SMART CASUAL ACADEMIC

Meat Diet (of Worms)

I have been trying to figure out how to adjust to an emergent society in which the idea of a moral imperative is scoffed at; while any deviant (i.e. impolite) behaviour is reason for excommunication (even as lip-service is paid to inclusion); and the foundational elusiveness of the qualities of beauty and truth is posited as reason for their utter abandonment. History repeats itself, leaving out most of the good parts.

This is a painting of Martin Luther, Joshua Citarella and a lot of meat. One academic at the advent of the printing press, the other the internet.

"Another Reformation Meat Diet (of Worms): The Princes (Looks/Trade-off)", MMXXIII. Acrylic and (found) enamel on (found) board.

THE ABANDONMENT OF AMBIGUITY

I died for Beauty - but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room -

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied -
"And I - for Truth - Themself are One -
We Brethren are",  He said -

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night —
We talked between the Rooms -
Until the Moss had reached our lips -
And covered up  - Our names –

-Emily Dickinson, 448.

I recently read a book edited from lectures given by Michel Foucault called Fearless Speech,[1] that was quite satisfying groundwork for a post-Christian morality (grounded in pre-Christian morality). It basically revolves around the Greek word “parrhesia”, which Foucault explains thus: “In parrhesia the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.” [2] The Greeks understood that where this practise was not tolerated there was tyranny. I guess I believed that art was supposed to tell the truth in all its ambiguity, which, in hindsight has made me a bit infamous, commercial galleries have long seemed to be spooked by my politics even if my paintings seem to be quite widely coveted (even by directors of said galleries). It was only this week that I sold my first painting, this painting, in fact, to someone who does not live in Australia. It is some comfort to think that the risk-aversion and repression inherent to the system here is simply a manifestation of parochialism, but I am not so sure anymore, (we seem to have made the rest of the world as stupid as us by exporting our superior means for quelling a “larrikin” population).

I have never been a real believer in the capacity of the internet to connect, or that I would ever be anything more than an obscure malcontent, but in the case of the whole series of paintings that made up “Retrosynthesis (Ekphrasis): The Cognitive Elite”, basically most of the subjects found out about the work, and others offered to pass on the work to other subjects that they knew (to my great horror, lol). It took less than 24 hours for Joshua Citarella to find this painting and follow me on Instagram which was quite exciting, to be honest. Shortly after, a very smart and cool younger man of my acquaintance messaged me with a cryptic statement to the effect of “Internet daddy sharing your work is the contemporary equivalent of an E-Flux article”… which I was confused by… until he explained that Citarella had shared the painting in his stories (as much as the title made it quite clear that I was lightly trolling him).

REVOLUTIONARY (BOWEL) MOVEMENTS

PART ONE:

I FINALLY SAW MARTIN LUTHER’S TOILET!

Martin Luther was famously constipated, he wrote a lot about his bowel movements (to the extent that the recent discovery of his toilet was historically exciting): "I am like a ripe stool, and the world is a gigantic anus, and so we are about to let go of each other", (this is what he told his wife shortly before his death). This kind of discourse in early modern Europe was not actually that unusual, shit was everywhere and people were quite open to talking about it (and making lots of fantastically puerile jokes about it).[3] I seem to recall that the 95 theses (that ushered in the Reformation) were written almost entirely on the aforementioned famous toilet, being relayed by an academic in the field during my undergraduate degree in Arts (i.e. The Humanities) at the University of Sydney. I am convinced that this wonderful lecturer explained to us that Luther’s constipation was due to a poor diet, which for the rich of the time was necessarily high in meat. I can find no reference to this fact now. In fact, the closest mention I can find to his diet when he was writing the 95 theses is an argument to the contrary, as his diet as a monk would have been fairly modest (the fugitive Luther of the Junker Jorg Lucas Cranach the elder paintings is decidedly more trim than the face that we have come to know as launching a thousand new religions). In the Early Modern period (quite in contrast to the health-obsessed gerontocracy of our times) gaining weight was a sign of prosperity and the wealthy ate diets high in meat and low in fibre (causing constipation), while the peasants suffered from a lack of nutrition combined with high-fibre diets making them notorious for the loudness and fluidity of their bowel movements. Before joining the church, Luther had studied Philosophy (though he was ambivalent about the idea of reason being above god) and so upon taking vows, came to teach Theology at Wittenberg University from 1508 (the 95 theses were posted in 1517). Wittenberg was a “University town” much as we would understand it today, where most of the people were employed in service to the university (it was also the University where the Danish Prince that was to be the model for Hamlet was said to have studied).

As I have written about in previous posts, Luther’s close relationship with artist Lucas Cranach the elder (and his printing press) allowed for the proliferation of his image and ideology to the extent of this (fundamentally business-friendly form of) new faith. It could be argued that through this propaganda campaign (and close association with the artists) Luther sold-out one of the central doctrines of Reformist thought: iconoclasm. Since the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, art had been something commissioned and enjoyed particularly by well-healed church leaders, whose magnificent monuments and cathedrals impressed on the peasantry the righteousness of their religion. Luther’s theses were originally included in a letter to the clergy protesting the sale of indulgences that were to help fund St Peter’s Basilica in Rome (home of the Sistine Chapel, whose magnificent ceiling painted by Michaelangelo, was completed in 1512, though his “Last Judgement”, also in the Sistine Chapel, was not finished until 1541).[4] The gesture of the “nailing the theses to the church door”, has served as an image of the force of the rebellion (though this is apparently contested), the reality of the alleged door was pointed out to me when art historian (and local) Ulrike Brinkmann (generously) gave me a tour of Wittenberg, explaining that this side door (if I understood correctly) was simply  a church door/noticeboard (though the posting was well-timed on the feast day of all Hallows).[5] (Since seeing the church side door in question, I like to imagine the 95 theses alongside notices appealing for the return of lost cats or advertising babysitting services.[6])

Brinkmann and I in front of Luther’s toilet.

