Visual art and education in an era of designer capitalism - deconstructing the oral eye

The oral eye is a metaphor for the dominance of global designer capitalism. It refers to the consumerism of a designer aesthetic by the ‘I’ of the neoliberalist subject, as well as the aural soundscapes that accompany the hegemony of the capturing attention through screen cultures. An attempt is made to articulate the historical emergence of such a synoptic machinic regime drawing on Badiou, Bellmer, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Rancière, Virilio, Ziarek, and Žižek to explore contemporary art (post-Situationism) and visual cultural education. jagodzinski develops the concept of an ‘avant-garde without authority,’ ‘self-refleXion’ and ‘in(design)’ to further the questions surrounding the posthuman as advanced by theorists such as Hansen, Stiegler and Ziarek’s ‘force’ of art.

Vi sua l A rt a n d Educ at ion i n a n Er a of

D e sig n e r Ca p i ta l i sm

Series Editors:

jan jagodzinski, University of Alberta

Mark Bracher, Kent State University

The purpose of this series is to develop and disseminate psychoanalytic knowledge that can

help educators in their pursuit of three core functions of education:

1 facilitating student learning;

2 fostering students’ personal development; and

3 promoting prosocial attitudes, habits, and behaviors in students (i.e., attitudes opposed

to violence, substance abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.).

Psychoanalysis can help educators realize these aims of education by providing them with

important insights into

1 the emotional and cognitive capacities that are necessary for students to be able to

learn, develop, and engage in prosocial behavior;

2 the motivations that drive such learning, development, and behaviors; and

3 the motivations that produce antisocial behaviors as well as resistance to learning and

development.

Such understanding can enable educators to develop pedagogical strategies and techniques

to help students overcome psychological impediments to learning and development, either

by identifying and removing the impediments or by helping students develop the ability to

overcome them Moreover, by offering an understanding of the motivations that cause some

of our most severe social problems—including crime, violence, substance abuse, prejudice,

and inequality—together with knowledge of how such motivations can be altered, books

in this series will contribute to the reduction and prevention of such problems, a task that

education is increasingly being called upon to assume.

Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation

Visual A rt a n d Educ at ion i n a n Er a

of D e sig n e r Ca pi talism

D e const ruc t i ng t h e O r a l Ey e

ja n jagod z i n sk i

All rights reserved

First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®

in the United States—a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978–0–230–61879–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jagodzinski, Jan, 1948–

Visual art and education in an era of designer capitalism : deconstructing the oral eye / Jan Jagodzinski.

p cm.—(Education, psychoanalysis, social transformation) ISBN 978–0–230–61879–4

1 Visual perception—Psychological aspects 2 Visual perception—

Social aspects 3 Visual sociology 4 Art—Philosophy I Title.

BF241.J33 2010

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: October 2010

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

This book is dedicated toBrigitte always Brigitteand to Harry Garfinkle, whose genius always remains with me

and to my mom, who at 86 remains an indomitable spirit

Part I Deconstructing the Oral Eye

Three Historical Antecedents: The Rise of the Unconscious

Part II Ruining Representation

Six An Avant-Garde without Authority: Can

Part III Art and Its Education in Designer Capitalism

Eight Alain Badiou’s Challenge to Art Education:

contents / ix

Nine Between Creativity and Innovation? How to Become

Part IV Lessons for Art Educators:

Encounters with the Real

Part V Reorienting Art Education for a

Post-Posthuman Age

Twelve From Eye-World to Brain-Eye: Self-RefleXivity in

Ac k now l ed gm e n t s

I owe a very special thanks to Lesley Morgan Johnson for her amazing

front cover, as well as to a special class of students who did the “Barbie”

illustrations that appear as section dividers throughout the book, many of

which deconstruct designer capitalism Many thanks especially to all the

class members I wish I could have included all the interesting variations,

but that proved not to be possible To honor all the willing participants

who shared their ideas with me, I wish to thank Lachelle Farris, Emily

Hill, Lesley Johnson, Veronica Juarez, Karly Lagore, Stephanie Lavine,

Melanie Liles, Sarah Lun, Shawn Mackey, Jen Martineau, Christina

Molnar, Glori Palmer, Nadia Poelzer, Natalie Pool, Steph Richmond,

Kyla Satermo, Shelly Seifridt, Kristie Seright, Nekole Thauvette, Lindsay

Twerdoclib, Teresa Wallsten, and Ken Yau—the Advanced Professional

Team (APT) of 2010

I n t roduc t ion

A e st h e t ic i z at ion of t h e Wor(l)d Pic t u r e

E J Dijksterhuis (1961), the great Dutch historian, once characterized

mod-ernization as the “mechanization of the world picture.” Secularization—

brought on by mathematics and the utilitarian pragmatic mind-set of

merchant and laissez-faire capitalism—eventually began to infiltrate all

aspects of life as capitalism continued its aggressive developments We

can say that postmodernity, which shapes the information society under

designer capitalism, has brought about an ‘aestheticization of the wor(l)d

picture.’ The signifier as word and its signified as image or picture—word

and image together as a post-hieroglyphic sign—are presented “seamlessly”

together as various forms of simulacra—such as xenomoney, which made

its appearance in financial capitalism in 1973 Money refers only to itself

as a sign of exchange I use the portmanteau term ‘wor(l)d’ to refer to both

‘world’ (globalization) and ‘word’ to indicate the aestheticization of the

image as the manipulation of the sign through de(sign), with the prefix

‘de’ enabling the play of images through perceptual games of privation,

removal, separation, negation, intensity, and reversal—the ‘surrealization’

and serialization of appearances Hyperreality of image and sound, as

hyste-ricized by Jean Baudrillard, has become business as usual in postindustrial

designer capitalism Spectators living in globalized world centers are caught

within an information age of consumerism, resulting in a new machinic

assemblage of the synopticon—the panopticon has been inverted

The metaphor of the oral eye of the subtitle of this book refers not

only to the act of consumption, the isolation of the eyeball as counted

by networks to hold spectators affectively hostage through spectacular

entertainment, but by extension also to the aural ear, which is

coexten-sively tuned to soundscapes that vibrate the body’s molecular being The

intrarelations of the homonyms oral/aural, as the ‘oralization’ of word,

image, and sound pervade and define our mediated global order The

other allusion, to the I/eye, should be apparent

This is a rather ambitious book, for it seeks to develop and support

artis-tic and educational pracartis-tices that remain faithful to the continuation of a

radical attempt to disturb the consumerism of the eye, which de(sign)er

capitalism captures through ‘tele-images,’ as facilitated by tele-technologies

that Derrida (2002, 3) named through two neologisms: “artifactuality”

and “actuvirtuality.” These terms point to the seemingly vanishing gap that

exists between the actual construction of the image and its virtual

recep-tion through the imperative of ‘live’ transmissions This machinated mode

of screen production is facilitated by the technicity1 of digitalization, the

Internet (Facebook), and surveillance capture of information to identify a

‘calculable’ body (see Andrejevic 2004)

Capturing Affect

Jonathan Beller (2006) has identified the capture of the oral eye as a

“cin-ematic mode of production,” understood not just in the popular sense of

a cinematic experience, but also in the sense of “the manner in which

pro-duction generally becomes organized in such a way that one of its moments

necessarily passes through the visual, that is, that it creates an image that

(while the tip of the iceberg) is essential to the general management,

organi-zation, and movement of the [capitalist] economy” (10, original emphasis)

