~PRE-WORLD / E-VENT ~

That the world is not what is the case.¹

~ Rule of thumb ~

History is the strongest link in the understanding of the world and humanity. Within history, the connection between body and spirit obtains under the auspices of time and the world.

→ Alienation

The most common expression (expressive practice) of the potential of commodity staging is surely alienation. But, according to Schmidt, neither commodity production nor commodity staging is the cause of alienation! They are not responsible for the disruption of humanity and the world.⁶

It was largely clear that concepts of the world are not always facts. This does not mean that the world within these concepts was false, but rather that the concepts provided the means to describe the facts. This came with the potential for mystification and myth-making, but also with an equally central myth of demythologisation.

The disruption of people and the world.

Language and reporting

Even today, people speak and write. They speak and write, but they don’t like to report truths (that was [pre-]modern). They prefer to recite narratives, as used in more recent reporting to weaken or relativise the intellectual offsetting of totalitarian credibility for the statements in question. Uncertainty about the present circumstances has led to an attempt to play it safe and maintain the status quo.

Addressing political events has finally become chic and customary, a meaningless cultural form of a disengaged establishment – and an entire generation that emulates it. Nor is it a genuine social or idealistic investment. Once again. Added to this is the fact that in art, all references made to supposed problems are already more abstractions than descriptions. Media distance or proximity? Is a connection or dependence between the different evaluations suggested aesthetically, ethically? Because then you can learn something from it. The avant-garde has often adopted the language of the problem and used it in such a way that the problem became visible.⁷

Art itself does not proceed dialectically at all. It is a construction composed predominantly of ideal monologues and some other, plastic material. The only socially effective, that is, meaningful approach is to treat art as something that can be negotiated in a dialectical discourse and does not need to remain stuck in provisional positions. Art must now demand this all the more, and all the more strictly, insofar as citation and multiple coding have become part of its formal expressions and content.

On guilty conscience

The feeling of alienation, a sensation and suspicion of imbalance, is an expression of that guilty conscience which arises when your own involvement in the formation of the world, the emotional participation in the mass of images, no longer allows for (qualitatively) genuine emotional, autochthonous-creative individuation. Not permanently and satisfactorily.

It’s also worth pointing out here that the individuation crisis, in dealing with the mediatized nature of simulative images, does not arise from the fact that they are not real, but rather that they operate without the mediation of imaginative forms. They provide us with information without giving us insight through active participation.

The representational distance in empathy is lost in the mixture of simulation and autosuggestion (individual self-interpretation). As cultic, simulativity promotes maximal subcultures.

However, a minimum of participation is necessary to understand cult and art. Put another way, without participation, it isn’t art.

The weight of the accumulated knowledge in world memory obscures, through the pull of reminiscences, the precise meaning of an evolution that, after a brief century of reorientation, has brought us to the point where the immediate predecessors of the Lascaux painters stood.⁸

The creative process of image and world creation and the search for artistic possibilities are a necessity for future orientation. Today’s crisis will only become alarming if the relationship between the passively consuming masses and the creative elite leads to a reduction in the intensity of that search, as is the case in the social sphere.⁹

Cultural, not natural.

The fundamental idea of alienation concerns the conception of feelings of alienation as a consequence of a diffuse but effective oppression. It is about being oppressed and also being dissatisfied.

This engenders an imbalance, and emotional discomfort is a natural reaction to it. The conception constructs and exploits a very specific idea of naturalness (ideal typification) which, although cultural, gives human nature greater authority through its supposed greater evolutionary effectiveness in the overall picture. Cultural evolution is presented as insurmountable competition between techno-economic evolution and natural evolution. The old song of subsistence in the natural state of the human race is the same as the song of the new type of human being. No matter when this myth was resuscitated, related narratives have always been part of the tableau.

However, the whole is the lie, only the whole. (Hegel)

As driving forces in the creation of the world, fear and human desire are both nature and culture. The drive to refine and specialise potential appropriates ideas, knowledge and practical experience, leading to a “practice of the universal”, the world view. This genesis is probably the result of a multitude of social, cultural, genetic and hormonal factors, traumas, insults, reflexes and resonances of an emotional repertoire that is as natural as it is cultural.