Reformers protested against wealth being channelled towards these extravagant works of the Roman church, and art was a great example of the worldly decadence of church leaders. The defence of art as somehow absolved from perceived corruption, was a decisive intervention into the conception of art: in this new religion, art had now to be instrumentalised to prove itself in service to a regime of spiritual perfection. (This may well be the reason for so many stupid paintings demonstrating the evils of woman as temptress that came out of the Cranach studio, particularly under Lucas Cranach the Younger.) While proponents of art and philosophy/theology had a long history of antagonism (Plato argued that all poets be banished from his ideal Republic), it seems as this new imposition on art, which could no longer simply claim moral superiority in representing biblical stories, is probably the origin of our contemporary predicament of utterly didactic and instrumentalised artwork (and that which claims to be apolitical is the most instrumentalised of all).

I met another art historian (also called Ulrike) at the Grunewald Hunting Lodge in the Grunewald Forest (the oldest building in Berlin), which belonged to one of Cranach’s patrons, and, because there was no one else there to see it she took me through the collection. We laughed as she showed me the panels of the Temptation of the Christ that she wagered were probably the only works on that subject which demonstrated Jesus being kicked in the balls by the Romans. These paintings were memes. The thing to remember is that, as paintings, they weren’t actually very good (quite in contrast to the incredible work of another Reformist painter of the same time, Albrecht Dürer, who perhaps mercifully never made it to Wittenberg to meet with Luther).[7] The importance of images in conveying meaning to a largely illiterate public would mean that the austerity once aspired to in early Reformist thought would not be achieved until several hundred years later in the new democratic movement of the Bauhaus, which (in no way coincidentally) also began in Saxony. The Reformists were the first liberals. The art that these new rulers were to patronise would appeal to their sense of moral superiority (however easily demonstrated as pure hypocrisy in light of their hoarding of wealth). It was upon siding with the Princes against the clergy, and importantly, that other group: the peasantry, that Luther and his associates in the Reformation found themselves wealthy progenitors of a new world order, in which religion espoused the virtue of work and those who did not rise to prominence could be seen to be lacking in moral fibre (if you will forgive the pun).

PART TWO: ENTREPRENEURS OF THE SELF

Joshua Citarella is an artist and internet theorist who, like his friend and collaborator artist/theorist Brad Troemel, has sought to leave behind poorly remunerated and insecure casual university tutoring work in to deliver “content” via the “platforms” of the tech monopolies. While Troemel appears to make something of a living uploading video lectures (at a rate of about one every two months), Citarella publishes writing and a podcast via a Substack as well as content through the shared Discord server/blog “Do Not Research”, which he founded (and which recently published their second book, now boasting almost 200 contributors). (One can only imagine the attention garnered on the internet only reinforces positions against the “performance indicator” driven universities.)(At 100 readers per blog post surely I will find myself financially stable compared to my less influential peers in no time, lol.) Citarella has spent much of his recent career mapping political trends via the internet, which he has dubbed “edeologies”. He faithfully tracks these internet trends and memes (patiently speaking with younger people who are politically active) as representations of a new reality lived online. Young interviewees describe their political standpoints through niche vectors that are almost absurdist in their specificity: “Archeo-Futurist Irish Nationalism”, “Democratic Confederalism”. In Citarella’s case attempts to “deradicalise” right-wing youth lead to the adoption of methods taken straight from “in-cel” (Involuntary Celibate) culture as advice on how to become one of the handsome and privileged men that women allegedly exclusively desire (and whom the incels opine against): the “Chads”.  The particular diet regime referred to in the painting was suggested by a student heckling me in a lecture, when I was complaining about attractiveness being necessary to fostering interest in art and theory; the student informed me that actually Citarella had been following the “all meat diet” recommends of some of the far right (most famously, Jordan Peterson)(I think it may have made Citarella quite sick). He said that it was an artwork. We questioned if it was an artwork. The student said “muscles are weird”; I agreed: “muscles are weird” …and went back to the lecture. Citarella’s success in following diets and related physicial augmentation have even lead to his promotion of a ($5USD) “diet plan” in addition to the aforementioned cultural theory (I have not purchased the diet/exercise plan but imagine its content is probably much less extreme than where it appears to have begun). Interesting experiments in unlocated art school came to be promoted by a strong jawline and “shredding” (the practice of working out and extreme calorie limitation in order to obtain an “optimised” physique), all of which seemed perfectly tailored to the online hustle of drumming up business for this school via tech platforms such as Instagram, and yet there is something to the performance of the whole thing that really is quite interesting as an artwork.

There is certainly nothing wrong with taking care of one’s physique and the obvious health benefits (particularly mental health benefits) that ensue, nonetheless I personally found the turn toward gym selfies quite alarming, and feel I owe an emotional history to truly explicate this painting. Citarella had emerged to speak about concerns basically all those I know in Academia had raised about the challenges of working inside a university system that seems to be falling down around our ears. I had been seriously discussing the creation of an alternative art school, predominately with two straight male friends of mine, and we had been quite enthused by Citarella’s attempts to do something similar over the internet (though we were all agreed on the importance of organising in-person). Soon, I was having a good time forwarding the “gym selfies” to these two very serious intellectuals with captions like “ooh, look, another thirst trap”, though crying on the inside, after months of being otherwise unaccountably surrounded by successful liberal male creatives whose conversation revolved mostly around their 22km runs. With studio press shots as well as (stupid) candid group photos becoming the currency for promotion in the arts, the willingness to conform to the same standards in order to promote an “alternative” seemed at best dubious, a phenomenon best described as “capitalist realism”, by Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke et al, long before Citarella’s favourite, Mark Fisher. (I was trying to ignore the way that the information was presented in favour of the substance information, until Citarella’s recent appearance in the New York Times style section, shot in his studio, given their amazing track record for disinformation over the Palestinian genocide, all of which just made me sad.) Fisher’s work on the K-Punk blog as well as his books and lectures (still available over YouTube) present a lot of difficult information in a way that is entertaining and accessible; I can remember when I first came across his writing that depression was a natural reaction to the circumstances under late capitalism and how much it helped me to process a lot of grief.[8] Fisher was to take his own life at the age of 48 in 2017. It was a palpable loss, though it was hardly to be the first or last casualty of the devaluation of existence in favour of profit.

