Art Without Feeling

 

I am:

Technosexual. That is, I breathe pixels, I eat pixels, my cells are pixels and I am stimulated by pixels, as I am a picture beside a picture, linking to another picture, one after the other, mating together orgiastically.

With the stimulation of a virtual image, the action of right-click is the action of a piston in a barrel. And the action does not end, for virtual sex lasts forever, there is no shedding of organs but only hypnosis; the mental echo of real sexuality, the unconscious movement of a willing object inducing unconsciousness, the unconscious acting reflexively to the titillations of a stimulus, the object of an object.

Conveniently for capitalism, the most forward-thinking philosophers are nymphomaniac objectophiles. In Actor Network Theory (ANT), objects and people are both caused by preceding events and are equivalent in causing effects. Any successful action producing an effect forms a network link or 'quasi object' that becomes more concrete each time it is completed, and must be repeated or else it will disappear. There is nothing outside this network, that is, that all actions are interlinked yet they can be deactivated and the links can disappear. Actors are only broken off from the network by deactivating.

To say that people and objects are only the result of preceding actions, and that ideas are objects are equivalent, undermines the traditional importance given in philosophy to human consciousness and agency, such as, humans decided to make cars out of objects because they decided it would be good to haul grain and thus 'be fruitful and multiply'. In ANT. A human is a car, and won't work without its parts, can't have existed without being made as a factory, will run better the more you drive it and if it stays put it dies.

ANT has been criticized this as being 'purely descriptive'.

ANT reminds me of Robert Ornstein's model of brain circutry, whereby networks which are more used become more stable and more easily triggered, promoting recurring thought/action, except that Ornstein emphasises the agency of the individual, underlining that the decision to repeat an action and thereby strengthen its neural network, or to sustain from it, is the heart of consciousness.

Another new materialist school of thought developed at a 2007 Goldsmiths University conference,  Speculative Realism/Speculative Materialism, seems to say succinctly, ' Real things exist and more knowable than subjective things, so therefore reason does not exist either.' It is a form of Object-Oriented Philosophy which seeks to negate anthropocentricism.

However, according to the theory itself, even a 'clear' view of subjective reality is not knowable anyway. Isn't it pointless to pursue a true philosophy if it makes you nihilistic about the pursuit of the truth? It becomes clear that the motivation is not pursuit of truth but to reinforce the status quo (normative passive consumer culture) of which their institution is part.

These viewpoints seem to have forgotten that the purpose of philosophy is not to serve the interests of objects, it is to serve the interest of humans. Humanism is antithesis of nihilism is that it favours human life over death, consciousness to insentience, complexity over nothingness.

Art problematizes ANT and speculative realism. In art, humans manipulate objects very directly in a spontaneous action that has no apparent idea or object as its cause. Artistic creation thereby epitomizes agency.

Not only that, but viewing art is neither caused by an idea nor object, but the enjoyment taken in the illumination of subjective experience of another’s consciousness: agents reach out and touch one another.

A manmade object, a computer, or a natural object, like an asteroid, all exist and act without us, but their actions are not complex nor are they capable of evoking emotional response in a void.  The networks, images and substances and actions like exploding supernovae, while sensual and beautiful, will not be sensual or beautiful in a world without life, one dimensional, flat, dead. Thus objects cannot be sexualized, cannot stimulate in a world that is truly dead, unconscious. Technosexuality is a lie.

If the (ANT) promoters are right, the Speculative Realists, by virtue of their decrying the reality of subjective thought, will wind up unthinking themselves into nonexistence.