Correlationism of Modern Art

This text is about the problem of invention and essential novelty in the art, posited as the form of production. With regard to modern art as a type of production constituted by the particular moment of history, one may distinguish between:

(a) art as one of the forms of social production under 'the latest' capitalism (where creators are alienated from their works and their labor, with commercialization-as-commodification always directed toward the eventual embedment into market — the logic of development as well as a mode of being which Mark Fisher calls "business ontology");

(b) speculative, not-yet-realized art, as a part of natural productive life, that is, humans being-as-species through the life appropriation by transcending the alienation through the elimination of the state of affairs of the social, as a consequence of such annulment; art as manifestation of ‘generic production of free, spontaneous conscious activity’. While a) refers to the actual, real state of affairs, b) is at best a speculative and unspecified set of realizabilities with a set of particular conditions of unfolding. At no doubt, a) and b) taken as two mutually exclusive forms of production must expose critical differences concerning the modes of expression and performance, forms of exhibition, art functions and objectives, as well as evaluation and interpretation points of the work of art as work of art. The severity of their mutual contradictions is thinkable to the extent of making the artwork of one historical period incommensurable with the acceptance viewpoint of the other (the idea of what should be perceived as the work of art). However, the fact is that, regardless of how exactly art is understood, under what exact conditions it exists, it always exists as a certain form of correlation, and correlationism appears to be one of its transcendental, a priori conditions.

What constitutes the correlationism to which art belongs is, generally speaking, our ‘being-as-species’. Particularly, I’m speaking about the limitations of the modes of perception of art and its modes of production. By modes of perception, I understand all the possible access points of the human species to aesthetic experience. Not limited to the sensory data as such, they also encompass emergent functional properties mainly referred to as comprehension (reading, interpretation, viewer’s perspective, involvement, self-identification with fictional agent, to name a few). Modes of production refer to: specific conditions and equipment required for a particular piece of art to be produced (from paintbrush and camera to recording studio); [in some cases] special environments required for demonstration and perception (art gallery, theater, etc.); a set of actions (practices) yielding the artwork. Although not directly corresponding to our species biology (: = the data provided by the sensory system), both these modes are determined and, therefore, constrained by it (and its environmental conditions). Each of them implies a form of [mediated or direct] correlation. As JLIAT puts it: ‘Music is heard, paintings are seen. Music is played, paintings are painted. Duchamp’s urinal or Cage’s silence exist in and because of this correlation. In fact, they expose it, rely on it, and work with it. In Duchamp, the context provides the status of art. Cage’s 4’33” presents the impossibility of silence as an impossibility for us in our experiential relationship within the performance’ [3]. Since both modes are necessary for the art to exist as art, we arrive at the necessity of the correlationism of art.

Non-Correlationist Art: a Virtuality 

From the correlationist grounding of art, a radical novelty in art may be thought in terms of revision, as proposed by J.-P. Caron: as a trajectory  that seeks "to coordinate that which is internal to art itself in a system in order to conquer a space in which art can no longer be art" [1]. One of the possible configurations of such space [where the art ceases to be] is exemplified by what may be dubbed in the context as non-correlationist art. The concept refers to a speculative realizabilities of art, such as the ones that exist outside our perceptive affordances (: = outside the human correlation). An objection arises immediately: if it is unperceivable, non-given in a strict sense, what can be (un)learned and obtained from this account of art? If the object is presumed as such to be outside the correlation, how then would one distinguish between such an object and literary nothingness? 