Dominant ideologies proliferated through cloud-based “platforms” (operated by billionaires as digital fiefdoms) feed into a the narrative of the “entrepreneur-of-the-self” as viable alternative to traditional media and educational models. In an “attention economy”[9] the most viable means of self-promotion was via the “selfie”, as self-portraits were much more likely to be shared by algorithms than images of artworks, or even images of food (“food selfies”). And yet there is really nothing new in promoting the work of thinkers with reformist tendencies through their image, except that now they apparently have to be “sexy”. Citarella’s podcasts/servers/blogs provide a welcome antidote to the impoverishment of “left” discourse through the universities, traditional media and the art market, all of which now work to uphold a liberal consensus that in no way examines the reality of growing income inequality, un/under-employment and widespread precarity, but at the same time, it is hard to shake the feeling of complicity when it comes to methodology. Perhaps Marshall McLuhan was really right that “the medium is the message”.

PART THREE: QUALIFICATIONS

Amazingly, in Luther’s time, universities basically functioned without an administrative or professional class (and incredibly, without reference to any Key Performance Indicators). Subjects such as Philosophy and History were seen as vital to society’s function. In fact, for over 2000 years of wildly discontinuous history, universities basically consisted of academics/philosophers turning up and sharing their knowledge with each other and their pupils, weighing in on arguments seemingly as old as time, which will never be resolved. But since the 1970s universities have found the presence of middle-managers to be far more essential than all learning.[10] One of the changes fought against in actions by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), against The University of Sydney last year was against taking the paid research component out of the contracts of permanent academics (which is what enables the production of all of the knowledge that is then related to the students). More than half of its academic workforce last year were employed casually (a workforce that have necessarily studied for upwards of five years to be in their roles and are generally expert in their field). According to the annals of the twentieth century, art and the university have set the stage for radical political change (not dissimilar to the Wittenberg of the early 15^th century). But both art and the university have been crippled by “management”. Since the 1970s the contemporary corporate university has privileged shareholders and senior management over academics and educational outcomes, lately threatening the survival of a largely casualised staff-base (the university is the most casualised industry in Australia). While at the same time and across the globe, roles in administration have skyrocketed. At Yale University, for example, there has been a 44.7% rise in the number of administrative staff since 2003.[11] At the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts, widespread industrial action over the wage theft and extremes of casualisation (anecdotally) seems to have resulted in a decrease in availability of casual tutoring work, where permanent staff now seem to be lumbered with inordinately heavy workloads (whether or not their contracts promise a balance of research, administration and teaching).[12] Meanwhile, new senior “Education-focused” positions are being advertised, with undoubtedly some hope of attracting candidates from further afield, with a salary ranging from $100,000 to $192,000 AUD annually (by my reckoning, enough to have paid between two and five casuals to subsist, the way things were). The situation at Sydney College of the Arts looks set to mirror the gerontocracy, where it is unlikely that 18 year olds starting out will be taught by anyone under the age of 45, or anyone who shares their class interests, permanently entrenching the notion of the superiority of trickle-down art. Obviously, some academics will be sensitive to this reality, but the system is structured that academics should seek promotion over a broadening of their knowledge, essentially disincentivising solidarity (mirroring the operations of art institutions). Meanwhile, the same permanent staff are vetted by independent business interests, given training in areas of sensitivity, such as anti-racism, apparently in some cases even outsourced to organisations owned by Blackrock, which inherently requires the simultaneous acquiescing to a worldview that suppresses knowledge of the existence of 2/3 of humanity, the world’s poorest, populations which are inherently racialised. What is “taught” is complicity and “lip service”.

In an interview with Jacobin, academic Catherine Liu[13] speaks about a friend who told her in the 1990s that every cab driver in Moscow had read more than any Western PhD, and that now all we have done is to have made the world as stupid as we are. I cannot speak to what Liu means specifically, and yet have the same feeling, that no one reads where they can spend their time trying to impress their exceptional managerial skills to the effect of a program of utter infantilisation, where pedagogical practice takes precedence as a metric above all forms of actual higher learning. In terms of the teaching of contemporary art, any kind of historical awareness was long ago jettisoned as failing to be “radical” enough to comport itself as liberal propaganda (just look at all the wealthy artists/gallerists that self-characterise as “rock’n’roll” online). What this results in is the accessibility and education imperative where in both museums and tertiary institutions art becomes limited to strategies of teaching adults that closely resemble early childhood education (while institutions would also seem to be cutting apparently successful education programs both of children and towards disability inclusion, for example). I like to give everyone a break sometimes and try to advocate for joy in the classroom as a strategy for resistance (as much as that might be counter to this carefully constructed persona), but this does not extend to abandoning all critical awareness. There is a lot of joy to be found in trolling the system (or even people that one basically admires). Unfortunately, what I am writing about is in no way limited to the admittedly rather silly field of the Fine Arts. An academic in a business-related field explained to me a practice within institutions called something to the effect of “the great man problem” where course materials must be streamlined so that they can carry on seamlessly from academic to academic, that nothing that is the specific knowledge of any particularly brilliant and idiosyncratic thinker can any longer be taught as it may not be reproducible. This academic had been casual for a decade and had seen their work writing courses “streamlined” by permanent members of staff who couldn’t understand it let alone teach it. The way the system works, failing to conform to readily streamlined content is a surefire way to be sidelined, though advances within any discipline are very rarely a result of the reproduction of knowledge, even if that is the main lifeblood of the university. In other cases, work produced by casual staff is appropriated by the university for courses that they are no longer allocated teaching work in. Anything that one produces in aid of teaching and uploads to university systems is then the intellectual property of the university, though Casual Academics are highly unlikely to have been paid to write the courses that we do write (sometimes simply as necessary to the proliferation of our own research). The alternative to doing the work, that we that teach all believe that the students deserve, is to complain and risk these courses being standardised, thereby contributing to the redundancy of the whole system, because knowledge, particularly that particular to artists, is known and imparted by individuals in a way that no system could hope to emulate. I have worked as a lecturer and been paid as a tutor, and if the whispers are true, the new “education focused” curricula, where allotted course materials are taught, will mean that casual tutors will be paid as “demonstrators” as they are already in the Architecture school, which will mean being paid a third of their current wage.

