of sign letters above the contingency of life that does not want to obey the rule of that mode of cultural codification (Barthes 1977). When we apply it all in the aesthetic way of thinking in contemporary art, which was the main problem of Barthes’ and

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Eco’s thinking as such, we can only get what is valid for the limits of semiotics in its attempt to become a substitute not only for the philosophy of language as linguistic turn but also for sociology as a social science that deals with culture starting from some superstructure, from ruling principles for which reality did not explain the concept of becoming. Instead, culture as a system of signs becomes the aesthetic process of marking social relationships. And inside, this set of images replaces language. Therefore, we are entering into what Michel Foucault called the paradigm shift: from the culture of text to the culture of the image. With the breakdown of the basic concepts of semiotics, as Morris showed in consideration of this, it is evident that aesthetics no longer refers to the art system as a system of language that exists in the social order of the historical continuitydiscontinuity epoch. Instead, the art itself, in a single sign and meaningful turn, becomes the aesthetic process. The reason is that it is determined to be a technique. On the other side, the rule of language represents its metaphysical order of meaning. That “means” significant changes to the order of the category. Art no longer serves aesthetics and its object of reflection as, for Kant, the aesthetics of beauty ought to be represented as the paradigm of purposefulness without purpose. So, the disappearance of nature as a sign system of an-sich must have a sufficiently powerful substitute in its place that will play the same role in quite another way. The substitution site, therefore, occupies the image culture because it encompasses the symbolic power of language. However, the iconic message precedes communication. The semiotics of Morris becomes a distinctive form of aesthetics with an attempt to articulate the principles of signification in the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic areas of language (Morris 1992, 368). Suffice to add, in relation to cybernetics, the word technically has been addressed by Vilém Flusser and Abraham A. Moles, from which we got everything that established the present meaning system and its messages in the age of the technosphere (Moles 1991, 160170). Theoretical aesthetics can be nothing more than an extended concept of the construction of the digital world (communication) based on the event that goes beyond any possible “ontology of the image.” Finally, that is the reason why all techno-aesthetic interventions are something that we traditionally call reality, or the reality of the construction and deconstruction of that massive concept, and not the representation of the Being as the aesthetic object. The shortage of forms or ideas of art as mimesis and representation requires an attempt to understand the image as a state of transformation of Being itself. That was the task of Paul Klee in the painting of high modernism. In his diary notes, there are remarkable formulations of objects-

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paintings depicted by a painter as a subject. Likewise, Klee said that the painter is possessed by colour just as the poet has a word but does not rule it. What can be signified in that context as the picture might be nothing more than a step towards its technical immersion into an environment that has nothing to do with the past of its materiality, formality, and experience. However, one condition should be quite different. The cause of uncontrollable things in the assemblage determined the purpose of some effect. From Plato to nowadays, we should always be able to find the reason why art must simultaneously devote more attention due to the secret and miracle contained in the senses and be able to elevate itself into something else beyond itself. The word that determined its destiny, and hence images throughout history, was included in all metaphysical languages of the West and at the same time goes beyond the sources of that “world” and its secular traces. We know that, for the Greeks, the image was not just a look at an ideally realistic nature (physis). It was at the same time a living being (zoon) as the living gods inhabited the statues and architecture of a polis like Athens. No living picture has any living gods. The mythical experience of the picture is a testament to that. However, the problem arises from the fact that art as a production of the “new” (poiesis) requires something beyond nature and the human, something medial and therefore inhumane as such— techné. Life as an artificial creation in principle was already conceivable and thought of in Western metaphysics as logo-technocentrism (Stiegler 1998, 29-81). Just a few more words are necessary about the fundamental turn and the introduction of semiotics into the pragmatics of knowledge in the technical process of performing the event. When we would like to comprehend the structure of the image, it will be explicated by the concept of action (Handlung, pragma). What does that mean when we say that action changes its meaning with the signification of something fixed and permanent in reality? Undoubtedly, many different theorists of language as an activity, from John Langshaw Austin to the neo-pragmatists, claim that the performance of language points out rather than expresses what is meant by the subject/actor of the changing situation. It signifies that acting as an image in contemporary art, which derived from conceptual painting (Art Informel and new realism) to media art in all its aspects, cannot be determined by the classic cause-purpose paradigm. The transmutation of the effect on modern nature by the analogy of nature, which was relevant to Kant’s aesthetics of the contemplation of beauty, is no longer sustainable. However, the activity refers to the performance of speech, and images in analogy with the body no longer reflect the body in terms of the existing nature or subject matter of life, for example, in body art. Rather, clinging to

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their heteronomy of freedom can no longer be based on an idea of the rationality of effect. It could be the contingent performance related to its spontaneity. This is true even when it is completely “rationalized” in the proceedings. The picture no longer has a pattern of the body. On the contrary, the effectiveness of the picture shows itself in the performativeconceptual turn. No doubt, the image of the body has determined the boundaries rather than the reverse in the history of Western metaphysics (Belting 2005b, 350-364). We should take all of this into account when the speech directed at the performative-conceptual turn moves from language into the picture. The pragmatism of image knowledge, therefore, determines the performance of the body within media art. Instead of shaking the language and mind in its universality, as in the works of Velázquez as a paradigmatic painter of the golden age of the representation of modernity in the Baroque style, it has been freely depicted in the painting of the image model of knowledge. However, the pragmatism of the sign refers to its unreliability beyond the context. The purpose of the action is not known in advance. When José Ortega y Gasset, in his essay “Revival of the image” dedicated to the paintings of Velázquez, indicated that his whole painting might represent the sign of incompleteness, we are in the realm of contemporary art and its fundamental categories. This can be derived from the quantum physics of space and time. What seems unfinished can never be completed. It is simply at the end of the action of the causal-teleological model of thought in the aesthetic way of knowing the world. Therefore, it is common to argue, as diverse followers of semiotics as well as of cybernetics of different schools do nowadays, that art, science, and technology are complementary forms of human activity (Morris 1992, 375; Rieger 2002, 28-49). The synthetic experience of that “complementarity” leads us to the idea of the technosphere. It encompasses, hence, a new relationship established between epistemic and mimetic imagery. The former is no longer mere illustrations of the existing reality, while the latter does not depict the world as a represented reality in the umbilical medium. The technosphere, to our cognitive patterns, is determined by pragmatic directions as the action predicting the effects. However, it can no longer be a question of performing a planned action. The purpose of the event has been replaced by controlling the situation in which something happens. Therefore, the concept of the technosphere is encompassed as follows: (1) computing as the rational thinking of cybernetics; (2) planning as a project for analytical information processing; and

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(3) a construction that gives the meaning of technical genesis to each of the created objects in a new situation and context. The autopoietic way that the autonomous object acts is predicted by the future based on the cybernetic concept of system control and the environment. All the assumptions for that are already related to semiotics and cybernetics, to the signs and events in which the image is established by the paradigm of creating new worlds. All semiotic theories of a picture— from Peirce and Morris to Barthes and Eco—are based on the relationship between the image and the sign. But since semiotics emerged as metaphysica specialis within the philosophy of language or within linguistics with the setting of language as a sign of communication, then it is also certain that the main problem with that theory derives from analogical thinking. Any further problems arise when the picture can be comprehended along the way as a substitute language. If we attempt to analyze the arguments of those who support Rorty’s linguistic turn and similar directions in contemporary philosophy, we shall see that third solution (tertium datur) between the founding of the mind as logos and the emergence of the immanent transcendence of the body as openness in its sensitivity might be the exit from the ancient controversy. In short, the visual semiotics of the body has replaced “the first philosophy.” Finally, the attempts to free ethics of the 20th century from Kant’s novelty of rationalism with moral postulates and the categorical imperatives of the mind end with referring to the aesthetic concept of compassion with Other, as Emmanuel Lévinas has already successfully shown. Desire opposes the mind and its plans. From that perspective, the subversion of metaphysics metaphorically has the taste of meat, blood, sperm, and tears. Aesthetics, therefore, in all its transformations, from Henri Bergson through Alfred Whitehead to Gilles Deleuze, passes down the path of the “vitalism” of Being, trying to reach out to the mystery and miracles of existence through the suspension of God as an “immobile starter” or in some other version of its incomprehensive way of creation. Rorty, in his distinctive “postmodern epistemology,” must, therefore, assume that the only way of semiotic pragmatism is the “third” way that rejects neither “idealism” nor “realism.” That is the reason why language on the path of thinking turns out to be a pragmatic tool of knowledge. We can, therefore, say that the image is not just a means of insight into the nature of Being as such. In the continuum of the derived “linguistic turn,” the image appears to be a sign according to the action directed towards something that is left of language. And what is left of the indivisible addition to the performance cannot describe the acts of consciousness and intentions, but only events and

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changes in the very act of the image-speech situation (Rorty 1989, 3-22; Rorty 1992). What is the notion of a sign if a language is an image? If they cannot be the same, then why did we always talk about “picture grammar” or follow Barthes when he spoke about the “rhetoric of the image” with its syntax, semantics, and pragmatics? These are surely the most significant issues within the paradigms of image science and visual studies. If it might be determined only as a transfer from one structure to another, or an ontological turn from the meaning of Being to the meaning of information, then something must necessarily be left of the “first cause” and the guiding principle of the entire history of the image. The orientation towards the symbol of the image in its pure, autonomous, and sovereign impact must bring us to the assumption that the image is not just located in the “empty centre of the power” if we accept the well-known definition of democracy used by Claude Lefort as the constant struggle to power. Signs in a broad semiotic sense, however, must be somewhat “more powerful” than the language requirement in the spoken aspect of communications. I am thinking of a sign of worldwide domination as the purpose of communication not amounting to a mere relationship between the signifier and the signified because it will be thus perfectly obvious in advance that one always has the advantage and the power of legalization. Roland Barthes assumes that it can be a signifier. Quite contrary to him, Umberto Eco emphasized the function of the signified. Romanticism has fostered the idea of the artist shifting from a creator to a genius, a subject of the artistic process, and modern art has not completely rejected the idea of a secularized aura in the figure of the subversive artist but has deployed it or profaned it by the artist being more of a prophet, a genius, a superhuman who creates artworks for the future. In any case, the sign connecting the language and the image is somewhat meditating or going beyond what the language of the essence of the image should be. Semiotics is preoccupied with the process of meaning. Almost “everything” in the world could be the object of the process of “signification.” So, the world no longer gains its meaning from something external or internal. However, meaning, on the contrary, comes from a sign that is not “eternal” as a symbol. The difference between the sign and the symbol corresponds to the difference between immanence and transcendence. In summary, where the sign falls under the shelter of profane life, the symbol is generated from the desire to reunite the Being with beings and the essence of man. The sign refers to something in the world. That is the reason why semiotics is working in the attempt to grasp the meaning of beings as the totality of Being, while the symbol appears as a whole of separation wherein

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the condition is revealed as a Greek sacrificial vessel and must somehow be re-assembled. That whole represents the spiritual experience of the metaphysical framework of Being—God, man, and the world. Also, the symbolic understanding of the world is always addressed to the subject of the image best performed by philosophical hermeneutics. In semiotics and hermeneutics, however, it attempts to establish language as the perfect medium of its trans-epochal relationship with the world from the position of Being that could be posthuman and lasting in all its changes. That might be done by a pervading sign that goes beyond epochs by the perpetuation of a symbol that would be profoundly profane from the distant past to contemporaneity. But it remains essentially the same as it was represented in psychology by Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of collective archetypes. Culture, however, becomes such a symbolic transfer of symbols in the transgression of time. And it means that hermeneutics is the only unwanted child of the modern understanding (history) of art. When it is precisely within the same circle of French structuralism and semiology in the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan that the image seeks to understand starting from the unconscious that is structured like a language, then the image no longer has any sign or any symbol. It signifies and symbolizes that empty place of encounter between the “Big Other” (God, Father/Law) and the culture and traumatic nature of humans. It is genuinely constructed from the relationship between the imaginary and the symbolic, nature and culture, of the unchangeable and what is subject to change. When that is happening, then it might be obvious why the psychoanalytic image theory is nothing more than a semiotic expansion of the concept of the sign of language as an unconscious process of marking the world. After all, Lacan is concerned with Cézanne and painting as a square of visibility, which means that the image should always be interested in the view of the Other, and not in the ontological sense of self-referencing like the self-expression of Being as such. The image is thought of from the viewpoint of the universal event as a spectacle (theatre) in which everyone is watching the Other, and at the same time is given the role of the spectator of something that is happening in an attempt to give meaning to the secularized feast (Lacan 1998). Our position is complex because it is obvious that contemporary art can no longer be reduced to the semiotics and hermeneutics of the picture at a time when the paintings of Klee and Picasso opened the possibility of penetration into the pre-musical and archetypical setting of the mythical event of art as life itself. Why does that happen exactly in this way? The answer is subtle, but the pragmatics of the meaning of the image in any of its media versions—from photography and film to computer simulation— is something beyond the meaning of Being in the symbolic representation

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of reality and beyond its significance in a series of changes, as was made clear even with op art and the picture as a mobile object. This does not mean, however, that we can easily use the notion of metaphysics as its meaning cannot be semiotic explicitly because the triad of the signifier, the sign, and the signified has lost the credibility to create the technosphere as an autopoietic visualization. When the image in semiotic theories of spending loses any relation to reality in the society of the spectacle, when, also, the advertisement is an autoreferential sign of the end of representation as such, which was ultimately the intention of Andy Warhol and pop art, then we are talking about the problem of using the concept of the image in the meta-linguistic context of the disappearance of all references. This was a key moment in the emergence of the media and “image of the world” at the very moment of the flourishing of semiotics which, however, could no longer parse what was “really happening” when the art of its age no longer existed as a world but as a “world of art.” It was a time when a cybernetic theory came to light. It might be a sign of something forever dismissed by that, as well as metaphysics in all its historical-conceptual inventions. Language as a picture has become emptied of any meaning coming “from above” and “from below.” Finally, the change of perspective not only relates to the change in the standpoint of the subject. We are countered with a total change of thinking from a perspective that has never been so radical and farreaching. Media art marked the end of art and the end of the image as a world wherein there should be something like subjects and objects in its aesthetic appearance and semblance (Schein). The problem of contemporary art, and therefore the image problem derived from the paradigmatic “mission” of aestheticizing the world, might simply be performed in a way whereby the media are no longer the mediators between the subject and the object in the communication process, although the origin of the word medium has, as its main intention, the expression of the action of mediation (Paiü 2013, 484520). So, the image that was created technically as the construction of virtual reality no longer has any meaning because it lacks the “threefold pattern” of culture as communication, which comes from the domain of language, and it becomes a sign of culture. The medium is not there to mediate “something” that encompasses the assemblage of the dialogue and discourse in the sense of a form of communication. On the contrary, media are the prerequisite for creating an image as a technosphere because nothing is being rendered and nothing is being represented, so the grammar, rhetoric, syntax, semantics, or pragmatics of the picture can no longer cope with the “development” and “progress” of the gloom of total visualization.

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What the picture in the technological era might ultimately be can only be the event that is determined as how something “happens” (quoddittas), and the emergence of something like something (quiddittas) is no longer the act of the primordial production of beings from Being but the technical construction of the world as such. When something is constructed thanks to A-intelligence, then life becomes an artificial creation (A-life). And then, finally, the image as a (technological) event represents a condition of the possibility of contemporary art, which is not a subsystem of culture, nor does it serve as a sector of social production. Instead, art has become an aesthetic event of the construction of life itself and, together with the knowledge of the technosphere, goes somewhat beyond any kind of utopia, reduction, or anticipation of the future. The image of contemporary art and art itself has become a scientific experiment with life in its performativeconceptual turn to the body as a living machine of the infinite creation. It has finally become its destiny to get rid of what it came from—in pure visualization technology or in absolute light to accelerated erasure. The Russian futurists had a dream about the “trans-rational language” beyond the frontiers of that speech, searching for a hiding place in the logic of the grid and rationalizing the being. In the age of the posthuman condition, language seems to be quite discorporate. It remains with the pictorial letter of the technosphere. No one can decode that matter of fact without a little help from what might be the greatest secret and miracle of the telematic presence. This is, of course, the Internet as a non-material transfer of information in a sensitive meaning. The main feature of that transfer should be reduced to the synthesis of all of the senses in one encompassed matrix. The vision or the possibility thereof that Leibniz bestowed on intuition as the highest form of knowledge, even beyond the scientific knowledge of the being, becomes the centre of research projects in cognitive sciences and neurophilosophy. Might the vision of the image as a technosphere remain as the last word of life as such and as what remains of thinking that is irreducible beyond “the holy trinity” of computing, planning, and construction?

1.2. The image as an event: The end of information and the beginning of life Does the picture still represent something that can be emphasized on Velázquez’s canvas if its subject has been reduced to pure information? Everyone takes their “own” experience as a focal point related to their personal images that are carefully stored in private archives. Since computer files with an abundance of digital images have replaced the family albums

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of analogue photos, something has happened that Roland Barthes could not have dreamt of when he was reflecting on the “lightroom” (camera lucida) and its meaningful play of light, trace, and records. No one who is looking at the scenes of holidays in the virtual nothingness of its world of “personal things” is tied to these pictures in such a subtle way as was the case with photos made in the “darkroom.” It seems that we feel indifference to something quite untouchable. Yes, the pictures are actually “there,” yet out of reach of our fingertips. It is enough to look at them in any form of digitization for us to find that they are more abstract than materialized things. History has been preserved in archives. But the age that is now going on without history might be stored in all files as “warehouses” of information. The physical space of famous buildings within the great cultural empires, such as in the Austro-Hungarian era, was measured by the size of the state archives within the palace, the library, and the military and civic wonders of the architectural aesthetics of neo-historicism. W. G. Sebald, writing about that golden age of modern Europe, gave the greatest glimpse of his melancholic tales and reflections at the end of his idea of progress, which inevitably generated a collapse of culture that had risen in classical beauty and excellence in all its areas of influence. What does all of that mean? Probably the fact that even the technical imperfection of the media that emanated in a mysterious form of “beauty” and “harmony” cannot reach out beyond the inevitability of entropy. Good examples of American movies of the 1950s in a black and white style entitled “film noir,” from which radiate a melancholic and anxious beauty of the past, were stopped in the midst of the development of technology and the consumer society. In movies, the atmosphere provides nothing other than what Walter Benjamin named the aura of an artwork. The paradox is that the aura in the age of technical reproduction is no longer in the work, but it still endures in the medium in which the work is displayed—it has represented its message. Since it is a purely technical medium such as a movie, then the aura could be found in the reproducibility of the media itself. Without it, the art form of the movie cannot exist anymore (Groys 2008a, 86-87). If the technology of transferring the information with which a new image is created in the digital age now becomes the “aura” of the artwork, the access to the aesthetic whole of art and technology must be substantially changed. Boris Groys advocates the thesis, however, that no matter how it might seemingly be acceptable because it speaks about the relationship between the mimetic and the epistemic image, we cannot legitimately continue to use the term inherited from classical and Romantic art in the context of new media art, as is the case for motion picture movies. Namely,

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the term “aura” is the remainder of all that Hegel most profoundly reflected upon when he said that art at the present stage of spiritual development has gone away forever. The end of art has been pursued like a ghost, and Benjamin himself uses the term “the end of aural art” for that experience that had its place in the cult and ritual of the mythical-religious event of the divine. Holiness in the era of technology can by no means be incorporated into a work of art. The reason is that the event of auratic art requires a space of events in a temple or cathedral, while the space of post-auratic art might be distributed according to so-called “cultural needs.” It can be everywhere and nowhere, like the vanity of contemporary art, to which the idea of a museum might be just a substitute for its imperfection in the “earth.” The true “place” of contemporary art lies in the brain and the universe as models for the action of “artificial intelligence” (AI). So, the technology of transferring information in a digitized form or format in its essence has nothing more to do with the understanding of art as an experience of the beauty in the world. It would be equally inappropriate to take Benjamin’s description of the aesthetic power of film into two of its binding modes of action in modern society, namely the aesthetics of ethical-political engagement and the aesthetics of the religious-mystical escape into dreams and fantasy worlds. Sergei Eisenstein’s movie Battleship Potemkin and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will are paradigmatic cases of ideology as art, and the film based on Antonin Artaud’s eponymous scenario entitled The Seashell and the Clergyman belongs to films as experiments with body taboos. That is probably the reason why the film cannot theoretically explain it by referring only to the narrative dimension of the appearance of the cinematic image but also, and even less consciously, to the visual aspect as a substitute for the power of language. Politics and mysticism have been articulating each other in the openness of the artistic event, trying to reach repetitiveness by undermining its “message.” But what if the film as a paradigm of modern media art does not have any “message” or purpose in the causal sense of traditional aesthetics? What if its aesthetics of the event is focused on the openness of the image as the life of the avant-garde itself in attempting to realize its utopian dream of the synthesis of what a pure event is in becoming a new and effective form of halting movement? The essence of the film takes place in between images as motion and images as time, just as Deleuze has philosophically constructed in his two volumes of cinema studies (Deleuze 1986). Until the present date, the situation remains unchanged. The reason might be that the aesthetics of “adventure” and “experience” presuppose the modern art within their reach in the industrial reproduction society, while aesthetics as a body structure in its performance in the space

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and time of actual updating determines contemporary art as its transition from work to the event. Reproducibility is replenished by replication and the ultimate process of the creation of new life through genetic manipulation or cloning. If something is unchanged in the idea, it can only mean that it does not behave in harmony with the idea or that the idea goes unabated in its appearance. However, the idea of the film as a (new) medium assumes the sake of life in the form of the cinematic perception of reality. It goes to the extent that film production today does not apply to film production in the sense of a creative industry. Instead, life, thanks to the society of the spectacle, has taken its place as a “reality show.” In the digitized symbolic economy of global capitalism, everything becomes image-as-capital. Aesthetic production, however, occupies the observational capacities of humans in the mass society, and, precisely like the picture in the form of the technosphere, it should be a condition of its very existence. It might be transformed in advance from a myth about the “innocent eye” towards a critical observer (spectator) of multiple events in the network, which, from a wealth of information, accumulates capital in the form of images as a performance decision about the time to come. In that way, cognitive capitalism not only undermines the desire for interactive activities but also human contemplation as such in its condition of overall indifference to art (Beller 2006). Why, therefore, can contemporary art in the digital age not apply Benjamin’s term “aura” for its explanation in the new technological landscape? Simply put, the “aura” refers to the work of the immobile, the fixed base, and the space of belonging within the physical determinability of the world. Conversely, the film is required cinematic deployment, moving the space from one station to another, from materiality to immateriality. The event in which the image in the moving form of the film takes place concerning the observer and the work is no longer a “one-way street,” to use Benjamin’s famous utterance (Benjamin 1972, 83-148). So, the “reception aesthetics” here might be essentially altered concerning the work of art with a pattern in classicism and romanticism. The language of the poetic drama, however, is represented as a model for recognizing the beauty and the sublime of the natural harmony of the purpose and human power of transforming nature into action. Now, we are confronted with the contingency and the emergence of what might nowhere be in its own “place.” That is the reason why the time of the film’s essay on the aesthetic work can only be done in a non-spatial manner, in something like a “darkroom,” which created the pseudo-synthesis of religion as a feast of the divine and politics as ideological propaganda in modern society.

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When there is no space or topology of the “aura,” then technology takes the construction of time as a virtual update of its content in its hands. That only means space has been dumped at the time of the total actuality of information, where each image in its immersion into non-space shifts another image into an endless sequence of events. The technology of contemporary art has its media for the cinema. Hence, the reason lies in the fact that the place where life might be happening as an event is nothing more than the correlation between the physicality and the rationality of the image. The model is adaptable to the technosphere, and its image becomes the brain as a cognitive mappa mundi. However, it does not understand the reality of the world but constructs the aesthetic events that can be in fiction and the illusion of hyperrealism. What should be more real are the worlds in which we are living in video games, in digital photos on social networks, or in movies than in the so-called “real reality.” If Barthes has seen a trace of the text and the letters in everything outside and inside, then it is even more a mark of our age, which no longer has its own space and wherein time is completely reduced to sequences of flows and networks, constantly being updated. However, the image is an event that leaves any rootedness in “the ground,” the “earth,” and “space” defined by the concept of the transcendental perception of the relationship between the body moving in space and its “images.” The mimetic viewpoint was just “there.” It had to rely on Being, as in Heidegger’s definition of the human in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). That is the reason why, in its aspiration for the selfhood of the content, it was formally immortal. Bound to the walls of caves, galleries, and museums, the image was simply intertwined with Being as an image of its beauty and sublime in the mystery and wonder of what is determined a being as such. But the other side of that illusion of human perception was something that Ortega y Gasset attributed to the mystery and wonder of painting, not only by Velázquez—something that, despite the passage of epochs, belongs to the mortality and finality of humans, emanates and radiates far more than its visible signs in recognition of what is shown and represented in the picture to constantly create the experience or the atmosphere of transcendence whereby the work of art opens new worlds and raises us above the chaotic reality. But what is the “ontological difference” between the aesthetics of the work and the aesthetics of the event? Dieter Mersch credibly points to these differences being further fixed as cuts and discontinuities in time. Beginning with the historical avant-garde movements of the first half of the 20th century, there is a constant establishing of the disagreements and bruises or crackings between past and present, tradition and modernity, which is not continuity with the past but a radical

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break, and even the total deprivation and negation of earlier epochs whose art was a peaceful contemplation of the world and a (re)presentation of reality. The image as an event has been occurring in the fundamental forms of contemporary art that have arisen in the avant-garde, especially in the movements of futurism and dadaism. These forms or discourses of contemporary art, marked by the concept of painting and art, in general range from the anti-art of dadaism to the meta-art of the conceptualism of the neo-avant-garde of the 1970s. A feature common to all of them, however, that connects the body to its existential project of freedom and subversion to the existing world’s aesthetics might be the connection with the media event of real transparency. Those forms that were merely the legacy of the avant-garde are named—performance, event-art, happenings, installations, and interactive media art. Mersch points out three important directions of the movement of contemporary art and its images: (1) destruction—not in the sense of Nietzsche’s nihilism of existing values but in Heidegger’s meaning in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit)—adds to his view of the destruction of traditional ontology the finding of a “new tradition” linking the true meaning of art with that which is still in the upcoming; (2) the constitution of art related to the self-referentiality of art, which means that the painting no longer deals with anything other than itself and its “world” of self-referencing and self-creation, and that is also true concerning the language as text; and (3) the paradox as the principle of setting what is attacked as outdated and inadequate against the “new” and what, in the technical part of the experiment with life, becomes a shocking and provocative aesthetic effect as an event of meta-art itself (Mersch 2002, 188200). What is the “meaning” of this radical turn from language to picture as a physical performance in its destructive, self-referential, and paradoxical way? We can see in advance that art becomes the conceptual field of constructing meaning from the pragmatic knowledge of art as a process of creation. In the event, the image is triggered, and the body is rooted in the medium of its “imitation” and “representation” of what did not exist in reality—the world in its primordial openness in the horizon of the “meaning.” What has the main task of a semiotic picture been? For a nonexistent original as a copy, it gives meaning to refer to the effectiveness of language in its performing explication, or, more simply, the practical mode of interaction with the Other in the community. Semiotics was based on the

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idea of the circular motion of endless signs, and it creates the illusion of a closed culture system as a perfect text without history. But a sign that creates its reality can no longer be a provisional cultural character, and its environment is even more fragile. What has been lacking in semiotics in its attempt to grow logic as a language (spirit, mind), and which was at the height of the Western metaphysics of Hegel, is in its inability to perpetuate the sign as a work of endurance of being in all the changes. The word breaks into the ruins of the know-how of the moment when destruction, self-revelation, and paradox are involved in the game. When, then, the historical avant-garde appears with a new image of the absolute event, there is a “sacred trinity” of the readymade, the performance of the language and the body’s performance, and conceptuality and event-to-speech without ending with the technosphere in the digital age. Hence, the fundamental concept of contemporary art necessarily becomes what comes from the streams of information and the conditions of visual communication—interactivity (Gianetti 2005). One of the main problems of dealing with the idea of contemporary art and its paradigmatic image in “new media” is the inability to access this idea either directly or indirectly. The idea as a concept of Plato’s thinking was an expression of the meaning of the being. In the history of metaphysics, as Heidegger has shown, as has, in his traces, Jacques Derrida, the idea is multiplied and repeated in its singularity. In all ephemeral modes of expression, Being is shown-expressed (image-language) by itself in the play of openness and closeness, disregard and concealment. No doubt, the problem arises when Being is being revealed as an event of its history. In contemporary art, there is no longer any difference between the form of artistic expression and what we still call genres. Of course, the differences are only meticulously preserved, but in a distinctive way of understanding the relationship between universality and particularity, the whole and the parts. What that analysis has gained from the idea of a subject that constructs nature from the modern age is now being transformed into synthetic modes of the constructed life. In the contemporary research of post-genomics and other aspects of life-giving, the most recent theoretical form of biology is called synthetic biology. The new media making up television and its way of constructing events outdated as “the image of the world” are based on interactivity. That means precisely this: that the image and its “truth” are interpreted from the pragmatics of knowledge and that passive observers of aesthetic objects themselves create their “works of art” on the network. Right there, the difference between the signifier and the label disappears, and what Umberto Eco called “open work” with the primacy of the signified

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or the acting of the audience in the interpretation of the work has entirely become an “interactive event.” That, moreover, is not unlimited in the aesthetic process of the exchange of messages between the participants of communication but already possesses the feature of the normative and the new “cultural needs” of the democratically organized public. If, from the romantic ideas of total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk), we experience its seriousness with the historical avant-garde in the idea of a total artistic event (performance-installation-film), then it might be a turn of metaphysics itself. Instead of demonstrating-expressing Being as such in its “secularized” version of the modern industrial society, as a rule, it might be a technique from which art can in principle be “autonomous” so that it serves the ethical-political or ideological goals of changing civil society or the ideas of aesthetic mysticism reconsidered in the abyss of time. What is recorded “here” and “now,” to use Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous expression regarding the image as a language game (know-how), is no longer a “picture” of something in the so-called objective reality. Contemporary art no longer shows anything. It “comments” or “interprets” the event itself and constructs it at the same time. In that way, the “shattering picture” that Gadamer spoke about, trying to catch the essence of what is engaged in the painting of Art Informel and op art, transforms into constant relationships between the creators of the work as an aesthetic event and its users or recipients. We must pay attention to the change in the language of what was once an artistic audience. The language is being technically worked out. When that process still works in progress, all the concepts of contemporary art and aesthetics are taking over the scientific-technological alchemy of meaning. By becoming the aesthetic code of communication, art exceeds its limits. Like meta-art, it might use exact scientific methods and experiments to justify its disintegration—this, ultimately, was its application in the scientific aspects of the absolute construction of A-life, created by the Aintelligence concept—and synthesize all the differences and proclaim, using analytical speech methods, what the philosophy in all the world’s cultures since ancient times has spoken about, only showing it quite differently (tao, nirvana, ousia, energeia, spirit, work, techné). The problem lies in the time of the art in that it refers to everything and nothing. Therefore, the picture represents nothing other than what might be happening “now” and “here” in its own life without borders between the historically encircled areas of Being. There is no doubt that the event cannot be outside the media structure of what has happened. Therefore, the digital image whose essence lies in information can only be cinematic. In the constant emergence of the “new,”

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it is reflected in information, and information takes on the feature of projection. The persistence of Being, as well as what Hegel called “the spiritual need for art,” means our departure from “the past.” Without stability and perseverance, without the possibility of time being preserved in its past and opening its future at the same time, it is all about forgetting the technological updating of the “present.” Heidegger’s diagnosis of being “present” in a philosophical sense was undeniably precise and linguistically “exact.” What might be the fundamental problem of modernity in all its ways of showingexpressing (image-language) what is happening is nothing else but the forgetting of Being (Vergessenheit des Seins) (Heidegger 1976c, 203-238). Forgetting does not come from the less cognitive ability of a subject of contemporary art to preserve the memory of the immediate and indirect past. Its origin lies in the very essence of contemporary art and its images. Information as the essence of the digital image is constantly and infinitely streams of data in the process of their storage in the technically constructed memory. This collective memory, of course, is mostly ineffective. It cannot be considered as a human-to-human way of collecting what remains unsettled and chaotic in past events. That is the reason why today it can be said in the most profane language of the archivist or Jorge Luis Borges’s “guardian of memory” that the main problem of contemporary art lies in documenting events (Groys 2008a, 53-65). But from the standpoint of contemporary art as the technosphere that encompasses the mediasphere and the biosphere, this is not at all the problem that should hurt the head of the curators and visitors of great exhibitions, performances, installations, and other forms of great syntheses of art, science, and technology. The reason is that the technosphere represents autopoietic production and reproduction based on the visualization of the very occurrence of events as the life of the image and the image of life. As Deleuze’s model of the artist is a synthesis of montage and cameraman, it could still be radicalized and said that the model of the posthuman artist can only be a living machine that can remember its traces in the inhumane. As an “alien” without having the evil nature of human destruction attributed to it, that figure is uncannily upgraded. Nothing is “kept” from forgetting; it is stored in null files. And the whole problem of contemporary art comes down to the “memory growth” of an intelligent machine, a strong connection between contemplation and aesthetic production. It is not difficult to conclude what implications are produced in advance for the future of museums, archives, libraries, and documentation centres. An interactive digital library is already more than a substitute for a tactile book that you can still truly “infect,” as in Eco’s novel The Name of

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the Rose about the history of transcribing and preserving the heritage of the golden age of Western metaphysics. Thus, documenting the exhibition or archiving comments on the process of interactivity itself in the emergence of an event is already pre-determined by the fact that the mediasphere becomes a condition of the biosphere. Or, to put it another way, the new media in their powerful interactivity in the hands of everyone and no one themselves carry out the protocols of these professional operations. The robotization of production in the “factories” of industrial capitalism corresponds to digitizing the image of contemporary art. Theoretical attention might be focused on the work of the historical avant-garde in dealing with this inhumanity, apart from the difference between living and artificial, nature and machinery. Wolfgang Welsch, in the traces of Heidegger, Derrida, and Lyotard, opened the question of the end of the human in 20th-century art, clearly showing that in all visual arts whose “inheritance” derived from futurism, dadaism, constructivism, and surrealism until cyber-art presented the fallacy and delusion of the idea of the human, who, in classical and romantic art, still had the passion of the pathetic sublime under the shining stars. But the avant-garde devastated those illusions. This can be seen quite clearly in the idea of the aesthetic object created by Duchamp, in Malevich’s suprematist painting, in the atonal music of Schönberg, and in the functional architecture of Le Corbusier (Welsch 2004, 730-751). Where does the picture begin and where does language end in the absolute visualization of events? Maybe all this is just an ontological delusion. Indeed, the question is completely out of place. Even when it is gone, nothing goes wrong. We have a twofold understanding of the picture and language: analogue and digital. Language in analogue times shows what Being is, and in the digital age, it shows how the event occurs in its transformations. The picture in the analogue era depicts reality by displaying it and presenting it in works of art. In the digital age, the picture constructs the events created by the technosphere. The media-constructed reality becomes its condition for the possibility of transmitting information to the users/recipients. In a lecture dedicated to Baruch Spinoza, Deleuze posed the most veritable question since Heidegger: Why has the philosophy of the modern age made a bad compromise with God (Deleuze 1980; Goodchild 2001, 156-166)? Of course, there was a hidden answer in that regard. The reading was rhetorical and perhaps at the same time even “provocative.” Why? Because the philosophy of life is thought of metaphysically. Hence, it must necessarily assume the whole of the being as an event from the circle of thought in which Being, God, the World, and Humanity (onto-theo-cosmo-

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anthropology) can never be independent, but only in the other form of the ontological “rank.” For Deleuze, the compromise with the idea of God did not comprehend how the world without God as the supreme cause of all beings keeps on living in the idea of immanence. Each immanence appeared as the construction and creation of the new in multitude and difference. From that, it inevitably follows that the image in the idea of contemporary art moves into the assemblage of the event with the hermetic meaning of the production-creation-construction relationship. Contemporary art and its picture do not depict the reality it allegedly has to be. Such naive and vulgar “realism” should be avoided from all thoughts about that problem. It is, therefore, something completely different and other in a time when we are left without history, without meaning and signs in the reference circle of interrelated information, not to so-called reality in any form of its survival. A-intelligence (AI) products-creates-constructs those new worlds of digital illusions, and when nothing else does, that exposes the naked body of humans, apes, or amoebas in a “crystal cube of serenity,” as the great Croatian modernist poet Tin Ujeviü perfectly expressed with regard to the relationship between the alchemy of words and its fluid meanings. Why did we use the production-construction assemblage for what belongs to contemporary art? Is the picture that we call a digital or information image precisely “the sacred trinity” of concepts that say the same in the differences from the beginning of Western history to its end? The assemblage here denotes the technological circuit of cybernetics as the end of metaphysics. There are historical-metaphysically classified categories belonging to the historical epochs of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the new era. Where can we search for modernity in that constellation? Nowhere else than in the integrity of the circuit as a synthesis of differences. From that, it follows that the identity of the technosphere is auto-(re)produced and auto(re)created by itself. Production (poiesis) refers to the fundamental feature of the Greek understanding of art. That is the new entering the world thanks to the artist as a supervisor of things between nature and the artificial mode of being, for example, the goddess Athena in the Parthenon. It seems very useful to establish the difference between what might be a divine artefact or thanks to the work of the gods and what might be the result of the divine inspiration of an artist who goes beyond nature by placing a work of art as a mimetic image of divine beauty. Creating (creatio) implies the creation of beauty by embracing God’s creation of the world as the universe of created beings. The idea of the creator of all creatures is characterized by the feature of immortality and the most ubiquitous entities (ens increatum and ens realissimum).