Beller brilliantly argues that this expropriation of the visual leads to a

gen-eralized expropriation of attention, what Siegfried Kracauer (1995/1927)

and Walter Benjamin (2008/1936) referred to as “distraction,”2 thereby

opening up an “attention theory of value.” This extraction of ‘attention’

becomes a productive value for capital in the way it seeks the distributive

‘presence’ of the (interactive) viewer This “cinematic mode of

produc-tion” has been supplemented and to some degree supplanted in its effective

capture of attention by an interpassive-interactive paradox as presented by

‘new’ media, best exemplified by the paradigm case of the video game and

interactive mobile screen media (iPhone, Wii gaming technology) that are

shaping the posthuman sensorial condition Perhaps it is better to rename

the process as a capitalist “screen mode of production.” The word ‘screen’

has a rich etymology and genealogy As Kress (2003) has argued, we have

moved from the page to the screen—the screen referring to protection as

well as projection Beller asks precisely the question that captures the

dif-ficulty addressed in this book and the challenge that a critical art and its

education would entail:

Could we rethink the hold of the cinema [the production of desire through

the image] on our eyes by producing another way of thinking about it which

at once takes seriously the sublime, the internalized relation of the cinema

introduction / 3

with money, the function of the cinema as time machine, and yet which

does not reproduce aesthetics or philosophy or repeat the work of ideology

critique or of psychoanalysis? (Beller 1994, para 51, emphasis added)

This is a tall order, which I hope to tackle

Beller, following Walter Benjamin, connects the emergence of the ‘aura’

with the modification of the sensorium brought about by the

develop-ment of the metropolis, where a changed relationship to the visual object

occurs between the perceiver and the perceived This occurs in relation

to the various forms of looking: from early cinema to the movement of

the flâneur and flâneuse around the arcades, grand magasins, amusement

parks, and cafes of Paris, caught by the lure of the vitrines.3 Benjamin’s

dia-lectical thesis characterizes the economy of modernization It is minimally

anthropological where production and reproduction lead to modification as

new conditions emerge from such transformation To leave the mediation

of technicity out of this account would be to discount the way in which

hominization is itself shaped by technics, which has been the important

preoccupation of Bernard Stiegler4 (1998, 2009), as will become more and

more evident The perception of the aura eventually becomes “the

subjec-tive experience of the objecsubjec-tive commodification of vision” (Beller 1994,

para 17) The circulation of the commodity brings about a new value

sys-tem imposed on goods that is attributable to Baudrillard’s (1998) Second

Order of Simulacra, made possible through the electric technologies of

reproduction

The fetishistic character of objects, attributable to the First Order of

Simulacra, depended on originality, uniqueness, and authenticity The

frame that surrounds an objet d’art was meant to take it out of circulation

so that the desire to contemplate its transcendence, as that which is

beauti-ful, becomes possible.5 The aura that surrounds the objet d’art,

identifi-able by the gilded frame, for instance, makes it untouchidentifi-able, utopian, and

transcendental, and it is usually housed in special institutions—such as

churches, cathedrals, and museums Such religiosity and creation of awe

can help describe the body’s affective surrender to such objects (and

peo-ple) to the point of weeping and crying, an emotional state in which the

viewer is overwhelmed by the object’s (or person’s) presence.6 Beauty flips

over into sublimity only when the perceiver is no longer able to maintain

the frame When the image begins to dominate, a reversal has taken place

The gap between subject and object is where the negotiation or

transfer-ence of the aura takes place and where questions of desire and surrender

to the image or possession of it arise The injunction against touching

in churches, cathedrals, and museums ensures that this gap or distance

is maintained The dissolution of this frame, or rather its repositioning

through the tele-technologies into the ‘frameless’ image of digitalization,

marks another approach to art as ‘new media’ and its education in which

touching the screen is often encouraged

The frame’s function begins to change with the Second Order of

Simulacra, which can be identified with ideology proper, as

institution-ally defined by the state, articulated by Althusser’s (1996, 1997)

‘struc-turalist’ reading of Marx Monopoly/cartel capitalism at the turn of the

century reached a position, to use a Hegelian term, ‘for-itself ’ ( für sich),

from its (often misnamed) earlier laissez-faire ‘in-itself ’ (an sich) status

(1880–1918).7 From the state being a ‘neutral’ player (as conveyed through

Adam Smith’s notion of the ‘invisible hand’), it now becomes, in Alfred

Chandler’s (1977) terms, a ‘visible hand’ aiding and abetting capitalist

expansion Between World War 1 and World War 2 was when Walter

Benjamin’s thought matured, as the critique of what was the ‘first’ phase

of the ‘society of the spectacle,’ the phase of phantasmagoria,8 which

the Situationalists, led by Guy Debord, developed Interpellation, as

Althusser develops it, still holds here, since the belief in an ‘original’ has

not been fully weakened This happens when capital moves into its latter

phase after World War 2, into what Baudrillard (1993, 50–86) terms the

Third Order of Simulacra: the move from capitalism of production to

that of consumption; from electric to electronic technologies; from the

movement-image to the time-image, in Deleuzian (1986, 1989) terms

The shift is essentially from closed to open systems of thought, from

‘objectivity’ (positivism) to ‘subjectivity’ (‘emic’ sciences and pluralism

of cultural studies), from internationalism to the globalism of trading

cartels, from ideology to ‘postideology,’ from Marxism to post-Marxism,

from proletariat to ‘multitude,’ from snail mail to Internet, from analog

to digital, and so on

Above all, perhaps, this is the ontological shift from depth to

sur-face—or, I will argue, from the dominance of space to its supplantation

by time that comes with the cinematic mode of production, which

mani-fests as moments of reorganization of libidinal flows of matter Zygmunt

Bauman’s (2000, 2003, 2005) ‘liquid oeuvre’ addresses the ‘post’ status of

modernism, where he develops the concepts of ‘liquid life,’ ‘liquid love’ and

‘liquid modernity’ to capture the constant becoming of things Changes in

social conditions seem to outpace any possibility of members consolidating

habits and routines Time becomes theorized as a liquid Speed matters,

not duration; ‘liquid life’ now becomes a consuming life To put all of this

in another way—globalization is the flattening of the world into a new

cartography As Henri Bergson had already prophetically theorized at the

turn of the twentieth century, the postmodern sensorium has become a

world of images

introduction / 5

Commodity of Desire

Commodity fetishism, as productively reorganized within monopoly

capi-talism through reproductive technologies, generates lack (manque), in the

Lacanian sense, as the “desire of the Other” (social order) It does this

through magic (an unexplainable event) and suggestion (hypnosis), which

affect the subliminal self; these are the two traits mainstream Freudian and

Lacanian psychoanalysis has largely abandoned.9 The processes of

struc-turing and interpellating the mass-psyche in this period are performed

through the form of the montage, as Sergei Eisenstein developed it The

regime of the image, defined as the conflict between two shots that forces

the spectator to think its synthesis, is meant to ‘educate/ discipline,’ within

the proletkult aesthetic.10 Like the reflexology of Taylorism and Pavlovism,

as the capitalist and communist equivalents, respectively, the ambivalence

between educating and disciplining the body is meant to mobilize action,

to move the body into praxis, but through ‘presentation’ rather than

rep-resentation; to generate belief or what Beller (2006) calls “the productive

value of human attention” (108, original emphasis), thereby achieving

transformation—creating ‘history’ as such by manufacturing the event

“In our conception a work of art is first and foremost a tractor ploughing

over the audience’s psyche in a particular class context” (Eisenstein Writing,

62; in Beller 2006, 99) Eisenstein’s film The Strike is exemplary in its

dialectical method Dialectics as mediation “is today actualized as media”

(Beller 2006, 138) In the truest sense, the screened image as impressed in/on

our body’s imaginary is the vanishing mediator It does its job at the level of

attention, where memory and affect coalesce

The question that will emerge later in this book is whether the shift to a

nondialectical tradition, as developed by Deleuze|Guattari, might provide

an alternative development to the Marxist-Hegelian philosophical

tradi-tion that has pervaded critical cultural thought: Marx, the social Darwinist

of historical change versus Nietzsche’s Übermensch, signifying a historical

‘Messiah’ yet to appear, where the will to power replaces God to reverse

the master-slave relationship; where Zarathustra, as a prophet of the new

age, challenges a Christianity that fetishizes a utopian heaven rather than a

‘grounding’ in the here and now This is an ‘aristocratic’ approach, like that

of Deleuze, where the message serves only those who want to hear—it is

not proselytizing in its approach I will later develop this as an avant-garde

without authority Yet the dangers of this approach are obvious, for was it

not Benito Mussolini who brought Marx and Nietzsche together,

fashion-ing himself as the ‘superman,’ the Messiah that had come via the National