I wrote in Undergrad that “intellectual property would be made redundant by its rightful possession”, in some characteristically cynical and optimistic turn against the colonisation already apparent to me then in the name (and law) of “intellectual property”... A couple of years back, Brian Fuata sent me a voice message detailing how it transpired that any of his performances done in the context of a major exhibition, for which he was paid the princely sum of $1500, were simultaneously the intellectual property of the institution, and the photos and documentation belonged to the institution such that he could not sell them in order to make any money out of his work. Apparently, this is not necessarily stated in the contract, (though it was suggested and thereby enforced by the curator, who did not agree with the practice.) The policing of the self and other was now so complete that we knew that we had no right to our own ideas.

As much as there has always been some resistance to the weirdos that we might prefer to read, within an establishment that is, after all, set up to proliferate knowledge even before advancing it, it has become unsafe to the point of utter penury to exist on the margins of the academy. Reading the “Preface to the English Edition” to Pierre Bourdieu’s “Homo Academicus” at the beginning of my PhD  I found myself laughing at Bourdieu’s self-described Derridean pun, when he explained to an American student that all of the French theorists he so admired (that form so much of the academic discipline of Fine Art) were all quite marginal within the academy, basically the marginalia.[14] Marginalia from medieval manuscripts having become some oddly fashionable craze in the flattened-out time of the internet, it all seemed vaguely appropriate. Obscurantist takes on the history of knowledge hardly provide immediate benefits in the area of job-training, or instrumentalisation as regards an overarching politic, and yet underpin some nascent strategy of communication. I seem to recall Citarella characterising the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as “poetry for art students”, saying that it is not the kind of thing that one hears quoted on the picket line (or the like). I like to read portions of Eileen Myles’ “An American Poem” to classes, because I think that poetry is actually a pretty effective political instrument (don’t get me started on the efficacy of the work of one Rabbie Burns). Before I began art school I studied Philosophy in a heavily Germanophilic department where no one even spoke of the French. When I was introduced to artspeak I was immediately irritated by the meaninglessness and the tendency to misquote theory (I am basically agreed with Troemel and Citarella that it is terrible and needs to be stopped). There was a year in which the Helen Lempriere (now the NSW Travelling Arts Fellowship) prize had two works about Albert Camus’ “On Sysiphus”, both simply rolling things up and down hill, and I remember thinking “Existentialism is philosophy now?” as the stupider work of the two, that of Lauren Brincat, took out first place. Camus was, of course, a well-known apologist for colonialism and ongoing inequality in Algeria (where he was born),[15] which, maybe a few months ago seemed like a terrible oversight, but now seems about right for the art establishment. Art works and artist statements should definitely revolve around things that they mean (and can comprehend), But I feel like a more political act, in the current context, than even to write plain anti-capitalist texts (which are generally absorbed into the machine) is to advocate for the contemplation of texts that aren’t immediately useful. To paraphrase Audre Lorde, we really have to question whether the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house. I hadn’t fully appreciated that those weird French academics (Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari) whose works I also admired may not have found a way to practise had they been working today, until literally the other day. But this is the problem with looking at any history as a monolith, either advancing or destroying the work of “great men”: ultimately it is just a form of censorship.

THEORY AS PERFORMANCE/PERFORMANCE AS THEORY

Citarella’s most effective art work may be in an almost overproduced series of videos for DIS [16] made with Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman (who also made the excellent short film “Szygy” about the history of the “leveraged buyout” among other things).[17] In the series of short videos, Citarella’s rugged good looks are put to use as he explains the effects of the tech giants on artistic production, and possible cooperative models for alternative societies (memorably in makeup and lighting referencing “Blade Runner 2046”). It is very effective work, basically intuiting the performativity of the white male intellectual, or indeed any public intellectual, while making a lot of salient points about the deleterious effects of platform capitalism. The rarification of the white male “genius” still plagues an industry, that is afterall reliant on the wealth of the few, who would tend to prefer to be reflected in the artists that they patronise. White men invented identity politics and it is oddly satisfying to see white men reduced to performing it (as “others” have so long been forced to) and not as the bearers of objective reason. At the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair (Syd Con) last year, I was pretty amused to find myself in what seemed like a massive sausage fest of the otherwise fantastically un-self-aware, where conservative paintings were all the rage for collectors matching their couches and having “nice” conversations with “nice” men (boudin blanc as far as the eye could see). Ironically, the identity politics that have become synonymous with the museum are opined in this series, undoubtedly as new media works are particularly dependent on representation in public institutions. In one particular video, Citarella (and presumably Hurtwitz-Goodman) make the point that for all the “social justice movements” that have sprung up on the internet it would seem that “the house always wins”, speaking to how Museums have recently begun to sell off artworks under the guise of “diversity”. I mostly agree with these works, and with Citarella’s broader contention that institutions (both the museum and the university) are superior modes of distribution when compared to the flagrantly monopolistic tech platforms. However, one need only walk around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking at priceless treasures, whole structures, imported from Egypt, and see the names on the wall to appreciate that those benefactors constituting the old guard were unlikely to have hoarded enormous wealth through projects related to sustainable development. We should be angry that the institutions have weaponised the rage that was rightfully initially directed against them into these shallow means of divide and conquer, but this, if anything, calls for greater solidarity and self-awareness, where formerly privileged white people, such as myself, find ourselves with all the influence and money of those that were dubbed “white trash” in the early part of the 20^th century. The fall into precarity is shocking enough that we too can fall into misdirected anger against stupid art that seems to take up most of the space of the museum, as much as deep down we know that if the reckoning had never happened we would only be looking at the equally if not more stupid art of white douche bros and “feminists” (who would not have been looking after their communities as first nations artists are wont to do). In Australia, up until very recently, we were very lucky to have State Sponsored museums, and immediately since the move towards public-private partnerships we have seen the systematic censorship of art and artists. If the museums referenced in the series were “not perfect” the critique needs to extend along the same lines of monopolisation that has however been exponentially exacerbated by the tech platforms, though are they really so different to the efforts of “robber barons”?[18]

