e-flux journal issue 61:
Politics of Shine, Issue One
with Tom Holert, Sven Lütticken, Brian Kuan Wood,
Tavi Meraud, Adrian Rifkin, Natascha Sadr Haghighian,
and Timotheus Vermeulen
www.e-flux.com/issues/61-january-2015
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Shine and shininess are characteristic of surface effects, of glamour and spectacle, of bling-bling contingency, of ephemeral novelty, value added, and disposable fascination. Shine is what seizes upon affect as its primary carrier to mobilize attention. Shine could be the paradoxically material base of an optical economy typically (mis)understood as being purely cognitive or immaterial. Even at an art fair or Hollywood gala, surface effects are widely deployed while being categorically condemned to the domain of inconsequential superficiality, for shine is also persistently unwilling to compromise speed for substance, surface for depth, attractiveness for soul, effect for content, projection for stasis, inflationary wealth, success, and splendor for reality.
Shine and luster tend to block the view of things, while at the same time inviting fetishistic adherence. The architectures of finance and global management pretend transparency while offering glistening opacity. Likewise the impression management of art world glitz acts through the highly refined shininess of contemporary signature white cube buildings, containing tons of gleaming video equipment for costly multi-screen installations. Who’s doing the polishing of high-end Poggenpohl kitchens (when the masters are at work) or outside at the skyscraper’s window, in the limo garage or at the hairdresser’s boutique?
Indeed, it is the particular materiality of declarative shininess that we now recognize as a clear sign of paradox, as it is so often used to mediate decay and divert attention away from oncoming collapse. And as we now start to recognize how lighting effects constitute a primary function of what can only exist through mechanisms and metaphorologies of visibility, recognition, refraction, and dissemination, we might start to ask whether there is another side to shine altogether. Does shine not also serve a core planetary function of giving life to our planet, through the solar capital of the sun? We cannot afford to be idealistic here, as the sun’s light and heat do not always disclose and reveal. They cannot be geo-engineered through cool roofings at will, since they’re equally cruel and unstable. The sun’s radiance also subtracts life—it produces famine, drought, and night.
Edited together with Tom Holert, this first of a two-part issue of e-flux journal, though determined to focus on shine, surfaces, and light in all their aesthetic peculiarity and contemporary relevance, aims less at adding to the (still very slim) cultural history of the phenomenon than to rendering palpable the cross-sections of power and aesthetics in the material and immaterial discourses of shine—past, present, and future.
Although the physical behavior of smooth surfaces, the gloss of lips or the shiny coat of car metal, the hard body sheen of porn or the blaze of solar panels all continue to be experienced in the offline world of skin, glass, and steel, it would seem that shine is now predominantly produced and obtained on-screen, as a digitally calculated mimicry of (sun-)light refractions and deflections, as mediated radiance. Yet, this virtual availability of shine and gloss, of Glanz and éclat, is deceptive in its awesome ability to simultaneously neglect and conflate the material, the political and economic, infrastructure of the production of today’s fetish-artifacts.
Do we need a different discourse of light and exuberance, a counter radiance that outshines the sun that shines on the privileged, an insurgent technology of brilliance in the service of those who are doomed to do the rubbing? Perhaps this light could already be today’s version of what Guy Debord described in his 1978 In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni:
“A society which was already tottering, but which was not yet aware of this because the old rules were still respected everywhere else, had momentarily left the field open for that ever-present but usually repressed sector of society: the incorrigible riffraff; the salt of the earth; people quite sincerely ready to set the world on fire just to make it shine.”
—Tom Holert, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
In this issue:
Tom Holert—The Sunshine State
How much sun is needed to maintain or improve psychic and physical health? What are the repercussions of ripples in global energy markets on local labor politics? To what extent is the distribution of wealth related to the distribution of light? Questions of this order are placed in the folds of the narrative and the imagery of Dardenne’s film, and they keep haunting the western-style tale of the heroine searching for a reason among her coworkers and within herself to stay alive in the desert of the solar-industrial real.
Natascha Sadr Haghighian—Disco Parallax
The English word “pig” refers to the animal raised and sold by farmers, while the French-derived word “pork” refers to the edible meat from the pig. The gap between these two words relays the class dimensions of the animal, its producers, and its consumers. The dual use of wording marks the distance between those who produce and those who consume: the prosperous Norman conquerors who could afford to eat porque from the pig raised by the underprivileged Saxon farmers. Japanese philosopher and literary critic Kojin Karatani refers to this very gap as the parallax dimension—a phenomenon that appears when we are confronted with irreducible antimonies and the opposed positions they produce.
Tavi Meraud—Iridescence, Intimacies
When speaking of intimates, there is an emphasis on the proximal, in the emphatic, spatial sense of the word—those who are close to one another, those who are close to me. It describes—in a phrase—the logics of proximity. This superficial closeness, literally proximity understood through the metrics of how much of my private sphere comes into contact with that of another, is rather a foil for an even deeper sense of spatiality, that of interiority.
Timotheus Vermeulen—The New “Depthiness”
But what the line from Girls hints at is that, just maybe, we are seeing the first stage in another history of another kind of deepening, one whose empirical reality lies above the surface even if its performative register floats just below it: depthiness.
Adrian Rifkin—Yes, That’s What I think
Stricken almost speechless, my friend managed to say only, “Hello, big, isn’t it?” To which the tutor replied, “Yes, and shiny too,” and passed on without more than a glance at the supposed masterpiece. Was it a judgment on my friend’s simplemindedness, or maybe on his incapacity even to have registered the shine? Or on the painting that was thus relegated to some storeroom of Adornian kitsch, even disqualified and misattributed, precisely on account of its shine, its over-varnish? A Caravaggio, even?
Sven Lütticken—Shine and Schein
In his early essay on Wagner, written during the Nazi period, Adorno characterized Wagner’s music theatre as “phantasmagoric” precisely because of its basis in commodity fetishism. In trying to create a seamless illusion and a dream-like atmosphere, Wagner prefigured later, more technologically advanced manifestations of the culture industry, while his tableaux on stage recalled contemporaneous displays of consumer goods. In the phantasmagoria, “wird der ästhetische Schein vom Charakter der Ware ergriffen.” Wagner’s operas are dependent on the concealment of labor, a prerequisite of commodity fetishism.
Brian Kuan Wood—Is it Heavy or Is it Light?
Under a regime of visibility that usurps older notions of substance, what figures can we use to affirm its surface effects, to understand its refractive powers, to crack open its hidden energies and make its calculus work for us and not against us? How has this new superficiality realized and flipped the politics of spectacle described by Debord? And why should we take a closer look at the sun?
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