Socialist Party in Italy that was to meet the crisis of capitalism (Pierson

2001, 23–25)? If Marx is too ‘communist’ in his redemptive Utopianism,

then Nietzsche is too ‘individualistic’ in his Indeed, they were

contempo-raries There is a fork in the road that persists to this day as to what

direc-tion the critical spirit is to be kept alive that stems from their trajectories

Commodity fetishism in the Second Order of Simulacra shifts desire

onto the mass-produced object, whereas the copy still derives its lure

from an original that anchors its many possibilities and innovations

Deleuze|Guattari’s (1987, 167–191) discussion of faciality, especially the

close-up of the affect-image, as developed by the Hollywood ‘star’

sys-tem of divas, would be an obvious example of Second-Order Simulacra

ideology The ‘star’ amasses transferential and transcendental ‘light’ not

only from fans, but also from being projected on the ‘big’ screen Objects

take on a new, sublime dimensionality, and a new force forms an

ideal-ized gaze There is an accumulation or accretion of memory of the ‘stars’

image simply because of the amount of distributed exposure he or she gets

through the available media outlets This technology directly targets the

‘suggestive (optical) unconscious,’ which becomes hypnotically entranced

by the early screen faces of Greta Garbo (as Roland Barthes (1972/1957)

once discussed in terms of an absolute state of flesh), Marlene Dietrich,

June Allyson, and Ava Gardner; the moving image in general is made

pos-sible by the mechanical ‘kino eye’ that Dziga Vertov so enthusiastically

promoted as the experiment of a new form of image production freed

from both literature and the theater stage The link between design and

technology to commodity fetishism again brings in the seeming magic of

unexplainable events, the specter of ghosts, caused not only by accidents

in early photography as afterimages, as well as animated filmic sequences

where objects seem to move by themselves (like the chairs unfolding in

the opening of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera), but also by

record-ing instruments that leave the voice disembodied, soundrecord-ing hauntrecord-ingly

strange and uncanny

While the vitrines displayed the mass-produced objects that could not

be touched, which were lit up for presentation, even live mannequins

posed in windows to show off the latest fashions This remained

primar-ily a generalized feminine space/time The peep shows in erotic arcades,

however, were reserved for men Peep shows make the act of looking

conditional on payment, as the image displayed behind the vitrine now

becomes a commodity one has to pay for just to look; “The image of the

commodity becomes the commodity,” as Roberts (1991, 223) puts it.11

The commodity itself becomes redundant, since the goal of such

custom-ers is masturbation rather than actual contact or coitus The ephemeral

image generates surplus value that advertising thrives on as the capitalist

art form.12 Putting money into the slot so that the sexual image is exposed

becomes the very paradigm of libidinal economy The expenditure of

introduction / 7

capital and the expenditure of male desire (ejaculation) are relationally

calculated It is the dematerialized image that becomes the commodity, with

the movie screen becoming the counterpart structuring technology of the

dematerialized visual commodity image It is here, of course, where

adver-tising becomes an embedded capitalist practice, establishing itself after

World War 1 “[B]y 1925 advertising was the primary industry, capable

of setting the cultural agenda of radio, film, and later, television as well”

(Wicke 1988, 15) Within monopoly imperialist capitalism, the frame,

like the Model-T, now becomes a standardized screen, a point

empha-sized by Deleuze (1986) when he maintains that “[t]he frame ensures a

deterritorialization of the image” (14–15) It becomes possible to reduce

every image into an exchange value simply through the various

develop-ing technological camera techniques that Vertov, for example, had already

explored: close-up, extreme close-up, morphing techniques, long shots,

dolly shots, and the combination of close-up to cut to establish distance

The ‘society of the spectacle,’ as Debord theorized it, emerged between

the wars (ca 1918–1939) It was a time of both capitalist and communist

crisis that included the Stock Market Crash (1929), the Great Depression

(1929–1933), and Stalinism Besides the advertisement industry, which

established itself by 1925 and where the question of capturing attention

was of central concern, there were a number of other important

technolog-ical developments that addressed Benjamin’s thoughts on the aura: 1927

was the year that television was perfected, the year sound film was

devel-oped, as well as the year when production, distribution, and exhibition

were integrated in the film industry (Crary 1989, 1999) “The

introduc-tion of sync sound transformed the nature of attenintroduc-tion that was demanded

of the viewer” (Crary 1989, 102, original emphasis) The hypnotic voice

and the gaze made possible through the recording technologies furthered

the capture of attention The year 1927 was also when Benjamin began his

Arcades Project, while Henri Bergson—who becomes such a key figure for

Deleuze’s nondialectical approach to perception—received the Nobel Prize

in Literature in 1928, although his philosophy was fading The importance

of memory for perception that Bergson introduced is of overriding

signifi-cance when it comes to the afterimages that persist in the commerce of

commodities

Capitalist Iconoclasm

It is useful at this moment to make mention of Ann Kibbey’s (2005)

intervention when discussing “the theory of the image” within

capital-ism Her key thesis that Calvinist iconoclasm formed the antecedent

event to the commodity fetishism of consumerist capitalism draws a line

of disagreement with and a critique of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes,

Jacques Lacan, and Laura Mulvey Kibbey’s key point is that the

per-formative act of transubstantiation that magically ‘transforms’ ordinary

bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ does so through the

trope of metonymy, which does not require any form of displacement

(like metaphor);therefore, there is no altering of shapes Such a

perfor-mative act is paradigmatic of the commodity fetish Upon consumption

of the commodity, one can join the ‘corporate’ body in communion, so to

speak Metonymic disruption does not generate an image; it is the figura

of the substance that radiates the spiritual presence rather than the

qual-ity of the object Kibbey maintains that Baudrillard’s “precession of the

simulacra” thesis as a form of apostasy is caught ultimately by his own

nostalgia for the loss of “basic reality,” while Barthes’s thesis in Camera

Lucida reverses what he wrote in Mythologies, wherein second-order

signi-fication is referred to as myth Instead, the photographic image becomes

reified as “the person’s soul or essence” (31) And, quite rightly following

Goux’s (1991) analysis, Kibbey labels Lacan a hard-core iconoclast, while

Mulvey’s groundbreaking psychoanalytic thesis, for Kibbey, inflects

iconoclasm with sexuality, namely the femme fatale and the fetishized

body of the ‘good’ woman

What escapes Kibbey’s analysis is the very obvious and elementary

point that Calvin’s iconoclasm by way of metonymy has a long history for

Lacan when he was developing his theory of desire As a metonymic

phe-nomenon, desire reaches as far back as Plato’s Symposium, where Alcibiades

(a handsome young man) perceives Socrates (who was old and by all

stan-dards ‘ugly’ in looks) as possessing the agalma, the hidden jewel inside

that ugly casing, that Alcibiades lacked—namely, knowledge As an object

cause of desire, the transference (secular transubstantiation) that Alcibiades

invests in Socrates shows Lacan that the magnetic force of adornment

(which Socrates rejects and denies) is imaginary and fetishistic.13 The

apostate from the Protestant religion no longer would see bread and wine

as the body and blood of Christ but as just ordinary substances drained

of their magic; that is, drained of desire Gold turns into shit This is

precisely the same psychic mechanism that is at work when tribal statues,

some elaborately carved and painted, are then ‘used up’ in some ritual act

of exorcism and shorn of magical power, to be simply discarded (and later

picked up by tourists or archeologists and thereby resignified in museums,

antique stores, and import/export sales) Anyone who has watched Antiques

Roadshow on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) sees this constantly