I have enough of a background in the humanities to know that this writing is an artwork, where poetic sense is employed more stringently than reason, that I am effectively applying for the same role in the performance of theory (much less successfully than those I critique). Walter Benjamin speaks early to the possibility of what would become this Contemporary phenomenon of “theory as artwork” earlier exemplified by figures such as Hito Steyerl. In “The Author as Producer” Benjamin writes:

“There were not always novels in the past, and there will not always have to be; there have not always been tragedies or great epics. Not always were the forms of commentary, translation, indeed even so-called plagiarism playthings in the margins of literature; they had a place not only in the philosophical but also in the literary writings of Arabia and China. Rhetoric has not always been a minor form: in Antiquity, it put its stamp on large provinces of literature. All this is to accustom you to the thought that we are in the midst of a mighty recasting of literary forms, a melting down in which many of the opposites in which we have been used to think may lose their force.” [19]

I have found myself sometimes underwhelmed by thinkers I really admire for the works of art they have tried to make, while their rhetoric functioned quite perfectly as the same thing. Citarella’s insights are made perfect as performance, not necessarily aided by commodified objects (though how one is supposed to hustle enough to survive from internet applications and galleries is beyond me), particularly in the case of a limited series of photos of all the insane cures that are promoted both on Goop and Infowars. (The original source of what I like to call “gender horseshoe theory”, in which the hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine are so mutually dependent that they are basically the same thing.)[20] The point is that the insight is best realised as performance. As static art, unrelated to any other digression that one might expect of a theoretical text it falls into the trap of being overly-didactic and explicatory, which is my main critique of artists that came out of the era of “Post-Internet”, that the extra step is missing, in either poetry or analysis, that piece that somehow makes the specific universal and the universal specific.

In the European conception art must almost necessarily begin as some antagonism to the current order, only to come to be used to reinforce the ends of the society (the ruling class) that claims it. As the veneer of progressivism is stripped from the politic evident in American Universities (and especially the Ivy League) it must be stated that the extent of the irrelevance  of “the canon” is the extent to which it has been subjected to the straight, cis, white, middle-to-upper class male identity politics, where the ruling class has claimed the work of all the great weirdos of the past. Decolonising means the reclamation of Donatello and Duchamp and Shakespeare against those that would strip them of their radical subversiveness. The recent fallout around “academic freedom” at institutions such as Harvard has been very disturbing, and yet it is probably the Ivy League itself that is the most disturbing group of actors in this debacle, the origins of censorship rooted in the absurd narratives of rich liberal meritocracy. I have trouble that believing that anything like “academic freedom” could ever exist inside the corporate university, and especially the Ivy League, which exists only to establish and enforce an economic elite (even in Masters of Fine Arts programs). The reified trajectory would seem to be to read all of the classics, organise one’s entire young existence and all activities around getting a place at one of these institutions so that one may earn the privilege of a paying job as a staff writer on “The Gilmore Girls”. I had a good laugh recently when I looked up the most famous semi-contemporary writers that graduated from Harvard to find that they were David Foster Wallace and Margaret Attwood, author of “The Handmaid’s Tale”, whose tagline may as well have been “imagine if the horrors routinely inflicted on women of colour happened to white American women” (the horror).

INTERNET EXPERTS

In an Instagram reel entitled “Instagram and the Rise of Resentment Reels” tech journalist (and known associate of Citarella) Taylor Lorenz examines the phenomenon of those disgruntled that their “hustle” has not lead them to the financial independence promised through following the prescriptions of the algorithm. Instagram has recently changed its algorithm again to reward video content over static images (doubtless in response to TikTok). (I am surprised to find myself affected by something I take as so peripheral to my life, not that I haven’t used these tools to effect.) This whole project “Ekphrasis//Ekphrasis” is reliant on a now defunct format. I was mocking the pseudo-“newness” of an application that offered images and text in its obvious connection to the propaganda machine of the Reformation (beyond Cranach, the images of the clergy being shat on by a peasantry in pamphlets and chapbooks could even serve as early modern memes). The switch to “reels” has everything to do with what Varoufakis calls “The New Cold War”, the threat of China’s recent predominance in the area of tech leading to what outwardly seems like a pretty weird hostility to TikTok, that many take as an attempt to censor radical content (TikTok is apparently a hotbed of information on the Palestinian genocide as recounted, filmed and uploaded by those experiencing it). A blanket ban on the app seemed to have already been on the cards, especially in relation to China’s fully automated banking system. According to Varoufakis, the American government’s efforts to freeze foreign banks accounts as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, may threaten the dominance of the American Dollar, as it has spooked foreign regimes into investing in China’s new finance infrastructure, which elimates banks as intermediaries in transactions through the “everything app” called WeChat.[21] The move toward a forced divestment of TikTok (on the part of the Chinese government) over the originally posited ban, is pretty dubious when people like Steve Mnuchin are moving to attempt to buy the platform. Lorenz claims that the divestment is a way of cloaking the ban, but the divestment actually seems a lot more troubling. Meanwhile, the always myopic liberal Matt Stoller suggests that the whole thing is related to the Democrats wider program of antitrust legislation that will presumably save the world, and that objections “on the left” have solely to do with Mnuchin’s involvement in the Trump campaign (yet his outspoken stance on greater funding for Israel would affirm more cynical suggestions). If Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter/X is anything to go by, one man at the helm of a tech oligopoly has plenty of scope when it comes to the suppression of dissent (particularly disturbing given Musk’s stated intentions to turn X into an everything website to rival China’s WeChat).[22] And so, even on Instagram we have to post videos to appeal to the algorithms imposed by the Western hegemon (though, strangely enough this extra step of analysis was not alluded to by Lorenz, a journalist for the Washington Post). The technology may be novel, but in reality it is a machine for subjugation under this financial system that threatens all life. The rather short length of time that it has taken to develop to mobile data streaming services capable of holding an eternity of video footage is staggering, and it is important to remember that it will cost the earth (one hour of streaming Netflix or similar is equivalent to running  a refrigerator for a year).