1. Non-correlationist art is not an antithesis of the correlation, nor is it its transcendence; rather, it is the affordance which stands beyond both human correlationism of art and its denial. In most of his writings, JLIAT develops the concept of ‘noise qua noise’, considered non-correlationist, unintended noise, opposed to ‘noise as subculture’, as ‘anti-music’, as art—the correlationist account of noise. As such, this account of noise still falls under the existing paradigm of what we used to refer to as ‘art'—without any novelty. This is precisely because it appears as a direct negation of music— as a particular exemplification of the mode of production we call art— it is eventually assimilated into this mode of production as the other manifestation of it. As the antithesis of musicality, it is commensurable with the art paradigm as such (through its inclusion into the metaphysical framework that constitutes this paradigm). As for the second account of noise, which JLIAT calls ‘noise qua noise’, it is described as follows: ‘It exists in any system as an unwanted possibility, which is why noise qua noise is always unwanted even in the arts because it destroys the correlation, or, if used at all, it is used to achieve some destructive act in a very careful way’ [3]. This second account of noise stands beyond music and anti-music, as something indifferent: either to the artist or to the listener. What JLIAT considers here may be thought of as an affordance of such noise that exists as some unintended (unwanted) realizability, inherent to the system’s modes of production, as something that may be created as what we may also consider to be noise, but that won’t stand in any graspable relation to ‘noise as art’— neither as its denial nor as its paradigmatic case. What is said here about noise may only be, as I suppose, attributed to art in general—to the mode of art that exists outside our perception, and, therefore, the correlation presupposed by art to function at all. Furthermore, it may not necessarily be inherent to the means of production within the system: rather, it is something indifferent to such a relation of belonging or outsiderness to the system of production in general (i.e., meaning this indifference to be the possibility of art production outside any thinkable correlation with it, either within the existing form of art production, or by the outer means of this form). To demonstrate what I mean, I would give an outline of non-correlationist art as non-specified thinkability.  

2. Non-correlationist art is thinkable. Consider the encounter with nonhuman hosts of intelligence that are similar to our species by functional properties (of mind) but significantly differ structurally from our species: namely, they can interact with ionizing radiation without any negative impact on their organism. What is more, they also possess some ‘additional’ sense which allows them to perceive it in a featured way, and manipulate it — to the extent sufficient for the production of, so to say, ‘radioactive arts’ as a fully distinct mode of art production [added to other modes of production, based on the modes of perception that we share in common]. Although we may have their descriptions of aesthetic experience provided by that other art (given only as knowing-what), for us as a species this experience remains inaccessible in a direct form because of the lack of that sense in our sensory system, as well as the impossibility of interaction with ionizing radiation without harm for ourselves. In terms of anthropocentrism, this art doesn’t exist for us, since no correlation is possible in principle with the objects of ‘radioactive arts’ and the modes of its production. Yet, it is thinkable and imaginable as something non-given but graspable, not fully understood, although [at least to some extent] comprehensible: either through analogies and metaphors, or theoretical representations and abstract concepts given as a metaphysical framework of this ‘other aesthetics’. 

3. The knowledge of the fact that non-correlationist art exists demarcates the artwork outside the correlation from an empty space. It is in principle possible to dismantle the ‘corollary’ to Cage’s ‘4’33’’ made by R. Kostelanetz that ‘pure silence is physically impossible’ [2], putting that, in fact, it is, after the heat death of the Universe, but it would be inaccessible to any physical entity. Just as we know about anything else that we know for sure to take place, yet as something inaccessible in either direct or indirect form (for instance, time before and after human species existence, as Meillassoux puts it); just as we know about something to exist, although being unperceivable ‘to us’ from the ‘species being viewpoint’ of such ‘us’ (electromagnetic spectrum outside the portion visible to us; ultra-high sonic frequencies on which rats communicate with each other all the time, unheard to humans; ultraviolet, infrared colors, etc.), we would know about the fact that it exists — in a form of realizabilities of production and perception of such an art. We would be aware of its existence, and this awareness is what would distinguish ‘the art outside the human species of perception’ from merely ‘nothing perceivable’. And the awareness of it as of the Other’s affordance, ‘unperceivable yet existing’, is itself an emergent novelty of art that now appears as a pragmatic projective, as a desire of unfolding our modes of perception. It is in principle possible ‘to make works of sound that might be considered as music even if they are not only un-listenable in practice but also un-listenable in principle’, as well as to make visual (art)works that are unviewable in principle. It may not yield something new, since that would only enhance — ‘quantitatively’ — the specters (the ‘scope’) of modes of production and perception that are already at hand. But this enhancement may only be the starting point of unfolding the modes of perception — that is, reorganizing and updating aesthetic experience. As for such an update, we may consider the reassembling of our subjectivity with its perception affordance scope in general through the creation of new access points to other aesthetic experiences.