hap-pening What is someone’s trash becomes instant gold, provided there is a

buyer The object’s worth can only exist within the hype that is bestowed

upon it as a ‘sacred’ secular object, to use an oxymoron

introduction / 9

It has obviously been the genius of Slavoj Žižek (1989) to present the

fetishistic object as a “sublime object of ideology.” Ideology regulates the

relationship between the Symbolic and the Real psychic orders The

fan-tasy of the Imaginary sustains it through forms of jouissance as well as

affect These two forms of libidinal energy are not to be equated The

clos-est Lacanian term for affect is the drive (Trieb), but feminine jouissance,

following Luce Irigaray (1993), may be closer, since this is a difference

formed in multiplicity Her concept of “the sensible transcendental”

para-doxically fuses mind with body, yet retains women’s difference It is closer

to Gilles Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” as thoughtfully explored

by Tamsin (1999) I will argue later that this is only half the story What is

often suppressed in Žižek’s oeuvre is not the object cause of desire but the

abject, where the transferential investment is not between the Real and the

Symbolic but between the Real and the Imaginary There are two forms of

the Real, but the psychic Imaginary remains common to both I develop this

tension throughout the book as a ‘parallax’ view between the presymbolic

and the postsymbolic Real What is the more difficult task when it comes

to commodity fetishism is what supports the belief in the exchange value

of goods What sustains the fantasy, and why should it or should it not be

sustained? Why would anyone pay, for example, several million dollars for

Liberace’s piano (he owned thirty-nine, only one of which was the famous

rhinestone piano that sparkled) that looks like any other piano?

Baudrillard’s final stage of the simulacrum is its ‘pure’ form, which is a

form of consumptive becoming—what, in this book, I refer to as design The

forms of design in the capitalist sense are characterized by the imposition

of human models through various forms of rationalism and

instrumental-ism and a general coding by means of signs for meaning, along with

medi-ated surveys, so that a prefabricmedi-ated simulation with a factored end in

sight is achieved Baudrillard’s idea that there is a perpetual (re) doubling

of the sign so that there is no ‘de(sign)ation,’ no referent, becomes

pos-sible when capitalism presents itself in the für Alle (for all) position This

is a (post)ideological state of affairs where social class, as Baudrillard

out-rageously claimed, has disappeared, by which he meant, on one level at

least, that it seemed that one’s position relative to the production

pro-cesses in terms of class and status seemed rather trivial compared to the

hype that everyone had access to prestigious consumer goods if they had

the money; the institutionalization of state-wide lottos, available credit,

and more gambling casinos and video lottery terminals assured that such

hype sustained itself High-ranking call girls and their pimps, and porno

stars and their producers, could drive luxury cars and own mansions as

well But this is the frailest of arguments, given that designer capitalism

of the simulacrum manages these signs to create new fantasies that keep

the socioeconomic arrangements in place (MacCannell and MacCannell

1993) Baudrillard’s theory of seduction, written in 1979 to meet the

chal-lenge of these surface ‘appearances’ and aimed at feminine difference as

championed by Luce Irigaray, did not wash well Seduction was but a

game, yet another clever way to reinsert masculinity (Plant 1993)

Spectacular Tensions

If the montage shaped attention and affect in this earlier period of

the spectacle as cinematic movement, then it is Cubism in the

capital-ist development and Constructivism in the parallel Russian communcapital-ist

development that does so in this stage of the spectacle under the signifier

of collage.14 The collage technique was its ability to capture the unfolding

spectacle of the metropolis by juxtaposing space and time next to and in

front of each other.15 The assemblage seems to do the same work as collage,

but constructs space in three-dimensional form It seems more appropriate

for what was developing in Russia concurrently, although the Futurists

used this term as well The question is to what extent such assemblage is

‘machinic.’ Deleuze (1986, 80–83) makes the claim that Dziga Vertov’s

kino eye offered a ‘montage’ effect that demonstrated a machinic

assem-blage An inhuman perspective is constructed that is able “to carry

percep-tion into things, to put perceppercep-tion into matter, so that any point whatsoever

in space itself perceives all the points on which it acts, or which act on it”

(81) Vertov’s montage ‘style’ sets up an “empty place” from which can be

observed what constructs the ‘human.’ Such an “empty place” is without

ideology; it anticipates the multiplicity of differences, which will then be

ideologically constituted into statements of truth But how does one tell

which styles enable such deanthropomorphization to take place, enabling

the unthought and those that recuperate it ideologically? Beller (2006)

makes the case that Eisenstein did the latter, Vertov the former

Some of this same difficulty emerges with the question of

spectacular-ity Debord (1977, sec 63–65) made a distinction in this first phase of the

spectacle between what he termed ‘concentrated’ and ‘diffused’ types The

concentrated spectacle characterized Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and

Maoist China Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—figures who were larger than life,

as their monumental portraits were meant to convey—guaranteed national

cohesion and a totalitarian mentality Debord took the United States as the

model of the diffused spectacle, which was associated with the abundance

of commodities and an undisturbed development of modern capitalism—

the “grandeur of commodity production in general” (sec 65) But it seems

to me that this distinction can only hold as tendencies during this prewar

time, since Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were equally

introduction / 11

strong paternal figures who could just as easily fit the ‘authoritarian

per-sonality’ type, as T W Adorno and fellow researchers argued in their 1950

reflective summation of leadership during the war After World War 2, the

spectacle became “integrated” in Debord’s (1990, VIII, 21–23) view when

he wrote a reflective correction and updating of his original thesis

It seems to me to be precisely during this interwar period that the

fun-damental antagonism between art & design in modernism that is

paradoxi-cally embedded in the Kantian Critiques, which I explore in chapter two,

comes to a head between the reception of Cubism in Europe and New

York and mid-1920s Constructivism in Russia and its eventual

importa-tion into America via Naum Gabo’s “Realist Manifesto” written in 1920

and co-signed by Antoine Pevsner It is the antinomy between

(capital-ist) art and (commun(capital-ist) production that appears to repeat an impossible

reconciliation within artistic and utilitarian practice The Constructivist

critique of Western art was in terms of Marxist commodity fetishism The

idea was to generate a new proletarian culture with practices integrated

into industrial production and collective reception—proletkult The new

society was to be developed through Vkhumetas (‘high grade art-technical

workshops’) and Inkhuk (‘Institute of Artistic Culture’) via an avant-garde

of industrial designers, engineers, and architects who were to produce

rev-olutionary functional designs of practical use Constructivist artists such

as Tatlin, El Lissitzky, and Rodchenko were influenced by the utopian

avant-garde theories of both Saint Simone and Marx attempting to wed art

to life (Rose 1984) Hal Foster (1990) discusses this issue within Russian

Constructivism, which was an overdetermined response to art as

condi-tioned by a bourgeois culture of individual production, reception, ideal

taste, and the patron and open-market system Could Tatlin, who tried

to find a path between art and production and whose own path took him

in the direction of synthesizing artistic and utilitarian thought through

a “truth to materials,” or Rodchenko, whose own path was a synthesis of

the ideological and the formal, be considered performing the same task

as Vertov’s kino eye? Could any of the Constructivists be conceived as

anything other than ideological statements? It’s difficult to tell,

accord-ing to Foster, but the tension that exists between Vertov and Eisenstein

repeats itself, in the utopian impulses of the kino eye to “create a new,

perfect man” and in the Taylorist impulses that eventually lead to Stalinist

social realism as propagated by Zhdanovism It seems that the

produc-tivist side of Constructivism was eventually co-opted and recuperated by

the West through Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern

Art, via the Cubist-constructive tradition, while the Bauhaus seemed to

have been embroiled by the same fundamental tension between useless

art and functionalist design The more ‘mystical figures’ such as Johannes

Itten and Paul Klee, who were opposed to Walter Gropius, Laszlo

Moholy-Nagy, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the supporters of functional