The danger lies in interpreting the media monopolisation of fashionable normative trends, the loud and simplistic, as a direct reflection of social practice through the discourse of current historical and situational analysis. As the source of cynicism, from which action//actions spring.

Boredom and diversion

The entertaining cultural history of the bourgeoisie revolves first and foremost around its liberations, interpreted as an ascent. This is a recurring theme in contemporary discussions about various issues that have accompanied the rise of the bourgeoisie to this day.

Whether it concerns the myths of the history of sexuality, the history of religion, the history of secularisation, the history of psychoanalysis, the history of feminism, the history of imperialism, the history of politics or other cultural topics, the bourgeoisie is a social group that constantly proclaims permanent liberation as a state (almost a contradiction) of further development.

Why is this relevant? Because, within the framework of generally accepted degrees of freedom and the associated guaranteed securities, bourgeois creators and disseminators of knowledge have succeeded in representing artistic phenomena and the symbolic imagery of ethics and morals as descriptive models and the rhetoric for the avant-garde. An avant-garde that, through use of the right language, reveals something hidden.

The social yield of this much-vaunted artistic freedom is far more meagre when you consider the errors, repetitions, and polemical carnival of fakes that make up the usual present – propaganda, or mere entertainment advertising arising from the massed ideological activities of these achievements. These “culture wars” are more or less hawked around subculturally and, depending on their relevance, in anticipation of influencing the real future. In the world and events?

In the world and the events of the myths of sexual history, religious history, secularization history, psychoanalysis history, socialization history, feminist history, imperialism history, political history, and others.

Fakes for real. What is there, is there.

The natural

Using the natural in a functional way for salvation from the schematic. That sounds promising. A paradox, but the assumption is that a representation of a possible equilibrium can be found again.

But please, not in the sense of a state of nature with true needs, which an enlightened elite believes it can distinguish from false needs in a trivialised, handy form of Marcusianism. Rather as an effective force exerted on the aesthetic (sensual) with a temporal connection.¹⁰

Natural objects can evoke deeply emotional aesthetic responses, independent of social structure and value constructivism. This is art purified to the point of near dissolution, whose entire power lies in this near dissolution that is always-postponed.¹¹

Schematic time versus temporalisation and chaos

(Necessary reminders of Blochian temporality)

The future is events that are not predetermined! They are not folded into trends.

Events of possible appearance. This harbours real danger, but also real salvation.

As a model, the future here runs imperturbably counter to the constitutive determinism of Judeo-Christian and Islamic notions of the afterlife. Their danger, as well as their salvation, necessitate eschatological predictions of transition scenarios, without which the afterlife and, even more this life, would come to nothing. Resurrection cannot redeem the future without schematics. At most, all that remains is the cyclical ritual.

Salvation from the schematic cycle in this world¹² must be conceptualised in close connection with alienation. Intuitive knowledge can only ever apply to individual cases and extends only to the next individual, remaining there, because sensuality and understanding can actually only comprehend one object at a time.¹³

The conceptual use of the term “alienation” here aims to represent the discrepancy between the world (= descriptive model) and emotion (affect and affective experience), not Marx’s interpretation of labour and object as an incompatibility between the product of labour and the producer of that labour.¹⁴

This, on the one hand, in connection with the anachronistic idea of the species’ primal state of nature – from homo sapiensis to faber? – and, on the other hand, with a one-sided approach to balancing/harmonising the descriptive world of ideas and its realities in the daily routine¹⁵ in favour of meaningful work, which has become and remains an inherently universal ethical (control) instrument for many societies. Largely integrated into the ethos dogmatically.

Work as an emotionally impoverished concept, together with the recognition of “good and evil in the world”, are defining orientations of our Western societies.

Without the unrest of the now, there is no real dialectic. (Bloch)

Shuddering is humanity’s best part (Goethe)

According to Celibidache, the phenomenon of tension in music is an approximation of multi- or non-simultaneities. Music may well be mentioned and contextualised here as a core competence and management of relationship networks for formative, image-like, and image-generating processes.

This tension reappears in another emotionalised cultural phenomenon of the entertainment industry (with dramatic narrative methods in film, theatre, radio plays, songs and books): horror.

In Alien (a blockbuster from the last century, USA1979), the thrill lies in the approach, the race to catch up with potential, with possibilities, with (already anticipated) certainty.