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In medieval theology, the notion of creativity as an artist is not feasible. We know that art from a theological standpoint has been conceptualized as an act in the glory of God. What, in the Greek world, was conceptualized as cosmos becomes, in the Middle Ages of Christianity, mundus as a created world or a work made by God, and man himself was created in God’s image and figure. That is also evident in the notion of the concept of the image. While the Greek eikon is what is immediate, living, and present in the image, whether it is a statue of the god Apollo or an image of Heracles, the Christian concept of creation derived from nothing (creatio ex nihilo), the image as an icon, or the German Bild are signs of the representation of the divine in the image as its resemblance (mimesis and repraesentatio). Creation in a theological sense refers to the imitation of God in the act of the transformation of nature. That concept of art is governed by the end of the romantic conception of the 19th century. This is explicitly related to Hegel’s “end of art” in the sense of the end of the spiritual need for “shining the idea.” To create not only shapes the pattern of God’s unique act of creating the world in the onto-cosmo-anthropological sense. It also means changing and transforming nature as Being following the measure and legitimacy of the relationship between God and man. The transcendentals of one (unum), good (bonum), true (verum), being (ens), and beautiful (pulchrum) have determined what a work of art could be in general and why it inevitably refers to the only “narrative” of God sharing in human presence. The old and modern canons of Christianity, according to the notion of art as a metaphysical organization of the secular reality of man, have attempted to re-actualize the problem related to cosmology and ontology as such. It would be, no doubt, very interesting to consider how Vasilly Kandinski, from the avant-garde perspective of the notion of creation, raised a theological understanding of creativity in the era of the secularized technical reality: Painting is an art, and art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul—to, in fact, the raising of the spiritual triangle. (Kandinsky 1911/1977, 110)

What can, however, substitute art and act in that “open void” is at the beginning of the new era. The age of science and technology was enabled by thinking as computing (calculation, Rechnen). Instead of making or creating (poiesis) and creating according to the model of God’s creativity (creatio ex nihilo), from the bastard is born the monstrosity of that new Being of being subjectivity. This “new” is no longer imaginative but the reality in advance that cannot be imitated or represented, and this means that

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old categories of creation do not allow adequate consideration of the evolving forms that will come to fully dominate the entirety of world history. It encompasses the computational character of thought as a planning of the future and the construction of artificial life. Then, for the first time, the turn of the fateful meaning for contemporaneity and the function of art takes place in it. The artist is no longer just the producer and creator of an artwork as a subject. Moreover, besides the mark of creativity or the creativity of the productive power of imagination that Kant holds up to the principles of the “aesthetic mind” in the world’s knowledge, there is now a label that in which scientists are well-versed—inventiveness. Finding something “new” means changing the form of its presence. Constructing (construire) means making something up from something else. In every single design, the circuit represents a system of technical relations. It is not just a thing that functions as a mechanical machine—for example, Gutenberg’s printing press—but, above all, it might be a system of rationalistic thinking for a sufficient reason. When something is constructed, then the artist as a producer becomes an engineer. Its attribute becomes something truly monstrous and amazing: to find experimental prototypes of things as functions for some other practical purpose. The construction aims to find the “other nature” with which human moves into a posthuman condition. A vision of the future world of working machines was already appearing in the Renaissance. Starting from the body as the medium of construction of new worlds, we can catch sight of an artificial network of mediation. Leonardo da Vinci was no longer just an artist but primarily a scientist in the practical sense of the word. And that would determine the fate of science and knowledge at in the era of thinking machines. Science, indeed, is no longer just an epistemic field that is different from techné. It encompasses a set of technical knowledge of the world as a possibility of constructing new worlds. In the constellation of facts, which is unlike classical metaphysics, where the foundations of the struggle are raised and disbanded, an adventure of new art is surely taking place. The picture as a construction shows that it is already latent in the process of creating a technical reality as an aesthetic assemblage. The art of the modern age in a painting is enabled in such a plastic way by finding the depth of the image thanks to the technical invention of the central and linear or geometric perspectives. What Hans Belting explained with regard to invention in Ernst Cassirer’s notion of the “symbolic form” of the new culture is quite true. Since the Renaissance, the technical invention of nature has begun to conquer all areas of the humanities. That is the reason why an artificial event

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could be celebrated as a “new myth” about the possibility of restoring classical Greek art in the new (technological) landscape of nature and spirit. Thanks to the central perspective, a painting could sail into the safe harbour of representation of the economic, political, and cultural power of the West with the paradigmatic image resulting from the essence of the art. Furthermore, it should be added that a perspective with which the history of art painting fetches an illusion in the ideas of beauty would signify a “cognitive revolution” on the path to the rule of the technosphere (Belting 2005b, 9-12; Boehm 2007). Synthetic life is constructed from the synthetic mind of the technosphere, and the synthetic nature of new media allows analogue media to continue to be available, not only as nostalgia for the past of the ideal object. We are faced with a process of re-formatting reality. The trans-coding of the picture format to another format is irreversible (Manovich 2001). Therefore, it might be virtual-real time that flows from the future to the past. And they flow in the closed circle of meta-referentiality of meaning. In media theory, the picture no longer signifies anything external or internal in the sense of objectivity. Since media transformation events are the construction of a new reality, then the image should be quite logically comprehended as the “transfer of information or data” (Münker 2008, 322). The media function retains only the third principle (tertium datur) in between information and communication. So, the image did not become fully technological because it was meant to be the mere result of media and technical construction. As for the digital image itself, it might be the perspective to a different vision of “reality.” Hence, it represents a source of origin that goes beyond visualization. That would be an insight into the technical nature of the image of meta-art. The technological circuit in which a digital image finds its “place” and “time” encompasses the very construction of things as objects of computational thinking on top of the rank. The way this is happening means keeping the future of the “plane of immanence,” if we are able to receive the leading concept of Deleuze’s ontology of becoming the multitude and the difference. Planning means controlling the future. From that viewpoint, the main technical category of cybernetics is becoming an efficient cause (causa efficiens). That concept right now might be called feedback. There is no longer causative action because the event as the interplay of information, media, and communication performs the transformation of life into the order of artificial or virtual reality. Everything is “immersed”, so therefore the spatial world does not develop furthermore as a submerged, bottomless net. Where is the life of this picture going on? Of course, in the structure of the

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same network that becomes open space without time, we can see the eternal updating of fractals of time-space (nunc stans) (Grau 2003, 13-23). The network controls the matrix as the last stage of the realizationcompletion cybernetics performs, causing the death of metaphysics. Just as we saw in the film of the Wachowski brothers-sisters entitled The Matrix, events in digital prosthetics cannot be a “narrative.” Whoever tries to recount what is being acted out in a movie like The Matrix or philosophy that deals with movies like it deserves a reward for finding a non-existent reality. There is nothing to do about it, nothing is displayed, and it might be pure nothing. The film constructs reality as a contingent event of the reproduction of past and present times. That is based to a fair degree on the logic of the technosphere. What is truly techno-genetic in its visual form if not the matrix of all matrices, the form of all forms—life as an artwork of the immediate vision of the creation of what “happened” only in dreams? This was corrected when Wim Wenders talked nostalgically about his films such as Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin), and Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt) because the images of the space of those different “worlds” without he could not come to the dreams of the other fantasy worlds disappeared in the clash with the technosphere. But concerning the film technique, we share the view that film is no longer tied to any vision of space located “now” and “there.” The reason lies in the fact that the image that arises from construction logic be captured anywhere, such as the Mars environment in the motion pictures of the miniature rover Curiosity that NASA manages to use remotely to investigate whether there are any traces of life on Mars. What really “happens” when the production-creation-construction of new worlds becomes constructive-creative-productive or techno-genesis? Something goes beyond the simulation of the original. It is no longer a simulacrum of the existing reality, its cloned twin, as determined by the poststructuralist theory of meta-language that is preceded by speech and the image in front of the language. Instead of terms that are already “completely contaminated” by the metaphysics of positive sciences and cybernetics, they can be found in Derrida’s early works, such as Of Grammatology. Therefore, it should really now be a techno-scientific or epistemic way of observing something that is not yet but might constantly be evolving in the transformations of the condition. In other words, “what is happening” means that the autopoietic way of doing life as a self-confessing and selfinconsistent case in an emergent series of transformations has been determined by the rule of the technosphere. The image as an event does not have its meaning in the semiotic circle of references. It does not appear in the concepts of the intention of consciousness and its subjective worldview.

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However, we are witnessing more and more attempts to perceive its pure ontological status within the phenomenological orientation of image science (Bildwissenschaft) in close relation to the view, vision, and objectivity of the subject itself (Wiesing 2005). We do not need to be surprised. What is particularly affected by this visual or iconic turn is our ability to observe the artificial reality. It is not to be expected that—even within posthumanism/transhumanism as a theoretical movement towards understanding the new techno-scientific environment and life—there will be more and more such efforts, just as a parallel observation shows there are more and more studies of human cognitive abilities and those about animals. The neurocognitive sciences must necessarily be addressed by observation and research. The reason is that the orientation of evolutionary development to the question of the relationship between consciousness and body is now reflected in a new light. We have a lot of nice examples in contemporary movie productions. It is focused on the experience of looking at a situation when we are involved with technical appliances as our artificial environment, and it becomes our “nature” and almost the only remaining environment of meaningful living. Probably the most promising evidence of the change of sensitivity and the perception of that turn was left by Jean Baudrillard in his programmatic essay entitled “The Ecstasy of Communication” (“L’extase de la communication”): But today there is no longer a scene and a mirror; Instead there are screens and networks. Instead of a reflexive transcendence of mirrors and scenes, the work is a non-reflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations are performed—a smooth operational surface of communication. […] Private ‘telematics’: every person sees himself, thanks to the control of a hypothetical machine, lonely in the position of perfect and mentally controlled sovereignty in an infinite distance from his place of birth. What would he say, in the austere position of the astronaut and his aeroplane, in a state of emergency that necessarily needs an orbital flight and enough speed to save him from the collision with his domicile planet. Realization of live satellite, in vivo in the everyday space, corresponds to the realization satellite or what I call ‘hyperrealism simulation.’ […] The moment of hyperrealism begins now. (Baudrillard 1998, 146-147)

Conclusion Ultimately, can we obtain some acceptable conception of the image that would connect the cave paintings of Lascaux, the Greek mimesis, and Velázquez’s representational paintings in the golden age of European aristocracy with Malevich’s suprematism and, finally, with digital images? If that is possible, then all attempts that were made by philosophia perennis

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were futile efforts to perpetuate transcendence, like trying to hold a drop of water in the palm of our hand. Our thinking must be at least as old as the first humans, with the difference that they had an open history of opportunities in front of them and the necessity of the open gaps that Kandinsky spoke of when he gave pessimistic regard to the possibility that the mission of great art can even somehow result in its replacement. In any case, aesthetics entered the discourse of humanity as an unwanted child of the thought of rationalism from 1735 to 1750, since the emergence of the avant-garde movements in the first half of the 20th century had to be deployed within the propagation of new art. It was no longer a teleological task for Being to be true and given to the beauty of the perfect beauty and that all together is confined to the eternal glory of God, if nothing else, or at least as a postulate for its moral part. The art in the autonomy and sovereignty of the “new beginning” wanted something quite impossible. From the beginning of the first painting on the walls of the dark caves, it was more than any life of a species/genus that suffers and thinks on Earth. It might be impossible to revive the image as an artificial creation in its sensitivity. No doubt, revival signifies the ultimate contrast to every single experience and the perception whereby art already has its foundations in the notion of truth and its absence and the presence of Being. When something is revived, then a picture that does not show something and does not represent something goes beyond the mimetic-representative experience of own history. That becomes what the mythical revelatory experience might have been in the early beginnings: the openness of history as the encounter of earth and heaven, gods and mortals, what Heidegger called the circular schema of the Fourfold (Geviert). Therefore, philosophy finally ends up as metaphysics on the path of return to a thing alone (to autó) (Heidegger 2000, 165-187). If anything of the phenomenological program that Husserl conceived belongs to the assemblage of human science to prepare for the long journey of liberation from the positivism and objectivism of historically created obstacles to simple living and thinking can still be preserved from oblivion, then, surely, it is the performative command: “Back to the things themselves!” The return to the picture has, hence, the same meaning as a return to language. We will not go back to something that has already passed away. If we are going back somewhere, then it is a future return to sources when history has still been able to decide to become what it has become or what it can do in a different direction. Images and language are not given to humans like coffee and/or disposition and opinions. The act of giving could be a rare event. And hence it is just as Heidegger said in the lecture “The Thing” (“Das Ding”) from 1950: the Fourfold opportunities portraying the secrets and wonders of Being painted

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in dark cave chambers were still one with a world where it had not yet been possible to build a “satellite of the soul.” If the image of the very moment of the Fourfold, to which Heidegger—in regard to art—gives the primary meaning of the ringing of life, passing through the surroundings of given opportunities as “the necessity of freedom,” then the greatest possible step of approaching the distance is taken by reaching away from things themselves. The more we approach the disappearance of images as “things” and the transition to the transformations of actuality within the universe as a cognitive-neural network, the more we might feel a sense of abandonment of Being, the image, and finally language. We have communications and networks so that we do not get lost in the truth that goes beyond any information. And that truth is not revealed like God to the terrified Moses in the form of a burning bush on the holy mountain of Sinai. The truth of the picture lies in its event. All that is visualized with the technosphere as the last possibility and necessity for the world is to be reflected in its bare transparency. Art no longer opens new worlds. That is the time in which we live. We have meta-art experiments, architecture that goes to unsurpassed altitudes, city-satellites, museums as data networks, post-history archives, libraries without books, and pictures without worlds. What we have, however, could be a life that is drifting and the backdrop of the technological expectations that will improve our body’s performance and restore the power of imagination that dropped Leibniz into a long winter night as he delved into the nifty semiotic of the computer machine and saw the future of theodicy. What connects us to the first human is the same strange feeling that art is just a temporary relief of survival, so even when there is that universal code, it in no way restrains beauty. What holds us in front of that picture that prompted Aristotle to speak in Poetics on fear and anxiety as an essential “function” of a tragedy is derived from the act of ethical catharsis or the overcoming of the idea that life can be performed, as it is already, tedious in dignified sacrifice and work, which apparently comes from something that gives the image a significantly different view of lust in the metaphysical trap of feeling, experiencing, and mindfulness being the very thing. In any case, the picture might be following a work of the mysterious event. And regarding chimaeras, we cannot know anything except that “there is” and that “so-and-so” functioned. That would be a factual condition because it might be the simply incomprehensible question of why there is something rather than nothing. That is the reason why Wittgenstein’s mystical expression of “form of life” as language and images derived from the reality (“necessity” and “freedom”) of the world in its self-

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reliance. It is precisely that limit of the imagination of any future technoarts. When language no longer has anything to say, and the picture is developed in its production-creative-constructive frame as a silent machine, there remains only stillness and silence. Humans are no longer in front of their work; instead, the world exists in front of its event. On that deep silence that depicts the most profound language of poetry, it is worth recounting what Fernando Pessoa spoke about in The Book of Disquietude: Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and trappings. If we think, the world’s inscrutability is enough for us; to want it to understand is to be less than persons since to be a person is to know that it can’t be understood. (Pessoa 1996, 54)

To see the truth with our eyes means to admit that the image is only a flash of light, which art, through life, passes to the last darkness of the universe. Caves were the home of art, solely asylum to the peril of the world. When a picture resets everything that has lost its language by becoming meaningless, there is no longer any reason why art carries this primordial name of secrets and miracles, as there is no reason for the image to be called the “thing” created by itself as a techno-genesis without the world. Life has replaced the secret of Being, and the technical circuit has transformed the inhuman into the living machine of thought without suffering. But art without suffering no longer makes any sense. At the zenith of the Spanish Baroque era, El Greco’s paintings were created in the mysticism of faith and represented truly suffering in pain. It was not “painting for painters” but a “spiritual eye” experience that did not come from the viewpoints of the most cutting-edge technology. All of that derives from the tears as the last proof that our image is exalted over what we still call a life. Before the picture as information, we cannot kneel. We cannot, in the end, let the tears go. What can be set by the fatal numerical system of every future interaction between the animal, human, and machine? We can only count down that infinite emptiness of time. And something more, of course: look at the perfect design of the technosphere with fascination and “joyful indifference.”

CHAPTER TWO THE SILENCE OF DUCHAMP: TIME WITHOUT EVENT

2.1. Signs of emptiness and the spatial turn The texts of philosophers and artists directly or indirectly linked to the spirit of the “historical avant-garde” bear the path of expectation of a great turn. That, of course, does not have to be surprising. The two world wars and the communist revolutions were fatal events of a turning point concerning the steady direction of the historical movement. After all, without understanding the radical turn of the historical assemblage of Being, beings, and humans, one cannot even conceive what avant-garde art was about to do. Who would like to liberate contemporary art from the sound and fury of the politics acting in the name of purity of form might be naive in their blissful aesthetic autism. It would be still worse to think that this can be resisted by the escape into the closed worlds of decadent feelings of life, such as performed by des Esseintes, the hero of the novel The Damned (Là-Bas) by Joris-Karl Huysmans, who moves into the chambers of his own narcissism and the repugnance of the thrill of the massive taste of the crowd to preserve his dignity of thought and his own freedom (Huysmans 2002). The modern era of science and technology, at the same time, started the worst politicization of the lifeworld in the history of mankind. One should not be fooled by the fact that the emergence of a rational organization of the societies and states of Europe in the late 18th and 19th centuries marked the end of any single form of un-reflected rebellion against the order. When modern corporate capitalism started its long-term career, concepts such as “ideologies,” “political parties,” “bureaucracies,” “oligarchies,” and “masses” encountered the almost necessary dualities of chaos and order, regression and progression, and traditionalism and utopia. The purity of art seems to belong to something beyond this life—the sphere of the divine or autonomous field of work of the unfinished profane purposes of life in the struggle of interests and passions. Moreover, just like in the dizzying vertigo of breathing into the ideas of “progress” and

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“development” with all their more sophisticated technology, we are immensely distanced from what has been accurately attributed to the idea of an artwork (ergon, work, Werk). It seems that there is an eternal and immutable divine essence of existence behind its appearance or the splendour of beauty in the present world. According to this, everything is measured, straight, and governed in the world. The allocation also refers to affirmation in things and the form in which Being becomes materially present. The character of the work separated from that is materialized in the ideas of the present. When it comes to the artwork (poiesis), we witness a beauty or disembodiment, even a negation. The artwork, unlike the aesthetic object (ready-made), reflects the singular contingency and unrepeatability of the original. But it might be the necessity that art cannot exist without a formal-material trace in time. Since the beginning, it has not been a problem of the necessity of presence as form-matter (eidós-morphé-hylé), but rather of what constitutes the essence of the idea of art. Every single epoch must be able to consider the idea of art in its way. The Renaissance sought to revive the spirit of antiquity in the new environment of the birth of science and technology. Neo-classicism pushed on to the reconstruction of the Roman tradition in light of the emergence of the modern system of values. More recently, the historical art of the avant-garde no longer wants to drive or represent anything. Instead, that art attempts to perform radically what Reiner Maria Rilke said in the Duino Elegies: “You have to change your life!” (Du muȕt dein Leben ändern!). In the ecstatic exaltation of the anarchist rebellion against the false values of modernity articulated in the banalization of life, the words of the main thinker of dadaism, Hugo Ball, from his “Dada Fragments” (19161917) are still inspiring: The word and the image are one. Painting and composing poetry belong together. Christ is image and word. The word and the image are crucified…. (June 13, 1916) The new art is sympathetic because in an age of total disruption it has conserved the will-to-the-image; because it is inclined to force the image, even though the means and parts be antagonistic. (March 30, 1917) Perhaps the art which we are seeking is the key to every former art: a salomonic key that will open all mysteries. (May 23, 1917) (Ball 1927, 99, 154 and 161)

The paradox of contemporary art was created in Ball’s fragments concerning the experience of dadaism in trying to simultaneously subtract the essence of aura devoted to the divine deprivation of its autonomous

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status in civil society and bring it to the threshold of what had belonged to archaic times but has since passed away. What should be considered as distinctive to the idea of the beginning (arché) appeared to the “historical avant-garde” in the 1920s and 1930s: (1) as an attempt for fusion with everyday life, and (2) as a desire to create something “new” from the basic prerequisites of modern technology. The avant-garde explicitly wants to reach out to the future. In that constellation, it should see the salvific dimension of time, but by removing the past from the illusion of frozen time. In all manifestations, and particularly in Malevich’s Suprematism Manifesto from 1915, the past, however, disputes and denies that the idea of art was sacrificed on the altar of religion. In this way, the call for the ultimate delusion of the art form and its work goes into almost obsessive dialogue with the “new mythology” of the fine arts. If, however, the struggle with the aestheticism of modernism present in the works of 19th-century artists and writers deemed it necessary to step up to the pseudonym of the artwork and figures of the free artist, it was a strategy game with the ultimate aim of enhancing the independent work in the common event of what goes beyond the aesthetic purposes of art. This is not about anything other than the encounter and confrontation with the essence of the art as a way of exposing Being in the modern world. Heidegger did this in his famous lecture entitled “The Question Concerning Technology” (Heidegger 2009, 9-40), which was more an undisclosed talk about “the end of art” than about its dubious “renewal” and “return.” The undisclosed, on the contrary, refers largely to the interpretation of Hegel’s assertion that the disappearance of the spiritual need for art signifies its shift to the level of the profane order of meaning. And the point lies in the fact that the entire 20th century is represented as a century of total “line-of-sight” and mobilization of the era of artistic flourishing as an aesthetic or cultural drive. In the previous epochs, art was never so highly elevated to the throne of absolute freedom and power. Moreover, nobody ever expected its historical role to be one of a salvific outcome. Besides, it should create the conditions of possibility for the coming event, like the emergence of a new openness to God’s arrival. In that respect, it is by no means coincidental that the relationship and the philosophical relation between mythology and technology have to be shown as freedom and power, contingency and necessity. However, everything began with romanticism and its idea of the return of the gods in history. This is deeply perceived in the poetic fate of Friedrich

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Hölderlin. His life drama ultimately becomes the starting point for a tragedy of the modern age. Madness is not, therefore, anything external to the loss of the primary speaking of the language by transformation into meaningless signs. What Nietzsche called in metaphysics the criticism for overturning Platonism for the people, thinking of the crucified Christ of Christianity, in Hölderlin gains the characteristics of lost faith in the return of Greek gods. Because without their presence in the life of a modern human, everything remains empty (Blanchot 1955, 221-233). In the sign of this emptiness and the absence of a sacred event, from the art of romanticism to the end of the avant-garde, we witness a triumph of the aesthetics of perception, experience, and interactivity—the substitution of rule for sovereign power. Well, an idea is going to flash concerning the outcome of the technological period of the “end of history,” which began with the movements of the “historical avant-garde” (futurism, dadaism, constructivism, and early surrealism), that art is a true venue of that life that is not conducive to external purposes but is rooted in the techno-poetical emergence of pure events. Those events cannot be explained or justified by anything else than their eventuality without a first cause and ultimate purpose. Why might we determine what kind of “foolishness” there is towards art in the age that has been closed since the new era and then, in the possibility of Being, produces almost anything but rational, scientifically, constructively assemblages? And how could we be able to explain those largest, fanatical peaks of thought in philosophy, stretching up to nowadays, in the cases of Heidegger, Adorno, and Deleuze, who put their hopes of saving the metaphysics of art into searching for the single and unrepeatable salvific event? We have seen that Hugo Ball equates language and image. However, it is no longer a matter of language primarily as logos over the sensitive nature of the image since the beginning of metaphysics is reduced to the concept of imitation, but as the ever-living reality (mimesis). The entire historicalepochal framework of the rule of language is now reversed in its “Being.” Rather than the lawfulness of necessity and immutability in changes of state, onto the throne of thought ascends the Other, always accidental, passive, and material. Dadaism was, in this regard, the crystallization of the idea of a historical avant-garde that radically changed the order of signifiers and signified. It is an ontological sign of the signs in the corporeality of the body as an image. Regarding it as such would be the only possible manner to understand the all-around rebellion against the metaphysical concept of art with its highest point in the idea of autonomous work. Therefore, it no longer gains the meanings of myth and religion but of something that belongs to the fundamental power of a modern form of life production. It is about the scientific construction of the world as a technical setup of Being.

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If the image has occupied the place of language, then the very image of this world of modern technology has become the techno-political form of existence as well. Furthermore, the art that, in its attack on the institutions of modern capitalist society, led the whole of this non-articulated movement of the “historical avant-gardes” of the first half of the 20th century in Europe could be designated with a really “absurd” name—DADA (Krahl n.d.). The term does not mean anything. It can even be said that its “inconstancy” refers to the decomposition of the meaning of language. Indeed, the failure of avant-garde art in what is left of that radically performative movement of the destruction of language as the construction of the technical picture becomes the truth. This, of course, does not mean that other art movements within the historical avant-garde were much less important or have now completely fallen out of favour regarding the interests of contemporary theory and art history. But neither futurism nor constructivism, nor even surrealism, had in their programmatic foundations such a clear demand for anti-art, the anti-picture, or the transformation of life into the aesthetic object. Not even on that plastic path did the question of the transformation of Being into becoming the body as a synthesis of animal-human-machine beyond any kind of superficial politicization and aestheticization of what is left of “life” ever open.4 In the understanding of Hugo Ball, along with Hans Arp, Marcel Janco, and Tristan Tzara, as the main representatives of DADA’s rejection of anything “programmatic” or, conversely, discourse theory, drawing attention to the theoretical idea of art, the spirit of rebellion and chaos, contingency, and indeterminacy must be understood from the urge for the whole structure of metaphysical thought-feeling to break into debris. This is not just about art. On the contrary, the notion of “art” in the historical tradition derived by the Greeks has become the reason for its enactment as a delusion and obsession with power and ruling over the pulsating forces of life as such. Despite this seemingly dissipated and unusual way of thinking, from texts that instead of the whole try to reveal the truth of a fragment, we can derive what will become a fundamental feature of contemporaneity concerning the close connection of aesthetics and technology. If DADA assumes anything that is some kind of opposite to the order and harmony of the current image of the world, then it might construct a new way of understanding art and life. But it should no longer be considered on the horizon of what has become the leading canon, a measure of value, the postulate of morality, and the rule of the mind. In all of Ball’s texts, which are both autobiographical and “programmatic,” we can see a clear demand for the reversal of the rational discourse of Western metaphysics. But the form of expression at the same time includes poetic-pictorial thinking in search of

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the “truth” of life, without theoretical or any other mediation (Freeman 2006, 225-251). The rebellion against the perfection of tradition signifies the direction of creating the “new” that has been elevated above the primordial source of Being. This is even as the Dionysian cult of dadaism, in the context of the “historical avant-garde,” undertakes the quite ambiguous project of the abolition/overcoming (Aufhebung) of art in life. On the one hand, it celebrates the upcoming future of machinery and new technology as a salvific turn of history, and on the other, we are witnessing the desire to return to the state of eternal admiration as a creative way of exposing Being. Technology and chaos make up the inner link of the historical avant-garde on its way to destroying all the present values. In one place in his notes, the compilation of which was entitled Flight Out of Time (Die Flucht aus der Zeit), Hugo Ball explicitly said: It is the power of modern aesthetics; you cannot be at the same time an artist and believe in history. (Ball 1927, 36)

This quote is located at the very beginning of the first chapter of Peter Sloterdijk’s book Copernican Mobilization and Ptolemaic Disarmament (Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und Ptolomäische Abrüstung, 1987). Sloterdijk had the slightest reminder of the avant-garde belief in the decay of all aesthetic principles. Dadaism, hence, had the function of opening something “new” with the bond of art and politics, understood by the spirit of radical anarchism as the destruction of absolute rule and power of God, the state, culture, and aesthetics. That euphoria of “promise’s ideology of progress” in the aesthetic avant-garde, however, paradoxically finds itself alive in the devotion of destruction. Therefore, it might be by no means astonishing that the idea of the “new” is marked by “constructive destruction.” It belongs to the very “essence” of art (Groys 2002; Krauss 1986; Sloterdijk 1987). The loss of faith in history, referred to by Ball, simultaneously refers to its purposefulness (télos). DADA had the task of relieving art from the imperial mission of history in its “necessity.” All that remains after the breakdown of metaphysics is thus reduced to a set of possibilities and cases. This invocation of the chaos and freedom with which the new art of the “historical avant-garde” has opened up space for a paradoxical relationship of aesthetics and technology seems to have ceased to be the guiding principle even today when contemporary art seeks inspiration in the research of technoscience and “artificial life” (A-life). Does that mean the loss of faith in history? It might be not a symptom of indifference towards political events. After all, without the world and civil wars and the revolutions of art in the 20th century, it would remain just an empty plate.