Lorenz’s 2023 book “Extremely Online” is probably an essential study in developments around platform capitalism, if one is interested specifically in monetisation, in a plain and readable assessment of the user-lead augmentations to the way each platform has performed over time. The work that she does is exemplary of this moment in offering a simple explication of the data with little “judgement” or like unpleasantness as to the implications of these functions. In the course of this pop history one is unlikely to be prompted to question whether a lawless experiment in rampant monopolisation is the best place to be trialling an attention-lead form of democracy, for example (which one might surmise to be the ultimate “tyranny of the majority”, to borrow the expression of Alexis de Tocqueville in writing about the American free press in the mid-19^th century). That said, Lorenz is great to watch, and in fairness her “reels” and interviews are matched by and play off of the smart, engaging conversational tone of her newspaper articles. And if one were to purchase a copy of the book and read it over the course of one’s lunch breaks or on the train the attention to the inattentiveness of the modern reader might be very much appreciated, where there is literally no requirement of memory or attention span. This would almost be a truly aware form of writing, an indictment of the ableism of the interfaces of information extant as of the era of print, if it weren’t simultaneously so irritating to read in a concerted sense, and so fantastically inefficient (where repetition is necessary as a means of pacifying the reader against anything that might be deemed “challenging”). [23]  (Yes, I know, I constantly repeat myself and when I turn this project back into my PhD I will do my best to employ proper formal language. I do not have high hopes for my success, either.) The effect of the repetition in Lorenz’s case is that each vignette congeals into a kind of “Adam Curtis Bingo” where hackneyed expressions are dragged out to describe every scenario as a way to plainly state what happened (while making few judgements beyond the sense that it is good when “content creators” are paid for their work).

Adam Curtis Bingo card by Chris Applegate (@chrisapplegate) on X (formerly Twitter).

If one were to attempt a reading of the (apparently absent) subtext of the work it would seem that the history of internet applications is veering inevitably towards better times when tech overlords acknowledge the labour of those who (generally accidentally) “go viral”, and that the profitability of these individuals to advertisers will be acknowledged to the general betterment of the media landscape. I know that I, for one, am greatly relieved that the owners of “grumpy cat” will never have to work again. What is actually interesting in Lorenz’s deep investment in the way these subjects function is the utter randomness of how platforms seem to develop, where YouTube started out as a internet dating site which failed spectacularly in that very few women uploaded videos of themselves. Sometimes it seems as though the entire landscape of the internet was invented as a dating application by lonely “nerds” self-identifying as superior and/or “nice”, and meant to provide a level playing field against “handsome jocks” that apparently monopolise the attention of women (who are unable to exercise judgement). It is, of course, amazing that those who afterwards have proved to have been attempting to reduce every aspect of human, natural and cultural life to a monetary value to then hoard, were not immediately sympathetic as romantic partners (we have always been subjected to not so much a politic but economics of envy). Never forget that the advertising revenue that used to sustain hundreds of local publications as well as the major publications, (worldwide) probably millions of livelihoods, did not disappear but was rather reoriented towards the owners of the platforms, and do not forget that book sales are still thriving while authors struggle to make ends meet and books seem to be published almost without editors (especially if written by popular talking heads who produce journalism and/or other short form writing, regardless or not whether their skill-set is easily translatable to the book-form). Whether or not it is ableist to argue for the preservation of these forms over the distribution of information strictly through recording formats, the transfer of information is more resounding through the written word. This unnatural format bred of the alphabet and the printing press provides the economies and efficiencies I write of, which have to do with the speed at which one can read and process information, which is inherently superior to any other means of proliferation. (This could be seen as an argument for the forced universal implementation of the Hangul alphabet as the most modern and efficient of writing systems, but I am not quite that much of a tyrant, lol.) The saturation of information exemplary of the contemporary is that much harder to navigate under the corruption of attention by its tech monopolies. It’s almost as though those who are hoarding the world’s wealth have a vested interest in the ignorance of the population, which is advanced as all the “difficulty” is taken out of reading, as all the “difficulty” is jettisoned from the university.

MAGIC THINKING AND THE MEAT DIET (OF WORMS):

I feel the need to speak briefly on the exploits of Joseph Beuys, who was one of those most resoundingly responsible for the university-lead art practices of today. In 1973, Beuys explained the thinking behind his most famous phrase, ‘Every man is an artist’: ‘Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART. This most modern art discipline – Social Sculpture/Social Architecture – will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism.’[24] Similarly, there has been a persistent effort on the part of internet-obsessed theorists to recast the meme-form as the new democratic art, shifting power from the gatekeeping of museums and galleries and legacy media to truly realise the Beuysian dream, even as the institutions have attempted to compete in terms of popularity, effectively making anything “difficult” a far greater evil than the systematic disenfranchisement of the majority of the world’s population. Beuys, borrowing of course from Rudolf Steiner (another avowed “centrist”) was largely responsible for this swerve toward academic art as we now understand it. While it was a feature of art as cult of personality dating back even before the mental health issues of Van Gogh, Beuys narrative of redemption embodies the proliferation of the gesture of absolution-via-PTSD, even insofar as his founding mythology began in being a fighter pilot for the NAZIs. Those alleging trauma always seem to find themselves above the fray of meaningful argument. In art schools this trajectory reads more like a move from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism to Structured/Unstructured Play. In either case, it is plainly wrong to criticise, to a large extent because it is very difficult to criticise theories and praxis that are essentially meaningless, zombie-forms of disciplines and research. Embedded in  Beuys, as in many contemporary practitioners, is this commitment to the esoteric, a healing through the appropriated indigenous practices in the idea of the sacred “original” that might have horrified Marcel Duchamp, and that has made everything so goddamn valuable. (This is why Slavoj Zizek likes to describe “New Materialism” as “Hobbit Materialism”: a universe in which magic is imminent.) In Beuys’ case the appropriation was of practices of the Tartars, who he claimed had rescued him when his fighter plane crashed in the Crimea. This is little more than a patronising and racist superstitiousness applied to “other cultures” and their “magic”. Much of what Beuys achieved was despite himself and his silly and paternalistic notions- his work was better than him.