The real protagonist is the xenomorph, another reincarnation of the inscribed unease, which performs pornographic incorporation on its “partner”, homo sapiens, in order to bear the embryonic alien larva in the reproductive cycle.

Horror and lust are equivalent phenomena of temporalisation.

Forshortening of reality through exaggerated [ideal types (B.S.)

No one knows (still) what a human being is – the age-old problem.

Attempts to derive the respective world view as an understanding of the human condition from something like an underlying primal state, and thus indirectly justify it in the sense that it cannot be anything other than human nature (including being a monster), originate in eras of one-sidedly esoteric scientific practice – fat least rom today’s perspective.

This applies to the early Western university foundations under papal patronage as well as under imperial privilege, and later to those bourgeois academic elites of the superior Central European states whose research interests were pursued on the basis of a large-scale colonialism. Within the imperialist worldview, the foundations of their own superiority were not critically debated. The same applies to the tripartite division of the world in the atomic age and remains valid to this day.

In any case, they, human beings, have never been fully understood.

Advanced civilisations and social ills

(such as opportunism, dogmatism, sectarianism, panic, apathy, segregationism, cynicism, narrow-mindedness, etc.)

The real dilemma about these social diseases is that they form practical, closed worlds that work. Stereotypes.

The dangers and consequences of stereotypical/ideological thinking and the legitimisation of actions based on it, as an end that justifies the means, lie not only in the possibility of error – which is difficult to see due to simplification and the closed nature of a practically believed idealism (world view) without self-relativisation¹⁶ – but also in the fact that the distorted overall situation swallows up individuals, in-individualises them and makes them singularly indivisible in the mish-mash with ideology.

(To the point of martyrdom.) The individual becomes the individual of the idea, its voice in the sense of the suffix “logy”. Represented by the body, which has become a tool and recedes behind the model as its “work”.

The thing becomes fatalistic. For example, the little guy falls, but the flag remains flying!¹⁷

There are many such ideas. Propaganda. Widely disseminated by the entertainment industry, historical reality and the truth of history in particular collapse into an intellectually idealised simulation. The historical events used are rendered value-free, mere accoutrement, or more accurately, devalued. That was not the purpose of the bourgeois theatron. The purpose, formerly propaganda, is now entertainment.

Meanwhile, we enjoy the ahistorical short-term asset/memory of postmodern generations’ lack of experience, and the fact that there is such a thing as narratives to complement our entertainment in the first place.

Stupidity, but without the instructive “docet et delectat – framing/expansion” of the theatre (processual vividness), unlimited. Truth, whose evidence is always linked to space and time, became the narration of images that hardly ever show connections, but always only this or that.¹⁸ Thus potentially already untrue. The untruth of potentiality, however, is not the subjunctive, for this is the truth in potentia.

~ RULE OF THUMB~

“Once you start with ideology, you can’t get out of it.” B.S.

A variable set of techniques for social ills

is constantly on standby.

Faked for real

What for? What’s it to you?

The current crisis of orientation stems from the transformation of the speculative potential of the media (virtual space, simulation space) into an ideological-religious or esoteric dogma.

Techno-economic collectives wander around like zombies in their ritualised aesthetic worlds. And you could say that the Establishment’s affectations are spreading into pop culture, formally into the mainstream. Of course, only in form, not in terms of property and wealth.

The collective presence of the dividuated media protagonist (a fighter in the fake world) can be and is nothing more than “false” and “fake” news or fake events. This is her/his figuration within this constructivist-deterministic discourse.

A self-staging that is believed. The dividuation of a psyche (ego) into comprehensive mediatisation, the totality of the mediatised self, constantly becomes the pseudo-meaningful moment of what is actually singular, the measure of individuation.

True boredom. Everyone is concerned about everything that affects them only through the media.

Rather than stopping time, the staging has succeeded in collapsing the dimensions of space and time as history passes by. Irretrievably.¹⁹

All space-time dimensionality would leave traces and compel representation. Ritual has therefore always pitted dimensionless presence against dimensioning representation, right up to the well-known icon controversy or the dispute between ὁμοούσιος and ὁμοιούσιος, if you wishes to draw on Western history for clarification.