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The reason lies in the fact that, after the death of God, what remains is to seek justification in politics as ideology and aesthetics as a mysticaltechnical way of exposing Being. The turning point still continues in the 21st century. Why? Simply put, art “today” no longer witnesses any other mission than the re-politicization and re-aestheticization of the world. At the time of the rule of the technosphere, time drives without events, and the spaces of contemporary art are out of content but become the pure form of architecture of absolute deterritorialization/reterritorialization. We can see that the inadequacy of contemporary art is strongly related to the impossibility of “revolution” and “utopia” in an already altered modern world in which the only true “revolutionary utopia” has been realized in the technological construction of the “Real.” This primarily refers to the experiments in “A-intelligence” research, from which “A-life” is now being created. Instead of events that are awaiting both the neo-avant-garde movement called situationism and fundamentalist messianic theologians, all that is on the agenda is the order of change in the technological environment itself. All that, with heavy acceleration, might produce the preconditions for the emergence of the posthuman condition. When there is no radical change of society, which was a condition of the politicization of art in the “historical avant-garde,” everything is reduced to the “small stories” of the subversion of aesthetic values and to the turn to the idea of an artificial act as an event. At the centre is the notion of the interactivity of the observer. Throughout the history of art, its role has been much neglected and left behind. The rebellion of an eye that looks at what is happening and is critically responsive to the interaction of the work, the author, and the public is a part of extending the aesthetic circle of communication to the work itself. In the society of the spectacle, the “observer” becomes more important than the creator and his work. Moreover, the infinite self-production of the content of art in the era of new media formally corresponds to the idea of critical participation and participation in the process of creating art as a common work/event (Rancière 2011). The space in which such an adventure of the “distribution of the sensible,” as Jacques Rancière calls it, cannot be determined from the classic paradigm of understanding art. While literature in this respect is almost the intimacy of the reader in the wider community of users and has not significantly changed its role since Schiller’s days when the modern order of the meaning of “public” was created, everything is now quite different, thanks to the changes in close connection with the development of new media— photography and film. It is therefore not surprising that the most important writers in the first half of the 20th century adapted to the “cinematic mode of writing” in their style, like Franz Kafka and Alfred Döblin. Images have

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become dynamic, and their collusion and montage role turned into a fullfledged game with the long-lost world of symbols. Therefore, space is no longer located in the field of the “Real,” to use Lacan’s term for the power of language as an articulated form of unconscious construction. Instead, it is pervasive, and the total life of a contemporary human is happening in a network of different events. Their feature becomes the contingent chaos of images that replaced language. The taboos, dogmas, and totems of what we call contemporary art lie in its paradoxical task to lose its temporality in that way whereby it will be fully merged with the space of its disappearance. Although it declared a mission in the spirit of the absolute deconstruction of imitation of God and nature (mimesis), the deployment of the Euclidean space and the opening of a multitude of worlds of difference, which is represented a step beyond the boundaries of creation and the created, can be still left over from its uncanny disallowance. The iconoclasm of images and the transition from the kingdom of speech into the body of events have enabled the emergence of something that, from the very beginning of the modern obsession with visualization technology, was conceived in the works of the greatest artiststhinkers of the 20th century—Marcel Duchamp and Antonin Artaud. It might be described as the experience of the end of metaphysics and its transition to pataphysics without moving up and down. What is intimated in the impossibility of further presentation-representation (repraesentatio) of pure works of art corresponds to the ideas of a philosophical and scientific turn towards something that, in analogy with the linguistic turn to the picture, can be named the spatial turn. When the idea of modern art can no longer find any trace of God, nature, man, or the world in their entire metaphysical meaning, we are faced with their empty markers. Hence, their replacement is not a mere substitute for something original, so, probably, the programming of digital media cannot then be a substitute for the painting media, from Giorgio de Chirico to Francis Bacon. On the contrary, the inner logic of hybrids might be represented by the semiotics of restoration in action in exactly that way that we did not see with our eyes; moreover, it can show anything more based on the rules of language and can be used in quite an ordinary situation. Contemporary art in its infinite reproductions of (and without) the original, hence, should be determined as the life of the indeterminable event. All this corresponds to the constant presence of the staging of what is pursued like a ghost. And it reminds us of the problem of “empty space” in the Gothic art age (horror vacui). But there is no longer a fear of something possessed by the anxieties of existence, just like in the heroic age of high modernism where, in the expressionism of Edvard Munch and in the existentialism of Jean-Paul

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Sartre and Albert Camus, the question of the subject became almost the first ontological question and art opened its door to the thing of pure contingency. We might also notice it is worth something else. Contemporary art, in its reduction of the spatial immersion in the pure virtual event’s update, is faced with the question of its “open-closed” nature. Alain Badiou, in Being and Event (L’etre et l’événement), calls it the void in between the Being of the multitude and the event as the structure of time in the thinking of the new. This is exactly the place where a break with previous history begins (Badiou 1988). It is, therefore, not a location that determines the place between something that exists “here” and “there.” That empty place has “no place” in real space and time. And just because it is “not,” just what “is” empty in its “void” can become a singular event of new space and time or remain forever empty. Contemporary art would be shocking and provocatively silent about what is still filled with the creative-destructive pathos of revelation from the moment of its reconciliation with the venue of the event. So, the museums of contemporary art live together by that dogma and taboo. They are just like the totems of their affliction in dealing with what makes their essence—to keep the experience of a lost connection with the past and archive a consciousness of their own place—the time of the empty in between. The space of the infinite duration of contemporary art at the time of updating and actuality represents the de-realized zone of the sacred. All museums of contemporary art are therefore inexhaustible hypermarket cathedrals, or even spectacular hangars on the outskirts of the city, apocalyptic inns of urban nomadic architecture, a lofty architecture that has already counted on three keywords to replace the classic aesthetics of beauty, sublime, and fantasy: shock, provocation, and experiment. Without their effectiveness in the public space of society’s performance and the policy of global capitalism, contemporary art and architecture lose their last reasons for existence. This might, of course, be nothing new. The problem of the logic of substitution for what has gone irretrievably away with historic advances and the development of technical science consists in the fact that almost everything is now becoming art without an object because there is no longer a subject that has produced a new one. Instead, we have the technosphere. This cybernetically creates a new life with transgenic mutations, as in the projects performed by Eduardo Kac (Gianetti 2005; Reichle 2009). Without the object and the authentic timing of contemporary art, the “event” is being staged at a media image creation. Here, of course, the difference between the real and the fictitious is no longer crucial. What should really be essential in art comes down to shock, provocation, and the experimention of life as the remaining relicts of freedom of transformation

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in the artistic event. Giorgio Agamben attempts to think of that era of profanation as the logic of openness, without what Heidegger already saw in the painting of Cézanne and Klee—from the pure pictorial to the pictorial appearing, starting from the immersion into the secret of the very creation (Purgar 2019). Openness today simply becomes “emptiness” (Agamben 1999). With it, nothing happens anymore in the sense of the upcoming event of something new that deeply undermines the human experience of living. The “empty” openness of the present time brings nothing but the spectacle of the “new” performance. Any single performance is “empty” if it is more shocking and provocative. An experiment with a new form in its stunning repetition, which the philosopher of technology and information Gilbert Simondon calls metastability (Simondon 1989/2007), causes the fatigue effect of perception. And an observer of an active and participative audience—who must be a participant of the event, not because they want to, but because with pure indifference, the audition reverses and the event happens without any difficulties—becomes self-contained in the closed-loop structures. Of course, that time does not represent the view of the Other, but the regard of the tired god Dionysius and his homeostatic eye, which is looking permanently in itself along the way. Contemporary art, therefore, at the time of the spatial turn, has passed through three stages of its deployment: (1) Mimesis—nature is deformed by neutralizing its primordial creative power by adapting to the laboratory case of the aesthetic object as a “new nature,” from artificial human parks to genetic manipulation; (2) Representation—the subject is constituted by the view of the Other and the unconscious language as a “desire machine,” ranging from the sound and fury of the Berlin School’s dadaism to the schizophrenia of identity at the time of the digital image from which reality has been drying up, like the air of Duchamp’s Bottle Dryer; (3) Information—the events are produced from the system’s need to control their active users in the realm of “controlling societies” by giving them the freedom to experiment within the limits of the Father/Law of the corporate network of media events. The shifting of the space of performing the artwork as an event from the position of artists and events as work from the position of the “Big Third” as a feature of a museum institution with the right of a sovereign decision to expose-in-time leads to the history of art as a history of the idea of art. Of

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course, the rule of language leads to the power of the picture, which takes place in the circle of imitation of the “original,” representing the “dual” and the “immaterial” construction in the same world. Such a world might be located in its own empty in between. Here, we cannot locate a space to present something in terms of objects. If an idea is presented as a concept, then the idea of the museum of contemporary art would be outdated. The ideas do not show up. But money in the form of symbolic and real exchanges of perversions of value that, as well as the place of its representation, might be like corporate headquarters such as the gold reserves and reserves of network states in the global order. When an idea becomes the art “object,” then the problem of the “subject” is that it no longer exists beyond the idea of anything other than the other “object.” In that delirium of infinite reproduction, the desert of the interobjectivity of our uncanny times increases. No, there is no more fear of emptiness as in Gothic art, where emptiness superseded the divinity of the crucified Christ in the architecture of the cathedral in between heaven and earth, immortal and mortal. No, it is no longer the anxiety of a modern subject fleeing the worlds of its fiction so as not to participate in the orgies of mass idolatry to sacrifice the Other on behalf of the nation/race/culture and the unconditional power of technology over life as such. Now we are witnessing the experience of emptiness without any further signifier or signified. But what is that “empty in-between” because it no longer links Being and the event? It seems that the absence of the relationship between the two just shows that this second void—unlike the loose centre of power of God, human, machine, network, and universal code of life—is nowhere else in the world itself. With it, contemporary art seeks to establish a relationship of mutual “creative indifference.” What is in that state of “inbetween” might be empty, but nothing should be simultaneously empty and waste in itself. It cannot be just a space in the space as such. Therefore, space itself as the time that comes out of it is articulated rather emptier than emptiness as such. When the openness of contemporary art falls to the construction of space as a network of events, then any deployment of institutions in which the temporary metastability of the closed system has occurred is obvious (Deleuze 2000). The inheritance is the pit of wickedness within itself. Simply put, the reason lies in the fact that it can only be the criticism of the political representation of power and the criticism of the aesthetic production of life as a technical object (Rancière 2000). There is nothing left between them. Apart from what is empty, we are dealing with the spatial turn, which means starting from the assumption of the classic definition made by Arthur C. Danto that art as “enacted” institutionalized activities in

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the space-between system and the lifeworld assumes a networking event. And it might be impossible to get rid of it or to destroy it (Danto 1997). Artworks are just like every other system in the complex world of the technosphere: law, politics, economics, science, religion. And because artworks—by their rules, their symbolic function of enacting the space of events—can no longer be regarded as viable if there is no mutual play of centres and edges, institutionalized powers and alternative muddles. The paradox is that we are faced with more and more art being produced today because there is no need for “spiritual content.” Contrary to Hegel’s “end of art” thesis, we should note that the spiritual need for art no longer exists in the contemporary art world. Rather, we can detect desire as a driving mechanism of the information in the capitalist culture, and it is constantly producing a series of new events. Regardless of their artistic quality and status, they create the illusion of something new behind the facade of staging the spectacle. It is completely removed from the discussion about what is being done “now” and “here.” The shock, provocation, and experimentation arise from everyday banality to sublime traces of the transgression of death, from cannibalism to the act of the birth of the superhuman from tubes. JeanLuc Nancy was right when, in his book The Muses, he said: In a world without image in this sense, a profusion, a whirlwind of imageries unfolds in which one gets utterly lost, no longer finds oneself again, in which art no longer finds itself again. It is a proliferation of views [vues], the visible or the sensible itself in multiple brilliant slivers [éclats], which refer to nothing. Views that give nothing to be seen or that see nothing: views without vision. (Think of the effacement of the romantic figure in which the artist was visionary.) (Nancy 1996, 94)

First of all, our understanding of the articulation of thought today has undoubtedly become so mediated by “views without vision” that we no longer notice that any intervention in space does not come from the sphere of the so-called “social participation of artists” (Rebentisch 2013, 58-91). Quite the contrary, interventions are a systematic reconstruction of the order of capitalist modernization. In this framework, architecture no longer builds the “new” but divides structures and particles into the new context and situation network. No longer is there any vision. But we will be able to see new buildings, for better or worse. The intervention in the space of contemporary art, to complete the paradox, comes from the fact that the “sanctity” of the institution of exposure and the representation policy of the event as protected work temporarily suspends and neutralizes. Openness necessarily becomes disclosed. When the image of contemporary art acts as a body and the body as an event no longer applies to anything other than

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this self-referential circle of meaning, then it becomes clear that we are dealing with a completely different understanding of and approach to what has so impassively entered our world, and we did not even notice it, because we no longer have the original gift to see (vision) into emptiness. The technique of looking at emptiness is not particular to Eastern wisdom like Zen Buddhism. This might be determined as a feature of contemplation. And with it begins modern subjectivity. But when this “emptiness” in its essence lies at the very core of the space as the time of the total mobilization of art=capital (Kunst=Kapital), to use Joseph Beuys’ formula, then there is no difference between art and architecture, because “empty” does not come from the outside. It is not somewhere outside of this circle of understanding. The problem must be solved in such a way that “empty” becomes the substitute for the “Being” of the art itself in being deployed to the zone beyond the sacred and the profane. Once again, in the era of information dissemination, the image of the world itself is represented in empty space. This might be the space in between, and that space between them does not connect more than two separated entities and get meaning from them. On the contrary, the “empty” place becomes a new eccentric centre and constitutes everything else as the Other. Museums of contemporary art necessarily rely on that experience of ontologicalstructural gaps in their principle of the open sealing of worlds. We have seen that Jean-Luc Nancy showed that, in the “proliferation of seeing,” what forms “the essence” of contemporary art is not just an art picture. It is an iconoclasm of its own life (Paiü 2021). The visualization of events has occurred in reality. Therefore, the media image of the world requires, necessarily, the ideological construct of meaning. But when the vision seen in everything equates to looking “empty,” then there is nothing left for museums of contemporary art than the dissemination of information. The vision of the new can no longer be seen from the possibility of creating a “new” space in the earth and the sky. All that we can do might be to produce contemporaneity by synthesizing the experience of the historical past, the experience of the present, and the contingency of the unpredictable future. The experimentation is reduced to the game with ideas, not the design of the “Real.” There exists a very sharp difference between art and architecture, even when the latter views itself by playing with the form and changing the foundations of the material world in which we still live. The synthetic age of life can also be seen in the nomenclature of science and the definitions of media art: from synthetic biology and anthropology to new media. If an “empty” Real only signifies the impossibility of further “progress” and “development” of the idea of contemporary art, then could it be the right time to pose the question of what its limits are and what and how such an

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idea can still have any meaning in the future? The spatial turn has become an experimental play of metamorphic structures with biological, social, and political significance (Warf and Arias 2014). What Michel Foucault termed heterotopy could now be emerging as the synthetic dystopia of the politicalaesthetic experiment with institutions and their actions in the culturally mapped space of the global order. It should be added, hence, that instead of redirecting history from an announcement of the future in which lies the kingdom of perfect freedom and happiness in the field of contingent possibilities of change, everything becomes more perspicuous and multipurpose in advance. One cannot know anything about changes in the future, but one might know all about changing in this presence as actuality marked by the signs of knowledge/power (Foucault 2004). When time is exhausted from being rounded-up in space, then there emerges a time of spatial curvature and networking, the age of absolute deterritorialization/reterritorialization, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari analyzed in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). What caused the difference between the problem of contemporary art and what, at the beginning of the avant-garde in 1916 with the dadaist Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, had the considerable anarchist rebelliousness of anti-art and anti-aestheticism against the history of the metaphysical perception of Being, beings, and the essence of man? It seems that the difference can only be perceived after we realize that the spatial turn idea is primarily somewhat uncanny in the very idea of space as such. The metaphysical idea of space acquires its sense of belonging and in what should be already “there,” one by itself, or by God’s grace, innate and natural. Mathematically speaking, the word is about the rule of the number and the measurement of the surface of the Earth (arithmetic and geometry). Space is always determined with regard to the movement of an object. In this respect, Archimedes is a paradigmatic case of statics, and Bernhard Riemann represents dynamics. The linear direction represents a sign of infinite persistence and necessity and the curve of interruption and contingency. That is the reason why space was set in advance as a frame for which the time is determined and to which the meaning of the space is given. The purpose and goal of history can be determined from the beginning of the movement (arché) to the last point in the filled circle of possibilities (télos). Therefore, the meaning of life in its historical significance should be the circle of possibilities in the frame of the reality check in advance. In other forms of discourse, which Heidegger inherited from the Greeks to set metaphysics free from its exaggeration and gigantomachia, it is noted that the topology of Being (Topologie des Seins) can be considered further as an event. Something having its “own” space in the world means having the

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freedom of openness to sharpen the possibilities of Being itself. The event originally stems from the essence of art as the construction, creation, and production of the “new” (poiesis). So, it must occur in the living space of thought and Being, not in the desolation of the homeland and the void of the resignation of humans and other beings. Space represents the habitat and the accommodation of Being as an event (Heidegger 2010, 193-195). Its openness decides on the exposure of Being. But the dadaist rebellion against the metaphysics of the illusion and the ideology of the capitalist drive of autonomous modern art would certainly not be so violently destructive to art as such that space in the era of the technical rule of Being did not transform itself into something completely uncanny and therefore inhuman. The statements about the “alienation” (Entfremdung) of spirit in the work of Hegel’s dialectic, then Marx’s reversal in the direction of criticism of the capitalist system of social relations, suggest that the core of an aesthetic-political relationship with the time-division on work and leisure cannot find anything else but narrowing space, for which art determines the meaning. Implosion should be understood in a double sense: on the one hand, it is about narrowing the space of freedom of existence in the mass society of late capitalism, and, on the other, it is about shaping the possibilities of the endless production of goods and artefacts. Finally, the underlying concept of the contemporary technosphere, known from McLuhan’s early media theory, is called the implosion of information. In technical terms, any information to be decoded as a message of some significance must be compressed in content and narrowed to the beginning of the formal media structure—the language and the image. This seems to be quite similar to what Hugo Ball—in his reflections and aphorisms about DADA, art, politics, technique, and the goddess—got caught up in when he spoke of the “structures of time of the classic avant-garde” (Freeman 2006, 244). My thesis statement might be that the essential differences between the metaphysical art of the historical heritage of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the new era, and modernism regarding the “historical avant-garde” are contained in the following dichotomies: (a) unlike the historical continuity of time, we have the discontinuity of history as a reflection of time and its restraint to the premises of the “eternal present” (nunc stans); (b) the struggle against the “musealization” and “historicizing” of historical time in the early avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century became precisely the gesture of establishing the world as

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the aesthetic-political space of a new “visualization” and “historicization” in the second half of the 20th century; the avant-garde constructs the space of an art event in the cinematic sequence of new technologies and no longer deals with the delimitation of time at a distance from the past because its relation to everyday life necessarily takes the character of aestheticizing its banality, plainness, and triviality; with the autonomous status of art, artists, and artwork in aesthetic modernity (figures such as Charles Baudelaire, for example, being written about by Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault), anything goes into a new form of action as a substitute for the religious cult in the modern age of the emergence of politics in fascism/Nazism and the politicization of art in communism; the rule of time over space arises from the growth of the metaphysical structure of thought; in that way, the use of new technical appliances and devices (new media such as photography and film) also creates new artistic techniques such as montages, collages, and assemblages in the visual arts and the cinematic expression of literature (Franz Kafka and Alfred Döblin); the image replaces language with the ultimate consequence of creating a new aesthetic “taste” that is produced in the interaction between “high art” and the world of life (the paradigmatic case is represented by the industrial designs of the Bauhaus art school); the idea of art has radically changed with regard to the earlier epochs, from the Renaissance to classicism, since art no longer appears as a means of emancipating the idea of God and the Holy but becomes a synthesis of works and events in the same way as a technologically produced life.

Given these considerations, we should move on with the assumption that contemporary art might be the result of a dispute and critical dialogue between the so-called “historical avant-garde” and the “neo-avant-garde” regarding their equivalences and differences in understanding the idea of art, the notion of artistic work and events, and ultimately the structuring of the relationship between art and life, starting from the self-deployment of the technosphere (Paiü 2014). Since techno-genesis would be a new concept—unlike techniques and technology, as in the “advancement” and “development” of humanity—for the new, as is seen in the autopoietic acts of thinking concerning computing, planning, and construction, it is obvious that the transmission and retention of information within the control of cybernetics and the communication

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between the system and the environment must function perfectly. The technosphere is defined by the rule of an “open machine.” It also creates and experimentally performs operations in virtual space and in real-time. Its “space” might be, therefore, the immateriality of the network and a condition of the possibility of the action of the animal-human-machine synthesis in the emergence of creatures/things as a cognitive matrix, outside of the distinction between living and inactive. In this respect, it should be clear that any “story” about the idea of art created at the time of the “historical avant-garde” and “neo-avant-garde” is already supposed to interfere with what surpasses the dichotomy of an authentic, inexcusable, high, mass culture. The question of technology, as was first posed by Heidegger in contemporary philosophy, signified the question of the relationship between reframing-performing-concept or a triple form of the occurrence of artwork-events as installation-performativity-conceptuality. Moving from things to bodies and ideas leads to the path of sameness and differences. The question of contemporary art would be impossible without insight into the emergence and the form of the very existence of the technosphere. And in the early avant-garde vision of the Berlin School and dadaists such as Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, and Hans Arp regarding the idea of cyborgs and androids and the relation of the inhuman machine to thinking of collective intelligence outside the human body, it might be only in itself understandable that the artistic question is ultimately nothing but a question about technology in the spirit of the aesthetic construction of the world (Biro 2009). Should we abandon all the previous interpretations of the relationship between the “historical avant-garde” and the “neo-avant-garde” to reach the purity of the problem that not only overwhelms the undeniable nature of contemporary art but also seems to make everything “new” due to the renewal of the past in the present in the aesthetic and artistic sense? Does this not give the future almost nothing which could be described as “new”? Is art concerning the technosphere not something that fascinates and conjures up its installation-performance-concept in the hyperspace of virtuality and causes the traumas of the “Real” to completely overwhelm the metaphysical confusion of the “truth” and the “semblance” of what the art of invention has pronounced in its idea? In this consideration, I will endeavour to show the inner reasons for elevating art to the highest peak of the philosophical task of creating an exhilaration from the bottom of “historical avant-garde” and the “neo-avant-garde” regarding the issue of the technological feature of the event with which it no longer flows in the long term nor spins like in the early moments of the arché. Time simply disappears in the timeless networks of virtual spaces. This, of course,

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presupposes the introduction of an approach that comes from the usual interpretation of the aesthetic heritage of the dispute between the two avantgardes. Rather than dealing with the reconstruction of the question of art in the society of late capitalism, as was done in Adorno’s aesthetic theory and the sequence of discussions of the Frankfurt School, we will try to open a different reading of “the same” and “the different.” Therefore, we will carefully deal with and critically analyze the theory of the avant-garde in Peter Bürger’s work and its recent revision and the theory of the neo-avantgarde in Hal Foster’s work and that of American critics in the famous magazine October (Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, and others). In conclusion, we will summarize the direction of contemporary art after the end of the avant-garde.

2.2. “Historical avant-garde” vs. “neo-avant-garde”: Peter Bürger vs. Hal Foster and others It is commonly assumed that the two avant-garde waves were at work in the 20th century. The former was born in the 1910s and 1920s in Europe (futurism, dadaism, suprematism, expressionism, constructivism), and the latter arose in the 1950s and 1960s in America and France (pop art, fluxus, situationism). Almost all of the relevant art history dealing with the terms modern, modernity, and modernism emphasizes the distinction between the fundamental features of these art movements.5 While the first wave, named the “historical avant-garde” for its principles and actions, concerned the destruction of the entire legacy of the metaphysically understood art of the West, the second represented the transition from radical innovation practices to the criticism of late capitalism with the meaning of its pure aestheticization. To put it simply, while the “historical avant-garde” set up its revolutionary destruction of history and the concept of artwork in the institution of the museum, the “neo-avant-garde” aimed to deconstruct destruction or to establish the principles of negation and rebellion through shock, provocation, and experiment as a new way to understand the idea of art in situ after the end of any opportunity to change the capitalist order and society. That is the reason why the term that denotes the movement of the “neo-avant-garde” might be the one that rose to prominence in the aftermath of the student rebellion in May 1968. This word became a new “mantra” for various movements that, from the 1970s to the late 1990s, invoked the avant-garde experience. Of course, that word is subversion. Anyway, if, for the first avant-garde, the “revolution” of the existing capitalist society was the focal point, then for the second avant-garde, it was “subversion.” What was being done at the same time,

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self-evidently and controversially, between the first and second waves was determined by the “dark age” of 20th-century history. The horrors of the totalitarian orders of fascism, Nazism, and Stalinist communism and the devastation of the world in the Second World War were serious and disastrous moments with far-reaching consequences. Also, between the two waves of avant-garde tendencies in art, a set of relationships was created from which a new centre of power of global capitalism would emerge in geopolitics along the way. This dislocation was done in favour of the United States. This replaced the total historical hegemony of Europe from the new era until the end of the Second World War. Whoever, therefore, wants to talk about avant-garde art without a political-ideological platform of power and its deployment in the 20th century remains in the clouds of an inexperienced aestheticist’s illusions. It can be said that the question of the relationship and controversy between the former and latter avant-gardes remains at the same time a question of understanding the inner change in the very “being” of what should be termed the threefold meaning of the modern as such (Ziarek 2001, 86-115). Before we begin with the analysis of the most significant and farreaching influence of the German theoretician Peter Bürger and his book Theory of the Avant-Garde (Theorie der Avantgarde, 1974), it is necessary to further define the concepts of the first and second avant-gardes. Though Bürger’s book speaks of a “historical” avant-garde seeking to undermine history as a purposeful-target mission of the ideas of “progress” and “development,” we will use the term avant-garde for the following two reasons: (1) because of the underlying purpose and programme of art movements of the first half of the 20th century that the historicity of history differs from onto-theology and is radically obfuscated and denied, employing art and political “revolution” to control and communicate within a differently perceived contemporaneity; and (2) because instead of focusing on the object and purpose of the different understanding of history, it might introduce some quite new conceptual tools such as chaos, ambiguity, complexity, and emergence. There is no doubt that new concepts have been derived from the physical sciences, philosophy, and biology, ranging from quantum theory to string theory. Although the difference between the “historical” and the “posthistorical” times is that the former signifies the event without reducing the scientific insight into the essence of the event as such and the latter assumes

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a predetermined boundary between thought and Being, the avant-garde task is shown in its ambivalence. At the same time, it must collapse the illusion that history happens by making each epoch develop the idea of the ultimate purpose of the consciousness of freedom, behind which stands Hegel’s and Marx’s constructive-destructive dialectics. But, on the other hand, its task is, beyond all that radical negation and “logic of disintegration,” to open and to perform quite another conception of history. Through anti-art, antiaesthetics, and anti-philosophy, it opens the way to a completely “new” understanding of history as such. As was best described by Hugo Ball, history needs to be relieved of the demand for the continuity of eternal perception and aesthetic justification of the social lies of existence in the form of autonomous art without a deeper meaning for the community. In this sense, historicity, unlike post-historicity, possesses the characteristics of openness and secrets, not just a rationally organized path toward guaranteed future purposes (Osborne 1995; van den Berg 2005, 63-75). What does that “other” mean in the frame, if not repetition and regeneration to establish a different order of signification? It is clear, then, that a “new avant-garde” is defined in relation to the “historical avantgarde,” not vice versa. This relationship makes the definition of a “positive” foundation of contemporary art after the period of the avant-garde impossible, but even more conceptual chaos can be discerned from the 1970s onwards, when the terms postmodern and postmodernism were given to the discourses of social sciences and humanities and, within the broad field of art, occupied a space between technology, information, and communication. As in the case of the relationship and controversy between the first and second avant-gardes, in this conceptual quarrel, we should see an attempt to understand the identities of and differences between the first and second forms of modernity and modernism. In any case, we find ourselves faced with an ambiguous concept of history. After its essential features like “progress” and “development” have become ideologicallypolitically discharged from the essential meaning, the world seems just like a gaping emptiness in the very core of reality. Let us remember that the controversy between Habermas and Lyotard about the modern as an unfinished project and the postmodern as a commendation of difference and the Other was ultimately a question of the boundaries and conditions of the emergence of a “new” in a techno-scientifically constructed world of mutually overlapping innovation-originality and a reproduction of the first and second ways of thinking about the upcoming event (Habermas 1998; Lyotard 1988). The case of the “new avant-garde” therefore, as we will see below, becomes meaningful for every further reflection on the possibility of a historical event in the condition of the logic of the technosphere.

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Why does Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde seem to be so unique and have so much weight given to its essential setup points that, despite the array of criticism and the author’s acts of revision, it nowadays marks an unavoidable reference point for any future discussions on the issue of art and its status in the modern world assembled by society, culture, politics, and ideology? Certainly, one of the most compelling answers to this was offered by Richard Murphy. He argues that unlike other important books on the same issue, particularly a prominent book by Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Calinescu 1987), which is the inherent issue of the “developed phase” of modernism starting from the difference between politics and ideology and the purity of the aesthetic value of art, Bürger comprehends the avant-garde in the “literary-historical context, but with a view to certain changes in the perception of the social function of art” (Murphy 2004, 5). However, the problem cannot be located in “the social function of art.” What is more important is to investigate what emerges from the theoretical platform of its understanding of art’s configuration after the collapse of metaphysical systems, the highest points of reference of which are in Hegel’s and Marx’s thinking. The structure of all the categories and concepts that Bürger develops in his considerations of the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde carries the signs of Adorno’s negative dialectics and his criticism of the aesthetic autonomy of judgement in modern society. In this regard, the critical analysis of Bürger’s avant-garde theory could be implicit, and, by extension, criticism is intended to be made of the legacy of Adorno’s aesthetics. Precisely, it exemplarily depicts the position of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory concerning the “essence” of art in the modern world (Lüdke 1976, 27-71). Everything that has come down to society in the modern age of historical development of the subject’s idea is necessarily simultaneously desubjective. It becomes something that belongs to mass survival in the reproductive part of the “cultural industry” (Adorno 1955, 7-26). Adorno’s key concept, sketched at the end of the 1930s, shows above all the proportions of the “alienation” and “reification” of modern society. Art in modern society, however, is self-assertive. However, this emancipation becomes insufficiently performed. It goes further, to such an extent that society becomes the means of the rule related to the substance-subject of the process of capitalism to the final stage of a highly developed machine of false universality. Capital determines the “essence” of modern society only to the extent of its abstraction. It might be a sovereign ruling in terms of ideology, culture, and spectacle. But, we can say that it is only in itself clear that art within the framework of growing commodification and technology

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becomes apparent to the deprived critical-emancipatory possibilities of a man to enjoy, besides pleasure in the contemplative experience of the work, in reaching out to the point of the transformation of “values” outside the realm of entertainment and temporary catharsis. Let us bear in mind Kant’s aesthetic comprehension as the power of judgement, which defined the model of art rendering with the idea of beauty from the peaceful contemplation of a fixed object. Nietzsche would already be tempted to disintegrate such a passive synthesis of art as the unity of the conjunction of representation and the representation of the beauty of a permanent object (nature). In place of a rational construction of a sublime object from which aphasia gives rise, a subjective judgement that something is beautiful without any other purpose could be considered a disturbing figure of a philosopher-artist. Its mission becomes devouring the contemplative purity of art. Nothing is fixed and permanent any longer. Everything grows, happening in the ecstatic chaos of becoming, the destruction of nature, and the justification of aesthetic will to power as life. Therefore, criticism of aesthetic judgement in the environment of modern art with the arrival of the avant-garde has been changed in the direction of critically questioning the social prerequisites for the emergence of an independent sphere of art. The whole problem of Adorno’s aesthetics is shown in this space in between the autonomy of the aesthetic position of modern art and the sovereignty of the radical negation of the conditions of “alienation” and “reification” of man in capitalism, moving, in the 20th century, in the direction of culture as the new ideology (Adorno 1955). If we comprehend the “social function of art” as a matter of constructing the technological conditions for the emergence of mass society with new cultural needs, then the case of the “historical avant-garde” and the “neoavant-garde” represents a far more complex problem of their mutual relations and interpenetrations. All this goes beyond what Adorno and Bürger criticized in the aesthetic autonomy of art and its abolition/overcoming (Aufhebung) in the world of life. Bürger begins his analysis in Theory of the Avant-Garde with issues concerning the historicity of the aesthetic categories in Adorno’s quote. The main thinker of the critical theory of society, therefore, says that aesthetic theory requires an appropriate understanding of its history. However, the basis of Bürger’s proposition is derived from Marx’s example. That exactly shows the objective universality and historical development of the field in which this category operates in its relation to the manifestation of art: It is my thesis that the connection between the insight into the general validity of a category and the actual historical development of the field to which this category pertains and which Marx demonstrated through the

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It is already clear from this that the conditional alignment and validity of art as a category derived from the notion of work gives the notion of “the work of art” all the features of the ontology of history that Marx carried out in Capital from a deliberate activity based on the elaboration of Hegel’s logical-speculative dialectics. If work in the modern era with the emergence of capitalism separates itself into concrete and abstract work, then it becomes clear that the conditions of its objectivation (causa formalis and causa materialis) can only be derived from the third member of the fourfold cause of the Aristotelian model of production. This is called the efficient cause (causa efficiens), which creates something as something in the form of a materialized object. And what gives it purpose lies in the final cause (causa finalis). The usable value of work objects always appears in a concrete product. But the moment when it comes to the process of the abstract system of functioning of modern capitalism is certainly created by introducing the real value of exchange market value. The problem of parallelism between work and art is that Bürger must assume that avantgarde means total consciousness or the knowledge of how art as an idea of original production makes sense and how aesthetic meaning for Man turns to the abstraction of the reign of the work of the living human in the community. For Marx, this process of self-awareness (phenomenology in the materialistic form of thinking) reaches its culmination in the critique of the fetishized character of commodity production. Therefore, it has arisen when money in itself synthesizes the duality of goods and capital, becoming the independent value in the process of exchange. If it is equally true of art, then the idea of “artwork” at the highest level of abstraction is identical to this process of fetishism. By becoming a condition of acting in an abstract world of goods’ values on the market, the work of art as a subject of exchange loses the quality of beauty and self-centred pleasure and becomes a means for other purposes. However, what Bürger attributes to the idea of avantgarde art in this process of self-awareness is something astonishing: that, under its attack on the idea of art as an “institution” in civil society, the concept of the autonomy of the work of art has been taken as something which is deeply questioned. And, indirectly, the meaning of the artist’s

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figure might be changed in many aspects. From a romantic genius, the artist becomes an autonomous producer of aesthetic values. What does the “historical avant-garde” mean for Bürger? If it presupposes only something related to the art movement within the immanent development of modernism as the aesthetic configuration of the ideas created at the end of the 19th century, which united the figures of Baudelaire and Nietzsche, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, then obviously we cannot come to the comprehension of why modernism—in its anti-art and anti-aesthetic form in dadaism or in its construction of the new society and man in Russian constructivism—has become the condition with which the contemporary art must constantly demonstrate its “actuality” and critical line of “social conditions.” Also, it exists as a complex institution of aesthetic production of life. Without a critical engagement in shattering the contradictions of society, art loses its credibility. It is not enough to possess the technical skill to shape a new aesthetic reality. The artist must leave a trace of its elaboration with the idea of art and its position in “society.” Indeed, there must be some adequate reason beyond what lies at the very basis of Adorno’s aesthetics and Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde. Away from aesthetic autonomy and the concept of a rounded artwork in the socalled bourgeois society of modern capitalism might be nothing else than being in the “Being” of how art in the meta-aesthetic field of meaning affirms its meaning. That determines something that paradoxically brings together the dadaist anti-aesthetics of Ball and Heidegger’s reflection on the “second beginning” (andere Anfang) in thinking after the end of metaphysics. If art belongs to the event, its “destiny” lies beyond the social changes of Being, from the horizon of the upcoming event that is already here, because it is historically exposed in the peculiar complexity of art as a production (poiesis) and the art of knowing the creation of “new” (techné) society does not determine either a work of art or an idea of art. What the “historical avant-garde” in such a cruelly destructive way brought to the “essence” of art at the end of metaphysics was nothing but a seriousness of the idea of autonomy acting in the sovereignty of event. That can be named the insensitivity of life that determines the art of its limits of action. There might be no real disagreement and contradiction between “autonomy” and “sovereignty.” On the contrary, the sovereignty of art in the modern world can only be credible if the artist works in a creative way of thinking-acting. There can be no external power. After the death of God, we are facing a different kind of need for metaphysical holiness, as witnessed by avantgarde artists like Malevich, Duchamp, and Beuys. But what should remain intact is the “holy fire” of freedom outside of service to religion, society, politics, ideology, culture, etc.

