Speculative Aesthetics, Mackay et al.

Review and notes on Speculative Aesthetics, edited by Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell, and James Trafford.

Introduction

• Speculative realism - perhaps moves away from the primacy of intuition adn interpretation, and therefore is anti-aesthetic?
• SR art: levels the artistic witha nonartistic universe.
• Artwork is a thing, in existence with other things.
• SR realizes art after philosophy: vacuously general concepts can transform things - stuff - into an aesthetically and philosophically significant experience.
• Speculative aesthetics must refuse to create additional materials. It must focus on the structure.
• Aesthesophobia’
• Contemporary political art seeks both to subvert the political status quo while itself being a product of these very forces.
• ‘Undo the imag eot undo power’
• Speculation treads between naive realism and ruinous ontological speculation.
• Contemporary art erodes the agency of the image.
• ‘Real abstractions’
• Speculative aesthetics rethinks cognition in the collective.

Art and it’s ‘Science’, Amanda Beech

Thesis: Art deals with representations and mediations. It transforms and shapes power. A ‘scientific’ turn in art attempts to define itself by non-normative difference, which of course is already normative; it attempts to make its representation invisible by adhering to an empirical real which itself is no less fragile than the very conceptions of art it rails against. Let the mediation of art by fully visible rather than obscured, and let us not hide under the guise of scientism to wish ourselves into free art.

• What is art’s standard claim to the political? Art simultaneously marks its own images as the derivations of a real free from the laws of the restricted real,
• Contradictions: the image becomes universal and prelinguistic, yet images are powerful because they are abstract and slippery. At the same time, images are weak: they can only gesture towards the potential of emancipation; the image always abides by the normativity from which it is created.
  • Althusser says something similar but different on art - art cannot produce knowledge, but it can allow us to feel. It is not a science.
• The criticism of art as incapable of being separated from the conditions which create it itself constructs the stable dominance of said power systems.
• When art is interpreted as representational, it masks and hinders contact with reality itself. “Art is never anything but always something”; images are weak but special.
• Art is not normative, but it must struggle to normalize itself.
• Institutional Critique - suggests art is in crisis and will stay in crisis (like capital); it is a crisis of existence and the real.
• How can art escape these ‘dead ends’? It can try to claim itself as a sort of science. But this has resulted in yet another form of self-hatred - the resentment of the mediating image.
• Scientism is ‘edgy & cool’; it plays with irony, dispassion, dispoession, and so on. It persistently searches for difference and multiplicity, and therefore is ‘naively constrianed within its own universalizing rule of infinitudal pluralism’. Radicalism for radicalism becomes unradical by the ontological virtue of radicalism.
• To become ‘scientific’, the work must abstract itself from itself and become invisible by freeing itself from its own representation.
• If representational politics is vacated, what we have left is the appearance of an open multidimensional space. Yet what we really have is a ‘fake’ faith in empiricism: the empirical is advocated as the real path to a more real real.
• The escape of art into science is inherent to art’s critical nature.
• What we lose is a theory of aesthetics which allows us to consider how images participate in the structure of the real.
• The methods of scientism which claim to work towards freedom in fact result in crisis of contradiction.
• Politics demands the existence of Althusser.
• Art itself is put at risk: why do we produce what we call art if science is sufficient to equate the image with the real?
• What is invested in the category of ‘art’? Why does ‘art’ matter, if it does at all?
• Art cannot apologize for the fact that it is an image, it mediates meaning, and therefore mediates power.
• Guilt-laden critique of art: if art is good, it must repress and deny itself, like a good little Freudian subject.
• (How does artwork always already inhabit this science?)
• We may not ask what images mean, but rather inquire about the mechanics of images as force - a deconstructive analysis.
• We need to understand the image again as a critical-political project.