Over the last 30 years, similar codified “interventions” into community have been imposed by a newfound adjacency to architectural practice (advanced by Beuys but especially prevalent in the 1990s), what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari once referred to as “the royal sciences”. Because before there was the mass-organisation of society based on credit, there were all kinds of ways of doing and understanding things, sciences that did not require an overarching world view (most of which were assimilated or outlawed in deference to this set of rules employed by the church and state). The builders of “Gothic” cathedrals were also the architects of the same. This embodied knowledge, squaring techniques used to raise spires towards the heavens was eventually thought to be a situation that gave artisan/architects far too much control over their own work, far too much power as far as the imperial church was concerned. This was corrected by the Renaissance and the heroic figure of the architect exemplified by Filippo Brunelleschi. Even the Reformers of the German Renaissance adopted the perspectival technology pioneered by Brunelleschi, inventing this notion that about a thousand years of European history had been “dark”, that collective works and technologies were inferior to the single-point perspective of the “great man” (all paintings had to be seen from exactly one vantage point and no other). The architectural model imposes written language on the world of aesthetics, but there are other ways of creating meaning. All these strange instances in which what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “minor” or nomad sciences were assimilated or disallowed by those in power, which, through architecture, lead to these aesthetic hierarchies that have become all but redundant over the last hundred years (very few would argue that perspectival drawing is the highest form of art, and even art made with the latest technology is no longer seen as the height of human artistic achievement).[25] Similarly, in the Western European world, the medical practises of midwives and village wise women most probably based in millennia of trial and error ended with the witch trials, though they were probably much more scientific than the at times utterly mad history of “surgery”. I often think of a funny BBC program featuring Tony Robinson, “World’s Worst Jobs” where a historian explains that one of the cures that was offered by village wise women or “witches” was a soup made up of worms which was likely to actually have improved the health of those who would have been quite low on iron… this was placed against the work of the surgeons of the day who were primarily interested in bleeding the illness out of their patients through various horrifying and elaborate means. But through these new sciences, the knowledge could be codified and linked to qualifications and so controlled from the top down. Qualifications have become ever the more necessary to obtaining work in industries which in no way actually require such training (even journalists once began with cadetships), even as university education is increasingly diminished for the sake of a quite insane form of economic rationalism. So contemporary art offers us this “magic” from the top down, which to any of us who have been tried for exhibiting a power that was not bestowed upon them by the ruling classes is wildly insulting. To be a witch is to dissent against the royal sciences through thorough research into their political positioning and a philosophically rigorous scepticism, which is something quite different from the kinds of invocations of “magic” that align perfectly with the Neoliberal practices of “The Secret” or Gwenyth Paltrow’s “Goop”. It seems as though the last bastions of liberalism continuously claim these aesthetics of subversion to differentiate themselves from the Protestant conservatives with whom their class interests are thoroughly aligned.

If, buried and yet recognisable in the vagrant ideologies of agreeableness, the Christian Protestant turn can so clearly be read, then under the auspices of consensus, criticality has become improbable to a degree that would have once been disappointing on a theological level, as Luther stated in his defence of his doctrine at the Diet of Worms:

“I rejoice exceedingly to see the Gospel this day, as of old, a cause of disturbance and disagreement; for such is the character and destiny of God’s word. “I came not to send peace unto the earth, but a sword,” said Jesus Christ. “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes shall be those of his own household.” (Matthew x:34-36).

God is wonderful and terrible in His counsels. Let us have a care, lest in our endeavors to arrest discords, we be bound to fight against the holy word of God and bring down upon our heads a frightful deluge of inextricable dangers, present disaster, and everlasting desolations.”[26]

I can only offer a poetic sense that things have “progressed” unto this Christian (e)sc(h)atology to the point at which no Messiah can return. I used to believe that everyone should get the chance to study Humanities subjects at a university level, it changed my life in ways I can’t begin to describe. And yet, through the ongoing purges, hundreds of thousands of years of knowledge has been lost, and I don’t know if there is any way to undo the damage that has been done by subsuming every value to that of the almighty dollar. We have to build our own heaven on earth, and just as lay preacher the champion of the peasants Thomas Müntzer[27] would have it, this is dependent on the dismantling of hierarchies. We need to end the dependence on qualifications administered by business interests, we need to democritise education, which will probably mean abandoning the corporate university, as much as I find that painful to admit. Anyway… Omnia Sunt Communia.

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[1] edited by Sylvère Lotringer from a series of lectures that Michel Foucault delivered at the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and available via Monoskop.

[2] Ibid, 19-20

[3] (It is probably best observed for counter-cultural pungency in Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Rabelais and His World”, which was in turn judged too subversive and censored in Stalin’s USSR.)

[4] (In Sigmund Freud’s interpretation, these areas across the borders of Germania, and thus outside the bounds of the Roman Empire were easily riven from the Roman church having no direct lineage to it. Even in Friedrich Engel’s work on the subject the actual “peasant war” that he lists as an important antecedent was local to Saxony and the slightly further East of the Czech Republic, being in that strange middle ground between the Eastern Church and the post-Roman Empire, like at a protest where you can’t quite hear to magnify the chant on either side of you, the anxiety of the interregnum.)