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However, Bürger’s philosophical and historical legacy in the discussion of that problem does not go beyond the horizons of a “negative dialectics” of society that, despite the irreconcilable differences in understanding the notion of autonomy, has been bound up with Adorno. Moreover, it is possible to show that the main thesis of his Theory of the Avant-Garde— that the avant-garde experienced a failure or defeat in what was not properly implemented in its programme of abolishing/overcoming (Aufhebung) the aesthetic autonomy of art and its reintegration into life praxis—stems from a belief in the power of changing modern society through aesthetics related to the act of revolution of “life.” The decline of the aura of art in the banality of life marks the aspiration to shift the idea into practice. In this way, life has to be transformed entirely. No doubt, life has to become an aesthetic of a labyrinth of desire as an art event. It is not, therefore, a life that is autonomous in itself. Quite the contrary, it should by no means be indifferent to other purposes than living in the contingent processes of the creation and destruction of Being. But it always works on the social order of importance, on the possibilities of its aesthetic “revolution” in the area of affirmative culture. In the fourth note in the first edition of Theory of the Avant-garde, we can find a wider exposition of how, according to Bürger, this “historical avant-garde” differs from “the new avant-garde.” It can even be said that this note is more than an explanation for terms that are parallel to the series and that, despite their alleged self-discernment, they are by no means what they seem to be. Summarized, the term “historical avantgarde,” intended for the early 20th-century art movement, encompasses dadaism and early surrealism, as well as the Russian avant-garde after the October Revolution. What is common to them is nothing but the rejection of the entire history of art as a whole, the radical break with tradition, and the most extreme aspect of the attack on the “institution of art” within civil society. Bürger adds that, with some exceptions, it can also be applied both to Italian futurism and German expressionism. The case of cubism is quite different. It belongs, namely, to the notion of the autonomy of art. The feature is that it continues and overturns the rendering by changing the perspective. And it does not belong to the programme of the abolition/overcoming (Aufhebung) of art in life praxis. Finally, what separates the “historical avant-garde” from “the new avant-garde” in the 1950s and 1960s in Western Europe, according to Bürger, is that after the devastating movements of the aesthetic field of destruction, it turns into an affirmative function of culture. By leaving an aesthetic object like Duchamp’s ready-mades in the museum, “the avant-garde protest has turned into its opposite.”6

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The task of avant-garde art consists of the negation of the first principle of modernism and the positivity of the underlying philosophy as metaphysics. What Bürger’s search, on the traces of Adorno, is trying to think consistently might be, therefore, how and why the term autonomy is artificially transformed as work into an event of articulation of the very idea of art. How could we understand that art movements of the first avant-gardes such as dadaism, constructivism, and early surrealism simultaneously deny the highest form of aestheticism (l’art pour l’art) and realize the attempt to fulfil the art of life in everyday practice? The paradox of this programme seems that it must, in fact, remain the problem of contemporary art in the age of the technosphere. The denial of modernist dogma does not thereby mean the radical rejection of the freedom of artistic creation as a precondition for the synthesis of art and life. But in general, it should be clear that this synthesis cannot be serious without something that constitutes the reference framework of avant-garde movements. And that is, of course, a demand for a revolutionary change of society (politics-ideologyculture). When the autonomy of art has been through the process of abolition/overcoming (Aufhebung), then it produces the space of its impetus in a revolutionary “life praxis” that must become more than life in its ordinary, banal, and trivial opportunities. Finally, the form of this censorship cannot be accomplished without the art giving the contingent power of change and transformation of Being. The performative action demands what all the “historical avant-garde” movements, as well as of the “neo-avant-garde,” show in their programmes or manifestations. For the first time in the history of art, the decisive role of discourse theory appears. And in it, philosophical reflections, scientific speculation, literary art, and the messianic-apocalyptic appeal of the “new” to the world come close together. Unlike the aura of high modernism with the cult of aesthetic autonomy, now the dislocated centre signifies searching for the practical transformation of the world through art. It is no longer mimesis and representation of the world as such. Instead of that passive synthesis of the act, there is an active struggle for a change of life with all the available conceptual tools of the theory. Therefore, it is worth mentioning the ambiguities of avant-garde “techniques” in the process of negating the “old” and the positive foundations of the “new.” “Techniques” are at the same time innovations that change the inner landscape of art, such as montage, collage, and assemblage. But they belong to all of what we might call the psycho-dynamics of lifestyle change. Artists like Marcel Duchamp, Antonin Artaud, Andy Warhol, and Yves Klein, for example, really could be named as the heirs or inheritors of the spirit of romanticism. It was the first programme around 1800 in Germany that required a radical

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turn in history. Based on those fundamentals, we can expose the new aesthetics that became the synthesis of mind and body, philosophy and art (Sloterdijk 2009). Let us now dwell on explaining the “institution of art” (Institution Kunst). It seems that it may be obvious how this term has been derived from repeatedly mentioning the autonomy of art in modernity. Within the framework of the fundamental settings of the Frankfurt School, it seems to me that this would be only possible if the “bourgeois society” developed to the stage of separation of economy, politics, and culture. This was recalled in a dispute with French postmodernism by Jürgen Habermas in the book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity regarding the autonomy of the articulation of social power having been achieved and carried out by sociologist Max Weber. Therefore, it is not just a case here of talking about institutionalizing art in museums, libraries, universities, and academies. Autonomy must be institutionalized because otherwise it cannot be effective. What does that mean? Certainly not that art and artists belong to the state infrastructure, that their works are protected by copyright ownership agreements. It is, however, a term that can only be understood within the developed civil society of freedom, liberties, and rights. However, it does not exhaust its meaning at this level of professional profanity. What makes the relationship between autonomy and the institution of art effective, indeed, must be freedom as an event of creation and aesthetic pleasure. Still also, Bürger removed the positive definition of the term “the institution of art” in the Theory of the Avant-Garde. But it is quite clear that this concept must be derived from the basic concept of Theory of the Avant-Garde, itself following Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Of course, it presupposes the notion of the autonomy of art in civil society. Art as “the institution” established the release of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline from Kant and Schiller to Hegel. After all, the entire problem of contemporary art today demonstrates that its dispute with that aesthetic appears through the interpretation of the status of a work as an aesthetic object (objet trouvé) articulated by Marcel Duchamp and developed by the neo-avant-garde in quite another social and cultural constellation. Therefore, we cannot talk here about a particular sociological theory of institutionalization or philosophical attempt to understand “the society as an imaginary institution,” as the French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis has already done (Castoriadis 1999). Instead, Bürger later elaborates more systematically on what he found in the Theory of the AvantGarde within a massive setting about the loss of power of the autonomy of art with the appearance of the “historical avant-garde” at the beginning of the 20th century (Bürger and Bürger 1995; Rockfill 2014). However, one

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must not deny that the emergence of art as an institution presupposes what we might call the process of the aesthetic configuration of modernity as a whole. In many places in the works of Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas about the emergence of a developed sphere of culture within the capitalist modernization of Europe from the end of the 18th to the early 20th century, we find the term “socializing taste.” All that happens in the gap between the aristocratic lifestyle and the mass society of industrial capitalism when its position as an aesthetic mediator between the worlds has been occupied by an educated class of citizens. In these cultural preferences, they are not just an expression of its power. Ultimately, it is what creates a cult of absolute freedom and independence from the institutions. The paradox lies, however, wherein the largest ethnic minority in civil society is largely outside the institutional framework of the aesthetic autonomy of the work. The success of fate, contempt for civil morality, and life on the verge, on the other side of the honour and reputation of Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Ezra Pound, among others. Is that not sufficient proof of the two-sided “Being” of modern art as such? For further discussions of the aporias and paradoxes of the “historical avant-garde” and “neo-avant-garde” from the viewpoint of Peter Bürger’s main thesis in the Theory of the Avant-Garde, it is necessary to clearly define and explain the concept. What is meant by the autonomy of art in civil society? Can this notion really be decisive for contemporary art, or should it be preventively suspended and neutralized because it is linked to the historically formed socialization of Hegel’s objective spirit, that is, a society whose “essence” determines the liberal term of private property and the political-economic concept of work? First of all, we are dealing here with the function, production, and reception of art that is liberated from the age-old frame of the magical-religious image of the world. Kant’s invaluable merit means the notion of autonomy as the rule of the free subject over his actions and deeds derived from the construction of the transcendental mind. It cannot, therefore, be thought of as any autonomy outside the logical-historical process of liberating the mind from religious dogmas and the practical demands of obedience to authority. All autonomy means the sovereignty of action within the boundaries set by mind-action. If art establishes the subject of such autonomy in modern civil society, it means that its purpose can no longer be performed from external causes of survival. In the secular age, the autonomy of the mind thus passes into all spheres of human activity. Nothing can be excluded. That is the reason why art concerning politics, science, culture, and faith as indisputable as society has been established by the free play of aesthetic powers of shaping everyday life. The autonomy of art does not, therefore, signify the liberation

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of religion as much as it does of social functions. Among them are classsocial roles and the integration and political distribution of power. If the autonomy of art is defined as art’s independence from society, there are several ways of understanding that definition. Conceiving of art’s apartness from society as its “nature” means involuntarily adopting the l’art pour l’art concept of art and simultaneously making it impossible to explain this apartness as the product of historical and social development. If, on the other hand, one puts forward the view that art’s independence from society exists only in the artist’s imagination and that it tells us nothing about the status of works, the correct insight that autonomy is a historically conditioned phenomenon turns into its denial; what remains is mere illusion. (…) Like the public realm (Offentlichkeit), the autonomy of art is a category of bourgeois society that both reveals and obscures an actual historical development. (Bürger 1984, 35-36)

What kind of illusion should be revealed right there? If aestheticism represents the inner “essence” of high modernism, then the problem cannot be resolved so that autonomy is perceived as a demand for freedom from the social conditions of the restriction of the artistic field from others. Bürger’s key setting, however, relies on the growth of the aesthetic configuration from Kant and Schiller to Adorno. But the real reason for emphasizing this idea, which the “historical avant-garde” brings into question, derives from the logic of Marx’s historical dialectics in a materialistic sense. Citizenship is based on labour and capital relationships through a series of interactions between the holders of economic and political power as the ruling class and those that they govern. Therefore, the ideology of civil society denotes an illusion of autonomy in all areas of life. This, of course, does not mean that the autonomy of action should only be considered as a small fiction. Every space of freedom in the modern world makes a step towards the advancement of humanity. Also, without autonomous action that legally belongs to the constitutional state as its justification of “progress” concerning authoritarian models of the rule before the rise of capitalism in Europe in the 19th century, it would be impossible to imagine any radical emancipatory politics. Marx’s critique of civil society and limited “sovereignty” even when it comes to art (Honoré de Balzac was a paradigmatic writer of the heroic era of modern “realism”) does not indicate an attack on aesthetic criteria of value. On the contrary, its blade should be opposed to “homo duplex,” to the ambivalence of the creation of a new subject in the process of building the social frameworks of modernity. The reason lies in the fact that in its rise to the top of the pyramid, it would be able to expose the Other and the least passion for the beauty and truth of Being. It might be true for capitalism and highly

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developed civil society only if they are built on the ideology of the consumption of illusory goods as they fall deeper and deeper into the abyss. And it is precisely in that enchanting power of life production that it stands behind the brink of the “autonomy of art” (Paiü 2013, 522-568). The abolition of an aporia is hidden behind this. After all, the programme of destruction of the metaphysical framework of “art autonomy” does not apply to autonomy as such, to its cognitive-aesthetic terms of freedom of creation and the secularization of religious content. There is no doubt that modernism represented a truly aesthetically political substitute for the service of art to religion throughout history. This was quite obvious in the works of Adorno and especially in Benjamin’s famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit) from 1935 (Benjamin 1996). The effort was directed at criticizing the unfinished emancipation of art from the cult-religious ritual. Its substitution appears in the politics-ideologies of 20th-century totalitarian movements—fascism/Nazism and Stalinist communism. For Benjamin, as is well-known, the notion of the loss of artwork’s aura outlined the essential requirements of the rule of modern technology in society, although his understanding of art was bordered by the Frankfurt School’s basic idea of the “social ontology” of art. In general, the problem with the criticism of the “autonomy of art” attributed to modernism stems from the fact that Bürger does not point to the difficulties of its abolition/overcoming (Aufhebung) in “life praxis” (“Prinzip der Aufhebung der Kunst in der Lebenpraxis”) (Bürger 1974, 63). These are not just difficulties of a theoretical character. The practical effects of the turn are far-reaching. What happens when there is no difference or gap between the idea and the reality in the abolition form? It might, ultimately, have become clear when the “historical avant-garde” of the movement of the radical negation of civil society in modern capitalism became the ideological-cultural “mausoleum” of Stalinism in the 1930s in the USSR and was degraded to the construction of “new art” called “socialist realism” (Groys 2008b). My thesis is as follows. The idea of the autonomy of the artist’s work as well as its “constructive” subject in the figure of a modern artist represents the conditio sine qua non for the avant-garde change of society through art. In that sense, the Aufhebung of “being” art in civil society denotes a double strategy of fulfilment for the idea of art as such: (1) art becomes meta-art of the event at a time (performative turn); (2) life becomes aesthetic action in the construction of everyday life as an “artwork” (design). By doing so, the body is constructed as a techno-genetic design of a look that goes beyond the uniqueness of human identity. Being out of self means to be something

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that can only be possible when change is no longer understood by changing the social conditions of production of life. The most radical change comes from the technical mind of the contemporary era of thinking machines. Let us not forget, however, that the abolition/overcoming (Aufhebung) of philosophy was Marx’s project. He overturned the rational core of Hegel’s dialectic operating concept, impressed into the logic of historical progress, with technoscience and the social production of emancipated work. So, the sharp metaphysical character of philosophy with the guiding idea of transcendence was fulfilled in the immanent circle of all concepts of Hegel’s logic, but in reverse. Hence, it is not about changing civil society with aesthetical-cultural instruments. The true revolution of society in its “alienated” and “reified” form could be only possible as a total project of abolishing/overcoming (Aufhebung) the “Being” of the entirety of history under the sign of alienation. With capitalism, it reaches a peak in a pure abstraction of “reality.” Political revolutions are equally too short in their ultimate reach. That is the reason why it becomes clear that aesthetics and politics are just two faces of the same coin. And what Heidegger called the aesthetic and political kitsch in the late 1930s is quite true (Heidegger 1997). If one realizes what constitutes an essential programme of the “historical avant-garde,” then it must be obvious that it cannot succeed in its way because it attacks something ambiguously. Of course, it encompasses aesthetic or artistic autonomy within “civil society.” The problem of severing that very autonomy in “living practice” arises when that “life” is not autonomous in its contingency and irreducibility. Life cannot be thought of without the whole of worldly manifestations. Among them, art certainly belongs to the spiritual power of exceptionality and the existential case of the boredom and banality of the “alienation” and “reification” of everyday life. Instead of the hermeneutic circle of understanding the “Being” of art, here we encounter the limitations of the validity of the historical dialectics applied to the action of the “historical avant-garde.” If, therefore, the autonomy of art in civil society might be a condition for the possibility of a “historical avant-garde” project to reintegrate art into life praxis, then the main premise of Bürger’s theory would be something that results from a double impossibility. The first is determined by the impossibility of autonomy to end or abolish/overcome (Aufhebung) without overcoming the “essence” itself or the idea of art in the historical sense as mimesis and the representation of “alienated” and “reified” Being. It should be, therefore, entirely justified that Bürger sees in Duchamp and dadaism everything that constitutes a new definition of the notion of work within avant-garde art. Secondly, the inability of “life praxis” cannot be thought of without the reciprocal effect of “artistic practice.” In this way, there exists a rift and a

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gap between art and life instead of consensus and equivalence. With the failure of the “historical avant-garde,” Bürger further determined the defeat of the student rebellion in Europe and America in 1968. But at first glance, it must be clear that any kind of talk about the avant-garde is inevitably a reflection on its “second beginnings” in the new movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Before we take a closer look at the theoretical consequences of this leading assumption of Theory of the Avant-Garde and Bürger’s revision of his standpoint in newer texts on similar topics, one needs to look more closely at how it works concerning the notion of “work” within the understanding of avant-garde artists. Is the autonomy of the art, the singularity of the “new,” which was the fundamental feature of modernism, still present in force, or should we perhaps take one step further to consider the important change of these ontological-aesthetic categories? We have already said that Bürger follows the basic outlines of the Frankfurt School creatively. He mainly refers to the authority of Adorno, and sometimes to Benjamin, Marcuse, and Habermas. It should not be forgotten that the philosophical understanding of the notion of artwork in the 20th century was considered at its highest level of speculation in Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 1936) as well as in Benjamin’s discussion of art in the era of mechanical reproducibility (Heidegger 2003a). An encompassing thought has extremely important impacts that arise from the simple reason that Heidegger radically rejects what the Frankfurt School puts in the foreground. Once again, right here, the keyword of Aufhebung in philosophy is society. In both cases, it appears as the reinterpretation of Hegel’s aesthetics, although Heidegger’s artistic discussions cannot directly show it. Work as a synthesis of the senses and the mind, which encompasses the surpassing of nature with the idea and the reality of art creation, goes beyond the boundaries of the subject and the object. In this respect, Hegel did not articulate the peaceful contemplation of nature or spirit in the form of a statue, a song, or an image but revealed the Absolute in its historical exposure. But Hegel’s ending of art ends in the interior horizons of speculative dialectics as a question of the relationship between philosophy and science. As might be well known, Hegel speaks of the disappearance of the spiritual need for the artwork, not of the fact of the end of the art. When the spiritual need disappears, the strategy of the rule of “cultural needs” is superseded. In the different socialization of the spirit with the highest point in the autonomy of art in civil society, the character and status of the work itself are also very different. Not only does that apply when the disappearance of the works of the cult-religious ritual arises as an event of the community feast for the divine presence, but the place of exposition of art in painting and sculpture is also largely secularized in the

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institutions of museums and galleries. When the work is set out of life praxis in the sphere of separation from life as such, a different understanding of the idea of art and the notion of work as a whole has arisen. This passage of speculative-dialectical methods in the art of thinking, which owes more to Adorno than to Hegel and Marx, is evident in Bürger’s definition of the notion of artwork in the “historical avant-garde,” starting from what the “essence” of dialectical thinking is as such. Of course, we know already the keyword—Aufhebung: The European avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men. When the avant-gardistes demand that art become practical once again, they do not mean that the contents of works of art should be socially significant. (…) The avant-gardistes proposed the sublation of art— sublation in the Hegelian sense of the term: art was not to be simply destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life where it would be preserved, albeit in a changed form. (Bürger 1984, 49)

What can be said about that? Hegel tried to understand the dynamics of the historical process by the term Aufhebung. That raises the spirit from the state of its immediate immersion into nature by mediation and reflecting on itself to the absolute knowledge of one’s production. At the same time, the slightest abolition/overcoming of the term signifies the extinction of its content, keeping it in shape and elevating it to a higher degree (tollere, conservare, elevare). The question, however, has the intention of revealing the way in which the work might be established outside the autonomous space-time of exposure to art, which was a feature of the aesthetic relation of modernism with the public. Since Aufhebung has to find a new spacetime of its fulfilment, then the design of “life praxis” could be more important than the artistic right to freedom of creation. The price to be paid in this dialectical frame of pervading ideas and practices, autonomy, and heteronomy is extremely high. First, by introducing the notion of “life praxis,” Bürger knows that it would be not something that already exists in terms of the purpose and aim (télos) of history. Art signifies contingency and singularity. But life is not accordingly insensitive to anything externally exerted, and nor should the form in which the modern state of the body has been sovereignly ruled in the application for aesthetic autonomy. If art has to suspend the autonomy of choice over myth and religion forever, it must be obvious that life as a practice must take a step beyond immersion into the mere passage of the uniformity of Being as the banality of everyday life. The mutual suspension and neutralization of power in this act of “trans-

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substantiation” requires a different way of thinking of the main performers and predecessors of contemporary art. There is no doubt that Marcel Duchamp’s figure is represented paradigmatically in that context (Cunningham 2006, 254-279). After all, one of the few illustrations in Bürger’s book belongs to Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917, showing how dadaism has been revealed to the “essence” of the theoretical and practical requirements of the “historical avant-garde,” so much so that Duchamp’s case for contemporary art as a whole is more than representative. The real problem of the avant-garde project of the abolition/overcoming (Aufhebung) of art in the “life praxis” is that the realization of the form requires a radical change in the status and character of the artwork. What the Frankfurt School, except for Benjamin, did not solve satisfactorily in relation to Hegel, and indirectly to Marx, within the limits of that paradigm of socialization of the idea of art, it deals with the mediation between the autonomy of the work and the demand for its severity in the so-called “life praxis.” In the rise and fall of the avant-garde movements of the first half of the 20th century, one must see the ontological indeterminacy of the influence of new technologies on social changes, and thus on changes in the way of understanding the idea of art and the notion of work. In recent literature, Krzysztof Ziarek’s proposals are very interesting. Dealing with the relationship of modernity, modernism, and avant-garde, he introduced Heidegger’s notion of the event (Ereignis) from the late 1930s. Since technical thinking was circular in both dadaism and Russian constructivism, it might be not unusual to purify the concept of artwork in dialogue with Heidegger’s view of the criticism of metaphysics. Enframing (Gestell) as the “will” of technology is determined to push more than the status of works and artefacts in the ontological sense. Moreover, what Duchamp disclosed as an “aesthetic object” or ready-made can no longer be a problem without constant repetition. Now it comes to reproducing our power and aesthetic production of objects from which true Being does not radiate. Instead, and at the same time, the admiration of the avant-garde directed at technology shows us, according to Ziarek, an attempt to find an alternative way to experience. The other side of aesthetics and technology could be the solution (Ziarek 2008, 88-89). Therefore, it is no longer possible to separate the “work” from “event” after the experience of DADA. What makes a mystery of the factual in which there is the possibility of an aesthetic object replacing the aura of an artwork (songs, pictures, sculptures) is a coincidence of singularity and contingency as repetitions. The event could be unimaginable if it reflected the physical self-expression of living beings in real space and time. But the work is repeated if technically multiplied to infinity.

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Between work and event flows the fatality of modern technology. All this became even more providential in the case of the “new avant-garde” of the 1960s, and, in the case of contemporary art and the so-called postconceptual condition, a wide alliance of actors has been established today dedicated to examining the relationship between the inhuman and the body regarding the possibilities of designing “A-life” (Osborne 2014, 19-27). Within the techno-poetics of dadaism and constructivism, we come to cooperation between aesthetic and technological thinking. For instance, for Francis Picabia, a prominent dadaist, the idea of a machine has appeared in the spiritual sense as a bond between romanticism and the avant-garde (Ziarek 2008, 95-96). Moreover, the space between everyday life and the social practice of life might be determined by the rule of mechanical reproduction. If the “machine is the soul of the modern world,” then the task of art can no longer be described by displaying-presenting what here and there is Being in its emergence. Thus, it may be possible to understand why dadaism is explicitly striving for anti-art and anti-aesthetics, but it cannot be reduced only to revolt against metaphysics and its basic principles of language as speech (logos). We have seen that Hugo Ball has done very well to set up a visual code of language in the centre of new art. However, this did not mean that the fate of contemporary art would be beyond the modern sense of the autonomy of art but also of any possible heteronomy. It was a proclamation of a differently placed art from the “Being” of the event in which they are united, which is, no doubt, seemingly contradictory, both the original and the copy, the singularity and its reproduction. Anyway, we meet something “new.” From that viewpoint, the idea of newness and novelty from a radical turn towards tradition is to be established from within a different relationship with the historical framework of Being, beings, and the essence of a human being. It is not “new” that interrupts the development line of the historical walk from exile to infinity. The “new” must now be thought of as the possibility of a creative repetition of what is no longer an original in the metaphysical sense of the word. Continuous renewal and the constant production of the same as the difference belong to the idea of the mechanical reproduction of machines. But we are not faced with a single original duplication of the original. It would be better to point at what the theoretician of the avant-garde Boris Groys called, at one point in his interpretation of Benjamin, “the return of the aura in the spirit of reproduction” (Groys 2003, 35). If such a problem arises, then theoretical “discoveries” like that of Rosalind Krauss about Duchamp does not belong to the “historical avantgarde” since its basic principle might be the cult of originality and “newness” and its “aesthetic objects” evidence of the spirit of the copy’s

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duplication, which is nothing more than a path to a one-way street (de Duve 1996, 1-86; Krauss 1986, 157). My assumption, on the contrary, is that both avant-gardes, the “historical” and the “neo,” encompass both the same and different aspirations. This is only in place of the Manichean logic of history that embellished the revolutionary enthusiasm of futurists, dadaists, constructivists, and early surrealists for situationists and followers of various aesthetic paradigms from pop art, conceptualism, and the transavant-garde to the “musealization” and “historicizing” of shock, provocation, and experiment. What has risen in the anti-movements of the destruction of historical (artistic) sense, such as the storm of the dadaistic rebellion, at the time of “the new avant-garde” became only the aesthetic deconstruction of art as such. Instead of the speculative-dialectical logic either-or, now it is about promoting the either-too principle. But this does not mean anything “revisionist” in itself, according to Malevich’s and Duchamp’s actions. For these reasons, I cannot accept the otherwise properly constructed thesis of Rosalind Krauss, which otherwise reminds us of what Peter Bürger has already claimed. Within his discussion of the notion of work in the avantgarde concept, the key place in his Theory of the Avant-Garde should be given to evaluating the contributions of early and late 20th-century artists: [T]he neo-avant-garde institutionalizes the avant-garde as art and thus negates genuinely avant-gardiste intentions. This is true independently of the consciousness artists have about their activity, a consciousness that may perfectly well be avant-gardiste. (…) Neo-avant-gardiste art is autonomous art in the full sense of the term, which means that it negates the avantgardiste intention of returning art to the praxis of life. (Bürger 1984, 58)

Did the “neo-avant-garde” indeed have some kind of cynical idea in its erasing of traces of the past with its move of the “fountain” into the museum with which the “revolutionary” installation of Marcel Duchamp, a shockingprovocative and banal-trivial act at the same time, pointed to the false synthesis of art and life and to what an original work of a modernist artist was—the aura of singularity, authoring and aesthetic value expressed at the economic cost of the art market? However, Bürger, despite a refusal to justify his position, unequivocally and clearly stated what became the general place for the disappointment of “historical avant-gardists” with how art in late capitalism has paradoxically undone the fundamental idea of abolishing/overcoming (Aufhebung) its autonomy in life praxis. Duchamp best formulated the criticism of neo-DADA, or “new realism,” by pointing to the relationship between anti-art as a rebellion and the aesthetic institutionalization of the protest. Incidentally, the same goes for the cynicism of neoliberal corporate capitalism. It sells “subversion” and

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“utopia” as a brand and logo of its greed at the same time as everything becomes cognitive, creative, and smart and when even life might be reduced to the nothingness of marketing. We should see that we reach out here to a turning point in the programme of the “historical avant-garde.” Instead of shifting the idea of art as a living, the work has become a pseudo-fulfilment of life as an art. Figuratively speaking, the streets have become empty and abandoned by the militant shouts of the aesthetic revolution, and museums are nowadays filled with aesthetic objects, installations, and conceptual crafts. Finally, it brings together the new gift of the body as integral to the “Real.” And this means that the performative turn has “extracted” all the remaining forms of visual art. No doubt, it goes so far that society is being interpreted today in light of the evolutionary possibilities of change (Assman 2008, 93-124). In the mark of physicality, we should be able in the future to think of identity and the difference between works as events and events as works. Therefore, the criticism of Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde in the context of the American journal of visual art October, particularly by the notable theorist Hal Foster, can be called an attempt to “suspend and neutralize the settings of the heroic-advanced avant-garde” and the “conservatively-regressive neo-avant-garde” with the “return of the Real” (Foster 1996). If we were to summarize all that has already been said at the level of controversy about the theory of contemporary art that seeks to shed light on the role and function of the new in the 20th century, we could not omit to say that it is a conflict between the heritage of the Frankfurt School and the advocates of deconstructionism and postmodernism. Also, everything seems almost identical to the case that launched Habermas against Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Bataille, and Lyotard in his book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. But now, it is not about ontological issues regarding society, politics, and culture. At issue could be the sustainability of the assumptions of the failure or defeat of the historical avant-garde in 1968 with its far-reaching consequences for the idea of contemporary art. In Theory of the Avant-Garde, Bürger relies on Benjamin’s notion of allegory. The reason lies in the fact that it refers to the development of an “inorganic artwork.” But what might be most important in the “illustration” of the theoretical approach to the problem of defining work and the event in contemporary art refers to the concepts of “new,” “contingency,” and “montage.” The order suggests a reversed metaphysical picture of the world. Since the novelty of something new is derived from the bonds of creativity and technology created by the application of fundamental science in a modern capitalist society, it might be clear that nothing “new” can be understood from the notion of the spontaneous

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production of imagination. The media theoretician Vilém Flusser therefore used the term techno-imagination in his writings (Flusser 2007, 209-222). It cannot be the “inhuman” fantasy of the machine. Quite the contrary, it is determined by the distinctive new way of thinking. In producing the newness, which can only be possible thanks to the connection of the brain and technology, that thinking finds an appropriate figure. Spontaneity, therefore, has to be thought of differently. Freedom stems from an event that, in turn, is located on the horizon of art. We cannot think without consciousness of thought as the process. In that event, we come up with new concepts. Moreover, we are constructing language games like an infinite network in the universe. The avant-garde, according to Bürger, is technically organized as an order of meaning in which creation does not signify the intuitive breakthrough of the boundaries of experience. Instead, the world of technological reproduction gives the artist the idea of chaos and a set of conditions without which there may not be a modern era. Just as we are faced with a likeness of the surrealism of René Magritte and in Alfred Döblin’s literature, we are now faced with an assemblage of conceptual images. In this way, the language of new experiences comes from mechanical reproduction technology. That does not mean, however, that the relation between the original and the copy—the singularity and the repetition—signifies the vulgar rule of the primacy of the former over the latter. However, of course, although Bürger, in the traces of Adorno and Benjamin, viewed the way of artistic experience as authenticity and unauthenticity, this attitude, in the more recent texts of his own so-called revisions of avant-garde theory, has been considerably softened in the discussion, even almost eliminated therefrom (Bürger 2014, 19-40). The American “defence” of what we call neo-avant-garde in Bürger’s former theory was declared institutionalized by the rebellion as “a new aesthetic taste,” which is distinctively articulated in the critical texts written by Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, and Rosalind Krauss. In his most important article entitled “What’s New about the Neo-Avant-Garde?,” which represents the backbone of his influential book The Return of the Real, Foster argued that Bürger’s definition might be read as “excessively selective” (Foster 1996, 8; Hopkins 2006, 91-106). This means that it is performed on a “small sample” of the actions and analyses of the artworks of the “historical avant-garde.” Also, several theorists of contemporary art do not share Bürger’s main thrust on the autonomy of modern art in civil society and its Aufhebung in life praxis. Newer analyses call into question such terms as “proselytism” and “dignity” within the framework of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory. The reason is, according to these notions, that the avant-garde cannot be exhausted by just one generally valid theory.

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And that is particularly important because the most valuable artworks of the first avant-garde, such as Malevich’s Black Square from 1915, did not dispute the idea of autonomous modern art. A series of such examples could be given for a critical degradation of Bürger’s “grand narrative.” Even the most significant Russian films up to Stalin had other tasks and suggestions to turn the audience into a subject/actor of new art tailored for the demands of so-called “life.” That could be equally true of European expressionism. Until nowadays, it encompasses audiences in common avant-garde tendencies (for example, Fritz Lang and his Metropolis). But all that is not so crucial to something much more important than running through examples from different movements of the first avant-garde. Bürger also very rationally considers illustrations of his theory, such as Duchamp’s antiimages or surrealistic collages and assemblages. What might be, however, the real problem of him being “excessively selective” refers to the fundamental idea of the autonomy of art in civil society and its abolition/overcoming (Aufhebung) in the praxis of life. Foster and Buchloh do not see the potential for further analysis in this critically acclaimed aesthetic theory in the traces of Adorno. The dispute begins with the credibility of the notion of “avant-garde theory,” which uses the binary opposition of authenticity and inauthenticity, namely, that the first form belongs to the “failed avant-garde” and that, in the second, the paradox is being completed in the “successful neo-avant-garde.” We can agree that the question of the success or failure of a project is solvable only when we define what this means. Is it possible to talk about the realization of the idea of aesthetic power as a continuation of social or politicalideological power by other means, or perhaps if the category of success is estimated from the upcoming time, then it is expected that utopian thought fits more with the determination of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde projects? However, it does not appear convincing to critically argue the value of Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde by splitting hairs in the network without the whole structure being brought radically into question. If one wants to critically re-examine its fundamentals, then it would be more sensible to start dismantling the whole of the structures on which the Frankfurt school of thought and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory are based. But, since Foster and Buchloch want to preserve the dignity of the “actuality” of contemporary art museums, which is in some way violated in Bürger’s plan, then their criticism, as well as similar attempts by Krauss, should understand the defence of “feedback” from cybernetic theory. It is known that this is a milestone concept that enables the transfer of information and its protection from the threat of entropy.