Rites can be built upon, as their outcomes are already predetermined and, although they perform an eventful experience, they are also reproducible and plannable. They can therefore be integrated into a (schematised) future.

Reproducibility sets the stage for controllable developments, for progress.

Nevertheless, multidimensionality remains as an option, resonating in the background (as original fear); within the secure operation of stable recursive processes.

~ On the connection between post-adolescence and mysticism ~

“The bait must appeal to the fish, not the fisherman!”

/ Norwegian proveb

Apparently, as people grow older, their interest in mysticism and science tends to fade in favour of concrete life experiences. (A claim based on self-observation.) This seems to motivate at least some in the course of their lives to favour technology for social interaction, and to participate less enthusiastically in the mediatised commodity spectacle of “social media” and “virtual life”. And to generate hardly any potential for accelerated dividuisation for the growth-producing market.

Very likely the decline in libidinous energy (demonstrated at least among male actors in modern and postmodern European industrial societies) plays a role in this. And, in general, that a shift in the pleasure-safety gap sets in with increasing age is considered normal.

Also worth mentioning is the physical connection between age (health or signs of wear and tear on the body, leading ultimately to death) and subjective perception of time.

While these are controllable factors, not everything is possible at all times!

The net serves to catch fish, so make sure you catch the fish and forget about the net! / Chinese proverb

According to Umberto Eco, mysticism is the victim of the mind’s tendency to classify, a tendency that reappears time and again in Western history. But In Eastern thought, [mysticism] is a constant.²⁰

In all relationships to things, other people and yourself, only the consensus between cogito and world has meaning, not the (individual) gaps in between. This is the basis of the functionality and effectiveness of concepts and mysticism.²¹

The divisive story, the saga of alienation in various forms, can also be found in the biblical context: “A little later, they will be ashamed and hide. Not from each other, but from God!”²² (→ Universalism).

Similarly at the beginning of the Old Testament and, more or less, the New Testament. (Here it comes – the fish! And in any case, if you believe the story at all, death comes to Jesus, and that is no mystification. The thing about the New Covenant comes afterwards. Jesus’s mortality was not particularly unusual or special even back then – Christians still celebrate it and his inevitable death in their Good Friday processions to this day – and Nietzsche himself came to shed light on this strange misery by having his madman point the finger at it – God is dead!)

In the Torah original, alienation is (also) characterised as the separation of human beings – Jacob’s descendants , the tribes of Israel – from God. But it is not only shame as disgrace and physical suffering, murder and death that come into the world – it is also work. A little anachronism lurks in almost every chosen people.

Much later, Marx would base his own concept of alienation on a description of labour as the cause of inequality.²³

From the Jewish faith to Protestant capitalism. Property is formulated as a cause of inequality, as a deviation from the paradisiacal state of nature, but without taking into account the techno-economic cultures based on the division of labor that lie behind it.

Paternalistic superlatives.

Shame and godlessness are thus the worst things in this world, while death is what we fear most, to an immeasurable degree. It is something beyond our comprehension and no longer part of this world. That is already expressed in the truism: You don’t experience death. Is that a little too broadly defined? Death is just as much a cultural phenomenon as God – simply not sufficiently civilisable, and even more secularising! Concretely profane. No god should be that; God should still stand above (the cultures of) ethics.²⁴ He must be much worse than evil, for he proves the innocence of evil (Bataille).

Some indigenous cultures have developed a much more relaxed and less naively agitated/restless relationship to their own deaths and those of their loved ones, as with the deaths of the others – animals, plants and things – which surrounded them and were part of their “world”. In other words, to their deaths and those of the others that were part of the world to which they felt they belonged and which they trusted.

Death harbours all time. God harbours eternal life. You can see it this way or that.

Some indigenous cultures have developed a much more relaxed relationship with death, their own, of their loved ones, and of the others – animals, plants and things – that surrounded them and were part of their “world”. In other words, with their own deaths and the deaths of others that were part of the world to which they felt they belonged and which they trusted.

Death holds all time. God holds eternal life. You can look at it this way or that way.

Transference. Me in the world.

This is about the objective relationship to the world; that is where the question arises: Me in the world?

In a philosophical sense, a question is resolved when it disappears. That sounds simple, but it is hardly feasible, because it means that the problem, the question, must disappear completely. You see? Not even God has completely disappeared.