corpo-rate design, were ousted as capitalism moved forward

Desire of Commodity

Turning to the commodity fetishism of consumerism, which progressively

develops with industrial capitalism after World War 2, Baudrillard’s Third

Order of Simulacra as ‘sign value’ emerges The aestheticization of the

art-commodity becomes established, along with the dominance of

Swiss-developed Helvetica, which becomes the classical typeface that best

repre-sents the corporate look—clean, tight, secure, and modern, boasting over

forty corporate logos Baudrillard, who remained close to the Situationists,

gave his controversial talk on Andy Warhol16 at the Whitney Museum of

American Art in 1987, calling him the prime representative of the

renun-ciation of art, of its disappearance, by turning commodity into an art

form Only the signature of the artist gives it a differential value within

a system of signs It was Warhol’s art factory and his machinelike output

that made ‘art’ part of the sign culture, subject to rules, codes of fashion,

and commodification whose value is determined by the market Warhol

seemed to play an endgame as to where art had ‘arrived’ in the West It was

the neo-Dada Fluxus group (1962–1978) that attempted an anti-aesthetic

attitude, like Baudrillard himself, to keep the possibility of art open.17 It is

precisely this Conceptual Art movement in the later 1960s and early 1970s

that tried to evade the market trap—unsuccessfully.18 However, a strand

of contemporary art that I shall mention in my later chapters eventually

picked up the legacy they left

Robert Miklitsch (1996, 1998a) attempted to provide an updated

‘gen-eral economy of commodity fetishism’ as classically developed by Marx by

drawing on Baudrillard’s simulacrum of the sign—calling it

“commodity-body-sign” (79), where use- and exchange- as well as sign-value all come

into play.19 The commodity (exchange value) and the body (use-value)

are supplanted by the sign in a ‘perverse’ economy In Baudrillard’s terms,

“The fetishization of the commodity is the fetishization of a product

emp-tied of its concrete substance of labor and subjected to another type of

labor, a labor of signification that is, of coded abstraction (the production

of differences and sign values)” (in Miklitsch 1998a, 78, added emphasis)

Whereas Marxist critics (the Frankfurt School and especially Adorno, who

with his concept of ‘negative dialectics’ pushed and radicalized the

dialec-tic to a point of a ‘utopian impossibility’ in his break with Hegel) stress the

primacy of production of the culture industry within a perverse capitalist

system, along with their resultant pessimism, the tendency of cultural

introduction / 13

studies has been to champion an optimistic cultural-populist movement

The active, resistant, and savvy consumer who is not duped by the culture

industry is the hegemonic subject of cultural studies The two positions

are locked in struggle, neither of which seemed to offer a completely

satis-factory solution Miklitsch’s (1998a) discussion of Madonna studies that

emerged during the early 1990s (99–138) exemplifies both sides of the

debate, including some sort of middle ground that confirmed this

mal-aise as having no resolution.20 Madonna ‘is’ the commodity; Madonna ‘is’

postmodernism; Madonna appropriates black and queer culture; Madonna

‘liberates’ female pleasure Madonna ‘is’ a prostitute, it’s the way she ‘gets

off,’ and so on

There is however, another way to look at this Miklitsch identifies

Marx’s indifference to individual consumption: “ ‘what the laborer

con-sumes for his own pleasure’ beyond the surplus-value imperatives of the

capitalist” (83) is a realm outside the circulation of value during the

nascent period of capitalism It is precisely this realm that the ‘labor’ of the

sign captures through its ‘use’ value as pleasure and desire The ‘body’ part

of the sign-value, which Deleuze|Guattari identify and develop through

their ‘body without organs’ (BwO) is recognized by Miklitsch (52–56),

but subsequently dismissed (as did Baudrillard).21 But the recognition of

the body sets us in a direction different from Žižek’s Hegelio-Lacanian

position, which distrusts Deleuzian forms of subjectivity, maintaining

that Deleuze’s Spinozian interpretation simply plays into capitalist forms

of subjectivity (Žižek 1993, 216–219; 2004)

Bodily Woes

The worry about the body and its excesses perhaps can be understood as

reaching back to Herbert Marcuse’s22 failed attempt to develop a

Marxist-Freudian counterrevolution of a new subjectivity in the late 1960s and

early 1970s (right around the time of the student protests in 1968, which

he influenced), which was to release the accumulative “surplus-repression”

of the social order of domination by drawing on the drives (Triebe) that

had creative potential (as in the Spieltrieb [creative drive] of infancy) His

critique of “affirmative” bourgeois industrial capitalist culture maintained

that art had become a mere commodity wherein the repression inherent

in bourgeois liberalism had been sublimated The reality principle had

become the “performance principle” that was in the service of

surplus-repression What was called for was a release of pleasure—the repressive

desublimation whereby desire was manipulated and channeled through

the culture industry The libidinal release, often referred to as the

sex-ual revolution, was part of such liberation The body as an instrument of

pleasure rather than one of labor led to a nonrepressive society, a free and

happy society.23

Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2005), in their The New Spirit of

Capitalism, tried to show that this very period from 1968 to 1978 was a time

of ‘artistic critique’ and progress, while (in France) the period that followed

(1985–1995) was a period of progressive setbacks.24 Bernard Stiegler (2006)

would have none of that He faults Boltanski and Chiapello not only for

fail-ing to recognize Marcuse’s contribution, but also for their inability to

recog-nize the role of technicity in capitalist formations He identifies the ‘mistake’

Marcuse makes in his belief that it was possible to “uncover a golden age of

libido,” thereby liberating the “instincts” by supplanting the pleasure

prin-ciple over the reality prinprin-ciple Stiegler’s entire point is that there is no pure

state of desire that can avoid the question of thinking the originary technics,

where desire is already enwrapped with species modification All objects

of desire are pharmaka—poison and cure—and the paradox is that even

use-value as alienated labor can be a source of pleasure: the worker learns

to love his chains As the theorists of libidinal economy (Lyotard, Deleuze,

Baudrillard, Pierre Klossowski, Lacan) in the mid-1970s maintained, the

perverse social structure of capitalism thrives on liquefying all of the

super-ego barriers—what Žižek is fond of calling “the demand to enjoy!”

The Synoptic Assemblage

Historically, we have moved from a cinematic apparatus of ‘exhibitionism’—

its attraction was the very display of its own visibility for spectators (Gunning

1990)—to a state where self-conscious constructivist self- reflexivity of

the narrative (or lack of) expands spectator pleasure.25 This extraction of

‘attention’ becomes a productive value for capital in the way it seeks the

dis-tributive ‘presence’ of the (interactive) viewer, best exemplified by the video

game industry As a corrective, Jonathan Crary’s (1999) genealogical study

of ‘attention’ is a valuable contribution in the way he charts the changes

of perception—understood broadly as a bodily sensorium—dislodging the

hegemony of vision when theorizing spectacular culture, exploring rather the

“strategies in which individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as