[5] I wondered who the other tourists were in Wittenberg, as many of them looked so much like a stereotype of middle America that they hardly seemed real, but of course, I was at the birthplace of Evangelism, where people did not appreciate Brinkmann and I having a good laugh at some of the weird details of the Cranach paintings.

[6] (Or whatever equivalent would have been posted in those days, though I imagine little would have changed in that regard, human needs are human needs).

[7] I have previously mocked a Harvard art historian in attempting to go against the tide of art criticism on this point, suffice to say, that while art is subjective, it is not that subjective.

[8] Summed up eloquently by Simon Reynolds in his Obituary in The Guardian “Fisher argued that the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals. Rather, it was the symptom of a heartless and hopeless politics: precarious employment and flexible work patterns, the erosion of class solidarity and its institutions such as unions, and the relentless message from mainstream political parties and media alike that “there is no alternative” to managerial capitalism. That this is as good as it gets – so deal with it.” Mark Fisher’s K-punk blogs were required reading for a generation | Simon Reynolds | The Guardian

[9] A phrase coined by Shoshanna Zuboff.

[10] This has been written about across the political spectrum (in such bastions of radical left thought) as Forbes Magazine (lol), as well as by David Graeber. Caroline Simon, “Bureaucrats And Buildings: The Case For Why College Is So Expensive,” Forbes Magazine, September 5, 2017: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureaucrats-and-buildings-the-case-for-why-college-is-so-expensive/?sh=­2c648050456a. David Graeber, “Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 64, no. 34 (2018): B12–

[11] https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-part-of-its-leadership-to-lead-yales-administration-increases-by-nearly-50-percent/

[12] (Like apparently most of the Casual staff working for the Sydney College of the Arts, some of whom have worked there for close to a decade, I am teaching only one class this semester which has made my financial situation extremely precarious, while the permanent staff seem to be dangerously overworked. If I were a cynic, I might imagine this to be a retaliation on the part of the university against the union-lead protests demanding an end to rampant casualisation.)

[13] (Who has also been interviewed on Citarella’s podcast, an episode which is particularly well worth a listen).

[14] Pierre Bourdieu,“Preface to the English Edition” in Homo Academicus, Standford University: California, 1998. viii-xix

[15] https://jacobin.com/2020/10/colonialism-albert-camus-france-algeria-sartre#:~:text=Algeria's%20War%20of%20Independence%20between,posthumously%20as%20The%20First%20Man).

[16] (the sometimes literally painfully hip video art streaming service) https://dis.art/series/when-guys-turn-20

[17] Syzygy (jacobhg.com)

[18] This term was applied particularly to the progenitor of The Frick collection in New York City.

[19] Walter Benjamin, Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others, “The Author as Producer” in SELECTED WRITINGS VOLUME 2, PART 2 1931-1934. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999. 771

[20] I think also of a recent conversation with a friend whose wife has seen all the “Fast and the Furious” franchise and so explained to him how the main character had a child with the woman who was not his soul mate, apparently because of a coma and some amnesia, to which I replied, “So it is basically “The Bold and The Beautiful” with car chases?”

[21] Yanis Varoufakis, “The New Cold War”, in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, London: Penguin, 2024.

[22] In an article for The Grayzone, Kit Klarenberg, writes of his total ban from X and the disturbing implications of being completely shut out of an app that may one day contain bank accounts: “I was banned from Elon’s ‘free speech’ X app for offending power” in The Grayzone, March 19, 2024 https://thegrayzone.com/2024/03/19/banned-elons-free-speech-x-app/

The banning of journalists (particularly those seen as left-leaning)  is widely affirmed as practice including in sources with a more liberal/conservative bias such as: Mark Joyella, “Elon Musk Accused Of ‘Silencing His Critics’ As X Suspends Journalists” in Forbes Magazine, January 9 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2024/01/09/elon-musk-silencing-his-critics-as-journalists-are-suspended-by-x/?sh=78b98abf2588

See also: Erin Hale, “What is Elon Musk’s ‘everything app’ and what can it learn from China?” in Aljazeera, 3 August 2023,

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/8/3/what-is-elon-musks-everything-app-and-what-can-it-learn-from-china

[23] The book also apparently conforms to a chronological structure while often referring to events not alluded to in earlier sections of the book (this is repeatedly explained to be the case, which is strangely annoying in itself). The imposition of an order that is afterwards undermined makes it feel jarring and incohesive.

[24] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-joseph-beuys-every-man-is-an-artist-ar00704

[25] Gilles Deleuze, & Felix Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2004. p.365: “This whole current of Archimedean geometry was taken to its highest expression, but was also brought to a temporary standstill, by the remarkable seventeenth-century mathematician Desargues. Like most of his kind, Desargues wrote little; he nevertheless exerted a great influence through his actions and left outlines, rough drafts, and projects, all centred on problem-events: “Lamentations,” “draft project for the cutting of stones,” “draft project for grappling with the events of the encounters of a cone and a plane,. .. Desargues, however, was condemned by the parlement of Paris, opposed by the king’s secretary; his practices of perspective were banned. Royal, or State, science only tolerates and appropriates stone cutting by means of templates (the opposite of squaring), under conditions that restore the primacy of the fixed model of form, mathematical figures, and measurement. Royal science only tolerates and appropriates perspective if it is static, subjected to a central black hole divesting it of its heuristic and ambulatory capacities. But the adventure, or event, of Desargues is the same one that had already occurred among the Gothic “journeymen” on a collective level. For not only did the Church, in its imperial form, feel the need to strictly control the movement of this nomad science (it entrusted the Templars with the responsibility of determining its locations and objects, governing the work sites, and regulating construction), but the secular State, in its royal form, turned against the Templars themselves, banning the guilds for a number of reasons, at least one of which was the prohibition of this operative or minor geometry.”

[26] https://davidbahn-reflections.com/2017/10/31/martin-luthers-here-i-stand-speech/

[27] (Whom Engels was quite convinced was actually an atheist).