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Hence, in this case, we must talk about the reactive impacts of the “neoavant-garde “on the “historical avant-garde,” or the theory of the “new” from the point of deconstruction of all the fundamental ideas that, for the sake of pop art, conceptual art and situationists in the 1950s-1960s, opened up quite a different way of understanding the categories of artwork and the event. While Bürger, from the revolutionary enthusiasm of the former avant-garde, evaluated the aesthetic tradition of the latter, Foster went in quite the opposite direction. Now, he estimated the former initially by the latter, or, to put it in other words, he intended to free its past large-scale application so it will present the reasonable measures of “utopia” and “subversion” in the world of the realized aestheticization of life. By the way, the latter concept derived from the contemporary German philosopher and aesthetician Wolfgang Welsch, who successfully developed it within a reconsideration of the problem of avant-garde art and postmodern aesthetics. The term refers to the end of aesthetics in the metaphysical meaning of the founding of the philosophy of art. Instead of aesthetics, the era of design and new technology and information is characterized by the new experience. Rather, it represents a global process of aestheticizing everyday life in all aspects of the world of life (Welsch 2012). What for Bürger was the cause of the failure of the entire avant-garde programme now appears in a new reading to justify the re-examination of not only the avant-garde heritage but also its sources from quite a different standpoint. Hal Foster developed the following assumptions. There were two radical returns in the late 1960s to the experience of the “historical avant-garde”: (a) re-reading Duchamp’s ready-mades in the case of pop art, and (b) introducing the contingent structure of Russian constructivism in a painting of abstraction. Thus, in the theoretical texts written by Clement Greenberg about modernity and the avant-garde, it was precisely DADA and Russian constructivism that shaped the formal determinants of a new way of constructing reality. The need for a new genealogy of the avant-garde stems from the aspiration to elevate the banality and triviality of the present in the industrial way of life of late capitalism beyond the limits of aesthetic experience. And it invokes the plurality of “styles.” Also, we might be witnessing an attempt by the neo-avant-garde to create its “own” Duchamp. But now there is a need for art in the era of the historical loss of revival. Foster, hence, shows that making distinctions between the original and the copy—the singularity and the reproduction—of the work requires a different understanding of the relationship between authentic (artistic) history in modern society and the ghost of “history.” As a result, artists such as Yves Klein and Daniel Buren have appeared in the idea of the transgression of the society of the spectacle in the traces of the “historical

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avant-garde.” For the sake of the heroic era of pathetic anticipation of the future of the art in the field of new technologies, as Bürger did in his texts, including those that belong to the revision of the original idea (Bürger 2001, 186-204), Foster tries to reveal the relationship between what makes the difference in the very “essence” of the repetition of the event. Drawing on the theoretical guidelines related to the works of Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze, he seeks to give a voice to the contemporary art of its own time. But he does not derive to order the nostalgia for heroic times of the first avant-garde. What he explicitly seeks to derive as the fundamental notion of modern art in the present times is completely different from the time of Duchamp, Rodchenko, early Artaud, and Breton. Thus, it is widely understood that the notion of the “Real” might be the keyword for any further research. It is clear, however, that it strives to suspend and neutralize all that Bürger had in mind regarding the setting for the fusion of art and life into the early avant-garde. Instead of un-reflected and crumpled life, which was in the meantime conveyed to Foucault and Agamben in discussing biopolitics, the attempt is to try to symbolically construct the reality from the spirit of the new avant-garde. And it is beyond the reach of the contraposed authenticityunauthenticity, work-event, form-matter, or aesthetics-politics. With contemporary art, there is no “betrayal” of the principles of the early avantgarde. By refocusing the aesthetic order of meaning, the possibility of rebellion by other means against systematic repression in global capitalism does not disappear. It is deployed in the event of the constant collision and confrontation with the “Real” as the traumatic nucleus of conflict between nature and culture, the imaginary and the symbolic (Foster 1994, 5-32). We must particularly emphasize in this context the contributions to the discussion made by Benjamin Buchloh. He argues that the “essence” of the artistic activities of the avant-garde should be repetition. However, the paradigm shift occurs by creating new authenticity in the act of repetition. Footsteps are not repeated in a literal sense. Quite the contrary. Unlike mechanical machines, the act of reproduction shows the features of the specific case and spontaneity (Buchloch 2000). We might classify Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Yves Klein, and Francis Picabia among the artists who could witness that matter of fact. In the absence of representation with regard to the basic notion of modern aesthetics, historically-philosophically described by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (Le Mots et le Chose, 1964) (Foucault 1994), all has been refocused on the relationship between conceptual practice and the image that surpasses reality as a reference point. Keeping this in mind, it is not difficult to find out why Foster confronts the ideas of Bürger with the following three premises of his theory of “the return of the Real”:

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(1) the establishment of art has evolved only with the new avant-garde; (2) a whole range of its procedures and techniques may be described as creative analysis for the condition of contemporary art, but not for condemnation and aesthetic nihilism and cynicism; and (3) the essence of the new avant-garde is reduced to the legalization and embodiment of singularity as a repetition of the event due to its new interpretation. Following Freud’s notion of repetition as a resistance and Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming (devenir) in which repetition does not refer to the past but to the irreversibility of the open space of history of the future, Foster has provided an extremely credible defence of contemporary art against the accusation of falling into the aesthetic design of the world. However, despite the reasons he has put forward and which are largely justified in the interpretation mosaic of what is meant by the phrase “the return of the Real,” it seems that in the cases made both by Bürger and by the proponents of the new authenticity of the neo-avant-garde, it cannot be the most important problem faced by modern art today in its own risk of being left simply “nonupdating” with the demand for timeliness in answering the questions of social participation, re-politicization, and re-aestheticization. Why did just what has been imagined not happen? The answer seems very simple: because the horizon from which the dispute between the first and the second avant-garde is thought is no longer open, if it ever was. The art that would be effective in changing the social system in order to discover what it would be like might fall to the level of political commentary or “new realism” without the deeper reason of why it comes to the term “real” if its construction signified a thing called the praise of the social. But there is no society, in any case, not even “civil society,” the space of autonomy for freedom and heteronomy for the body. This is the result of the creation of something that goes beyond subjectivity. So, the “social conditions” of contemporary art lie outside “society” and its significant figures such as aesthetics and politicization. Somewhere else, however, we have to search for the “essence” of contemporary art after the end of the avant-garde. Therefore, we must seriously take into account the cynical neoliberal saying: There is no such thing as society. If there is no “society,” apart from resorting to the shapes of “network,” “communication,” and “media,” then the time has come to open the possibility of a new concept of art. The revolutionary-subversive cultural rhythms that belonged to the modern era have irreversibly disappeared. Art does not determine the effects of anger and ethical sympathy for the Other in this age of indifference. An event can no longer

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be reduced to anything ethical, political, or religious, and aesthetic selfdetermination seems to be depleted of anything that has so far been a reference framework for the creation of works of art. If it cannot be named in the verbal words inherited from the metaphysical history of the world, what is left?

Epilogue It seems that the enchanted circle of Adorno’s aesthetics as “negative dialectics” is the last wall that stops all attempts at thinking about the avantgarde as it was among the few at the very beginning in the thinking of Hugo Ball. Let us remember that his reflections are devoted to the idea that art as a word and image has the highest place in trying to resolve the last secret of Being as such. This was not, of course, anything new. After Schelling and Nietzsche came the almost testamentary obligation to pave the way of thinking beyond the reduction of Being to absolute knowledge or, as only the negative expression of the same, religious transcendence. From the beginning of the modern era, art has lain in the requirements of absolute knowledge and faith. Science, therefore, belongs to the new scope of thought. It can be considered as a “new faith” and as the rational metaphysics of mankind. Religion, however, can no longer be held in the world without the existential abstinence of the singularity of life. And when this is least expected from anti-art and anti-aesthetic advocates, it might be found in the performative-conceptual turn of the avant-garde that is best represented by Marcel Duchamp’s experience and DADA’s open path between the two spiritual powers—science and religion. The artist has the opportunity to find nothing in the encounter with the “new” that no longer fascinates or conjures up. Instead, that “new” becomes a condition of creative entropy. It becomes so insignificant in its final stages because it is not an act and not a mystical thing, wherefore Joseph Beuys blamed Marcel Duchamp that he might, in the reign of the new avant-garde, have done much more for art before he decided to go on the path to the nihilism of social indifference and the reign of the technical mind. What was the mission of the “Pope” and “great teacher” of the two faces—the “historical avant-garde” and the “neo-avant-garde”—of contemporary art? Maybe nothing more than a deep and uncanny silence. That is witnessed by the empty events in the space without time. This might be a mysterious network in which the immersed human is no longer trying to get out. Voluntarily imprisoned by the aesthetically perfect condition, the human deals with achievements by repeating everything up to the infinite. Duchamp’s silence echoes through the empty spaces of contemporary art

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like the secret of the last revelation. But does anyone know what is written in it? Perhaps we already know that it might be just empty text without words and images, just pure absence without a trace. Or maybe not…

CHAPTER THREE IF LANGUAGE IS NO LONGER SPOKEN: APORIAS OF CONCEPTUAL ART

3.1. Time as destruction: From “wire” to “wireless” In the famous book The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations (Les Peintres cubistes: Méditations esthétiques), Guillaume Apollinaire—the very prominent contemporary art author and promoter of the avant-garde art at the very beginning of the 20th century, as well as a French poet and creator of the calligraphic “horse” from scattered words—expresses the following attitude, undeniably decisive for the overall “essence” of modernity as such: This monster that we call beauty is not eternal. We know that our breathing has no beginning and will never cease, but we can, nevertheless, imagine the creation of the world and its end. (Apollinaire 1913/1965, 12)

What Apollinaire praises in the “new revolution” of art and society that comes with cubism can be seen here. We are not interested in the point of reconsidering the significance of this pictorial line of the early European avant-garde for our “reality.” After “la peinture conceptuelle” of Yves Klein and Daniel Buren in the aesthetic sense was interpreted from the perspective of the taking over and elaborating of the cubism tradition in the new context of media entering the production of visual art in the 1960s (Jimenez 2005), it became clear that there is at least one thing in common in the difference between the primordial (arché) and the new in the very concept of the avant-garde. What forms the connection between Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Marcel Duchamp with the conceptual art of the 1960s-1970s in the works of Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, and Art & Language? Are there any common features in the movements of the avantgarde and neo-avant-garde except the hypostases of the “new” through a strategy of shock, provocation, and experiment? It is certainly a common feature that the destruction of the idea of artistic “work” precedes both creation and destruction (of the world). This formal apriority does not mean,

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however, that we should start judging the term “work” from its destruction. Moreover, it seems that the notion of contemporary art concerning destruction and work (destruire and ergon) might be possible from the assumption that something third allows their relationship. For a “work” to be destructed in essential parts of the whole, a different concept of artistic work must be created or, in the same way, a path must be found in which the production of the “work” is replaced in the changing world of modern industrial production. It is obvious that the game has now been introduced to the monstrous power that has emerged from the new era with the emergence of a scientifically technological approach to reality. This new power could be defined as a technique related to mechanical reproductive technology. From a tool directed towards a self-moving mechanism, the process of the technical generation of reality is determined by the transition from the instrumental to the purposeful logic of action. The law of causality still works in the modern notion of the process of producing things as objects. Therefore, the main term that connects scientific research of the world and the technical method of production should be named experiment. In this triad of research (the world), methods (production), and experiment (information system), a complex network of transformational events is created in the idea of work and the notion of art as such. Let us just say that this triad corresponds to the categorical triad of the transition of mechanical reproduction technology to a cybernetic technosphere regarding autopoietic life: calculating-planning-construction. However, it becomes quite clear that contemporary art is no longer something that deals with “works.” On the contrary, it can primarily replace them with “aesthetic objects.” But this is only the first step in the total derealization of the world, the one commonly understood by the “first beginning” of conceptualism in the early avant-garde in the case of Duchamp (de Duve 1996). The second, most decisive step to overcome that Janus work as an object and event in the medial way of the representation of the event is in the disappearance of the work and hence the idea of art as the showing-representation of the “Real.” Instead of the work, the very event of constructing the idea of art in the sense of its realization becomes the art. Conceptual art, therefore, necessarily unites the essence of life itself as the thought rather than a mere reduction of aesthetic constructs such as taste, pleasure, and satisfaction in the contemplation of some “beautiful objectivity” of the transformed nature. The notion of destruction today has recently received the meaning of the destruction of the world in all possible respects, from the destruction of the monuments of magnificent civilizations such as the Assyrians and Romans in Nimrud and Palmyra in the “name of God” carried out by barbaric warriors fighting for the Islamic State to new terror and wars for the revival

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of global politics, an era that was predicted by Hannah Arendt in 1948, asserting that the only real problem of the 21st century would be the proliferation of refugees, displacement, and the loss of sovereignty of nation-states. But destruction cannot be reduced to reckless nihilism if one does not consider what this controversial concept brings in conjunction with the creation and production of the “new.” The destruction of the “world” in its original meaning opens the question of the relationship of contemporaneity with the past and the future. The origin of the word tells us something that has a twofold meaning. First, we can see that the positive relationship with tradition as a living heritage has become, paradoxically, negative in the modern age. Second, in Vulgar Latin, the verb destrugere means what is tantamount to neutralizing but not by destroying and decomposing. It is important to see that the word refers to the possibility of thinking and acting through the processes of neutralizing something that has the power of legalization. In its two paradigmatic cases in 20th-century philosophy, it has reached a peak of thought. Two philosophers have both identified just that in their most important books as a return to what can indelibly be called the very beginning of history and which allows for the openness of thought in the time that will very shortly arrive. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) from 1927 announced the “destruction of traditional ontology” by asking about the meaning of Being, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus from 1922 started with the destruction of metaphysics, reducing logical problems to problems of ordinary language. The destruction of the philosophy of the 20th century certainly signified the destruction of the idea of art at the time of the historical avant-garde in the first half of that century. We can confidently argue that this term, and no other one, has already been derived from it and produces a condition for comprehending contemporary art. 7 Without the “destruction” of the metaphysical tradition in philosophy and art, there is no possibility at all of the “development” and “progress” of modernity. From that, it should be obvious that the problem of time is simultaneously one that permeates both human faculties in the age of the scientific and technical understanding of the world. What do we “want” to do with that term? To be complete, contemporary art can go no further without the suffocating enclosure from the introduction of its meaning to the consciousness of the destruction of the world in question. It is, however, interesting that almost no one uses it in the various theoretical approaches in both philosophy and art, which continues to appear more and more rapidly in the direction of total dematerialization and the emergence of realization. What started, in quite a radical way, in

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thinking regarding the revolutionary turning point in history as being disciplined grew numb and stabilized the very act of changing the meaning of that term that occurred in the early writings of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. It might not be necessary to point out that what happened in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s in philosophy was almost the same as in the movements in contemporary art that we should call conceptualism and postconceptualism. Heidegger’s thought is determined as “the destruction of traditional ontology” and as understanding the sense of Being out of the primordial time horizon, transformed into the grammatological idea of deconstruction as différance in Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology from 1967. Wittgenstein’s theory of “language games” (Sprachspiele), determined as the pragmatic guidance for acting in the information society of late capitalism, became the idea of a frozen state of culture in the plural societies of liberal democracy. Language as know-how thus becomes the practice of visual communication between different entities/actors. However, this was consistently explained in 1979 by Jean-Franऊois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (La condition postmoderne). The destruction of metaphysics has thus become the deconstruction of “destruction.” We can add that, by re-examining discourse as such, thinking is used to make it to the other side of the upcoming future. On the other hand, “language games” as the pragmatics of knowledge are perfectly performed to describe the condition from which it has occurred that there no longer exists the idea of work nor even the sense of its existence outside of the context and situation in which it operates for the community of aesthetic subjects/actors. This, therefore, occurred when, in Derrida’s contemporary philosophy, there was an attempt to change the original meaning of Heidegger’s programme of the “destruction of metaphysics,” the time of the technical disappearance of the ergon, and the signifying configuration of the world. Anything could become the text. But the text only applies to other texts in the infinite network of the auto-referentiality of meaning. When, however, Wittgenstein’s step beyond logic in the “essence” of grammar happens to be a “language game” event as a practical exercise, then Lyotard merits a new post-industrial society transforming into information technologies. They no longer serve humans. Instead, they become the vigour of the technosphere in the creating of a “surplus of information.” However, it is precisely this that could be the precondition of the progress of the closed life system (Paiü 1996, 2011). By analogy, the same happens in contemporary art. It cannot be a coincidence that some leading theoreticians such as Arthur C. Danto are trying to see this inner reversal that does not go beyond the boundaries of the battle with the metaphysical legacy of history so that we could talk about

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the early avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde as playing with the same coin but with a different concept, and quite another approach to the idea of history and the work (ergon) itself. The legacy of Duchamp and dadaism, however, has obviously determined what remains unpredictable in the postconceptual art “without work” (Vidokle 2011). However, it is no longer a “living” legacy that is bound, but only one internal possibility with which direction is heading in the path of change, not in its suspension and neutralization (Danto 2003). Keeping all of this in mind, we can make the following basic assumption. The destruction of the meaning of Being and the logical structure of language presupposes the destruction of the notion of work and art itself as the production-creation (poiesis-creatio) of the “new.” In the development of contemporary art, by analogy, they are two paths related to the ways of thinking that Heidegger and Wittgenstein opened in contemporary philosophy. The former is related to the transition from the act to the event (the performative nature of the body as an artwork) and the latter to the transition from the work to the “language game” (the conceptuality of art as the concept of the construction of the “new” world). I will call this the performative-conceptual turn of contemporary art. From Duchamp to post-conceptual art, it takes place as a sign of deconstruction of the direction of the event from language to image. The consequences are far-reaching. Of course, this applies not only to the concept of art. The change also takes place in the notion of the relationship between the space and time in which the human body appears, such as (a) the existential project and (b) the aesthetic object (Paiü 2014, 63-105). Instead of producing-creating “new,” we now have a situation where construction as a technical way of creating “artificial life” (A-life) might not only result in the notion of work and art being essentially changed but also in the event itself no longer being able to be explained by the pragmatic translation of language as the game. What follows is the analysis of contemporary art through the theoretical reach of conceptual and postconceptual art, which will be directed towards the question of how an event without the language of its visualization arises, which essentially changes the entire history of metaphysics, and thus the human, art, and the world surpass the relationship of Being, beings and the essence of a human. Might that event still possibly be referred to as an “event” from the “logic” of destruction and the “grammar” of deconstruction as two faces of the same circuit in which, instead of creating the stability of meaning, Being assumes the endless process of becoming (Werden, devenir) the state of the event? Finally, can we come out of the vicious cycle of the end of all historically certain categories and metaphysical concepts that, like ghosts, continue to live in the categorical solitaire of conceptual and post-conceptual art with

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their demand for the dematerialization and derealization of reality? Of course, if aestheticizing life becomes exactly what conceptualism seeks to radically overcome, then everything becomes art without event. This is the last act of the “aesthetic turn.” Anyway, it should not be considered as a triumph over the aesthetics of art. If the worlds assume the features of artificial worlds surrounding them (Umwelt), this could be the only proof that hiding behind the process of aestheticism is the technologization of life itself (Welsch 1996). When the media in the digital network is a constructed event based on a priori conditions of each event in the world, this information no longer remains anything more for art than to be fitted into the system and environment of the technosphere. What has traditionally been called aesthetics as “the knowledge of the sensitive” has now become the technogenesis of the “new.” From the essence of the process of the media construction of the event, the “new” should be shown in its appearance of attraction and fascination. The aesthetics of information managed life as a navigation assemblage of understanding what is happening by itself and without a first cause. That is the reason why any talk today about “the death of aesthetics” concerning the first assumption of conceptual and postconceptual art ends in failure. We will try to show in a detailed analysis how the very distinction of contemporary art as performative, the installation, and conceptuality (performance-layout-ideas), from the viewpoint of the analytical theory of language, has lost its credibility. The reason lies in the fact that art in its liberation from the burgeoning of the metaphysical tradition with its concepts of “work” and “sense” hovers in the denial of the aesthetic notion of art itself. In this way, we can detect that going to the turn in the art as “work” becomes merely an inversion from head to toe, and placing art-as-work in the context of anti-art and anti-work as well as the location of its presentation leads to the institution of the anti-museum. All that was signified in the spirit of rebellion and the democratization of culture in the 1960s. But the denial of negation, as in Adorno’s negative dialectics, has not been carried out radically until there exists a “third” between the art and the work. So, this can be a fatal event in the emergence of a technosphere from contemporary science such as biology that results in the possibility of synthesizing the “artificial life” (A-life). In the era of synthetic media, that represents the basis of the technosphere, synthesizes all the senses, and imparts to them the condition of the possibility of their relative autonomy because it rests on the visual code of information. Any separation and fragmentation, always in the de-realized reality, is merely an illusion in the distribution of the world (of art) in a system file as an encyclopedia of information chaos.

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Something has been outlined in what is an obvious aberration. But it deals with the reasons why we must try again nowadays to think about what conceptual art intends. First of all, it is striking that “new” approaches to that problem coincide with the rise of two seemingly opposing tendencies. On the one hand, aesthetics flourishes within the various paradigms of understanding the image of phenomenology, analytical philosophy, poststructuralism, and deconstructivism, and on the other, we have witnessed the need for the constraint of the theory of contemporary art in the sphere of a trans-disciplinary science of art. Its task, despite its openness to the synthetic thinking of the prevailing orthodoxy in today’s technics, could be to limit “art” as a professional area ranging from visuality to communication. The paradox of contemporaneity regarding a position of science in the assemblage of new ideas is the following. The more talk about shifting disciplines and the necessity for cooperation between different sciences becomes practice, the more the need grows to strengthen the autonomy of the profession. Many of the sciences of art created after the linguistic turn of the 1960s and the iconic turn of the 1990s have no foundation in the idea of the stability of Being, so the situation with humanism is the best example of what is being done today with the theory of contemporary art. Formally speaking, there are quite a few theories that connect art historians, philosophers, and many others, from anthropologists to culture theoreticians. If we ask ourselves today if our profession seems almost insulted by this, this is particularly evident in the area of overlapping tendencies that is existent in cultural studies (Kulturwissenschaften). But the reason for that situation lies deep in the very core of modernity. No doubt, it may be the first period in world history that rests on the idea of horizontal spatiality and homogeneous time. Space and time, therefore, are based on fragile assumptions. Not just that, though; they are like towers in the air. But maybe that should be better termed as the building of platforms of strings. In other words, what seems problematic on both sides is precisely the idea of art as dividing life itself into both its forms—“natural” and “artificial.” Let us not forget that the differences between Kant’s and Hegel’s aesthetics or philosophy of art arise from the insight into whether the “nature” paradigm is represented as a concept of beauty without which artistic creation makes no sense, or whether it displays a “ghost” that nature endorses for its goals in the self-reflection of the artistic expression of the “sensible shining of the idea.” This dispute between the aesthetics of genius and the notion of art as a philosophical observation of Being in the media of the spiritual production of the historical world seems to be unresolved until it becomes clear that neither “nature” nor “spirit” correspond more to what surpasses and

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prevails. The peculiar avant-garde with the idea of the body as the living machine of the creation and destruction of the world has cast that into the face of aesthetics and art. After all, Duchamp brilliantly expressed this in his debate with regard to neo-dadaism and pop art by expounding his idea of the ready-made: This Neo-Dada, now called New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc. … is one of the cheap pleasures and lives of what Dada has taught. When I discovered ‘ready-mades’, I thought to discourage aesthetics. But in NeoDada, ‘ready-mades’ are used to reveal aesthetic values. I threw the Bottle Rack and the Urinal in their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them as aesthetically pleasing. (Jimenez 2005, 83)

Aporia is, therefore, the concept of uncanny art that becomes the “essence” of contemporary art in that it no longer speaks about art as its “subject” or “sense” as an aesthetic object. Instead, conceptual art has been understood as a question of something that surpasses both art and aesthetics and at the same time belongs to its triad of historical-epochal modes of engagement in the 20th century: performance (performativity), setup (installation), and idea (conceptuality). In this way, we can see that what has been determined from the very beginning as the issue of being of modern philosophy is at the same time the issue of being of contemporary art. This is nothing but the question of the meaning of destruction as a method and programme of metaphysics and within it the history of art as such. Aporia might not be something out of this circuit. It represents its reason for survival, and its solution depends on the possibility of further “development” in the upcoming period. Certainly, it provides that the need for art will still be a substitute for those “spiritual needs” about which Hegel spoke when he pronounced the most radical approach to art and its possibilities in the modern world: that we are very near to the “end of art.” The aporia of contemporary art continues to proceed with this as it carries an auto-immune body to its morphological chaos and entropy faced by something unknown and uncanny, more like that of Bataille’s “inner experience” that is almost incorporated in everyday life between the extreme of “extravagance” and, even more extremely, banality, triviality, and ordinariness. Anyway, this destruction is not represented merely as the method and programme of events or the word we are going to talk about here. What this term seeks to encompass refers to the experience of the very beginning. So, it lies in the aporias of contemporary art when the circuit following the movement equates conceptuality/post-conceptuality. It is not just thinking of something wherein the destruction of tradition wants to open the possibilities of “the second beginning,” as in the case of Heidegger. The

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problem might be formulated that Being as an event becomes a destruction of primordial time. Through the experience of the technosphere, it proceeds to establish simply pure derealization in time. Therefore, it is time without “Being.” In the field of abstractions and infinite technological visualizations of the same, we can detect how fast minutes, hours, and days flow. The problem should be analyzed with the intention that the destruction of metaphysics’ meaning performed by the stable experience of “work” in art evolves as an event of the posthuman condition. Whoever speaks about the destruction of the historical legacy of art must run in advance from the premise that art, as well as philosophy, is realized in the idea of the “machine of life.” Of course, that idea has been derived from cybernetics. Its fundamental notions are exactly those to which it shows-expresses the technological character of an inhuman existence. Cybernetics, in turn, operates with concepts like an information network, feedback, autopoiesis, interaction, and communication. Undoubtedly, it strongly focuses on our “contemporary condition,” which delineates us from both the past and the future. The limitation means only that the past has become the future past and the future of the past future of what has just ruled since the new era, such as the fatality of time reduced to “here” and “now.” If we were to derive time as a historical circuit to the technical circuit of the “eternal present” in the process of the visualization of events, then the metaphysics of the subjectivity of the new era would be located in the function of visuality as cognitive observation (Hörl 2008, 163-195; Mersch 2015). Also, if time were to be reduced to “here,” then we would have the primacy of visual space as a network with no centre and edges over time. The pure flow of the “eternal now” leads to the reality that can no longer be experienced other than as an aesthetically constructed artificial reality. For that reason, in the discussion of conceptual art and its aporias, we would be able to see that they are multiple, just like computer viruses; there is something truly “outdated” and belonging to the passing time. Since time is furiously accelerating, it can be difficult to preserve a decent distance from the otherwise de-realized reality. For instance, Jean Baudrillard, in his simulacra and simulation analysis, realized that the speed of obsolete information would very soon lead to the fact that the museum itself as the idea of data retrieval dates back to the 19th century, and it has become something like a burial ground. The argument of procedure advocates “being” modern instead of accountable, just as the assumption of conceptual/post-conceptual art “without works” ranges from references to Adorno and his attitude on the crisis of the aesthetic experience to the defence of the autonomy of the mind’s primacy, which could be a priori

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requests as in technoscience and cybernetics. But that is how this autonomy right now comprehends starting from the avant-garde perspective of the act as a re-politicized event of critical social participation. In the first case, we witness the ideas that are exactly represented by Peter Osborne and others on the traces of Boris Groys (Osborne 1999; Groys 2011). What they share could be the view that the fate of contemporary art “today” has become the reason for the rejection of aesthetical tyranny in various forms that arise from the idea of doing the logic of neoliberalism to the widespread claim of the “aestheticization of life.” If, for conceptual art, it is the question of time that arises from the question of the possibilities of language to the present events in time, then the destruction of the entire legacy of the philosophy of art represents a condition for access to conceptual art as “philosophy” in the form of the idea of art. Let us attempt to simplify this statement. If philosophy does not become an artwork, then the art-without-event disguises the essence of philosophy as “language games.” It gives special instructions for further action. What becomes of that “work” does not depend more on art as “work” than on philosophy as a performative-conceptual practice (Alberro 2003, 26-53). But what should be important to these theorists of contemporary art is that their notion of aesthetics is still coming from the time that disappeared with the introduction of cybernetics and computer information transfer systems into daily protocols of the world of life. For now, it can only be preliminarily said that the concept of aesthetics and the aestheticization of life goes beyond that of the traditional philosophy of art and therefore beyond new attempts to justify aesthetics in the different orientations of image science (Bildwissenschaft) and visual studies. While Osborne, from the perspective of the “radical philosophy”, seeks to open a productive dialogue with the global order of the world as a transnational network of artistic practices against the aesthetic “one-way street” of language as a pragmatic tool of knowledge, Groys attempt to defend a conceptual art from the harsh utter “aestheticization of life.” Therefore, it is quite clear that in the tradition of the neo-Marxist criticism of society, it is determined by the rule of cultural industries. The onslaught of aesthetics should always be on the brink of the critique of ideology, so it becomes self-evident that, in this regard, any single aestheticism without a critical immersion in a social change strategy must be condemned to the inability of the object and indifference of the collective observer. I have to argue that the concept is questionable because it encompasses “frequent passive features” of the subject in the society of the spectacle. If the subject represented here is no longer an artist, what is left of the “aestheticization of life”?

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Chapter Three Our contemporaneity is often characterized by the vague notion of an “aestheticization of life.” The commonplace usage of this notion is problematic in many ways. It suggests an attitude of aesthetic passivity toward our society of the spectacle. But who is the subject of this attitude? Who is the spectator of the society of spectacle? It is not an artist—because the artist practices polemical self-presentation. It is not the masses because they are also involved—consciously or unconsciously—in autopoietic practices and have no time for pure contemplation. Such a subject could be only God—or a theoretician who took a divine position of pure contemplation after God was proclaimed dead. The notion of aesthetic self-consciousness and poetic, artistic practice must now be secularized, purified of any theological overtones. Every act of aestheticization has its author. We always can and should ask the question: who aestheticizes—and to what purpose? The aesthetic field is not a space of peaceful contemplation—but a battlefield on which gazes clash and fight. The notion of the “aestheticization of life” suggests the subjugation of life under a certain form. But as I’ve already suggested, conceptual art taught us to see form as a poetic instrument of communication rather than an object of contemplation. (Groys 2011)

Why should any “author” need to be linked with the technosphere? Let us even leave Barthes’ idea of “the death of the author” at the time of the reign of the text as a sign system in which the signs refer to other signs. The autoreferential character of text always assumes the meta-referentiality of the signifier, regardless of whether it contains society, culture, ideology, or history. The meta-text, therefore, does not have the means to signify anything other than the necessity of a closed context of meaning. Loss of authorship does not replace here the collective identity of a group, for example, with the conceptual group Art & Language in New York or what is now common in cyberdemocracy in which the anonymity of the participants in the network signifies their ability to “resist” and “subvert” the pseudo-naming of life and its forms. What Groys is trying to defend might be to actively and participatively criticize the point of view of art; as we have seen, the “aestheticization of life” presupposes contemplation and passivity. No doubt, this might be the big problem of modern art regarding the constructivism of the Soviet avant-garde, the situationist movement, and particularly the followers of Guy Debord: what are the real possibilities for post-conceptual art to radically change the social patterns of life in the context of neoliberal capitalism? It seems that such a position only circumvents “activism” against “passivism.” It is the battle of art repositioned in the artefact. Almost similarly, in some panicked way, it seeks to search the transcendental “Big Other” of revolution and subversion just because it cannot reverse the metaphysical scheme in which art was founded and when it negates itself and henceforth the “authoritative” products of the world.