The “me in the world” encompasses a whole range of relationships of participation and rejection, or at least of involvement in mediated participation(s). In this way, alienation propels the ego forward, into the guilty conscience of “education” and the associated responsibility for the images thus fashioned: image liability!

The guilty conscience is the result of that unreflective compensatory behaviour which is a psychological reaction to the feelings of alienation against the ego’s tendency to dissolve in the mediatised. Better psycho-physical pathologies than imageless individuation – that is, better to become ill than to be ugly.

Thus we are personally responsible for our symbolic worlds in a physical, corporeal sense, with image liability. This leads to individual conflicts (the philosophical assumption does not disappear), which sometimes ensure change and transformation within societies, at least in terms of potential organisation. Why? Since there is variance on both sides of the images. On the one hand, there is an attempt to keep image formation stable (ideology and religions are examples of this), while on the other hand, emotional motives, desires and social ills are the formative factors of the corporeal reality (the everyday earthly), which in turn design the world and deity from within itself.²⁵

More discovery than invention? Both fluctuate in multifactorial interdependencies with the overall social network – neither in isolation.

The manifestation of social education – of a relationship! – is truly a total miracle of reciprocity, every single time.

Describing a situation within the variance, the breadth and depth of this reciprocity gives rise to a desire for the future arises. One of the oldest, most profitable and useful models for understanding, and so banishing lasting alienation, is an act of world (mediatised) responsibility and imagery. Thus the human race always has death before it, not behind it. Note: there is also life before death.

That isn’t a problem at all. No more problematic than the entire creation of images as proof of the cultural model of humanity itself. For in this state, whether thrown or grown into, there is movement. One possibility after another. Real time. So one does not stand powerless before the completely alien! Even if many concepts of the morality of togetherness seek to blur this in the good-evil dichotomy and other dualisms of reward and punishment, they are wrong. → The Fall always occurs in a state of powerlessness. And on this premise, even the very worst becomes an acceptable article of faith.

The good news:

Art is philosophy realised.

To engage in living dialectics, you don’t have to be a believer or a scientist. There are other ways of conducting research. Artists, who are the only ones to maintain a philosophically meaningful relationship to their world/creation/work. This relationship includes their images themselves as events and thereby invites us to engage in a figurative experience that can be understood neither scientifically nor through faith.

Everything artistic asks about the how of the world and doesn’t suffer from mysticism’s core problem, namely, that the world exists. Situational, individual question processes yield situational, individual answers.

Technology

The concept of alienation in the postmodernist world experience describes a phenomenon of the establishment and the bourgeoisie, of their cultures and civilizations in exchange via communication technologies that dominate the world. And of the globalization of the portable model of the net, which has now become worldwide.

Partially. The spread of technologies has limits. What share do cultures beyond these limits have in causal relationships? Politically, economically, ecologically in the civilisational project? Certainly even basic industrialism, outsourced to misery (the etymological meaning of the German word for “misery”, Elend, is “abroad”), contributes an indispensable part in the success of our postmodern cultures. And this needs dizzying amounts of financial capital. Of semiconductor technologies as a whole, it may be said that Big Tech needs Big Money for the Big Picture.

This aspect of postmodernism, particularly the idea of alienation, is probably just a trend in the culturally primary technological mediatisation of entertainment culture, which it has massively adapted from the staging of commodities over the course of the last century.

What is meant is that alienation within situations of technological mediatisation which have become systematic itself drives the current cultural model. The question whether everything that is technically possible should be done is rendered superfluous by the fact that it is being done. And the question whether anything worldy can exist outside a culture of entertainment is not at all easy to answer. It touches on a dilemma central to civilisation.

Up to the Middle Ages, the natural environment was primarily bound up with the world, and morality with aesthetics interpreted as an ethical category. Throughout the modern era, however, the basis for ethics has shifted to technology, based on the possibilities offered by simulation models of what can be done. This includes the globe and its divisibility (first in 1494). Ethics and aesthetics are now a function of communication practices.

Ugliness and morality

The question of the Emperor’s New Clothes is now the question of whether you would rather be ill or ugly.

