with contributions by Franco Berardi Bifo,
Jodi Dean, Jalal Toufic, Mark Beasley, and Michael Baers
www.e-flux.com/issues/39-november-2012
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When Hurricane Sandy tore through the Eastern US on the eve of the presidential elections, it seemed that a certain fatigue had found a strange mirror image in the libidinal force of completely absurd weather patterns, that a tired resignation to a lack of options in the political sphere had actually mutated into an apocalyptic revolution in the atmosphere. It was as if a negative omen had come with the prospect that the next global insurgency could arrive by way of non-human forces altogether—totally external to markets, but also to people.
In this issue, we return to an essay by Jodi Dean from 2009, before the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, in which the political theorist warns against the deep pitfalls of taking democracy for granted as the absolute horizon of leftist political thought. For Franco “Bifo” Berardi in this issue, it is through the deployment of language as poetry that we can resist capture. Bifo has often traced the current sense of doom back further, to a death of the future that accompanied the economic stagnation of the 1970s. For Bifo, crucially, the future in the mercantile West was always pegged to economic growth and the promise of increasing wealth. But even in the case of state-controlled economies in the East whose future prosperity was pegged to popular social and economic ideology, the future arrives as a kind of absolute currency. It is poetry that reactivates another sensation of time in the singular vibration of the voice.
Here we can also look to the resilience and sublime integrity of the works of Michael Asher (1943–2012), who passed away in October. In this issue, Michael Baers remembers Asher as his mentor at CalArts and though a final, unfinished work on the adaptive re-use of industrial factories by contemporary art institutions. Also in this issue, Mark Beasley reflects on Mike Kelly’s music projects as a search to recapture a popular voice offensive to the piety of tradition, but also to the formatting of the popular. And Jalal Toufic looks back to find a form of life that surpasses the terms of death in the story of Christ: “What is impossible for Jesus Christ as the life? Is it to “heal the sick” and “raise the dead” (Matthew 10:8)? No, such actions are possible for a God who is the life; therefore they are not miracles for him. What is impossible for Jesus Christ, the life, is to die … “
—Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
In this issue:
Franco Berardi Bifo—Emancipation of the Sign: Poetry and Finance During the Twentieth Century
Money and language have something in common: they are nothing and yet they move everything. They are nothing but symbols, conventions, flatus vocis, but they have the power to persuade human beings to act, to work, and to transform physical things.
Jodi Dean—Democracy: A Knot of Hope and Despair
Why does the left continue to appeal to democracy? Is democracy, as Slavoj Žižek asks, the ultimate horizon of political thought? Is reiterating the ideological message of communicative capitalism the best the left can do in the face of neoliberal hegemony and the collapse of socialism? Is democracy the fall back position for left politics, all that is left of our wounded and diminished political aspirations? Or does the hope its evocation promises mark instead a pervasive left despair? Is this as good as it gets?
Jalal Toufic—The Resurrected Brother of Mary and Martha: A Human Who Resurrected God!
Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, ‘Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.’ … ‘Leave her alone,’ Jesus replied. ‘It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial’” (John 12:1–7).
Mark Beasley—Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence: The Voice in Mike Kelley’s Music
It is in the satiric verse and corrupting voice, in the use of text and performance to attack governing institutions, that we find Mike Kelley, the contemporary Goliard, stinking up the institutions—on occasion the Church itself (Judson Church Horse Dance, 2009)—with his version of art, music, and voice as ritual form.
Michael Baers—Michael Asher (1943–2012): Parting Words and Unfinished Work
The matter of Michael Asher’s final, unrealized project is of more than peripheral importance, and I have described my experience at length to ensure that the concept of the project is marked with his imprimatur. I view it as the culmination of his work on the intersection between site, class, ideology, and history—his interest in understanding the real as a negotiation between the historical and structural basis of reality, arrived at through “epistemological procedures of which the archive is the cipher and research the mode.”
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