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What if the “aestheticization of life” goes beyond any binary oppositions like actively-passively or political-non-political? What if, on the other hand, the true “subject” of this conceptual communication of radicality, instead of “art” and “artist,” is someone “third,” not the author or their substitute in the figure of God or the theoretician? Quite contrary to Groys and all the extensions of the aesthetic theory of Adorno and the search for a sublime object of society, I argue that the “aestheticization of life” might be the result of what conceptual art itself in its application for self-identification in “life” as an idea (text-image-language-sound-nothing) carries itself in its nakedness. So, it should be a “subject” as a “suffix” of something that is conditioned by the development of global capitalism and does not refer to its change of the social forms and political systems of government. There is no kind of narcissistic society of the spectacle as contemplation behind the “aestheticization of life” but rather the techno-genesis as communication that encompasses the trinity of performance (bodies), setup (installation), and ideas (conceptuality). Life cannot be represented as the pure area of “critical social participation” but as the battlefield of the conflict and struggle with the technical character of Being as the event of the absolute aesthetical construction of the world. Accessing conceptual art from its auxiliaries means giving up on the political-religious hypostases of the permanent revolution of society from the changing idea of art. What the fundamental problem may be here does not arise from aesthetics and the aesthetical shaping of “life,” nor art and the artistic perception of the “world.” Following Guillaume Apollinaire’s aesthetic thoughts on “cubism,” it would have to reverse the direction of our thinking of conceptual art as an art-free work and say that it is an art-free event. There is so much more than the “creation of the world and its space” that it can become an art concept without God and theoreticians of visuality. But it would be performed only under one condition: that this time of the destruction of the beginning and the end of thought is “now” and “at the end of time.” What do we mean by that? Nothing but the need to reverse the direction of understanding the relationship between what comes to the destruction of the institutions of modern art and what is self-organizing as a post-neo-condition. Every single new avant-garde at the end of its exhausted possibilities is perceived to become post-conceptual art, and so is the one who no longer destroys art as a metaphysically defined concept of works, artists, and audiences as the critical public. If we want to be cynical, then we would say that what was so fatally missing in the idea of conceptual art in the 1960s, with the “linguistic turn” and the idea of art as a philosophical concept of an imageless event, is nothing other than the cybernetic concept of communication. Speaking

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metaphorically, it lacked the wirelessness of immateriality. It was lacking in the technical possibility of interactivity between work, artists, and audiences, which truly became the only essential determinant of the digital age. The gap between living and non-living in communication systems should be reduced to the technical connection between worlds. When we talk about the relationship between “things,” we are always talking about mediation. So, in that sense, the mediation between the participants of the communication has become direct. The reason consists in the fact that the relationship is no longer mediated by the technique as a means. Hence, the technosphere as a purpose becomes decisive right there. It seems that it should be much more concerned about the language of speech as a “learning tool.” But this is not something we use as an outsider. On the contrary, now the “tool” becomes a self-evident flow of communication, and without it, all at once can drop on the farther darkness of the naked. Losing a connection to the world that exists through a “wire” or a wireless transmission system means losing the possibility of being in time in a dividing way and the idea behind post-conceptual art. Surely, the immaterial does not appear in “work” or “happening.” The condition for deploying communications from Earth to the universe of space lies in the transmission of the signal between the sender and the recipient of the message. The question of contemporary art in that way becomes a matter of decoding the information code. The internet or technical connection to establish a network as an interactive relationship enables “artificial life” and the social participation of actors as “emancipated spectators,” if we were to use the term of Jacques Rancière that determines the communication aisthesis of contemporary art (Rancière 2011). As we will see below, some of the most noteworthy insights into conceptual/post-conceptual art are presented in the works of Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Seth Siegelaub, On Kawara, and the Art & Language group. Despite the apparent differences in approach, Boris Groys especially emphasized in his attempt to reconsider the impact of conceptualism for contemporaneity: critical openness to society, politics, and ideology of the “Big Other” regarding the global order of power. Art in the age of “modernity” is becoming so spectacular because the testimony of the loss of work and events in the processes of dematerialization and derealization is undertaking the reality. Instead, just like in Wittgenstein’s late thinking of “language games,” the construction and instruction for action are endemic. If we look at things in this way, conceptualism, as we will try to show in addition to the main theoretical streams, appears in the era of selfdetermination as follows:

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(1) as self-directedness to the media of its indescribability and the irreconcilability of ideas in text-language-writing, and (2) as a criticism of the “aestheticization of life” in global capitalism by invoking this or that form of participative activism. The construction marks the last stage of the idea of creating a “new” based on production-creation (poiesis-creatio) whose “essence” lies in the scientific exploration of nature as such. But instead of a reflexive relation to the subject matter, the turn occurs when the unpredictability of Being, like in Malevich’s suprematism and Duchamp’s turn towards the aesthetic object, changes in the way the world becomes the artwork. Now it might be a matter of designing what does not exist in “nature,” the emergence of something new from the techno-scientific construction of “artificial intelligence” (AI). Anyway, that should be the construction of a machine as well life itself. Also, that is the reason why it cannot be the two contingent cases that LeWitt and Siegelaub, in their “manifestations” or contemplations of the new “function” of art, constantly point to. One is the realization of the idea of art as a cognitive-perceptual “life,” whereby there is no longer a difference between “work” and “event”; the second has the main intention of overcoming the relationship between the subject and object of participation in the process of creating the new assemblage of things/ideas. If this difference became obsolete with the introduction of new media in the 20th century, from CinemaScope to the decentralized digital image-building apparatus and the ability to operate information, then it was the only thing left of classical aesthetics and art philosophy that was still a “concept” that connects poiesis and techno with pragma. Siegelaub reversed the relationship between “primary” and “counter”-information that precedes exhibitions as a conceptual “act.” Instead of the physical presence of art as a work intended as something in the world of objects and subject matter, which is contained in books and catalogues devoted to visual art, the turn might be that the text as an idea, materialized in the idea of book-catalogueimage, now becomes art in its visual code (Claura and Siegelaub 1999, 286293). The question that arises is best defined by Peter Osborne: Can the philosophical meaning of the “work” as a whole be derived from its material meaning? In other words, the issue of traditional aesthetics and the philosophy of art concerning the difference and the relationship between the transcendental mind and the sensible appearance of the idea in materiality appears as a question of the aesthetic definition of the “work” and the “event” of conceptual/post-conceptual art which, for the first time in history, no longer exists for its “object” as it “is” but as the constructed worlds of

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techno-aesthetical “things” that must take a very clear standpoint. This attitude can be drawn by turning to ordinary language. Therefore, the true “founding father” of conceptualism in the art of the 20th century was Ludwig Wittgenstein. The former phase was proved by the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1922, and the latter in 1951 with the publication of Philosophical Investigations. So, if information should determine the “essence” of contemporaneity in advance, then the key ontological categories of the destruction of contemporary art also used in the context of conceptual/post-conceptual art should be singularity and the horizon of the event. The terms have already been used by the cosmologist and physicist Stephen Hawking in the theory of the emergence and function of black holes in the universe. His most recent clarification of the ideas and functions of this “phenomenon,” which continues to represent a mystery of modern physics and, without any objection to this concept, of metaphysics, can serve us as an attempt to frame the apologies of conceptualism as a fundamental mode for the constitution and development of contemporary art in the coming period. We must also say that there is no way to apply attractive cosmological theory to the condition of art “today.” On the contrary, instead of that directed pragmatism, it is better to speak about the necessary dialogue with the theory of science and the philosophy of the liberated traditional disciplinary boundaries. For this, Hawking used the most significant terms of contemporary philosophy in his “metaphysics” of modern physics and, of course, consequently the categories of contemporary art to explain the mystery of black holes—like the trinity information-singularity-horizon of the event—as nothing other than proof of how the language of the discovery of the “new” should see the discoveries of what goes beyond our ideas of time, based on Einstein’s equation of the curved shape of the universe and the speed of light. Also, it must be consistent with the use of language in the situation of its technoscience assemblage. A few years earlier, Hawking presented his solutions to the black hole mystery at the Royal Institute of Technology conference in Stockholm in August 2015. In short, the problem comes down to the inability to see why the paradox of losing information comes to mind. If there is a black hole and matter (the star) crumbles into it, it is as if this information disappears forever in it when it evaporates. Since that might be in contradiction with the fundamental laws of physics on the preservation of energy and causality, since the latter laws presuppose the maintenance of all information in some system, and this answers the idea of the ontological primacy of Being that enables beings in their immutable substance to change their properties but remain essentially the same, it is necessary to go down another path in our research. The next point is the one

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that opposes classical ontology and cosmology, the main assumption of which shows that the difference might be the condition of being able to exist from the change of state itself. Hence, information can be transmitted and inherited only by some form of storage and memory, which, in his book Matter and Memory (Matiere et mémoire) of 1939, was considered by Henri Bergson as a reason for the introduction of vitalism and the notion of the creative evolution of the universe (Bergson 1988). Most physicists argue that black holes are formed when stars collapse at the end of their existence. Then there is the emergence of the singularity or the area of uncertainty, where neither the theory of matter density nor Einstein’s general relativity theories apply any longer. The mystery of science falls into the physics of the same rank, as Wittgenstein said in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Since we do not know anything about it, because it goes beyond the limits of our language founded on logic as the boundary of our world, everything that remains is still happening in the imagination and speculation of those who think differently, almost “technopoetically,” but starting from the underlying insights of contemporary physical science. So, Hawking, in his 2015 lecture in Stockholm, refuted his early theory of the 1970s. It was then considered that black holes that rotate following the quantum principle of ambiguity must create and emit particles as in the universe, and particles and anti-particles form in the fluctuation of quantum gaps. If they radiate energy, then the step to their disappearance is that their influence on the material world is so great that—as was said in ancient metaphysics, which reached its highest point in Plato’s Timaeus— nothing is “no matter” in terms of matter negation. Instead, nothing is present in the condition of the existence of the spherical form of the universe. Beings that float in the chaos and order due to the perfect order of Being follow the dark shadow of nothing. Let us remember the explanation Plato gave in Timaeus. God is relieved of any action in the mystery of the encounter of Being and nothing. But the point could be that Hawking must go radically further in his notion of black holes. He has argued that the very concept of time can be dissolved if it is shown that black holes cannot be explained by the physical laws of the universe. The solving of the problem that Hawking has posed is reduced to the following. Information remains preserved in some form of energy transformation. In other words, it does not fall under the fatal “singularity law.” If this were the case, it does not disappear in a black hole. It is stopped at the edge of the abyss, if we may figuratively speak in Heideggerian language. This path of stopping is similar to life on the edge of the abyss. That is what Hawking, and it is not conclusive that he must be familiar with the philosophical origin of this statement, called the “horizon of the event.”

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No doubt, we might say that this concept represents a mixture of two different Heideggerian paths of thinking. The former derives from the first stage of his thinking, expounded in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) from 1927. It was explicitly said in that book that the meaning of Being occurs in what is happening on the horizon of primordial time. Let us immediately refute any objection to the word “primordial.” This should be not something considered outdated compared to modernity. On the contrary, the primordial might be more contemporary than contemporaneity because it retains an understanding of Being and what has been created as a mystery of this “actual” destruction. The term “event” (Ereignis), thanks to the latter phase of Heidegger’s thinking, was raised in his lectures as concerning the work of art and his studies of the view of the openness of Being itself, which has become interlinked with modern art. Hence, it becomes obvious that the aesthetics of the event (film and new media) assumes jurisdiction over aesthetic works (modern painting, for example, where the key concept cannot be the objectivity and autonomy of the work) (Heidegger 2003a; Paiü 2021). The horizon of the event represents the notion of indeterminacy and the absence of information on the edge of a black hole in the state of the preservation of some of its “primordial” or initial condition (arché). On this, Hawking, in a plausible way, said: I believe that information is not stored in the interior of the black holes, as we might expect, but on the horizon of the event. (Hawking 1996)

How can we describe what that term means? Let us now hold on to Heidegger and what the meaning of the horizon of Being in understanding is and what the event (Ereignis) means as an openness to the temporality of Being itself. According to Hawking, this could be a protective layer, somehow a shell that, though structured like matter, keeps everything from falling and disappearing, including light. In a two-dimensional view, the horizon of the event is like the edge of the disc around the hole. Even when particles fall into it, they leave traces of their information on the horizon of the event. And when they come back in the form of radiation, they carry a changed part of the preserved information. As for any superficial philosopher of contemporary philosophy, we should here encounter the theory of autopoietic creation of the worlds. But this does not derive from Nicolaus Cusanus (creatio ex nihilo), but rather from the infinite production of information as becoming new (Werden, devenir). What is “new” is not absolutely “new.” In it is preserved the authentic or original state of things, because there is no either-or logic. It is a logical part of this either-either that should be merely the singularity of the entropy field. The black hole, at the same time, does not exist. The reason lies in what the laws of the

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materiality of the universe apply on their edges, and in their waste or gap, we can only speak of the indefinite, mysterious, mystical creation without God’s help. And finally, what Hawking said at the end of his lecture is equally intriguing, and perhaps even more significant for our discussion of the destruction of time in contemporary art. The remnants of information, their transformed “resurrection,” might be compared with the burning of the encyclopedia. But this information will not completely disappear. It will remain in the ashes, which means it will need to be reconstructed again as we do in our daily lives when memory loss demands that we rely on other more credible records and testimonies of our historical Being. In the contemporary performing arts, it is wellknown that involuntary memory and voluntary memory have recently been discussed because the digital age of new media with the implosion of information has caused the “empty time” of the present to be perpetuated in images. What is missing might be the secret of what has already happened, which, however, should be stored in the memory of our unconscious, which, as Lacan would certainly say, is articulated just like language. However, voluntary memory seems to be a much more complicated device if it ends in vanishing. Against the “black holes” of forgetting history, the procedure conducted by performative artists seems like Hawking’s “mythopoetic” thinking about the emergence, spread, end, and renewal of the universe from the spirit of singularity. This procedure has been called reenactment in performative arts nowadays. It involves various techniques and strategies for restoring historical memory just because we no longer have our own “Me” but only our own “They.” And because we no longer have an existing identity but rather construct it from an information patchwork, our destiny has become a state of transformation. We, the Alexandrian displaced and the wanderers of the worlds (Lütticken 2005; Massumi 2011)! The destruction of time, after all that has been said, should also mean the destruction of our misapprehensions “about” time, not just time itself. If the notion of destruction is fateful for contemporary art, then this is primarily because it retains some of the remaining time constraints of the very thought. Early Heidegger and early Wittgenstein responded by analogy to early Klee and the early conceptualism of Duchamp, and their late thinking, in turn, would be appropriate perhaps for the late Cézanne and post-conceptualism from Joseph Kosuth to Ilya Kabakov. There is a necessary division here: Heidegger was directly touched by the reflections of Klee and Cézanne’s painting, but Wittgenstein certainly never mentioned anything about Duchamp, while the arrival of post-conceptualists on the scene happened a very long time after his death. The destruction is the thoughtful act of the “idea,” which has negligible importance for real life. It

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might therefore be impossible to separate the thought and “work,” even though, in contemporary art, the concept of work takes on a completely different meaning from the material presence of some object in the space. In that sense, there are no so-called objective images of the world. The misunderstanding of the reality of the absolute knowledge behind which God stands as a substance-subject of the historical process of the “development” and “progress” of the idea was the backbone of Hegel’s speculative-dialectical philosophy. But here we are dealing with the differences and the relatedness of thought as the destruction of time. Therefore, it means that the notion of destruction is primarily related to the destruction of traditional ontology in Heidegger or the destruction of the transcendental-logical concept of reality in Wittgenstein. Thinking destroys the world, and never again will it create and destroy it, as Apollinaire said in his book dedicated to cubist painters. To be able to speak of the empire of the idea that overrides the status of works in history and art, it is necessary to destroy not only the idea of art as mimesis and repraesentatio of Being in its persistence. The condition of the possibility of destruction in contemporary art that begins with the turn of (art) history, the avant-garde, and its main actors/participants such as Malevich and Duchamp is nothing more than the destruction of the very “essence” of philosophy with which we continue to operate as if anything more happened after Hegel. As if we did not know that Nietzsche, Marx, and Kierkegaard introduced the philosophical analysis of time to the point of being determined, in turn, in the will of power to the practice of work as scientific history and the existential faith of the subject. The destruction of time signified the time of the destruction of Being as objectivity. In the new era, it was determined from the position of the subject-substance that, indeed, the world is “the case” of the construction of the cognitive actor of all further operations of nature’s cross and its technical structure. But the notion of destruction does not refer to something that is already truly present within the historical framework of Being, beings, and the essence of man. It is primarily a question of how the relationships between “things” transpire and how things can transform themselves into aesthetic objects. It seems that this “ontological difference,” in a creative way, has once again become the trigger for art reaching conceptual art. Its “most philosophical” representative, Joseph Kosuth, aims in his “work” at the aesthetic definition of an artwork that is opposed to linguistic meaning (Osborne 2013, 139). In his research of the relationship between philosophy and contemporary art, Osborne affirms that the tension and opposition of the categories are recorded in Kosuth’s self-reflective process of the destruction of the idea of an artwork. Art is not, therefore, a question of

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morphology but an issue of function. In this sense, conceptualism is still searching for a place in between. Of course, the essential opposite of the “work” and “event” might not just be something that is fixed and located in the space of the setting, such as a wall painting or what is happening in the fictional space of the epistolary presence of a film thanks to the technical development of the media. The two art paradigms also correspond to the binaries of Being as what is self-standing and the constructor of the worlds. What is morphologically determined leaves traces of the past as an act, and what has its function within the concept of art as an open space—the time of life itself—is derived from the instructions for acting within language. Aesthetics determines its boundaries in the former paradigm, while in the case of the latter, philosophy, as an opportunity in this art, takes a step outside and beyond this un-boundary border. When Kosuth, in his programmatic text entitled Art of Philosophy from 1969, quoted Wittgenstein from Philosophical Investigations about how “the meaning of a word is its use,” this was the beginning of a long struggle for the liberation of art as an idea of aesthetics (Kosuth 1999, 158-177). The paradox is that art must become a philosophical “work” and begin to speak “philosophically” to bring aesthetics and the aesthetical directly to suspension and neutralization. The reason lies in the fact that the art of its aesthetic reconfiguration in the 20th century—and that is nothing but the era of the technosphere because aesthetics was the result of the spirit of modern technology—must emancipate that so as ultimately to have something significant “to say” to the contemporary world. That should be comprehended in such a way that language as an apparatus of the ability to speak to art restrains its openness to the “world.” Because language constitutes the boundaries in the relationship between philosophy and art, it is necessary to reverse the current relations. The relationship, therefore, must be destroyed and become productive to “function” based on equality in modern times. To put it another way, it is necessary to bring out the purity of the “function” itself instead of the centuries-old form of service as an idea or the “Being” of the very essence. It is not a coincidence that one of the reasons for the emergence and sustainability of conceptual art in the post-conceptual condition, as Osborne calls it, is a perennial obsession of avant-garde art with the political ideas of radical democracy, such as equality (Osborne 2010, 118-133). And since, as Wittgenstein says, “essence is expressed by grammar” (Wittgenstein 1958, 371), then it seems obvious that the destruction of the notion of art is nothing more than the destruction of “Being” in philosophy. In the next wave of analysis, I will try to show why conceptual art is undeniable in the aesthetic way of understanding the world and why it is so

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strongly resisted by the return to the apology of avant-garde art of the first half of the 20th century. The starting point for each further discussion is always in the almost self-evident attempt to overcome art as sensitive information in an aesthetic object set into the space of an articulated “world of art”—Marcel Duchamp and his “invention” of the ready-made concept. It thus seems necessary to open the problem of why, in Duchamp’s case, the avant-garde idea of the transformation of the work into the very event of life has been already realized by moving the image into a living body that in its two modes of existence—aesthetic and performing—becomes a realized “work” or concept. Is another decisive “find” in contemporary art created in the 1960s based on the philosophical reduction of language into “language games” not, therefore, from the late thought of Wittgenstein— the notion of art as an idea of art without work? The rounded end of art is no longer an idea of “art.” Do we not have to talk about the idea of the historical event in the “empty time” of the same? After all, is that not what Osborne called the post-conceptual condition, just like the retention that nothing more could be said about the idea of art, or indeed the idea of philosophy? The truth of conceptual/post-conceptual art, unlike the mode of postmodern art, falls into the “essence” of something beyond the “work” as well as the “event” and allows their relationship with the construction of the technosphere as the “Big Third” of any future aestheticization of life. This “essence” of contemporary art no longer has anything to do with the idea of radical social change and the meta-politics of the event, as we can see in the aesthetics of Rancière and Badiou. But at the same time, there is no justification for criticizing globalized “empty time” from the position of the new critical theory of art on the traces of Adorno and Benjamin, as was theoretically performed by Osborne (1995, 2010). It is possible to talk about the “essence” of the technosphere, which, in the concept of information as such, encompasses the invention of science and the creative potentiality of art. Is there any exit from these aporias without which contemporary art would not have a reason to exist?

3.2. A question of language: Two approaches to conceptual art—Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth In a conversation with Georges Boudaille, originally published in 1968 in the journal Les Lettres Francaises, Daniel Buren, one of the most important painters of conceptualism, claimed that Marcel Duchamp first opened the question of the “essence” of art, but not as a finished aesthetic act by which the work becomes the “property” of an individual, group, institution, society, state, etc. What Buren put as the credo of all modern art represented

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Duchamp’s decisive break with the tradition of the notion of the romantic concept of art as a work of genius. When the gold plate is removed from this secularized doctrine of the dedication of art, as Duchamp first did, all of its possible transformations—from art to anti-art, from the work to the aesthetic object, from the object to the immateriality of the “idea”—are made already. But the singular “essence” of passing art from the eternity of the divine presence into the passage of life of “things” is divided into two areas: the desacralization of the process of artistic creation and the democratization of art as creators, works, and participants commonly sharing its openness to others (Boudaille 1999, 66-74). What art becomes might be formally identical to Wittgenstein’s term “language games”—all that is related to the “form of life” within the pragmatic knowledge of the world. When this has been translated into “ordinary language,” we should get a definition of the work of art as something that becomes almost anything that is exposed to the space of exhibiting “art.” Here we are faced with a paradox. The museum as a secular temple or cathedral does not represent only a place for exhibiting works that were created by the imagination or, conversely, are ready-for-use (ready-made), just like Duchamp’s “relics” derived from the daily reproduction of modern industrial society. What stands behind the museum’s institution is much more important than the museum as an institution. It is, of course, the idea that art sets itself as a symbolic form of the boundary between the two worlds—art and life. It cannot be surprising that Daniel Buren, in the above-mentioned conversation, showed with almost perfect precision that “art today”—and as we can see, not much has changed considerably since the 1960s—can no longer justify its “holy name.” Instead, turning to the only possible exit from its basic appearance in the society of the spectacle with the reign of media image as an ideology of spending things, art can no longer claim the right to autonomy because it has become part of the cultural drivers of the postmodern or late capitalism. For that reason, the necessity of its “stagnation” in that furiousness produces constantly “new” contexts and situations in which it seeks to overthrow the deceptive pursuit of a technological circuit in which “things” become aesthetic objects and objects themselves take on the art forms of their “second life.” In other words, art in the society of the spectacle remains the only exit to go back to what has been so radically dismissed in the name of the desacralization and democratization of “values.” And that might be, in the process of the alchemical skill of making or creating something “new,” the new dogma of our own “philosophy” by which the world as life is understood from the horizon of “work” and the “event” in their disappearance. However, this

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horizon is called conceptuality, which has a surplus of conceptuality versus “realistic” deficiency. Therefore, it ultimately signifies that art can no longer be understood from the outside or from inside as a pure object of performance or as the subject of creation. The condition of the possibility of self-art without work and event represents the conceptuality of the very idea that the world and life lead to quite an uncanny synthesis. Under the common name “conceptual art,” referring to the various practices, performance, actions, and manifestos of artists in the US and the UK in the 1960s and early 1970s, a movement has also encompassed “the whole world” because autonomous groups and individuals in Japan—and then the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Latin America, and elsewhere—opened new ways of understanding art as such (Alberro 1999, xvi-xxxvii; Groys 2011). Among the numerous definitions that contain historical and descriptive meaning, it is worth mentioning that of Diarmuid Costello because he made its “usability” quite simple: By ‘Conceptual Art,’ then, I mean a kind of art that came to prominence in the latter half of the 1960s and in doing so initiated a tradition that, broadly speaking, foregrounds art’s intellectual content, and the thought processes associated with that content, over its form. (Costello 2007, 93)

From that viewpoint, it should be evident that this represents a fundamental turn in the metaphysical scheme of art and aesthetics. Instead of the field of feeling and senses, the term comes to the concept that belongs to the fundamental notions of modern philosophy from Kant to Hegel. It is, of course, a sense of ratio or cognitive power as a synthesis of the perception of reality. However, if this was merely a reversal of what the centenary articulated, the extent to which the conceptual art was limited was its nature. Instead, it is a turn not only of the notion of art as a representation of the “world” in the fixed work, whether it is a painting or a statue in visual arts. When art renounces “sensitivity,” then the first term that is struck by this criticism is exactly what Apollinaire describes as “the monster we call a beauty.” But the reversal not only concerns art and its privileged secularized notion of holiness like “beauty” but is also associated with the notion of “beautiful art.” The real aim of the attack of conceptual art on the tradition of the concept of art, starting from the notion of “work,” is nothing more than the aesthetic understanding of art as something that belongs to the “lower” level of knowledge because it is, in Hegel’s view, part of the experience (of faith) and the realms of the mind. Conceptual art in all its versions does not appear only as anti-aesthetic, though it is worth it and its media continuing in post-conceptualism. It resolutely refused aesthetics having any impact on the idea of art. We have seen that Groys, in even

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ironically rejecting the notion of the “aestheticization of life” as a contemplative indifference to the design of the contemporary world, found the alternative in the communication dimension of the active relationship of conceptual art with society, politics, and ideology. This oversimplification of the mind and feelings, philosophy, and art make an open field of attempts to radicalize the avant-garde idea of life changing with art in the time of the end of avant-garde opportunities in a more sophisticated society and political world. What Buren identified as the dualism of the desacralization of the artistic process and the democratization of the subject/actor of the art itself as the act of creating the “new” was, in the 1960s, in the ambivalent process of the contemporary world. On the one hand, it is about the development of technoscience, cybernetics, and the information age in all areas of life, and on the other, we should note the social utopias of changing the world based on the revolutionary ideas of Marxism, anarchism, and postcolonial movements of the Third World. The rise of the technosphere occurs in the clash of social movements for the liberation of humanity from the subconsciousness of capital into the form of the society of the spectacle. Not surprisingly, therefore, beside conceptual art, which started from the “linguistic turn,” has been the latest radical-revolutionary neo-avant-garde movement of the Situationist International (SI) with the ideological guidance of Guy Debord, a neo-Marxist theorist, artist, and critic of the “society of the spectacle.” Their aspiration to overcome art as an outdated form of capitalist sociality goes hand in hand with attempts to turn the artist’s activism into a critical reflection of social rebellion against the ideology of the spectacle. Therefore, conceptualism can be defined as the essential experience with the situation, which might necessarily be performed as the iconoclasm. To oppose the field of the image of the world signifies the strategy of cracking the art as the power to represent the sublime object of the gaps. If, in Barthes’ semiology and the theory of language, things have their meaning only in the context, then the turn of situationists might be that art occurs only in the creation of a “new situation.” The criticism of the closeness of a sign within the limits of its media alienation takes on another form of apology of contemporary art. So, it should be reduced to the meaning of the spectacle as an ideology always being a question of presenting an image-like sign. Therefore, the iconoclasm dignifies the fight against the visual code of late capitalism by the instruments of its suspension and neutralizing Debord’s key concept, which he named derivé (Paiü 2013, 433-482).

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Conceptual art must, therefore, be considered in a narrower and wider context, irrespective of its emergence in America, where the pop art of Warhol and Rauschenberg appeared in a twofold form: (1) the criticism of the consumer society and the aestheticization of life in the circuit of late capitalism, which, instead of the culture industry, is ruled by a spectacular transformation of the object from the sphere of the aesthetic into the artistic sphere; (2) the self-reflection of art as a rational process of global production out of the spirit of innovation, experiment, and application into everyday life. It would be wrong to identify that with differences in access to art as a social and aesthetic platform for the development and improvement of human cognitive abilities. What is primarily a question about conceptualism at the very centre of one’s intention is, no doubt, the relation of art to the world from the horizon of language. We no longer ask ourselves “what” a work of art signifies as an object but “how” art as such in the world arises. Or better, how art arises if visual artists do not show it and do not represent the aesthetic Being of things. And when our thinking in all its manifestations is attached necessarily to the grammatical structure of language, the process of the formation of art presupposes the event of the “linguistic turn.” In this respect, the emergence of conceptual art in the mid-1960s and its zenith in the mid-1970s can be described as a process of the “spatialization of language and the temporalization of visual structure” (Buchloch 1999, 515). The quote we have just mentioned belongs to Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who is evolving in such a way as to show that the critique of the institutional act of art started with cubism. Elements of language fall into the surface of things as a pragmatic guide for action without work. The paradox is that it might be not the legacy of Juan Gris or Pablo Picasso but, above all, of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. From the very beginning, in the works of Sol LeWitt, at the end of the 1950s, it became clear that the conceptual art complex continued to evolve in opposition to self-discernment and action. When, instead of feeling and sensitivity, the mind as a paradigmatic construction of the “new” takes over what was in the competence of aesthetic production of objects, we encounter its fragmentation and contradictions. After all, it was already present in the age of the rationalist philosophy of the subject in the differences between Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. It is sufficient to mention here that Leibniz distinguished between two kinds of knowledge of Being: metaphysical or intuitive (intuitus praesens), in which God immediately and suddenly has an overview of the

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game in the world, and mathematical or rational (ratio universalis), which serves as a new philosophy with the help of exact natural sciences such as mathematics and physics. Natural science became the paradigmatic matrix of new thinking. Due to methodical precision and experimental methods, its language determined the perfect “circle of chalk.” The empirical experience of the subject due to the method rises to divine self-transparency. Hence, the language within Leibniz’s system of the metaphysics of monads gives a view to the image of the perfect world in its finite deceit, as represented in the language of geometry. Therefore, geometry signified a method in Spinoza’s Ethics that has been considered as the paradigmatic act of thinking of corporeality as a synthesis of mind and passions (feelings). Thus, both thinkers, Leibniz and Spinoza, are sources of inspiration for reflections on body and machine relationships, performative art, and posthumanism precisely because of the vision of thought and language as a machine. In the case of conceptual art, this conflict of mind and intuition does not appear just like something quite external to the understanding of its intentions. At first sight, Sol LeWitt’s work in the sculptures of Structures (1965) can be read as a kind of scientific positivism, as it is a purely empirical experience from which any rigorous visual form disappeared. Formalism was the highest goal of the conceptualism of modern art, which can be seen in the controversies with the most notable American theoretician of modernism, Clement Greenberg (Costello 2007, 94-100). However, LeWitt cannot be reduced in his sculpture to the “experience” or “spirituality” of that which has been counterpoised to form. The reason is that the “structures” do not relate to the observer’s experience of the artwork’s reflection as a disinterested observer. Completely differently, it is important to inspect LeWitt’s self-understanding of conceptuality. And what is truly distinctive regarding the reduction to “positivism” or even to minimalism is something that should be far-reaching for all further discussions about the “essence” of contemporary art. In his “manifesto” entitled Paragraphs on Conceptual Art (1967), among other issues, we can read the following: I will refer to the kind of art in which I am involved as conceptual art. In conceptual art, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman. It is the objective of the

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LeWitt can by no means be considered as a true representative of conceptualism precisely because it is not yet clear what the point of his understanding of the “work” could be. The sculptures, however, are semantically renamed “structures,” and the language has shifted from Wittgenstein’s perspective from the maker of significance to the marking of what is “acting” as a producer of the mental structures of human materiality. Although it is not “proto-conceptualist” or a “pure” artist-with-no-work, that does not mean that we are not entering the zone of the difference between work and event with LeWitt. Thinking produces ideas or concepts. If the “work” in its materialization requires something that gives it meaning outside the context of art, we are faced with some of the rest of the aesthetic experience. That is why his approach to conceptual art as the primacy of plan-decision on performance is nothing more than a trace of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics in another mode of expression. Costello was right in his very interesting discussion. What, however, seems far more important to our setting regarding the “Being” of contemporary art as a turn from language to the picture with which art appears in the service of the aesthetic code of the communication of the technosphere as such is almost apodictically imposed: The idea becomes a machine that creates art. If instead of the word “create” (creatio), which still carries overtones of artists of religious paintings as imitators of God’s creation, we insert the right word for what performs the final clearing of things, we might be incorporated in the field of the autopoietic structures of worlds. Yes, the idea becomes a machine that constructs art! And this means that the metaphor of the machine could be analogous not only to the idea of God as the creator of the world but above all to what goes beyond the concepts of production (poiesis) and creation (creatio). Also, it goes beyond the idea of God and man-as-artist as his double. In contemporary philosophy and the theory of art, Gilles Deleuze was most likely to talk about this. The machine is somewhat autonomous and, at the same time, self-sufficient. However, its “essence” lies in the calculating-planning-construction of what we call Being. It is not always “there,” rather it should be constructed as a technical assemblage of aesthetic forms and the process of artistic acts of the very idea itself. Thus,

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we shall testify to the following assumptions of LeWitt regarding conceptual art that date from 1962: x conceptual art is neither theoretical nor illustrative of the theory; instead, it might be intuitive because it is involved in all types of mental processes and has no purpose; x conceptual art cannot be necessarily logical, and its ideas are exposed by intuition; x conceptual art is not necessarily related to mathematics, philosophy, or any other discipline of the mind; x conceptual art seeks to engage the mind of the observer more than their eye or emotions; x it is even better if the leading idea has to be strengthened as well as executed. If all that should be compared to other LeWitt’s “manifesto” entitled Sentences on Conceptual Art from the spring of 1969, we can see the essential difference between “the logic of the science of production and the aesthetic experience” (Buchloch 1999, 517). What does this mean? The difference, as we will show, refers to something truly decisive for contemporary art given the two forms of its meta-referential framework that have existed since the beginning of the avant-garde in the 20th century. We shall call the first one the political-ideological, and the second one the religious-aesthetic. In the former, the focus is directed on the social practice of the collective work in the glory of the socialist revolution, and in the latter, attention goes to the individual spiritual turnover. The first one represents the model of desacralizing and democratizing the artist, leading it to participants in the process of creating a new community, while the second seeks to maintain the notion of medieval mysticism in which the artist occurs as an initiator of occult secrecy. We cannot deny that the origin of this controversy is derived from the definition of dadaism within the avant-garde art movement in the first half of the 20th century.8 If conceptual art must be related to the turn in a language that occurred in Wittgenstein and his approach to philosophy as the disenchantment of the “tower in the air” of metaphysics, then it becomes self-evident that, for LeWitt, the term “work” cannot be reduced to utter dematerialization-derealization. Instead, we would be able to talk about the understanding of the artist and art closely related to mysticism and logical positivism. It is paradoxical, therefore, that the concept of the idea as a “machine of creation” might be nothing but a turning point in the form of thinking. So, it does not follow that art seeks to find the path to a change of context and situation. Only the work requires

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the purity of one’s own “structure” and the slenderness of the language on the minimalism of the aesthetic sharing in the work. In this respect, the main features of the “manifestos” of 1969 are as follows (LeWitt 1969, 11-13; Smith 2011): x conceptual artists are more mystical than rationalists, but one cannot rise to the conclusion that logic is therefore non-existent; x rational judgement is repeated rational judgement; x an irrational judgement leads to a new experience; x formal art is essentially rational; and x irrational thinking is to be followed absolutely and logically. Does this mean that contradiction or a necessary substitution of the place leads to the relationship of mysticism and rationality? In any case, for LeWitt, we still notice a certain form of “rootedness” in the work of the mystic. That is why his approach to conceptualism cannot be purified to a paradigmatic way of thinking about things. For if he argues that the art which starts from the machine of an idea might not be an illustration of theory or philosophy or mathematics, then he is still a “believer” in the dogma of ancient religion called art and its work.9 Unlike the modernist cult of the autonomy of the artwork, here we have the transition to “rational mysticism” where things end up being aesthetic objects for artistic purposes like Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, provided their symbolic dematerialization and derealization. The language of the world is changing the “structures” into conceptual tools. They work independently in the same way as Wittgenstein’s “language games,” whereby they change their meanings whenever a new culture and its discursive power to change social relationships should be born. The complaints that exactly what LeWitt thinks about “an idea or concept” seems unclear are not quite solidly grounded in the matter of facts. For LeWitt, this statement signified something else in the irreplaceable materiality of acts such as geometric figures that only affect their objective by parole. The geometric figure is not merely the remainder of the early supremacy of Malevich or the abstract painting of Mondrian. In mixing, the table determines a form that emanates the meaning of ideas. We will add that it is realized as a set of linguistic reductions. The main problem, however, might be what we have previously pointed out. LeWitt’s conceptualism in his romantic defence of “autonomy without work” cannot yet be calculated with an excessive aesthetic share in the artwork itself. That is the reason why this logic takes place as eithereither: the tendency to the minimalism of the picture and its openness to logical positivism with its main solution that the entire history of philosophy