4. Non-correlationist art is accessible — through the reassembling of subjectivity. Just as Caron puts a contradistinction between the thesis ‘of the synthetic nature of the Self’ and ‘synthesizing activity of the Subject’ [basing on the nemocentrist criticism of subjectivity of T. Metzinger and R. Brassier], the idea of augmented subjectivity proposed in R. Negarestani’s ‘Intelligence and Spirit’ comes to mind. The account of intelligence from the functionalist viewpoint suggests a perspective of mind untethered from its biological and causal constraints and socio-historical totalities threatening its existential conditions. As such, this viewpoint implies the reinvention and reassembling of the hosts of intelligence, both their functionality and structural properties, since such a reinvention is the only plausible way of the intelligence self-liberation from its constraints present within the species of the intelligence hosts into which it is embedded at the particular historical moment of existence as such. 

The encounter with the hosts with either sensory system or subjectivity enabling the entirely new modes of perception, either as a viewpoint (in case of subjectivity distinct from ours) or as a new form of data inaccessible to us (in case of the other sensory system), may be a premise to  reinvention and self-augmentation of humans. In a broader context, a contribution to intelligence history (as Negarestani has it in “Intelligence and Spirit”): a  general trajectory of realizabilities unfolded by overcoming the constraints of species biology and subjectivity. What appears firstly as undifferentiated is then revised as unperceivable; as such it is then realized as lack, and considered consequentially as the desired change of the given state of affairs; as a desire, it is then thought through realizabilities of this desired, namely, the possibility of the implementation of what is thought as the desired properties/capabilities; which is eventually possible only in a form of self-transcendence, appearing as changes to our functionality and structure as the hosts of intelligence. 

Production →Perception: Changing ‘the Aspect’

What I intended to show by the idea of non-correlationist art is that the whole historical movement of art utilizing invention and novelty in it is constituted by the relationship between modes of its production and perception. As the history of art in the XX century shows, the most considerable and significant advances in art concerning its novelty were made through the updates of the modes of production, which, in their turn, have been enabled by virtue of the advances in technologies. As for the examples, consider cinema as an entirely new form of art, the institutionalization of photography as a form of art (enabled by technological advances), as well as pop art or electronic music as the new genres of the existing forms of arts. Whatever genius may be Vangelis and Tangerine Dream as the composers, their general abilities concerning the modes of performativity, as well as other implications necessary for music production, are restricted by their species biology, although these constraints have been overcome by technical devices of music production (such as modular synthesizers with sequencers and general capability of voltage control). The supervenience of these new modes of art production on technology is stressed by the fact that some of the most prominent contributors to these new forms of art production should be affiliated with academic fields (such as microelectronics, experimental physics, acoustics, etc.) rather than with arts as their background — with research and development rather than composing or performance (Donald Buchla, John Chowning, Curtis Roads, to name a few).

The realizabilities of these advances into the modes of production are, however, finite and, as for now, I suppose, are depleted or close to their full depletion. If the latter is the case, the source of radical novelty within the contemporary state of affairs of the forms of art production may be located on the ‘other side of the curtain', so to speak — meaning the advances of the perspectives and viewpoints granted to the recipient of any modality (sonic, visual, etc.), or, more generally—the modes of perception of the works of art, referring to the directionality of the search for novelty from the side of ‘recipient aspect’ rather than ‘creator’: the affordances of perception realized through the virtual-potenThe latter may manifest as upgrades to the existing modes of art perception, 'quantitative' augmentations made to our sensory systems (in a form of ‘enhancing the specter’ of existing senses), and/or subjectivity redefinition and reassembling. Or it may be thought of as the arrival into the wholly new access points of aesthetic experience through the augmentations to the sensory system and/or subjectivity, not merely ‘quantitative’, but also ‘qualitative’, referring to the possibility of the new data to be perceived, such that previously considered unperceivable. These advances of the modes of perception, in their turn, would give birth to the new modes of art production and the new forms of arts as well, according to the rate of these advances. 

REFERENCES

1. Caron, J.-P. 'Art & the Suspension of Subjectivity'. — https://tripleampersand.org/art-suspension-subjectivity/

2. Kostelanetz, R. 'Inferential Art' In: Kostelanetz (org.) John Cage. An anthology. New York, Da Capo Press: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ieb2m13yetifci7/Kostelanetz%20Inferential%20Art.pdf?dl=0

3. Whitehead J. (aka JLIAT) 'Un-sounding music; noise is not sound'. — http://www.jliat.com/txts/unsound.pdf