[being] disempowered”(3) In designer capitalism, the very aggrandizement

of ‘attention’ through celebrity status and reality shows enables such

isola-tion to be overcome through fandom, sports, spectacular events, Internet

dating, and so on

These interactive and cybernetic machines—not only the video

cam-era and computer, but also the audiovisual recording and playback

technologies—have become the new prosthesis integrated into our

bod-ies and minds They have changed our perceptions of ‘reality’ through the

introduction / 15

modulation of speeds and intensities they create in the affective flows of our

bodies The Foucauldian machinic assemblage of the panopticon has now

been inverted: we live in a synopticon26 where the many watch the few on

screens and a few watch the many by surveillance (Andrejevic 2004) This

new machinic assemblage of technomedia is able to aggrandize ‘attention,’

that is, affect, through celebrity status, reality shows, and news

documenta-tion of various sorts (its encoding and decoding capabilities); at the same

time, its surveillance capabilities (especially editing as its recoding capacity)

are able to capture and modulate the body into its proper categories and

reg-ulate its flows despite the failure of complete seduction That designer

capi-talism uses ‘bodies’ to power this synoptic assemblage by harvesting affect,

analogous to the supercomputer in the film Matrix harvesting electricity

from human movement to run it, should at least give us pause The

transfor-mation of life into value in the form of commodity and capital, as presented

through the dystopic vision of Richard Fleischer’s film Soylent Green, seems

equally ‘close.’ Reality television ‘harvests’ death as well, not only in the

sui-cides that result when casting members don’t make it (Feldinger 2009), some

suffering the psychosis of the ‘Truman Show Syndrome,’ but also in the

pro-cesses of dying itself (e.g., Lance Loud, Pedro Zamora, and Jade Goody) The

interactivity between accumulating affect and then controlling it—spectacle

as dramatic narrative and traumatic psychic breakdown—coupled with

sur-veillance makes the synoptic assemblage the perfect desiring-machine for

designer capitalism (The telescreen in George Orwell’s 1984 masterpiece

also had two-way capabilities.) Desiring and social production find

them-selves in a renewed circuit for capitalist gains Wealth can now be extracted

once again through what can be called the ‘creative turn’ of affective labor,

where desiring-production and social-production (libido and labor power)

are no longer separate spheres: private and public collapse

Designer Affect

In light of this, art and its education should no longer theorize

percep-tion “in terms of immediacy, presence, punctuality” (Crary, 1999, 4)—a

phenomenological inheritance27 that has often led to a residual visual

essen-tialism Instead, it should concentrate on how perception is now being

intensified, stretched, slowed down, speeded up, widened, condensed, and

so on, through contemporary interactive technicities ‘Attention’ is now

marked by the disjunctive synthesis of both fullness and lack—of

seem-ingly full presence and also that which can’t be grasped, what is

impos-sibly absent The screen holds the ambivalence in its ability to monitor

and record movement (surveillance), at the same time being capable of

reversing this function as spectacle, holding our attention for its own

productive purposes: totally active and totally passive are the screen’s ideal

limits that are being constantly breeched by spectators consciously

avoid-ing its capture or becomavoid-ing distracted Totally passive and totally active

are the screen’s limits, like the limit-field of vision itself The chaos of ‘pure’

vision, as Brian Massumi (2002, 147–148) develops it, presents a limit that

is not a boundary but an opening up of a virtual dimension characterized

as a visual attractor, a phase space that is a total field composed of

attrac-tors such as edge and slant The importance of this for art and its education

is that such a pure field of vision is pure kinesthesis, meaning that the limit

field shapes and governs motion that is indeterminate Vision, as the

per-ception of objects, is a subtractive process of fusion from the chaos, which

requires bodily movement; without it, the difficult question of

hallucina-tion presents itself A gesturing body is at play, not a static body caught by

an image

Massumi goes on to argue that there is no such thing as ‘pure’ vision;

even the laboratory attempts to evoke it (the Glanzfeld experiments) end

in failure He demonstrates how each sense has its attractors, its abstract

surfaces, or limit fields (e.g., the sense of taste has fat (a substance) as

its virtual surface, where fat holds every flavor) The intermodal nature

of experience, its synestheticism, means that the visual field is

intercon-nected with other sense fields; but “for that to be possible, there must be a

virtual purity of each sense separately, as well as a virtuality governing its

cofunctioning with the others: differentiation and integration go together

You can’t have one without the other” (157).28 This mixed virtuality at the

ontological level, combined with the phenomenal surface mix as the

emer-gence of the senses at the actual level, enables a discussion of the ‘force’ of

art that is developed in chapter six

The conceit of the visual in-itself (en soi) that art education often

cham-pions must be given up to mark vision’s place in the larger question of

affective embodiment within designer capitalism in the way it circulates in

control societies The amplification of the visual and aural through

technol-ogies—hence this book’s title as oral/aural eye of consumption—is done so

with and through the productive synthetic interplay between the ‘implicit’

and ‘explicit’ body, as body schema and body image This is a per-forming

as well as per-formed body.29 This is a short cut to grasp the way media

works with ‘originary’ affects30 through amplification and modulation of

sound and image as transmitted by the human face, what Deleuze|Guattari

(1987, 168) cautioned as an ‘abstract machine of faciality’ (visagéité)

Affective manipulation, as Susan Buck-Morss (1992) reminds us, already

lay at the heart of capitalist industrial commodification at the turn of the

twentieth century through the various forms of phantasmagoria that

aban-doned the scene of representation.31 The phantasm being an effect “that

introduction / 17

transcends inside and outside, since its topological property is to bring

internal and external sides into contact, in order for them to unfold into a

single side” (Deleuze 1990, 211) The current forms of biopolitical control,

in the way ‘life’ is being subsumed and transformed into capital through

“the marketization of affective capacity” (Clough 2004, 15) via

complex-ity theory, grounds the affect economy of designer capitalism through its

various network globalized systems Spinoza’s famous aphorism, “What

can a body do?” celebrated by the ‘affective turn’ (Clough 2008) has been

hijacked in such an affective economy of performance—Nike’s “Just do

it!” is a demand that places the body in various machinic assemblages of

sport performance As Jon McKenzie’s (2001) witty and clever book puts

it, “Perform or else!” The flexible body of designer capitalism—now a

‘fractal’ subject—is defined by the value it produces, to borrow Patricia

Clough’s (2007) apt phrasing, through “the augmentation or diminution

of a body’s capacity to act, to engage, to connect” (2) Twentieth-century

Taylorism has now come into the twenty-first century in a much more

refined form through the exploration of mapping the body at the

microlev-els of space and time, imperceptible to human perception, to capture

atten-tion, a development that new-media artists have begun to explore, which is

why the video installations of Bill Viola become so interesting in the way

these gaps of time are pried open to disrupt designer capitalist bodily

‘tai-loring.’ Some of the most interesting disruptions to the structuring flows

of libidinal capital are through animated short films (5–10 minutes long),

where, unlike in Disney’s Pixar, the artists have more control over content

and technique—but perhaps no broad distribution YouTube is now the

right venue (see aniBOOM) It’s time to move on

Pa rt I

D econst ruc t i ng t h e Or a l Ey e

Ch a p t e r O n e

Si t uat i ng t h e Or a l Ey e i n

D e sig n e r Ca pi ta l i sm

Affective Capture

Designer capitalism trades on the capture of affect through screen media

to establish a particular sensorium for its own ends Is there a way for

art and its education to avoid this capture? In the broadest sense, this

requires a transition from an imaginary based on representation to a

non-representational logic as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,

who drew on the seminal thoughts of Gregory Bateson, Baruch Spinoza,

Henri Bergson, and Friedrich Nietzsche It seems to me that their more

ethical and radical political potentialities as offered in Anti-Oedipus

(A-O) and Thousand Plateaus (TP) have been hijacked and subsumed by

more conservative ‘scientific’ proponents of chaos and complexity theory

(DeLanda 2006) Guattari’s more radical approach still remains in the

shadows of Deleuze, while Deleuze’s Logic of Sense (1990) and Difference

and Repetition (1994) have been given theoretical priority, which is why

(perhaps?) there has been a renewed interest in and reappraisal of

Anti-Oedipus (Holland 1999; Buchanan 2008) and the continued provocative

application of Deleuze|Guattari to politics by John Protevi (2001, 2009)

and Brian Massumi The ontologization of affect, its political

manifesta-tions to manipulate the political landscape, has raised strong debate,

espe-cially within human geography circles, where there is a strong recognition

that the prepersonal corporeal molecular dimension of experience relates

to the inhuman, not as some kind of biological or physiological

reduction-ism, but as the recognition of the creative forces at play within ethological

cartographies that are ‘more’ than human (Doel, 1999; Connolly 2002;

Thrift 2005; McCormack 2007; Barnett 2008)

Žižek (2004, 183–192) has gone so far as to accuse Deleuze of being

an ideologue of capitalism, bringing to bear the tensions that remain

unre-solved between Lacanians and Deleuzians Žižek’s clever reversal, Organs

without Bodies, should, however, be read more literally within the context of

designer capitalism: organs, as pieces of the body, have now achieved their

own legal and illegal commodity status, from stem-cell research to heart

and now entire facial transplants There is no part of the body (both inside

and outside) that advertising has not targeted “All organs have the

possi-bility of overcoding and being overcoded,” that is ‘facialized’ (Wegenstein

2002, 258; 2006) To be ‘organs without a body’ is to be a ‘nobody’ in the

social order, not counted As Haggerty and Ericson (2000, 619) point out,

within a surveillance society such as ours, this means the “disappearance

of disappearance.” If you can’t somehow be traced, you don’t ‘exist.’