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has been reduced to the question of language in its everyday and ordinary use. It therefore seems appropriate to mention that Osborne distinguishes two paradigmatic approaches to “concept as a machine” in his influential studies of philosophy and conceptual/post-conceptual art: LeWitt is included in the “inclusive or weak conceptualists” (not, of course, as judged by the socalled quality of their “works”), and Joseph Kosuth and the Art & Language group, considered to be analytically strict members of the art division, are called “exclusivists or strong conceptualists” (Osborne 2010, 48-49). It might not be difficult to agree with Osborne’s judgement that, in conceptual art, we are faced not only with the problem of the definition of what art signifies as such but also with why it may still be a necessary instrument for “philosophy” for its justification in the reign of the logic of techno-science since this seems to be the first “dogma” of conceptualism. In all its variants of LeWitt, Kosuth, Kawara, Opalka, and the “Moscow avant-gardists” (Kabakov, etc.), we can see the renunciation of any aesthetics and aestheticization of life, so the question we must pose should be how to speak about the philosophical assumptions of “pure art” in the idea with which it realizes that the aesthetics of the 1960s was coincidental regarding the rise of conceptual art that appeared in the form of cybernetic art and started with Max Bense and Abraham A. Moles, who significantly changed the viewpoints of the relationship between mind and sensitivity in a computerized circuit (Umwelt, environment) (Bense 1998, 429-446; Moles 1971). Those break up with the philosophy of art in the aesthetics of new information-communication technologies and “pure art” after the end of philosophy as promoted by Joseph Kosuth and the philosopher of art Arthur C. Danto, while the latter—in Andy Warhol’s work and pop art with the new understanding of the ready-made that has been seen as the “essence” of art within the development of a complex system of contemporary art— does not seem to have yet been overcome (Danto 1997, 117-134). Indeed, the theoretical advocates of post-conceptualism in its different versions (Osborne vs. Groys) are constantly warning us of the “culture wars” (Kulturkampf) between activism and the re-politicization of conceptualism and the aesthetic experience of the technosphere. We are aware that, in the meantime, it has become quite clear that, as was perfectly demonstrated by Daniel Buren, there is no more reason for the further practical existence of the very notion of art. Those who have lost their faith may still have to shift to another religion. But those who still believe in the ghosts of communication functioning in the production of art as a life-saving action of social participation and denied time are between two equally

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sophisticated “big narratives”—Heidegger’s thoughts about the “event” and Wittgenstein’s thoughts about “language games.” The relationship between conceptual art and philosophy can be described by the metaphor of coexistence starting from pragmatic reasons. After destruction became more than the method of contemporary philosophy, beyond the fundamental notion of contemporary art, there was not much manoeuvring space left to one or the other for its “purposes” and “aims.” The philosopher, aesthetician, and theoretician of modern art Juliane Rebentisch, in her analysis of conceptualism, made an interesting intercession, following the thought of Kosuth, to use the aesthetic experience to understand art regarding the main assumptions by Greenberg about the “pope” of high modernism. We have already seen some authors like Costello, for example, analyze the notion of an idea or concept in art from the disagreement of LeWitt with Greenberg’s reading of Kant’s assumptions in aesthetics. The other side of the same problem is summed up in an attempt to re-evaluate Duchamp’s “aesthetic object.” Inside the museum, it becomes a work of art. The conflict with the tradition of modernism, which is the most radical version of the criticism of aesthetic experience, requires minimum respect for the metaphysical understanding of art history from the position of the work, and its significance to the observer community, as Greenberg articulates (Greenberg 1995), takes place as a critique of the institutional act of art and at the same time as a criticism of the aesthetics (world) of life. When, therefore, Rebentisch speaks of a “teleological paradigm” that sheds blood inside the emptiness in a work of contemporary art, then the conflict between form/materiality and content/meaning determines the close relationship between philosophy and conceptualism (Rebentisch 2013, 139). From this, one can read a different form of apriorism of the philosophy of art. The form is no longer opposed to the content of a piece of work. On the contrary, its materiality is now what it has been in its anti-aesthetic mode of appearing, from Mallarmé’s ideas of the book, Barthes’ text, and finally Kosuth’s “Art as Idea as Idea.” However, it seems to me that the main problem of the relationship between philosophy and conceptual art is that pragmatic interest does not arise from “interest” but from the philosophy that the fundamentals of conceptualism are against aesthetics and its theory is reduced to a “linguistic turn.” The author of that syntagm was Richard Rorty, the American postmodern pragmatist philosopher. In the “first phase” of thought in the 1960s, he intensively dealt with the philosophy of language. To prove the point that this, in turn, might also be the reason why language no longer speaks and art no longer has a permanent place anywhere except the closeness of the “world of art” as a “life” in the vain struggle with the

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“aestheticization” of the world and life, it is necessary to show what Rorty thinks by the expression linguistic turn: I shall mean by ‘linguistic philosophy’ the view that philosophical problems are problems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language or by understanding more about the language we presently use. This view is considered by many of its proponents to be the most important philosophical discovery of our time, and, indeed, of the ages. By its opponents, it is interpreted as a sign of the sickness of our souls, a revolt against reason itself, and a self-deceptive attempt (in Russell’s phrase) to procure by theft what one has failed to gain by honest toil. (Rorty 2010, 62)

When the “revolution” in the philosophy of the 20th century seeks to reduce the turn from the language or thinking on Being to the very narratives “of” being, it seems that there is a reversal of meaning and metaphysics. This may even be true of what, in the 19th century, Nietzsche, Marx, and Kierkegaard were trying to carry forward in the struggle with Hegel’s inheritance. But it must be extremely restrained. The level of this “turn” is proportionate to what it could also encompass and includes nothing less than an attempt to think of Being as a whole and, as such, starts with the language of what is reduced to the “elementary particles” of speaking. When language becomes the condition of the possibility of philosophy as such, then the problem becomes one of thinking what language itself must speak, following Wittgenstein from the late period of his Philosophical Investigations. But what does that mean? The reducibility of philosophy to the “research” of the essence of the language has been related straightforwardly to what Niels Bohr’s quantum physics or neo-avant-garde art from Marcel Duchamp onwards means regarding the “pure” conceptualism of Joseph Kosuth. The problem is only that the language does not speak for itself; it no longer expresses what we still talk about just because it was a “stolen thing” of the techno-genesis, if we are able to paraphrase Rorty’s statement about the self-destructive attempt of reason. Just as the metaphysics of the mind might be reduced to the question of whether God is beyond the logical and analytical way of thinking of language itself, so the “linguistic turn” is reduced to the question of the limits of language as the boundaries of no more world, as Wittgenstein thought in the Tractatus. Instead of the “world,” the only real problem of philosophy, art, and science in the era of the technosphere becomes the “essence” of life. Hence, it seems to me that this is the reason why conceptual and post-conceptual art cannot offer the solution/exit from the vicious circle of calculating-planning-construction as performance-setting-idea in contemporary art within its performanceinstallation-conceptual framework. Language only describes what is

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happening here and now and does not reveal the “essence” of the event. However, language only points to the meanings of a change of condition rather than the stability of Being. The turn is, therefore, at the same time the inner turn of the means of determining the indication of “purpose” (Sagen-Zeigen). In short, when the structure of what we call the “essence” of life is changed, we find ourselves in a situation of construction that comes from the techno-poietic character of techno-science to reality. Such a “turn” requires language’s transformation into a pragmatic guideline for action. Instead of speaking the language, the picture is shown on the workout by visualizing the condition of the event. The consequences are far-reaching, of course, to leave for the concluding consideration of the “post-conceptual condition” of art in the age of the technosphere. What is undoubtedly clear in Rorty’s programmatic article on an introduction to the “linguistic turn” of contemporary philosophy is that language as a pragmatic tool of comprehension takes over the unprecedented primacy in its analysis of “awnings in the air.” Philosophy is represented as a different way of thinking compared to science, and therefore it cannot proceed from assumptions as axioms. All that may be to point the thought to its history from the perspective of language as a problem of thought, no longer as a problem of “the world,” “Being,” “totality,” etc. The same goes for art. By analogy, it is about questioning its idea or concept. For that reason, the philosophical crisis of mind also signifies a criticism of language. So, a critique of the notion of work and action in art at the same time represents a criticism of the history of art as a discipline created on the fragile foundations of the transfer of the notion of “style” to the historical past of the world. If LeWitt’s ideas were more “numerical” and less “linguistic,” as Osborne argues in his analysis of conceptual art (Osborne 2010, 53), it could be only in itself clear that the distinction between “number” and “language” stems from the idea or form of art itself. Of course, art does not equate to mathematics or linguistics as a science of the Being of what is established by the number and what comes to the articulation of the meaning of language from the sign system (the culture). It takes another step beyond the empirical experience of the sense of form to prove the materiality of language as the guiding principle of art design as “life.” But this and such “life” is what lies beyond the aesthetic experience. That is the reason why it carries the inevitable seal of the philosophical creation of the concept as the construction of a new reality. From the “being” of the “linguistic turn,” the aporia of contemporary philosophy was created, and this is simultaneously marked as the mainstream of contemporary art. Namely, if the language in its “purity” of thinking provides a condition for the ability to escape from

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the “self-denial of reason” as philosophy, then such thinking is just like the art of pure tautology. It never applies to reality and the world as an object of intentional consciousness, as imagined by phenomenology. Instead, the turn is revealed by the action or dematerialization/derealization of the world as the subject, and it establishes an autonomous subject of consciousness. The world could hence appear as a “case” of the factuality of language just as art appears through the factual relationship of language to its materialization of the form. The aporia of conceptual art consists in the fact that the form or concept with which the aesthetic experience of the subject matter of the world is trying to be suspended and neutralized is reflected in the text-as-image or, as Kosuth called a series of works from 1966, Art as Idea as Idea. In a series of 121.9 x 121.9 cm wall prints, in his First Investigations dedicated to the words “water,” “meaning,” and “idea,” the artist gives definitions of the words themselves. This was done by performing them from their origin beyond the semantic tradition. After Duchamp, the art is diverted beyond the issues of feeling and sensibility (sensus) in the realm of pure ideas or concepts. However, we cannot imagine the return of art to “itself” without the destruction of the very meaning of the word that art encompasses during its historical development. In this sense, the most significant step from Duchamp’s anti-aesthetic heritage into the open space of the construction is represented in Kosuth’s act that, instead of its morphology (likeness), art promises its function (scheme). At first glance, this is analogous to what “commands” the principle of avant-garde design against the principles of aestheticizing the outside world in Adolf Loos’s statement: “Ornament is a crime.” But things are still in the new context of the information age alongside the end of philosophy, and the art thesis has become far more complex. One of the most guiding parts of Kosuth’s “manifesto” “Art after Philosophy” published in Studio International in 1969, which stands for “pure” conceptual art, discusses how the function of art as an issue was first set up by Duchamp. It was not, therefore, the “invention” of the readymades that was merely a reconciliation of art relations in the face of the challenges of modern industrial society. Much more important seems to be that Duchamp, according to Kosuth’s interpretation, opened the language form of what was already said. Because of that, All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually. […] Artists question the nature of art by presenting new propositions as to art’s nature. (Kosuth 1999, 164)

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In this text, Kosuth has taken Duchamp and his concept of ready-mades as a paradigm for anti-art because this signifies the beginning of the “abstract negation” of art as such. From this vagueness, it might be necessary to move on to establish the “positive” that lies beyond the dialectical synthesis of contradictions and their negations. However, we have the experience of that “pure” conceptuality that goes into the condition of a radical rejection of both aestheticism and every relic of high modernism with its cult of the autonomy of the “work of art.” The paradox is therefore in the “positivity” that necessarily sets up the process of the aestheticization of life. Duchamp has been criticized for creating “aesthetic objects” instead of “works of art.” We would not be challenged in calling the previously quoted statement “the comedy of Kosuth’s argumentation” against aesthetic experience (Seel 2002, 197-202) because he simply assumes it even with the formal overturning of its survival in the photomontage and the “exploration” of language as a condition for the odds of thinking. Especially since it necessarily materializes the form at the time of its derealization. Instead, we can say that the problem in Kosuth’s request for “pure conceptuality” is simply that language no longer says anything but expresses its emptiness of meaning. This is the true aporia of the conceptual art that we are discussing here. But the “linguistic turn” cannot guide the work of a pragmatic language in the age of the technosphere. On the contrary, this would only be possible thanks to what Kosuth denies as well as the whole series of conceptual art, and this only seems to be directly apparent in the “postconceptual condition.” Of course, the “iconic turn” as a pure action of the image without the primacy of language becomes the turning point for further ontological dislocation. What might be the “transcendental form” of conceptual art is nothing else but a picture without the world as an iconoclasm of contemporary art. If we open up the problem precisely in these terms, which may indeed have been performed best of all by Kosuth himself in “Art After Philosophy,” then it might be self-evident that language cannot be a “pure idea” of what it does. Instead, it would be necessary to show why and how language does not speak at all without an image of its conceptuality in a series of works whose materiality straddles word-text-signs-diagrams-holograms. What is the “essence” of Kosuth’s work in the field of acting as a “conceptual condition”? First of all, the objects are insignificant to what art is now and what its purpose and aim is. Their meaning does not come from the objective world. Following the analytical positivism of the philosophy of language by A. J. Ayer, art can only be “what it is”: therefore, it is pure tautology. The “thing” of art is that its idea signifies art-without-work. Contrary to the aesthetic perception that ruled from Kant to Duchamp, now

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we have only the construction, contingency, and singularity of an event that is dematerialized in the derealization of the objective world. If we wanted to compare the Renaissance artist with his contemporary double, we could say that Leonardo da Vinci created works of art and constructed machine tools while Duchamp dis-corporated art and formed the idea of the possibility of transforming the world into ready-mades. Proposition statements become more important than works, and the analytical action of an artist replaces the philosophical activity of contemplating what is happening in language as an idea. It is not, therefore, a question of substitution or substituting what has been a metaphysical aesthetic understanding of art. Language itself, in its indestructibility, is shown through words and texts by taking over the function of demiurge as an idea from conceptual art. The distinction of morphology (figures) and functions (schemes) has a decisive meaning for every further discussion of power and language’s power within “pure” conceptual art. To clarify Kosuth’s “pure” conceptual art programme “after philosophy,” it would be necessary to show what it means when it comes to philosophy even more precisely. Philosophy is assembling from philosophers the art of artists and, regardless of their definition, their activity and productions (logos and poiesis) and the entities/actors of their performance (performare). This division has been historically legitimized in all historical-epochal ways of establishing states, societies, communities, and regimes. Certainly, it is not just a Western “custom” that has spread from Plato to the entire world and only changed the form of its action. Yet, the destruction of philosophy in the 20th century on the fragile foundations of Nietzsche, Marx, and Kierkegaard that began dismantling the metaphysical tradition in two directions—the Heideggerian notion of the event (Ereignis) and the Wittgensteinian “language games” (Sprachspiele)— opened two approaches to the role and function of philosophy, if we can say this in such a “profane” manner. Instead of the desacralization-democratization of art, as Daniel Buren observed, philosophy could only be considered as a thinking of the event in the metaphysical turn with the idea of “the second beginning.” The point might be that thinkers and poets are seeking to reestablish an alternative to the technical understanding of Being as well as the mind based on calculation-planning-construction. Heidegger’s path of thinking, hence, could not have been any “instruction for action.” In any case, the first feature of such thinking lies in preparatory care and an “openness to the secret” of the upcoming future. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, wanted to completely reduce philosophy to the problems of ordinary language. This meant that metaphysics as a whole was termed as the systematic madness of history, and the expected task or function of the

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philosopher was only to find the right kind of therapeutics for the illusions arising in the history of human thought as enlightened and not sophistic. In terms of the question that our fate obligates, especially today when everything is under the dignity of how thought and art belong to this enormous time of unity and astonishment, what philosophy and art even mean and who a true philosopher or authentic artist even is, we cannot get more from the notion of philosophy and art. Both are the activities of the spiritual Being and the undefined. Philosophy and philosophers deal with the “event” and “language games,” and art and artist, if they have not yet fallen under the law of the averageness and banality of everyday life, are on the road to failing their mission, as was the case when the philosopher was faced with the power structure of the technosphere and its main subject/actor—the genetic engineer. How, then, does Kosuth respond to this challenge in his “manifesto” “Art after Philosophy”? Many interpreters of this problem will point out that the affinity between Arthur C. Danto and Kosuth, despite the apparent differences in their approaches, is evidence that conceptual art seeks to permanently eliminate any connection with sensitivity and feelings, which was traditionally a provision of art in that it upgraded aesthetics as a philosophical “science of beauty.” Danto’s starting point for criticizing the aesthetic legalization of what belongs to art as an appropriate and autonomous area is that aesthetic objects such as the ready-mades of Duchamp and Warhol have become artistic works. This does not seem to be different from objects from industrial-style everyday life. Instead of the holy aura of religious relics that gives the art a special meaning, as Benjamin would say, there is a desacralization of the function of usable objects for purposes different from the usefulness of their everyday ordinary “status.” The term used here with extreme significance refers to the trinity of banality, triviality, and ordinary. However, it may already be apparent from this that the main problem of distinguishing the world of art from the world of everyday things created by industrial production is the problem of upgrading in the institution of a museum or gallery. How can it be possible that art and artworks are no longer determined by their “aura” but primarily by their use that has not been derived from cult and religion? Instead, art and its works become the “property” of someone else, and instead of holiness, the main criterion of judgement becomes what Danto calls the “transfiguration of everyday life” in the secularized “world of art.” This linguistic-pragmatic turn in the definition of art and its work starts from the premise that space becomes a condition of the possibility of the change of contents and the form of spiritual necessity goes beyond the materiality of its use. To look at the issue profoundly: instead of the priest,

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it is the curator who now determines what the masses will be, and instead of sanctimony, we are faced with a whole series of “sacred” practices of shock, provocation, and disturbance in the institutional “exhibition” of art. In short, for Danto, it is not the content that determines what art should “be” but rather the seeking of the form in which the daily life of an aesthetic object is transformed into a “work of art.” …everything can become an artwork, which means that if we want to find out what art is, we have to turn from sensible experience to thinking. In short, we need to turn to philosophy. (Danto 1997, 13)

The shift to philosophy, however, is by no means self-explanatory, because it was not a mistake in philosophy itself at its peak in Kant, Hegel, and Schelling to attribute to art the quality of the most general transcendental, represented by beauty (pulchrum), without which none of other four terms—unum, bonum, verum and ens—would have anything divine and sublime within a circle that, miraculously, encompasses just five terms and has so much that feels inhuman. The aesthetics of the avant-garde and constructivism was always philosophical aesthetics and the theory of artistic production. Danto made his notion of philosophy and philosophers out of an analytical-pragmatic turn on the traces of Wittgenstein and the American philosophy of language. This was a crucial step in his notion of the “profane” nature of art after Duchamp and Warhol. Moreover, the relationship between philosophy and art could only be associated with the destruction of their content, not before that act (Danto 1999, 1; 2001, 1-12). But there are two phases to Danto’s path of thinking regarding the philosophy of art: the former is strictly tied to the separation of aesthetics and art (sense and mind), and in the latter, he tries to bring his understanding of Hegel’s “end to art” to determine art after its “end,” as the view that the philosophy of art, and for Danto this always means contemporary art, can only really begin after the “end of art history” often varies. This close reading of “the end of art history” in the work of German scholars of the image science performed by Hans Belting has been noted and awarded with a dedication in Danto’s book Philosophizing Art (Danto 2001). Finally, we can detect the nearness and distance between aesthetics and art, and it seems obvious that this problem somehow came to the very forefront of this discussion about conceptualism and the “essence” of contemporary art. Danto says something very important about this topic: The link between art and aesthetics is a matter of historical contingency rather than a part of an artwork. (Danto 1997, 25)

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What must we conclude from this? Danto’s artistic objects of contemporary art—and paradoxically Warhol’s work Brillo Boxes are surely included here—give a different meaning and status to the aesthetic “dogma” about sensible appearance. In short, there are conceptual creations and concepts. And this makes them different from the definitions of the artwork so far, starting from the setting of philosophical aesthetics and its main notions of beauty and truth. Although it is obvious that there is no significant difference between Danto and Kosuth in their notions of art, the problem is not just that Danto has articulated a paradigm of modern art after Duchamp in Warhol’s pop-art “philosophy.” There is something else that is far more significant. Conceptual art, which is a “pure” way of appearing, is represented by Kosuth in works and philosophical texts as the ideas of art that have been born “after philosophy.” That is the reason why the “manifesto” became an obsolete form of testimony. It is not about publishing something “new” in contemporary art but about the tautology of innovation. So, without contemporary art, it loses its reason to exist furthermore. Instead of the “end” in Danto’s analysis of Hegel’s notorious and misguided statement of the “end of art,” Kosuth assumes the beginning of conceptual art is somewhat more “pragmatic” than the apocalyptically accepted view of the end of a historical-epochal advent of human existence in the world. What is more in that than the propositional structure of the statement of “art as an idea”? From it, everything that is prevented by art vanishes not only by releasing the mortal hugs of aesthetics. In addition, it is necessary to destroy every touch with the sensitivity of objectivity. Does this assemblage not represent the greatest oeuvre of contemporary art in general? Is, then, its profane “essence” to be defined as the conceptual language of dematerialization and derealization within “pure” materiality and the very idea itself? Kosuth was trying to solve the problem on Ayer’s traces in a simple way: by returning to the empire of propositional logic. Hence, art cannot be reduced to the auto-referential relation of a certain context and situation without relation to its own “Being,” which might be art as an idea. This shows that aporia now becomes a condition of the further destruction of materiality itself: from language through text to the image and visualization of worlds. Kosuth, however, cannot cross the threshold of the tautology of art and the “positivism” of language, and hence argues the following; The twentieth century brought in a time which could be called ‘the end of philosophy and the beginning of art.’ I do not mean this, of course, strictly speaking, but rather as the ‘tendency’ of the situation. Certainly linguistic philosophy can be considered the heir to empiricism, but it’s a philosophy

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in one gear. And there is certainly an ‘art condition’ to art preceding Duchamp, but its other functions or reasons-to-be are so pronounced that its ability to function clearly as art limits its art condition so drastically that it’s only minimally art. In no mechanistic sense is there a connection between philosophy’s ‘ending’ and art’s ‘beginning,’ but I don’t find this occurrence entirely coincidental. Though the same reasons may be responsible for both occurrences, the connection is made by me. I bring this all up to analyze art’s function and subsequently its viability. And I do so to enable others to understand the reasoning of my art and, by extension, other artists, as well as to provide a clearer understanding of the term ‘Conceptual art.’ […] What is the function of art, or the nature of art? If we continue our analogy of the forms art takes as being art’s language one can realize then that a work of art is a kind of proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on art. We can then go further and analyze the types of ‘propositions.’ […] Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context—as art—they provide no information whatsoever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that a particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art. Thus, that it is art is true a priori (which is what Judd means when he states that ‘if someone calls it art, it’s art’). (Kosuth 1999, 160 and 165)

I cannot quite agree with Osborne’s suggestion that Kosuth’s text is “one of the few technically discouraged philosophical statements about art” because, in its application of the positivistic conceptualism of Ayer, it defends the formalist idea of the autonomy of art, of course, from the position of “self-referentiality in going to its analytical proposition.” The respondent adds, however, that the problem lies in defending the “individualistic reading of Duchamp’s nominalism” in this text (Osborne 2010, 58). If that were the case, then we could conclude that Kosuth’s “pure” conceptualism just did not quite succeed in applying Ayer’s philosophy of language plus Duchamp’s “nominalism.” Moreover, the tautological definition of art would only be conditional to the cult of high modernism autonomy, which with Greenberg required the aesthetic theory of the “new.” Art cannot be reduced to the application of analytic propositions of language. And, as is mentioned in the above text, it is where Kosuth speaks of the analogies of art “language” in the history of art. In the text that he wrote in 1971 as a radicalization of this assumption about conceptual art, Kosuth said that he started with the attitude of the opposition of the character of art because of an analogy between language and art. So, what I was mindful of is starting to equalize the linguistic and artistic propositions. (Kosuth 1971, 54)

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If, furthermore, this equalization of language and art is proof of the fact that art is just another form of philosophical action, then the very form of action might be the individual (nominalistic) statement of language, which is by no means “plain” or “banal.” That language represents the idea or “essence” of art. That is the reason why art no longer relates to work from the so-called subject of the world of sensitivity. It only speaks the language of “pure” ideas. Consequently, conceptualism in its aporia is far from being a mere analogue of language. The problem that we are dealing with here, which Kosuth brought to light in the most radical way, is that of the odds of the philosophy of art as an art, that is, the possibility of sensitivity to the level of what Kant considered to be the “impossible project” of postulating aesthetics as a contemplative activity of observing beauty by a pattern in nature. This impossible project at the time of the dematerialization and derealization of the real world belongs to “intellectual perception.” Pragmatically, from the horizon of language as an “event,” it should be reduced to the question of the odds of conceptual art-without-work to produce the world as a synthesis of mind and sensitivity. Hence, that is the further reason why we have to talk about what was expected, and what the orthodox critics of “nominalism” and “autonomy” could see is nothing but anti-aesthetics and the spirit of participative communication. No doubt language is no longer spoken because that form of communication becomes unnecessary, just as art does not emanate hidden meanings because it is reduced to its own “empty shell” of rationality. Conceptual art in its “pure” form—and the best example of this anti-aesthetic “aestheticism” is certainly represented in Kosuth’s paradigmatic artwork One and Three Chairs from 1965, which uses the technique of representing one chair in three ways, with a photograph and dictionary definition on the wall behind a real chair (81 x 40 x 51 cm)— opens the question of a world that no longer has anything to say or can create anything “new.” Instead, it constructs the world by experimentally changing the context and the situation in which the already finished objects are located. Contextuality cannot be attributed to Kosuth’s basic intentions. No doubt, it would be naive to think that the change of space was inasmuch decisive to the change of the art’s function. The empirical experience is constantly witnessing the process of musealization in the global age. The paradox lies in that we thereby no longer have an idea for the new. But that is the reason why we have a productive sense of post-history and the transformation of ordinary life into the museum. Everything changes when art can no longer be understood by sensible manifestation and sensitive associations. Returning to the centre of the “mind” involves a reversal of space and time. After all, this was the premise

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of Kant’s first critique (of pure mind), also called “transcendental aesthetics.” The mind might be a feature of the productive character of the subject’s activity. In contrast to the ancient concept, everything is now deployed in the construction of space. The very essence of modern metaphysics has to evolve from the changing function of the subject (Costello 2007, 99-110). However, the subject can no longer be an individual artist of the artistic process. And it also cannot be collective, where our settings build theorists of social participation and engagement for the re-politicizing of art (Bishop 2012). What is left after that dissolution? With the change of the function of the subject, the way of constructing “reality” has also changed in this era of technologically established language rules. When we have all this in mind, it is not difficult to conclude that space is devoid of content, and time is freed from the primordial time of a meaningful set of things (past-present-future). The subject becomes the construct of the mind as the tautology of the whole process. Space without the content of intentional consciousness and time without the whole of events come to the end of the homogeneity of the same dimension of the extended concept of actuality. And what else can be expected from post-conceptual art except to consistently mediate participatory, communicative observation (spectatorship) and be critically inclined to the same solutions that change according to time? Actuality becomes the leading dimension of contemporary art in the “post-conceptual condition” (Osborne 2014, 19-27). If we do not know who becomes the subject of the whole process of the “development” and “progress” of conceptual/postconceptual art, then it might clearly be said that such and such a subject without its substance becomes the event. Therefore, it is nothing other than what Heidegger, in his destruction of traditional ontology in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), named with the German term “das Man” (the impersonal, “the They”). What is it, and who is “das Man” in information to do? That is the “un-subject,” a non-subjective actor on the network event generated by the technosphere whose propositional language does not say anything else except that it executes instructions for the action of “language games.” Art becomes meta-art as politics becomes meta-politics. Only metaphysics loses its reason for survival and is transformed into a meta-stable order of chaos. The platforms of strings are multiplied like viruses in the network without beginning and end, without centres and edges. But the exposed difference, unlike Duchamp’s and Warhol’s ideas, is that here it is no longer the case that all can become art if it can be placed in the museum. Nothing can no longer be art if it has not previously become self-reflective by the cognitive machine of ideas. In that, Sol LeWitt prepared the ground for Kosuth and post-conceptualism. The machine of

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idea works by constructing worlds, and it does not represent them anymore, nor does it represent what is supposed to be. The worst thing in visual arts has always been the assumption that there is a somewhat an-sich reality that needs to be painted and described without the share of the creative illusion of an artist. There has never been any “realism” as an artistic “style.” Anyone who comes to the term “realism” in philosophy and art ruins the mind and the production of the lowest branch. One should remember what Kant meant by this, and the thing immediately became clear. If nothing else, conceptualism is, in Kosuth’s case, the perfect case for Platonism with a pragmatic performance. So, this means that its “truth” lies in the construction of reality and comes from the idea of art “after philosophy.” This “reality” is nothing but the research of “tendencies” in contemporary art. The common one as a kind of substitute for the ontological term “Being” is the era of art, and it becomes conceptualism-without-language despite the intentions of its most prominent promoters. No doubt, after all, these are the basic assumptions of Kosuth’s art “after philosophy.” According to Osborne, these are (1) linguistic reduction, (2) psychology, and (3) the disappearance of the difference between art and the critical activity of the judgement of artistic work. And it might be truly ironic when the theoretician of contemporary art finishes his analysis of “pure” conceptualism with the claim that the author’s death marks the birth of an artist as a self-curator (Osborne 2014, 60). The auto-referencing (without) meaning coming from the world, added to everything already expressed, cannot be different from the art of what Ortega y Gasset called “painting for painters” (Velázquez), “poetry for poets” (Mallarmé) and “physics for physicists” (Bohr). “Art for (conceptual) artists,” in a certain “autistic” way, signifies the idea that requires the function of the machine instead of the illusion of (the figure’s) morphology throughout history. Within its assemblage, the work of art has been served to God, and philosophical aesthetics has determined what is beautiful and sublime in the spiritual world production as the openness of the work itself. If language is no longer spoken, there is nothing left to divide. A clean idea without a trace of aesthetic experience dwells in its figure. But we should remember the final message of Stephen Hawking’s lessons from the latest theory about black holes. Information cannot be completely burned up and evaporated in a nutshell. It stops at the edge of the abyss—in the “horizon of the event.” But what if, instead of the language of the image, it became the tautology of art as such? Does art then overcome its aesthetic boundaries of the material world, or does it, in the visualization of what is beyond the physical laws, draw a completely different art history as the aesthetic construction of the “thing” itself?

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3.3. “Post-conceptual condition”? “Contemporary art is post-conceptual art”—this is Peter Osborne’s basic assumption of theoretical works in recent years. The statement is, at least, apodictic, with almost no restraint on things that are even more questionable. There are, of course, many different philosophical approaches to and significant achievements in this contemporary art. But despite all this, as if we are coming back to the starting point, it might be inevitable that as decisive as figures of modern art such as Malevich and Duchamp were, we are, currently, more agreeable that the most important thoughts of contemporary philosophy are in the writings of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. And what is equally clear, despite the controversy, is that the last big theory of aesthetics represents a sign of contemplating the art of the modern and the avant-garde taken up by Adorno in Aesthetic Theory. If it is argued that contemporary art is “post-conceptual,” it is no longer Kosuth’s tautology anyway. It could (only) be the conviction that we now know exactly what we are talking about when we are talking about (a) contemporaneity and (b) art. It would be easy for philosophy and even science to apply some kind of periodization and division that has more to do with evolutionism than with the true notion of historical time. But we are well aware that the separation of philosophy into modern and contemporary is at least the most dubious procedure of the history of “discipline.” Modern and contemporary sciences? What would that mean in the case of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Max Weber? Is it not self-evident that their achievements in science are very contemporary, although, in the case of Weber as a sociologist, it is clear that society can be conditioned to distinguish between modern and contemporary? In philosophy, as demonstrated by Heidegger, there are historicalepochal characters from antiquity, the new era, and that which is called “contemporaneity.” Anyway, what is termed just that is not ontologically unclear and cannot be established by the self-asserting principle of running Being from the primordial time of the event, so we can be sure of what time we are talking about when we are reading Kant’s works or watching a new dramatic performance of Antigone. In short, what is worthwhile, but not questionable, for the history of art when it comes to terms like modernity, the “new,” and the contemporary cannot be identical to terms like philosophy, natural and social sciences, and the humanities. Modern art cannot be credible without considering the “Being” of its unfoundedness. The problem lies in the fact that the same goes for the notions of modern, modernity, modernism, and the postmodern condition that began to circulate in the second half of the 20th century. The best examples are these

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prefixes in the theory of poststructuralism and postmodernism. In the 1960s, they were crucial for both Osborne and contemporary art and postconceptualism. Without the philosophical explanation or “interpretation” of the condition in which we are dealing with that, it would be not possible to go further into the adventure of depicting and describing what may differ between conceptual and post-conceptual art. In this regard, Osborne seems to have the right to invoke, in inversion, the “essence” of contemporary art in becoming and changing, its constant “advancement” and “development,” even though what these terms mean nowadays is controversial, in the inability to stop in the present time. Rather, in turn, that assumes the substitution of a lawyer in a logical-analytical court. However, it can only be said that “post-conceptual art is contemporary art” (Osborne 2014, 1-2). And, again, in the manner of Hegelian thinking, we are speaking of an “empty form” that is not only related to thinking but to the reality to which it refers. Indeed, Osborne does not say it just like that. That judgement would be inappropriate for defenders of aesthetic (critical) theory on the traces of Adorno in the new framework of relations. Of course, that is something that determined my assumption expounded on here. It is not an empty attitude about something as something, but something as something is completely emptied of any meaning. The reason arises from that whereby the conceptual art of the anti-aesthetic is at work in self-denial of the possibility of action. The idea of conceptual art might not only be against the foundation of aesthetics but also against the metaphysical concept of art as such. Let us take a moment to look at the setting that we have been trying to prove from the beginning of our consideration. Contemporary art really should be either-too—avant-garde and neo-avant-garde (Duchamp and Warhol, Duchamp and LeWitt/Kosuth, and beyond), or constructivism and post-constructivism. But, above all, it is based on the destruction of the idea of history. The time that stands on the ground of this idea signifies an attempt to cancel the “advancement” and “development” of our unconditional trust. Since the destruction of traditional ontology, for Heidegger, was a question of the meanings of a primordial Being as an event, and, for Wittgenstein, this circular go-ahead from the critique of transcendental logic through analytics to the “grammatical turn” on the path to “language games,” then, by contemporary analogy, art destroys the contents of the history of art and, at the same time, the forms of its representation. No one has ever had such a negative attitude about aesthetics as Heidegger. Unlike all thinkers of “modernity,” the concept represents aesthetic points brought out of its origin from the enframing (Gestell) to be technology. Aesthetics is not, therefore, a matter of communication and

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participation in community art. It can be concerned with the loss of the autonomy of artistic work due to its technical establishment as an artificial creation. The observer, therefore, is being provoked to express their own “feelings,” “experiences,” and “appearances.” The result that occurs creates a genuine work of art in contemporaneity that should necessarily be located between two pernicious dangers—aesthetics and political propaganda. We may argue that this could very often be interlinked in modern times where the neoliberal axiomatic of global capitalism has absolute power without restraints. Aesthetics becomes, namely, political kitsch in the society of the spectacle, and political aesthetics becomes propaganda in the marketing of the rational choice of staff and services. When we keep this in mind, then the premise that the aberrations of conceptual art assume a condition of self-destruction of contemporary art is nothing but criticism of Osborne and some theoreticians miscalling the “post-conceptual condition.” Aporias refer to the concepts of contemporaneity, work, language, and image. And what links them together in a single unity of foundation and, consequently, causes the inadequacy of the strict periodization of “contemporary art” should be located in the inability to start from the “horizon of the event.” Of course, this also follows from the inability of the “end” to be a finished story or a rounded entity of something inherent in the idea of the destruction of history as a linear time of “development” and “advancement.” When did the spirit of permanent changes begin, and when it ends, will the innovative era of experimenting remain a mystery to some historians who are superficial in their constant comments about the leading trends and tendencies in current visual arts? They do not see what Paul Virilio called, in the title of one of his provocative books, the “aesthetics of disappearance” (Paiü 2014, 4-16). It still seems entirely tedious to strike a good periodization to listen to the advice of pragmatic experts for “propagation.” What begins in the mark of the Being of historical times is condemned to repetition. So, it might not be surprising that word re in the theoretical reflection of current trends in art that seeks refuge in politics and aesthetics becomes the boredom of the re-politicizing discourse of “resistance” and “subversion” or, in turn, the boredom of the re-aestheticization of every day using the categorization of risen aesthetics regarding the various profiles of impressions, atmospheres, installations, performativities, etc. What, then, is the “post-conceptual condition” of art today? Tautologically, the answer would be that it is contemporary art without its “essence.” So, it constantly actualizes the past just because we are no longer related to the primordial time of the event. Instead, it constructs the “eternal present” (nunc stans) by serving three equally (un)credible words/concepts: post-, neo-, and re-. After, new, and

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repetition round off the time of modernity as a circle without a centre. In the space in the mad circling of signs without meaning, only the starting point is located just there where it all ends with its post-neo-realizations in the other context. We marked this with the quasi-starting point as the beginning of the career of the “aesthetic object.” Anti-art with Duchamp’s signature thus set forth all future passages about original-copy, art, and design. The problem lies in the “post-conceptual condition,” which is more than Duchamp’s destruction of art as an author’s work and less than his vision of the upcoming sign of a different God from the institutional version of monotheistic religions. Like Beuys, Duchamp thus knew that only in dealing with the idea of the beginning and end of the universe, with the ontotheological assemblage of metaphysics, might art survive the death of the aesthetic and absolute rulership of planetary technology in the likeness of the cybernetic technosphere. The question of the immateriality and derealization of the image is thus reduced to the question of the idea of creating an (artistic) world without objects. And, of course, it assumes the question of God and the odds of creativity in the time of “pure” reproductive technique. But surely this is not a matter of law that could be in line with the critical theory of art that Osborne submits. Let us see how and in what way his texts discuss what is in dispute: modernity and art on the one hand, and, on the other, post-conceptualism as a “condition.” For Osborne, current “contemporary art” presupposes the following: (1) idea, problem, fiction, and actuality; (2) the construction/expression of contemporary or post-conceptual art; (3) the fictionalization of artistic authority; and (4) the collectivization of artistic fiction (Osborne 2014, 2-4). All of the above mentioned was shown by The Atlas Group (1999-2005) in its video We can make rain but no one came to ask. Working off that group necessarily requires an interpretative philosophical framework. And since it is not possible to approach conceptualism without philosophy at all, as we have done in the analysis of LeWitt’s and Kosuth’s “settings,” then the framework of comprehension no longer applies to blind people of the meaning of the “work.” Instead, the interpretation becomes the “frame of understanding” of what is born of “being” post-conceptualism. What is more than a vicious cycle of the ideas of the contemporaneity of this fiction as a reality that no longer belongs to being “art” as a praise of the individual’s position? The 1990s were the years of entry into the age of high capitalism. It determines the logic of cybernetics and “rational choice.”