The discomfort has become chronic. As a partially individuated – that is, dividuated – member of a popular cult, incorporating yourself into the redundancy of good forms is the convenient way to escape the ugliness that, in worldly terms, consists in the relationship of non-participation = meaningless.

If truth is a commitment, then there are different ways to commit or to avoid making the decision to seek useful information.²⁶ This clearly suggests that the beauty of redundant forms is, in turn, at least an ugliness and a betrayal of other dimensions of self-reference.

Despite its undeniable impact and institutionalisation, the aestheticisation of politics, counterculture in post-war Europe and beatniks in the USA, has also culminated in an encounter with art as a space for emerging commodity societies. The end point of the precursor movements is the market. Having arrived in space, the movement of time has come to an end, exhausted.²⁷

The past is the standstill of time within time.²⁸

The Make-Up.

Dividuation into the medial is a desperate attempt to escape being superfluous human beings. Social medial dividuation, participation as a value of communality, is the make-up of incarnate commodity-staging against its humiliation and the realities of uncertainty. Participation in collective conformism and cult as a reflection of the commodity with which you associate yourself.

Alienation should therefore be understood as a phenomenon which, on the one hand and under certain circumstances, influences even our most intimate and elusive psychological behaviours through the structure of the human group to which we belong, and conversely, in other contexts, shapes the structure of the group to which we belong through our most intimate and most elusive psychological behaviours.²⁹

The last countercultures and youth revolts – environmental radicals like climate activists, tree squatters, punks of all stripes, left and right, and other radicals – were now different, more an expression of an art form than a political movement. They worked on the commodity image with the purpose in life of not belonging (to commodities). The message: Somehow something could be done about it. Counterculture found its way into political realities in civil processes, and the illusion still bore institutional fruit.

Misused, the whole thing degenerated into a cliché and the mannerism of feigned revolt, intended to delude new generations into believing that they are participating in history.

What’s the point of all this? Because entertainment cultures offer no substitute but a fashionably designed conceptual arrangement of the world. From one senseless state, work, they collectively switch to another: leisure.³⁰ (Into symbolic activities, to entertainment world symbols.)

So that we can cheerfully turn away from world events?

Popular superficial knowledge. On the prepotency of image phenomena

The idea of psychologised gender, interpreted as a social category, is paradigmatic for the contemporary image worlds. A reminder of necessary but short-lived German Romanticism and its critical shift towards inwardness (psychologisation) instead of binding legal claims.

A purely biological gender has never existed in mediatized notions of social engagement. The concept of a supposedly almost purely sexual desire describes the performance arrangements of pornography, which was geared to the body orifices that invite penetration. The (psychologising) act of penetration, however, consists in an individuating (self-)marking in the other tending to the pornographic. A sexually relevant gender is psychologised, but never unambiguous, and can also be reframed in the best commodity manner as an asexual claim with pseudo-social relevance.

Whereas in the sexual vaudeville of coitus, the availability of inviting openings is of constitutive relevance, commodity images have no “social” openings at all, especially none of the sexual body, and can no longer perform as sexually diverse.

It could also be said that, as a degraded as a product of/by the entertainment industry, porn, the porno movie in general, still formulates the lament of castration through images and mediatised simulated worlds in the most primal site of its culture. The sold social body (!) that becomes a commodity. (Πόρνη [pórnē] comes from the ancient Greek word πέρνημῐ [pérnēmĭ], meaning to sell and enslave.)³¹

The prepotency of images has now been elevated to the highest level of the profane, surpassing even the esoteric avant-garde, which always enjoyed a place there, outstripping it and proclaiming pop culture as the communicative concept of the moment. This creates room for escapist spaces and has become the currently dominant cultural technique³² of the mediatised, specialised, affluent Western European societies.

Copulative. On the love of images.

Pornology

Art, emotion, and the world come together in a combine. A combine for multidimensionality.³³ Art here refers to expressive value, as use value. For example, as language, sign and drawing.

The specific function of metaphysics is to give meaning and direction to life’s events, such as the changing seasons and other cycles, sowing and harvesting, or work and holidays, but also to various concerns, such as illness and recovery, or death, scarcity and abundance, rivalry and community, expenditure and reproduction, and much more.

