Mapping Disorder: into the Flow, into the Light, into the Future

 Mapping Disorder: into the Flow, into the Light, into the Future

The disorderliness of nature, the disorderliness of the scene, the malignancy of apathy or depression, the need to regroup, to meditate to, as one Tumblr meme suggests, "listen to the whispers of [one's] own spirit instead of the shouts of the world". There is a Sontag-camp quality to the internet which is perhaps the hinge, if not the hub, of contemporary art production. The most relevant museum in New York, the New Museum, makes its new media focus very apparent, and even the architecture of it reeks of a kind of coral-like delicateness, which is in stark contrast to the brutish energies which must be sublimated to achieve "the fine flower of culture" (Bertrand Russell). We must become seers of disorder, less "Tidying up with Marie Kondo" and more "Tales of Power" (Castaneda), more "Mille Plateaux". But how to get there, and how to make the short circuit between the lowness of subcultural gluing and the fineness of the New Museum's cult of intangibility (represented perfectly by the recent Judy Chicago retrospective, which itself was perhaps epitomized by the video piece in which Chicago meditates naked amid colorful smoke bombs). How to transcend the PTSD epilepsy of alt right scoundrels and alt left burnouts? How to become, finally, a body without organs, short circuiting the crazed emphasis on identity (Paul Preciado takes this to almost pataphysical heights, which is to his and the trans movement's credit, but feminism is only one means of reaching the CsO), and coming back to center in the inevitably positivist epistemology of the multiple (less Badiou, more Russell, more Carnap). "Never give up, always keep going" should be our mantra du jour, a la Badiou's "Ethics", a simple but potent and important text. We need less fragile animal bodies, and more subjects-to-truth. We need less ambiguity, and more sophisticated order. Baugua, Vienna Circle, Animate Form, Virtual Philosophy, Sigyl, Candle, Collage. Moodboarding reality, honing irony, using stupidity (cf Ronell). "Girl, Interrupted" is a map of the post-feminist war-machine that is mass culture, whose mass effect (cf the collection edited by Cornell and Halter) is a yoga of objects (Harman, etc), a theater of neutrality (Maxwell, "Theater for Beginners"). So lie down, imbibe some THC or just a nice IPA, and meditate. The storm is just your brute animal power, we understand that. It's time to sublimate.