In the educational literature, this hijacking comes by way of seeing

affect (a-signifying semiotics) as yet another dimension to be tapped into

as a pragmatic learning process for heightened performativity to compete

on the world stage Deleuzian thought approached from the more

‘sci-entific’ end, as in the continuing thought of Manuel DeLanda (2006),

Francisco Valera (1993), and Humberto Maturana (1988), enables

edu-cational theory to harness complexity theory and the biology of cognition

as the state of the art in mathematics and science education The

poli-tics of desire are absent At the same time, the celebration of ‘affectivity,’

especially in the arts, has by and large also abandoned the ethico-political

concerns of agency and celebrated the body instead, forwarding

spiritual-ism, naturalspiritual-ism, and emotionality as various forms of post-Romanticism

caught up in an ecological and economic crisis of capitalism

The familial reproductive organic (autopoetic) body of industrial

capitalism, the body of the suburbs, has long been abandoned; its final

gasp is being heard loudest now with the death toll of Fordist principals

finally being sounded, with General Motors declaring bankruptcy and

thousands of autoworkers globally now out of work Toyotism has won

the day ‘Arnie,’ the Terminator Oedipal Father, once transported from

the future, can no longer protect his family While Deleuze|Guattari

con-nected Oedipalization with the schizophrenia of capitalism through their

two provocative volumes, the post-Oedipal configurations within designer

capitalism no longer maintain the idealization of the triadic nuclear family

(Žižek 1999b, 313–400; jagodzinski 2004) Now, it is possible for a

trans-gendered ‘man’ (Thomas Beatle) to give birth to a girl ‘Anti-Oedipus’ is

becoming a dated concept The future of ‘desiring-production’ (libido) in

designer capitalism is the manipulatable genetic body: already advanced by

cosmetic surgery, genetic research, artificial insemination, possible

clon-ing, designer sex drugs such as Viagra, botox treatments, and (as yet) illegal

steroids and hormonal drugs The illusion of a ‘natural’ body has slipped

away It should not be forgotten that this designer body is predominantly

performed over and on women’s body—in its reproductive and spectacular

capacities

the oral eye in designer capitalism / 23

The shift in social production (labor-power) is toward the idealization

of the worker as a liquid body (a flesh-technology-information assemblage),

more in keeping with the mercurial cyborg T-1000 in Terminator 2, Judgment

Day, ‘Arnie’s’ replacement; its morphing abilities enable it to continually adapt

through “life-long learning,” which is the contemporary pedagogical rhetoric

as undergraduate university degrees become devalued when it comes to the

workplace Postdoctorates are becoming more and more common,

becom-ing yet another step before enterbecom-ing the job market

Computer-generated-imagery (CGI) morphing strategies are perfect for designer capitalism—they

can generate universal humanity by blending together races into the

ideal-ized Platonic Forms, just like Photoshop technology can lighten skin to move

bodies into ‘whiteness’ and the values that come with such a move toward

purity, morality, celebrity, racial differentiation, wealth, and so on,

depend-ing how the value attached to its intensity is played out in various cultures as

a hierarchical categorization Such images continue to ‘hegemonize’ a

par-ticular sensorial idealization to the point where Asian women begin to value

wide(r) eyes and a lighter skin, seeking white donor eggs for light-skinned

babies (Mayes 2003) Four out of 10 women in Hong Kong, Malaysia, the

Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan use skin-whitening cream (Asian

Pacific Post 2006) Another side to global manipulation is the

Geographic-Information System (GIS) that stores, edits, analyzes, shares, and displays

geographic information—the typological and topological spatialization of

the globe that provides the search engines for gridding the planet Through

the sharing of data banks, social workers, health professionals, police,

educa-tors, insurance companies, and so on, can begin to assess ‘at risk’ individuals

through the profiling of information that can be used by any particular

insti-tution Who said biopower is a fiction?

There are, however, new media arts—digital, performative, video,

instal-lation—that provide art and its education with new lines of flight for the

development of a new sensorium, a BwO that continues radical possibilities

to disrupt the capitalist Imaginary and the subject it desires and needs These

potentialities are addressed throughout this book An array of neologisms,

portmanteau words, and conceptualizations that I feel necessary to introduce

for grasping this potentiality will be put into play: the homonym site/sight/

cite, which encapsulates the Lacanian registers; self-refleXivity; Xpression;

in(formation); (in)design; e(motion); Spieltrieb; avant-garde without authority;

and so on Can we desire otherwise than what designer capitalism offers us?

Designing Difference

This flexible, performative body of the neoliberal subject is now

begin-ning to morph into its next phase of the ‘posthuman,’ involved in a sort of

disappearance of agentic control, spread across geographies of bodily flows

within allocentric formations as brilliantly theorized by geographers such

as Nigel Thrift (2004, 2006, 2007, 2008) and Marcus Doel (1999), who

are familiar with ‘French’ theory “A person becomes a shifting ensemble

of states that are received and passed on, states over which that person

rarely has much in the way of direct control but which can be

modu-lated in the passing in such a way as to produce nuances or even, at the

limit, quite new forms of going on” (Thrift 2008, 85) As theorized within

complexity theory, our species becomes embedded in the lines and fields

within an animated global scale of other actors where ‘naturalism’ and

even ‘scientism’ no longer appear to be ‘dirty’ words for social critique as

social, cultural, and scientific theory seem to implode into the

celebra-tion of a Third Culture as masterminded by the American businessman

and ‘literary agent’ John Brockman (1995) through the auspices of his

Edge Foundation A new instrumentalism emerges, ideal for further global

expansions of capital’s designer economy, by harnessing the best creative

‘thinkers’ in articulating a future of the twenty-first century For all its

the-oretical faults and inadequacies, the coming “multitudes,” as theorized in

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), are in danger of being

apolitically transformed into Bruno Latourian “ANTs” (pun intended)

that form “the ‘cosmos’ of unruly entities that can impinge on any

particu-lar situation” (Thrift 88, n.5) Actor-Network Theory (ANT) maintains

that all elements in a network, human and nonhuman alike, should be

described in the same terms, with agency emerging from the

heteroge-neous associations between humans and nonhumans raising concerns as

to what precisely are the ethicopolitical dimensions of such ‘systems

think-ing.’ “Transindividuation,” as first developed by Gilbert Simondon (1992)

and furthered by Bernard Stiegler (see Crogan 2010), has the advantage of

recognizing this same inhuman dimension of human interactions without

losing sight of the socialization of libidinal energy from which care, love,

and civility emerge So, it’s not the individual but individuation as group

subjectivity, a field of experience “where the [preindividual] body is always

more than One” (Manning 2010, 118), where life at the molecular level

flourishes and overcomes the residual instrumentalism of “ANTS.”