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These are the keywords of the neoliberal axiomatic of corporate entrepreneurship. The paradox is that the demand for the extradition of the state and society on behalf of the sacred individual’s right to freedom was carried out at the end of individualism and the arrival of a total “dividuization.” So, the scattering of a subject is manifested in all areas of life. What was irrefutable and indivisible in the subject’s idea is now palpable and divisive in infinity. Deleuze, in his remarkable Postscript on the Societies of Control, exemplifies the radical consequences of this “social revolution.” The fundamental turn lies in the transition from the discipline of society to the control of society. In the place of “live immediacy” and “production management” now governs posthuman control. With the introduction of the information code, all social relations become technically regulated. The social, cultural, and psychological consequences of this transformation of relations in “high capitalism” can be seen at first glance only if we recall what the corporation and network idea resemble in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial or Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis. We no longer have experience of the “dehumanization of art,” as Ortega y Gasset said in 1925, but rather of the post-humanization of the world as a network of events whose essence lies in the implosion of information. If we translate that concept into ordinary language, we can see the technological cause of losing memory. The fall into “black holes” is oblivious to the need for constantly updating the state of change, leading to a paranoid need to archive the past. One of the widely accepted assumptions about being contemporary art is articulated by Boris Groys. He argues that the main problems, instead of judgements on the quality of the work, are now the documentation of the occurrence of the work itself and its dissemination into the community of the interactive participants or the users of the information (Groys 2008a, 53-65). The idea of art in the “post-conceptual condition” therefore becomes the idea of capital as the “being” of the driving process in the digital age. If that is the case, then it is a strange thing that Osborne does not deal with the performative-conceptual turn of body language as a picture without a world, as Joseph Beuys thought of art. Everything has its reasons. But even if the reasons are so firmly aligned in the logical grid of thinking with the choice of the key subjects/actors of conceptualism/post-conceptualism, there are always edges and fetters between works and events. In the core of ideas like art, niches and rhizomes are utterly crushed. Nothing can only be “rational” or “irrational.” There should always be the possibility for which medieval theology found the exception: that the third exists (tertium datur). While the narrative of the “post-conceptual condition” of contemporary art, as Osborne considers it, has been most interesting, it might be that the

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timing of moving the problem analysis comes from its appearance in constant transformations. On the traces of the aesthetic theory of Adorno and Benjamin, which means the Frankfurt School’s critical theory of society, the fundamental proposition is the following: The contemporary is a utopian idea, with both negative and positive aspects. (Osborne 2014, 4)

The alliance of the speculative tradition of romanticism and the criticism of the modernist cult of autonomy of artwork does not directly lead to postconceptualism being reduced to social participation, the engagement of artists in the community, and the repetition of the content of art. That is the way carried out by Pierre Bourdieu, the neo-Marxist cultural sociologist. The struggle against the institutions of art has the character of a cultural struggle (Kulturkampf) against the spectres of capital itself and its “slyness of reason,” so much so that success in the development of modern societies and neoliberal capitalism symbolizes the visual spectacle of culture. The “high-tech” architecture of capitalism and museums of contemporary art are the best examples of this mirror of success (Rebentisch 2013, 165-179). However, there could still be some of the socio-political construction that removes the control of theory as the last instance of the struggle against the “aestheticization of life.” And that could be just what, in the Foucauldian manner, we might call the hetero-chronotropic in modernity. This term refers to the overlapping of different times with their special cultural codes. Yet contemporary art is so flowing and passable in its fragility of quasifoundation that it can endure the shock of corporeal turn, the provocation of gender/sex/racial minorities, and experiments with the inhumane in the state of cybernetic singularity. So much is here at stake, and even more is in suspense and neutralizing the very rules of the game. What are the notions of the time-scale analytics with which the global order deals with contemporary art? Does it lose the ability to be a utopian idea rather than take on the “empty homogeneity” of the globalization age (Jameson 2005)? Osborne seeks to define the concept of contemporaneity by starting with identity and differences in the various points regarding the concept of globalization. It should be a historical time as opposed to the globalized economy of the network and the “homogeneous time” in which capitalism has taken its special merits and competence. For this, it is necessary to refer to Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s studies of art. The reason lies in what determines the major difference concerning conceptual art draws attention to the fact that the time that globalization produces directly stems from spatial expansion (of capital). From that follows the main apathy of contemporary art. Indeed, contemporaneity is, therefore, derived from the

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temporal nature of globalization as the “differing temporality of the new.” The aporia of contemporaneity is that its “empty homogeneity” appears in the necessity of global contemporaneity, and that is the ultimate contradiction of what Heidegger and Benjamin still thought of as the “coming” of the past like “secrets.” In general, the structure of this contemporaneity on which Osborne insists is actually “empty time” of the same with small cultural differences. What is true of the idea of Europe is signified in the same way in its spread to China and India. All this has crucial consequences for post-conceptual art, and it could happen in the media production of events and critical participation within high-tech capitalism. The “post-conceptual condition” of contemporary art represents a double coding: (a) art practices converge with each others’ files thanks to new communication technologies; and (b) the genealogy of art is reduced to “retrospective and reflexive totalization” (Adorno), followed by the main tradition of philosophical art thinking since Hegel and romanticism that Osborne calls speculative. Where can this be inferred from? Nothing but the “speculative” understanding of art as the idea of the total work that synthesizes the cognitive and sensitive or perceptual capacities of the human body joins this post-conceptual condition of “homogeneous and empty temporality.” The ultimate setting is, at least, the one that points to the convergence and mutual conditioning of “historical transformations in the ontology of the artistic work and social conditions of the space of art … which contemporary art makes possible” (Osborne 2014, 19-27). Due to this, trans-categorical practices appear in the process of delimitation. The conceptual space for “generic” art is opened exactly on those fundamentals by the disappearance of previous space related to the sovereignty of the nation-state concept that has been dominated in modern times. In the strict tone of Adorno, Osborne concludes that the dialectical complex of contemporary art is composed of “aesthetic, conceptual and distributive aspects of the work” (Osborne 2014, 10). All of that can be termed as the “post-conceptual condition” of contemporary art. Six of its major features are: (1) a necessary but insufficient conceptuality; the art is constituted by its concepts concerning non-art;

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(2) a necessary but insufficient aesthetic dimension, which includes some kind of materialization as aesthetic spatial-temporal phenomena; (3) the anti-aesthetic use of aesthetic materials; (4) the extension of infinity to the possible material of art (transcategory); this could be the meaning of “post-media”; (5) the radically distributive, irreducibly relational unity of the individual work of art through the totality of its tangible achievements (the ontology of materialization); and (6) the historically violent transformation of the boundaries of this unity (Osborne 2014, 11). However, it must be evident that we are faced with materialization and trans-categoricality. No doubt, this means that the change is articulated throughout the media, which becomes an artistic event-without-work. Suddenly, aesthetically, no matter how insufficient it could be, it returns to the game again in the form of anti-aesthetics. All that was not quite clear in previous times, and many media theorists, especially Baudrillard, radicalized their approach to the thing itself when they spoke of “the ecstasy of communication” in a completely different way than many orthodox neoMarxist theorists of activism and participation in contemporary art do nowadays. Once forever: art in the “post-conceptual condition” is nothing but the realized cybernetic potential of interactive communication. Therefore, the condition of its ability cannot be a formal “idea,” but rather a technically conditioned space-time of local and global connectivity. Without the technosphere, contemporary art would remain an “empty story” of the utopia of communication, as was extensively theorized in the 1960s. But then this word has more than some kind of fervour, just like the first Christians in the catacombs who were burning in their religious thought, hoping that, in the beyond of immanence, they would share the bliss of the resurrected Christ. Words become baubles when the utopian horizon of time is wasted. Without it, however, this time “now” and this space “here” lose their meaning to prepare the way for the upcoming event. The postconceptual condition, as well as art, becomes the result of the media circuit of the global order of power in the networked world. Anything can only be decoded by the media since the media at the time of the technosphere becomes more than the information medium. As the interaction between the world and life, the media are no longer the constructions of the “things” that lie beyond the imaging of the apparatus. No doubt, medially with an event taking place as a self-absorbed process and utopias of human belonging to the dematerialization of sensibility. The circuit is thus finally closed.

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What else would there be and could contemporary art constantly prove itself to be “revolutionary,” “libertine,” “subversive in style,” “critically participative,” “solidarity-in-community,” and all other features of repoliticization if it could already solve the question of God in the early avantgarde by searching for the anthroposophical, theosophical, and mystical dimensions of the tertium organum in Duchamp and Malevich, and later in Beuys? The answer is as follows. The history of art always ends in the new museums. There is no need for the subsequent cynicism of those who come to terms with delay. It is just that way. The rebellion against and for the preservation of order, change, and endurance arises rolled in the very “essence” of modernity. So, the struggle against the end of art in the age of the pseudo-synthesis of “cultural needs” for excess and experiment is to be understood only by the other side of its necessary aestheticism. Ultimately, however, there is nothing left except the technosphere and its strings. It would be ridiculous to underestimate the role of conceptualism in this process of changing and transforming the condition. But it seems that leaving the axiom of contemporary art is the first assumption of the destruction of what is truly an “impossible mission” of art in dealing with being a technology today. It is the abandonment of the use of any future prefixes and suffixes like post-, neo-, and re-. What comes after what is already highly significant in renewal and repetition can no longer be “the same” or “different” as in Deleuze’s ontology of becoming (devenir). What will come from the upcoming era of media constructions of reality will represent the absence of any event other than progress in restoring-repeating the destruction of thought and language. It is not a matter of art being better and “newer” than old art, as we already saw with regard to Malevich’s Suprematism Manifesto. The problem lies in the fact that the essence of the age can only be opened through the renewal-repetition of change. Rather, it stabilizes itself as entropy and chaos in a new change to the ultimate eruption. The idea of a “post-conceptual condition” in that sense is undoubtedly important for an attempt to illuminate what contemporary art “nowadays” spectacularly shows in the trinity performance-setup-ideas. Hence, the body must be placed in the space of public presentation-re-presentation as an aesthetic object. And it is precisely in this meaning that we should see the limit of any future discussion of the relationship between body-object-life. Why? First of all, because the body loses its original relationship with life, becoming a cyborg creature/thing. In the order of objects, its place has been determined as one to serve and function. Nothing else seems more important to the process of transforming information into energy. If Duchamp only wanted to discourage the “aesthetic sky” by throwing the gloves into the

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face, we have just a pretty glimpse of it today. Because there is no other face than the techno-genesis and the aestheticization of life. Behind this, there is only biopolitics and a call for the ultimate defence of the dignity of life. So, contemporary art is far more than the aspiration for the (de)materialization and (de)realization of an idea beyond the contradictions of the work and the event. It is at least an experiment with life. How could we understand that matter of fact? Life was understood by Nietzsche as an aesthetic way of being human. Art as a “will for power” is represented as the highest reach of knowledge and, at the same time, the odds of transforming this life “here” and “now” into the dance above the abyss start from the singularity of existence. From that point of view, it becomes clear why art opens up a new “horizon of the event” to philosophy. Without aesthetic construction, life would be reduced to the brave survivors of power in the landscapes of technical destruction. What remains of that “life” is not pronounced today by artists, to paraphrase Friedrich Hölderlin. Instead, it is only a techno-engineering construction of “artificial life” (A-life). What remains might only increase memory. Therefore, history no longer exists as there is no art-like idea. In an accelerating rhythm of ever-transforming life, all that could just be a temporary “state of affairs.” And the “monster that we call a beauty” may not be eternal. But without it, life no longer makes sense. Only what might be significant lies in the struggle against indifference towards beauty. Anything else belongs to the noisy and transient “novelties,” to the empire of banality, and to the gift of emptiness. Thinking of the elementary destruction of things means the world is being made open again and opening the possibility of falling into the “black holes” of events without a horizon. It seems to be an almost impossible mission for the historical performance of art. But does philosophy not have something much more than any reality and necessity that presupposes the possibility of things being set differently to preserve the “essence” from the beginning of its creation to the end of its survival? In the end, is art not close to philosophy on just quite another, different path to the same end? Well, language encompasses the world and marks its borders. Apart from language itself, everything exists in the mind. But apart from what makes thinking a joy and a pleasure, it is that the world is and that this and such a world in its thousands of transformations is always the same thing: that is what Nietzsche, in his mythopoetic way, denoted as the eternal ring of becoming. What remains of philosophy if art becomes a concept? Have we come to see how, in the end, both thinking and production (logos and poiesis) lose their “essence” in a collision with the historically powerful negation of Being that takes on the responsibility of the event itself as the construction

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of worlds? The concept signifies information, and the information starting from logos and poiesis finishes in the nothingness of the infinite vertigo of the technosphere. Téchne represents the last word of philosophy and art in an indefatigable age without history—téchne as tertium datur beyond language and the picture.

NOTES

1

The term that Jonas is developing must have the following criteria: (a) a resemblance to something else; (b) the intentional content of displaying something; (c) representationality in the sense that the painted subject represents something different, such as inequality with the original template, then the degree of Neolithic development on the template as in the expression of the image and, finally, the emancipation of the word leading to the ideographic letter; (d) visibility; and (e) the establishment of space in between spheres of meaning and what is displayed in the picture. Therefore, it should be obvious that Jonas’ theory of the image seeks to phenomenologically combine the notion of the sign, the reflection, and the image in such a way that it might be historically shown how the homo pictor contains the ontological aspect of the human towards the world, its openness, and its contingency (Jonas 1961: 161-176; Schirra and Hombach 2010: 145-178). 2 The slots are complemented by an interesting discussion on the compensatory character of art in the society of the spectacle as a “social system.” The profanation of Hegel’s “end of art” setting goes so far as to use the sociological concepts of the theory of the system of Niklas Luhmann in this discourse, as the modern system of necessity rests upon the “art” of interaction between the system and the environment (the world of life and its spontaneity in organizing individual networks of activities) in the capitalist exchange rate. Art becomes an “asylum” for artists and a huge store of the memory of cultures, without which the entire drive will lose the awareness of its power in relation to earlier epochs. When Sloterdijk talks about the “anthropological-utopian potential” of contemporary art, that faith does not refer to the whole of its practices, but to the “reserve of experience” necessary for the undisturbed functioning of its legacy in the form of current reinterpretations of history. What should be particularly emphasized here is that the setting for the compensatory character of contemporary art has been directly taken from the German aesthetics of Odo Marquard (Marquard 2003: 113-121; Sloterdijk 2007, 465-466). 3 In the process of signification or semiosis, Morris keeps in mind a situation in which there is a transmission of the third that is not immediately effective in causal terms. In that process of determination of something like something (Being?), the signs are acting as the markers; the activity is directly interpreted by the interpreter; and what is indirectly generated in this process as an expanded “thing” is determined by the designation. Each sign, therefore, is designed or marked but might not be immediately used. There are semantic and syntactic dimensions of the marking process and what is directly related to the designate—the pragmatic dimension. Hence the general science of signs, and in that frame of the image are three

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components: semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. Finally, the sign always refers to another sign, even when in a material and visual sense the sign should be identical, such as the symbol of the cross in the Christian faith and the non-gothic cross as a sign of a decadent subcultural group. Morris distinguishes between aesthetic signs within which exist the difference between iconic and non-iconic signs, and the main feature of the aesthetic meaning of the artwork is that it might be immanent itself, which means that it has own value. Aesthetics as a pragmatics of the meaning(s) of the image becomes a discipline for an adequate information age when there are different textual cultures within a community, and they must be understood first and foremost pragmatically and therefore as having mutual trust between them. What would be the main problem for the theory of communication in politics today is precisely that matter—the pragmatic determination of the meaning of consensus in culturally plural societies (Morris 1992: 356-357). 4 Dieter Mersch uses the term “performative archaeology” and places it in meta-art with reference to dadaism and surrealism. But what is central to the performanceoriented avant-garde refers to the “concept” of anti-art. Its intention is to deny and challenge the modern concept of the autonomy of aesthetic taste and the idea of an artwork within a self-imposed institution of art in civil society. The dadaism project thus has an “ethical” dimension. According to Mersch, for the first time, a clearly marked field of uncertainty and a contingency as a chaos empire emerge. From that, the symbolic use of art results from the technique of overcoming the aesthetic horizons of civil society in capitalism. The position of the author as a subject or a “producer,” as expressed by Benjamin in his famous study, is the negation of authorship. Thus, Duchamp’s concept of the aesthetic object as a ready-made paradoxically enters the body into contemporary art as “dead nature” in the form of collage, assemblage, and montage (Mersch 2002: 251-260). 5 An analysis of the notion of modernity in three autonomous areas requires a distinction in the designation of this circuit. The modern refers to the scientific and technical changes in the manner of life production (industrialism and reproduction); modernity refers to a new way of constituting (civil) society in the principle of separation from the (political) state; and modernism is the aesthetic and artistic configuration of the styles, movements, and tendencies that dominated from the middle of the 19th century until the appearance of the “historical avant-garde” in the 1910s and 1920s (Paiü 2021) 6 In their interpretation of the controversy between Bürger’s attitude and those of American art historians Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloch, and Rosalind Krauss, the author claims that it is in common with the various movements of the “historical avant-garde” and what distinguishes them from high modernism in that they represent “a constructive and innovative response to the challenges of technical reproduction.” In this way, the discussion introduces the fundamental question of the difference between original and reproduction, authorship and copy, which, thanks to scientific-technical innovations, completely changed the mode of production in 20th-century capitalism. Avant-garde movements have creatively appropriated new techniques but also, and at the same time, have impressed the new aesthetic relationship with reproductive techniques. This primarily relates to the role

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of photography and film and the technique of transferring images and text in mass media such as prints and posters. 7 Dieter Mersch shows that the “essence” of contemporary art is the realization of the dadaism programme, which means the performative-conceptual legacy of the historical avant-garde since there are three basic categories that develop a complex way of understanding what is going on and not what it is. These are: (a) destruction, (b) self-referentiality, and (c) paradox. Is it not unusual that these are concepts that, in extremely paradoxical ways, connect Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s attempts to transform, change, and shape the entire metaphysical tradition of the West into philosophy and art (Mersch 2002: 200-211)? 8 “Dadaism is a movement of ‘mystical’ rather than political—in spite of the public political manifestation and the rigour of its actions” (Mersch 2010, 16). 9 In the aforementioned interview with Georges Boudaille for Les Lettres Française, Daniel Buren summed up the antinomian relationship of artists and works within the context of contemporary art in a radical way. When he says that the role of artists has become “reactionary” today because there is no longer the background of development and progress in art itself as an idea of historical events, what remains is stagnating. Thus, the path from Cézanne to cubism, Mondrian, Pollock, and Nauman can no longer be repeated as an effect of the post-prehistoric “déjà vu.” And that means that it is not possible for the very concept of art to be maintained on its old foundations. When it became obsolete, it was no longer a matter of rejecting the aesthetic justification for art from some overt philosophical orientation. What arises is the total loss of faith in art. It no longer opens new worlds of meaning; they may only be constructed from other tools on the return journey, such as techno-sciences. Buren, indeed, very clearly shows what the consequence of this loss of faith in art is. Mental prisoners like him believed in Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire as it was presented in his images. After losing faith in art and the notion of work, what remains is reduced to the fact that all that remained after the disappearance was the Mont Sainte-Victoire. “Art destroys things. But it doesn’t mean that you are aware of it” (Boudaille 1999, 73).

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INDEX OF NAMES

Adorno, W. Theodor, 29-32, 36, 77, 91, 94-95, 97-102, 106, 111112, 116, 123, 126, 129, 161162, 166-167 Agamben, Giorgio, 83, 114 Alberro, Alexander, 127, 140 Alcinous, 7 Antigone, 161 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 118, 129, 136, 140 Arendt, Hannah, 120 Arias, Santa, 87 Aristotle, 13, 96, Arp, Hans, 78, 90 Artaud, Antonin, 7, 18, 57, 81, 99, 114 Assman, Aleida, 110 Athena, 7 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 5, Austin, John, Langshaw, 49 Avila, St. Teresa, 12 Ayer, A, J., 152, 156-157 Bacon, Francis, 81 Badiou, Alain, 82, 138 Bailey, Kenneth, 16 Ball, Hugo, 75, 78-79, 88, 108, 116 Balzac, Honore de, 102 Barthes, Rolland, 20, 38, 42, 46-47, 51-52, 56, 59, 128, 141, 148 Bataille, Georges, 5, 27, 110, 125 Baudelaire, Charles, 89, 97, 101 Baudrillard, Jean, 42, 70, 168 Baumgarten, Alexander, 13 Beckett, Samuel, 47 Beller, Jonathan, 58 Belting, Hans, 8, 23, 50, 67-68, 155

Benjamin, Walter, 10, 24, 56-57, 58, 89, 103, 105, 107-108, 110-111, 154, 166-167, 174 Bense, Max, 17, 147 Berg, Hubert van der, 93 Bergson, Henri, 51, 133 Berkeley, George, 6 Beuys, Joseph, X, 18, 33, 86, 97, 114, 116, 164-165, 169 Biro, Matthew, 13, 90 Bishop, Claire, 159 Blanchot, Maurice, 77 Boehm, Gottfried, 68 Bohr, Niels, 45, 160, 161 Boudaille, Georges, 138-139, 175 Bourdieu, Pierre, 166 Breton, André, 114 Buchloh, Benjamin, 91, 111-112, 114, 142, 145, 174 Buren, Daniel, 113-114, 118, 138139, 141, 147, 153, 175 Bürger, Christa, 100 Bürger, Peter, 91-92, 94-107, 109114, 174 Cage, John, 37, 39, 47 Calinescu, Matei, 94 Camus, Albert, 82 Cassirer, Ernst, 67 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 100 Cézanne, Paul, 4, 8, 53, 83, 135, 175 de Chirico, Giorgio, 81 Claura, Michel, 131 Costello, Diarmuid, 140, 143, 144, 148, 159 Cunningham, David, 107 Cusanus, Nicolaus, 134

Art and the Technosphere: The Platforms of Strings Danto, Arthur, 11, 23, 84-85, 121122, 147, 154, 155-156 Debord, Guy, 128, 141 Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 10, 18, 36, 51, 57, 63-65, 77, 84, 87, 110, 114115, 144, 165, 169 Derrida, Jacques, X, 9, 38, 52, 61, 64, 69, 110, 114, 121 Descartes, René, 10, 37, 142 Dionysius, 83 Döblin, Alfred, 80, 89, 111 Duchamp, Marcel, XI, 8, 19, 64, 74, 81, 83, 97-100, 104, 107-109, 112-114, 116, 118-119, 122, 125, 131, 135-136, 138-139, 148-149, 151-157, 159, 161162, 164, 169, 174 Durrell, Lawrence, 29 Duve, Thierry de, 109, 119 Echkart, Meister, 12 Eco, Umberto, 24, 37, 39-42, 46-48, 51, 53, 61, 63 Einstein, Albert, 133, 161 Eisenstein, Sergei, 57 Esseintes, des, 74 Feyerabend, Paul, 41 Flusser, Vilém, 19, 35-36, 42, 48, 111, Foster, Hal, 91, 110-115, 174 Foucault, Michel, 48, 87, 89, 110, 114 Freeman, Joel, 79, 88 Freud, Sigmund, 115 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 3-4, 13, 14, 17, 31, 45, 62 Gasset, y Ortega, José, 1, 50, 59, 160 Gehlen, Arnold, 23 GianettI, Claudia, 61, 82 Goethe, Johann, Wolfgang, 14 van Gogh, Vincent, 21 Goodchild, Philip, 64 Grau, Oliver, 69 Greco, El, 73 Greenberg, Clement, 113, 143, 148, 157

187

Gris, Juan, 118, 142 Groys, Boris, 56, 63, 79, 103, 108, 127-130, 140, 147, 165 Guattari, Felix, 2, 87, Gutenberg, Johannes, 67 Habermas, Jürgen, 93, 100-101, 105, Hansen, Mark, 22 Harlan, Volker, 34 Hausmann, Raoul, 90 Hawking, Stephen, 132-135, 160 Hegel, Georg, Wilhelm, Friedrich, 6, 12, 31-35, 57, 61, 63, 85, 88, 93-94, 96, 100-101, 105-107, 124, 136, 140, 149, 155-156, 162 Heidegger, Martin, 5-7, 12, 16-19, 30-32, 36, 40, 47, 59, 61, 63-64, 71-72, 76-77, 87-88, 90, 104105, 107, 120-121, 125, 133136, 148, 153, 159, 161-162, 166-167, 175 Heisenberg, Werner, 8 Heracles, 66 Heraclitus, 28 Hombach, Klaus-Sachs, 36, 173 Hobbes, Thomas, 43 Hoelderlin, Friedrich, 77, 170 d'Holbach, Baron, 14 Hopkins, David, 111 Hörl, Erich, 126 Husserl, Edmund, 71 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 74 Jameson,Fredric, 166 Janco, Marcel, 78 Jimenez, Marc, 118, 125 John, St. of Cross, 12 Jonas, Hans, 18, 25, 173 Joyce, James, 37-39 Jung, Carl, Gustav, 53 Kabakow, Ilya, 135, 147 Kac, Eduardo, 82 Kafka, Franz, 39, 80, 89, 165 Kandinski, Vasilly, 66, 71 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 14, 19, 28, 36, 39, 46, 48-49, 51, 67, 95, 100-

188

Index of Names

102, 124, 140, 144, 148, 152, 155, 158, 159-161 Kawara, On, 130, 147 Kierkegaard, Soeren, 36, 40, 136, 149, 153 Kittler, Friedrich, 21, 36 Klee, Paul, 48-49, 53, 83, 135 Klein, Yves, 99, 113-114, 118 Kosuth, Joseph, 118, 130, 135-138, 147-149, 151-162, 164 Krahl, Christoph, 78 Krauss, Rosalind, 79, 91, 108-109, 111-112, 174 Lacan, Jacques, 38, 53, 81, 114, 135 Lang, Fritz, 112, 165 Le Corbusier, 64 Lefort, Claude, 52 Leonardo, da Vinci, 67, 153 Leibniz, Gottfried, Wilhelm, 12, 55, 142-143 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 18, 51 LeWitt, Sol, 118, 130-131, 138, 142-148, 150, 159, 162, 164 Loos, Adolf, 151 Lüdke, Martin W., 94, Luhmann, Niklas, 173 Lütticken, Sven, 135 Lyotard, Jean-François, 14, 64, 93, 110, 121 Magritte, René, 111 Malevich, Kazimir, XI, 22, 64, 70, 76, 97, 109, 112, 131, 136, 146, 161, 169 Mallarmé, Stephan, 7, 37, 38-39, 47, 97, 142, 148, 160 Manovich, Lev, 68 Marcuse, Herbert, 36, 101, 105, Marquard, Otto, 4, 173 Marx, Karl, 88, 93-94, 96, 102, 106107, 136, 149, 153 Massumi, Brian, 135 McLuhan, Marshall, 42, 88 Mersch, Dieter, 15, 32, 59-60, 126, 174-175 Mitchell. W.J., 19 Moles, Abraham, 48, 147

Mondrian, Piet, 146, 175 Moses, 72 Morris, Charles, William, 43, 48, 50-51, 173-174 Munch, Edvard, 81 Münker, Stefan, 22, 68, Murphy, Richard, 94 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 85-86 Naumann, Bruce, 175 Newton, Isaac, 44 Nietzsche, Wilhelm, Friedrich, 18, 32, 36, 77, 95, 97, 116, 136, 149, 153, 170 Odysseus, 7 Oedipus, 4 Opalka, Roman, 147 Osborne, Peter, 93, 108, 127, 131, 136-138, 147, 150, 157, 159162, 164-168 Paiü, Žarko, 8, 21-23, 36, 54, 86, 89, 103, 121-122, 141, 163, 174 Pascal, Blaise, 4 Pericles, 3 Pessoa, Fernando, 73 Picabia, Francis, 108, 114 Picasso, Pablo, 53, 118, 142 Pierce, Charles, Sanders, 43, 51 Plato, 3, 5, 13, 49, 61, 133, 153 Pollock, Jacson, 175 Pound, Ezra, 101 Purgar, Krešimir, 83 Rancière, Jacques, 8, 34, 43, 80, 84, 130, 138 Rauschenberg, Robert, 142 Rebentisch, Juliane, 32, 85, 148, 166 Reichle, Ingeborg, 82 Rieger, Stefan, 50 Riemann, Bernhard, 87 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 75 Rimbaud, Arthur, 11, 97 Rockfill, Gabriel, 100 Rodchenko, Alexander, 114 Roesler, Alexander, 22, 68 Rorty, Richard, 51, 53, 148-150 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 82

Art and the Technosphere: The Platforms of Strings Saussure, de Ferdinand, 38 Schalk, Helge, 37 Schelling, Friedrich, Wilhelm, Joseph, 8, 116, 155 Schiller, Friedrich, 100, 102 Schirra, Jörg, RJ, 173 Schönberg, Arnold, 64 Schwitters, Kurt, 90 Sebald, W.G., 56 Seel, Martin, 152 Shakespeare, William, 14 Siegelaub, Seth, 130, 131, Simondon, Gilbert, 83 Silesius, Angelus, 12 Sloterdijk, Peter, 20, 25, 79, 100, 173 Smith, Terry, 146 Sophocles, 44 Spinoza, Baruch, 64, 142-143 Stiegler, Bernard, 49 Stockhausen, Ludwig, 39, 47 Stoichita, Victor, 12 Tzara, Tristan, 78

189

Ujeviü, Tin, 65 Velázquez, Diego, 1, 8, 50, 55, 59, 70, 160 Vidokle, Anton, 122 Virilio, Paul, 163 Warf, Barney, 87 Warhol, Andy, 99, 142, 146-147, 155-156, 159, 162 Weber, Max, 100, 161 Weibel, Peter, 25, 28 Wenders, Wim, 69 Welsch, Wolfgang, 64, 113, 123 Whitehead, Alfred, 51 Wiesing, Lambert, 70 Wilde, Oscar, 101 Wirth, Uwe, 43 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 62, 120-121, 130, 132-133, 135-139, 144146, 149, 153, 155, 161-162, 175 Ziarek, Krzysztof, 92, 107-108, Zima, Peter, 14