The event of cultural gender consisted in the penetration (-act) of an individuating self-marking in the other, the porno-graphic (as an act of becoming an image), and the social function of an imaged-based gender in exchange, the symbolic act of social self-understanding through others. Similarity and comparability remain (→ social body).

(Contemporary pornology, the postmodern [European-American] conceptions of sexual identities, are most likely an assimilation phenomenon of the ongoing staging of humans as commodities in the context of emotionally highly charged genital communication.

As love, the image-based, world-symbolic and artistic expression of sexual activities is related to the origin of images in most cultures. To the creative element of their original motivation. The real value of the expenditure on sexual activity lies in eroticism and (see Bataille) in death. Sexuality must expend itself, that is, live. This is certainly its biological programme, but it is also, and even more so, the imagery of the communal world horizon, its creative meaning.

The mytho-graphy³⁴ of sexual culture (the term porno-graphy first appeared in a less universal sense in the 19th century) is increasingly being organised into a mytho-logy. Manual copulation between the self and the world is becoming a multidimensional construction of images, language, and writing, of alphabets and notations as ritualised ordering systems, and their expanded gender.

UPSHOT:

Failure is followed by displacement—

from bootlickers of the ruling elites to bootlickers of their symbols.

The upshot of the structuralist concept of the First World: With the more or less simultaneous advent of technification and progress achieved through semiconductor technology following the post-war atomic era, and the end of left-right ideological conflicts as East-West competition (economic system competition as a culture war), backwardness in amassing the large capital sums required for the development of semiconductor technologies means enduring at least the economic form of domination. Thus the old concept of the colonial and imperial division of territories on the globe (the very image of their availability) was transferred and retained in globalization.

Ideologically right-wing among a minority of the less well-off lower classes, and ideologically left-wing as the acknowledged mainstream popular culture of the propertied lower and upper middle classes, enlightened middle class societies’ critique of clichéd slogans such as consumer society, materialism, financial capitalism, etc., has perforce failed due to its own conditions (itself being only a marginal phenomenon of the problem addressed) and fallen silent. And has shifted into its (its hypocrisy’s) institutional structure in the form of the ideal fringe groups, with artists and intellectuals as pop stars, the current symbol lickers of the same ruling elites.

All these are stereotypical designs for overcoming merely subjectively perceived resistance. Me in the world.

On the surface, failure is not a creative act, but rather a morphing or gliding into something similar, something akin. The means of spreading these safety nets were the mediocre news systems of the centre, whose breadth they guaranteed.

The superficial (dissolving causal chains) has become fashionable in socio-culturally influential areas of the mediatized world. Essential ethical concerns are institutionally transformed into “social design”. This serves as a template and silhouette of their morality (social responsibility), guaranteed somewhere by much fuss, scandal, and gossip.

Even speculation in academia turns into an experiment without results. A process? One that must never leave the art space. In this case, the art space must simply expand. ([..] Andersen’s evaluation—of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, which some may remember—is understandably oriented toward the basic attitude of production capitalism: the people’s mockery of the emperor’s nakedness, erupting in the laughter of children, awakens the emperor from his rapture of simulation and makes him realise his nakedness. He punishes the fraudulent tailors. Today, however, we must ask ourselves whether the people and the emperor are not wrong and whether the tailors do not have history on their side.³⁵

We speak of design when image forms distance themselves from themselves and oppose themselves, seeking to separate themselves from being images. This is a kind of parody of their original (representational) intention, calculated to banish the horror, the earnestness, and the monstrosity that comes to light in the relationship between image and event.

An evasive technique of image engagement with its origin in the event.³⁶

Dialectics of historical processes

We no longer know what to do with history as the continuous dialectical process. The development of education as a distinct discipline has produced isolated episodes, but hardly any universal foundations or contexts.

The hasty inauguration of educational institutions such as start-ups, as a supposedly necessary response by state and private patrons to the general prattle, to today’s world, in order not to lag behind but to be among the elite, will not remain without consequences in the present for our confrontation with asynchronies in the near future.

The (techno-economic) elite, however, is completely useless as an (artistic-rhetorical) avant-garde in the political state of society.

In productive terms, the postmodernist blurring and appropriation of everything in contemporary history serves the entertainment industry, the exploitation of past meanings, such as neo-historicist movements and the resurgence of resentment through dialectical or negative-dialectical legitimation.