Translated material
Water strider race
The cream of Russian and Western post-classical and political philosophy gathered: Chantal Mouffe, Bernard Stiegler, Valery Podoroga, Jacques Rancière, Saskia Sassen, Mikhail Ryklin, Boris Kagarlitsky. As one might expect, the main controversy revolved around the space and boundaries of modern philosophy. The reports were united by the topics “Philosophy and the formation of concepts”, “Universality, reason, chance”, “Limits of aesthetics”. The guiding star was the leftist discourse of the poststructuralist philosophical tradition, whose ideologists are well known: Derrida, Deleuze, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Girard, Simondon. The French tradition of modern humanitarian thought and linguistic criticism ruled the day. And what’s interesting is that, listening to the reports of eminent philosophers (political scientists, cultural scientists, sociologists), I suddenly thought about the main and most charming property of French culture: the ability to test the tension of the surface of Being.
Neo-Marxist ideas, one way or another, direct or reflected light, flickered in the reports of Bernard Stigler, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, Mikhail Ryklin. Bernard Stiegler devoted a report to the concept of “individuation” adopted by the sociologist Gilbert Simondon. Individuation differs from individuality in that it stores the memory of a person’s universal, non-personal, generic abilities. This is the possibility of language without private speech. Simondon and Stiegler believe that individuation helps prevent the individual from being absorbed into the collective. “It is precisely the collision with collectivity that makes it possible to mint the singular, to bring individuation to its possible limit. In contrast to the centripetal collectivity of the “people,” the collectivity of multitudes means the highest level of individuation, which makes it impossible to transfer powers to the sovereign (state).” Jacques Rancière spoke about how the Marxist concept of a universal commodity works in today's world, explaining its horrors and abominations. Consumer society has long appropriated the most radical methods of combating it, even that very leftist discourse. “The protest against goods is framed as the sale of goods.” Artists also suffered: the universality of protest is absorbed by the idea of the universality of goods, including in the field of art. In relation to today's world, Rancière introduced the concept of “democratic terrorism”: there is no freedom, there is freedom and consumer rights.
Chantal Mouffe defended her project of “radical democracy”, based on the recognition of the original gap, the antagonism of the social, the impossibility of symbolization, the totalization of this concept. The consequence should be recognition of the intractability of conflicts, and the conclusion should be tolerance and tolerance towards the opponent. Mikhail Ryklin spoke about the problematic nature of the most important quality of contemporary art - its “eventfulness”. Event spectacles staged by politicians and broadcast in the media (again, how can one not recall the “Society of the Spectacle” by the French Marxist Guy Debord, in which the performance is directed and controlled by the system of consumption of goods), in their impact (often inhuman, criminal and cynical, but very strong, passionate) leave the eventfulness of intellectual artistic actions far behind.
I was listening to the stars of left-wing discourse and suddenly remembered the water strider. These wonderful insects walk on water as well as on dry land, and with an amazingly precisely calibrated balance of forces they test the tension of the surface of the universe. French artistic thought has long been measuring the spatial tension of the Universe. Let us recall the design of Gothic cathedrals with claw-like ribs that disembodied density and affirmed the energy of touch. The same is true in the non-classical philosophical tradition. Gliding through various doctrines, thought measures their superficial extent, checking along the way for the presence of cuts, cracks, holes, design miscalculations and debris deposits. Both Deleuze and Derrida wrote about the primary importance of surface in the topology of the universe. Derrida eliminated the boundary between surface and depth. Deleuze argued that any science advances only along the curtain, along the border. Simondon believed that the living lives at the limit of itself, at its own limit; The polarities of life exist at the membrane level: “The entire content of internal space is in topological contact with the content of external space within the limits of the living” (“Individual and Physico-Biological Genesis”, 1964).
And at the conference we were shown the most sophisticated, masterly surface tension of the existing numerous philosophical, economic, sociological, linguistic paradigms in an attempt to measure the very semiotic velum that will soon cover the space of the II Moscow Biennale. The great water striders did their job, but some representatives of our art community remained perplexed. Perhaps because in Russia they are not used to dealing with the surface tension of the philosophical particles of the universe, but are accustomed to “looking at the root” and talking “in essence” - about the Biennale budget, for example.