Designer capitalism has caught up with Deleuzian difference Kane

Faucher (2010) calls this “McDeleuze” after the Big Mac It may well

be a Deleuzian century after all, stripped of its ethico-political thrust—

representation as such no longer sells Post-Fordism now transforms the

relations of representation against representing Heterogeneity is ‘in’ as

a strange attractor The negative is now positive Based in The Hague,

Netherlands, the typological experiments of the international firm Strange

Attractors Design (www.strangeattractors.com) are perhaps the best

the oral eye in designer capitalism / 25

example of this approach in the way custom-designed type and typography

address the ‘forces’ of local geography, politics, and culture by taking into

account local traditions (heritage), the graphic vernacular, and subcultural

representations to push against generic globalist styles (Boman 2006)

‘Broadcasting Tongues’ and ‘Yesterday, I lost my Helvetica’ offer a flavor

of this approach, which will eventually become the new survival strategy,

much like the continuing rise of book publishing by demand One might

call this a superindividuated approach, where the oxymoron of ‘mass

cus-tomization’ within the contemporary global and digital society becomes

possible through a compression of diverse personal ‘choices’ such as

cloth-ing, music, cell phone ringtones, iChat icons, avatars, hairstyles, and so

on The result is a unique, one-of-a-kind ‘becoming,’ a mixture of

authen-ticity, humanity, and naiveté The interactive dialogical nature of such

graphic design may well prove to be, like the ‘free software movement,’ a

way to undermine corporate design But it’s too early to tell Without an

ethico-political understanding that the building of markets is not only a

purely economic exercise that keeps the capitalist system afloat, but can

be an intervention into cultural change, this direction can also be a simple

upgrading of Robert Venturi et al.’s (1977) now-classic Learning from Las

Vegas The local vernacular as a ‘producerly text’ with a ‘producerly’

inter-active audience becomes new ground for expanded markets

Personal Views, a Web site (www.esad.pt/personalviews/) that offers

the opinions of contemporary designers around the world (coordinated by

Andrew Howard), is based on a conference that took place at the Escola

Superior de Artes e Design (ESAD) in Matosinhos, Portugal, beginning in

2003 Howard has explored similar ground concerning global design but

with a much more sensitive grasp of the political differences that design

can take, inviting designers who are aware of their complicity in shaping

the ecological environment and the political and influential role that the

American National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD)

plays in shaping the educational vision of where design is headed Gar

Hustwit’s two brilliant video documentaries—Helvetica (2006) and

Objectified (2009)—point to the tensions within the world of visual

com-munication and product design

The ‘new wave’ aestheticization of typography brought on by

Macintosh-devoted design experimentation in the mid-1990s (spearheaded by the

Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan) and the

reac-tion to this—a pulling back from such ‘excesses’ to a new sobriety,

clar-ity, and direct message-related programs (Dingeman Kuilman and Neils

Meulman of the Netherlands)—seems to repeat a dominant schizo cycle

of excess and sobriety, of capitalist deterritorialization, which is then

fol-lowed by its reterritorialization in ‘good’ fashionable style The excesses of

punk typography are ‘cooled off’ by a return to classical forms The

adver-tising social porn of Oliviero Toscani in the mid-1990s to sell Benetton’s

multicolored knitwear is perhaps finally challenged by designers such as

Andrew Howard, whose sociopolitically conscious approach exposes

mar-keting strategies.1 To what extent does Adbusters as a form of culture

jam-ming still remain viable as an interventionist strategy in this contemporary

mediated society? RTMark, Queer Nation, The Yes Men, TM (Tactical

Media), and WD+RU as anticorporate ‘resistant’ hacker groups do it all

one better For example, RTMark’s software, Reamweaver, can modify the

content of existing sites and then redirect it to a separate URL Forgotten

(perhaps) are designer educators who tried to redirect graphic design to a

more ethico-political understanding, such as Victor Papanek (1972) and

his sustainable design ideas, Jan van Toorn (1998) and his search for a

dialogical space that politicizes and mediates a space between the

rela-tions of production and the symbolic order—not always successfully—

and Sheila De Bretteville (1998), who paid close attention to local memory

and feminist issues.2

Containing Monsters

Designer capitalists’ ‘new’ approach to difference, which supersedes the

Colors of Benetton’s mentality of managing difference as serialized discrete

cultures, has emerged on the television screens as well The ‘hue-man’ face

is now an assemblage extended as an open system of expansion through

set-variation; that is to say, even the inhuman as monstrous, the abject,

can now be managed and contained and even catered to as seemingly just

another ‘difference’ that can now make a difference—that is, eventually

be counted Deleuze’s distinction between “determining determination”

(the logic of becoming) and “determined determination” (the logic of

being) in differential logics as a distribution of singularities has been

clev-erly subverted by treating difference as a possibility of sameness given as

a choice The differential symbolic power of the media now plays with

singularity as the chance event: not only wining the lotto, but becoming

a celebrity and achieving fame overnight The U.S television series Ugly

Betty, which reworks the Columbian telenovela Yo soy Betty la fea [Betty]

(Rivero 2003) and takes place at the high-fashion magazine Mode, is

per-haps the best example of this change The constructions of beauty/ugliness

are given their usual postfeminist twists along the same lines of previous

‘hits’: Ally McBeal, Sex and the City, and Desperate Housewives Viewers

know full well that Betty could be transformed into a ‘swan’ if she ‘truly’

wants too However, difference is differentiated within Ugliness is not the

opposite of beauty, but only so many degrees away from it If beauty can be

the oral eye in designer capitalism / 27

performed (Judith Butler’s well-established thesis), so can ugliness, which

also means it can be transformed (through the cosmetic ‘make-over’) The

logic of difference here is that of equivocity Everyone can be ‘beautiful’ if

they so wish Beauty becomes an open system concept, letting all in who

wish to freely participate in its construction Or, everyone can retain his

or her difference in a pluralist democracy as well, which seems to be the

American version In the contemporary Columbian version of Ugly Betty,

this would amount to overcoming the various class and race distinctions

as they continue to circulate as the key signifiers of modernization shaped

by Western/Christian ideologies (Rivero 2003, 67).3 Further, ‘Ugly Betty’

can even become the head of the company and win the lotto by doing so

Meritocracy in post-Fordist capitalism works on talent and abilities Ugly,

homely, or just fashionably challenged, as in The Devil Wears Prada, let

the best girl ‘win.’

The star talent system operates in the same way: the frumpy looking

Susan Boyle—her ‘ugliness’ supplanted by her stellar voice—turned out

to be such a singing sensation that she was perceived as the number-one

favorite on the 2009 Britain’s Got Talent contest; her failing to win lead to

an ‘emotional breakdown’ as bloggers and telephone calls weighed in This

wasn’t the ‘ugly duckling turned swan’ story that pervades these designer

programs, like The Swan makeover series What to do with this “hairy

angel,” the “down to earth” girl the audience fell in love with, as news

reporters put it? Coming from a disabilities background, Boyle eventually

cracked after being subjected to the cruelty and sadism of the reality talent

program She did not fit the body or the look of previous winners and was

emotionally fragile Perhaps she was diagnosed with a DSM-IV anxiety

order? Best to keep this private and secretive The machinic assemblage

of the talent contest had produced an unexpected result; it had become

a chance event like the lotto It didn’t take long, however, for Harper’s

Bazaar Magazine to change all that with a full-scale make-up and

photo-shoot attack It seems that there are still limits to faciality, even with the

new tolerance to difference

The white-wall/black-hole system of generative distinction as developed

by Deleuze|Guattari (“Year Zero: Faciality” in TP) has, however, morphed

in complexity Signification (the ‘white wall’ of meaning), which brings

out the ‘black hole’ of subjectification (the face), as yet another

significa-tion in a chain that either does or does not belong to the human(e) order,

has had to be expanded The face is not a location; rather it is a ‘grid’ or

a ‘diagram’ that configures the space of intersubjective relations of desire

Can this ‘diagram’ still perform its ideological affect quite so easily? It

seems that the ‘white wall’ has become a blank screen The blank face as

a surface is waiting to be manipulated in any shape or form “Blank sheet