From the Academic to the Lyrical

Page 21 November–December 2007 Shaviro continued from previous page in caves on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—have already won; where, amidst the teens “talking on their cellphones or playing video games, fascism has made a comeback in real time.” And if indeed we have to live with it, this is only in the sense that “there is no escaping from Kultur short of a very strong drug or death.” But are there really no alternatives, short of death or stupefaction, to all this madness? Beyond the Techno-Cave is not just a litany of complaints: it is also a search for a way out, for what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called a “line of flight.” Twentiethcentury avant-gardists, like Antonin Artaud—an inspiration both for Jaffe and for Deleuze and Guattari—sought this way out in a variety of extreme practices: sex, madness, body intensification, the disordering of the senses. Jaffe is cautious with regard to these explorations of the extremities of experience. How can we rely upon our dreams for escape, when “dream is in the process of being colonized”? Sex used to be an expression of “sovereign passion instinctively sidestepping calculations,” but “now sex is itself colonized, on the way to being virtualized.” In the high-tech, highly commodified world that we live in today, “the spectacle has now colonized every wilderness, exterior and interior. Hence alienation, or contemplation from the outside, essential to art and discourse, can no longer be invoked.” Nonetheless, Jaffe still proposes certain aesthetic strategies that may be efficacious in opening up possibilities for escape and transformation. The point is to “disrupt and destabilize techno-excesses by employing the self-same technology.” Jaffe proposes, and enacts within his own texts, a kind of aesthetic jiu-jitsu, turning the very strengths of the media-corporate-military system against that system. There are still a multitude of “parallel, subjugated, misrepresented or invisible narratives in our midst; though the commerce system is always working to colonize and appropriate these, its work is never complete; there is always some slight hope of helping the excluded narratives to return, their very exclusion and marginalization intact.” In order to do this, we need “to meander in twists and turns between the realms of the living and the dead.” A good rant is scathing and hyperbolic, but also finely observant. One simple way to accomplish such a return is by juxtaposition and recontextualization. One piece in Beyond the Techno-Cave recounts, in alternate paragraphs, the lives of the Burmese dissident Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and of the great modernist sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Another piece describes a number of suicides, ranging from those of Yukio Mishima to Simone Weil to the acts of anonymous (or at least unnamed) Palestinian suicide bombers. Jaffe offers us no specific commentary on what relates these various figures and their stories; that is something he wants us to work out for ourselves. It’s a matter of looking obliquely, of making unobvious connections, and perhaps of jamming the flows of the mainstream narratives. Jaffe also recounts other strategies of subversion and dislocation, from the way that Rirkrit Tiravanija has turned feeding the poor into art, or vice versa—something that Jaffe admiringly describes as a kind of counter-terrorism, the only worthy response to the terror of the powers that be—to various forms of dialogic art and process art, which disrupt the fetishization of Art as a commodity to be bought and sold. He concludes by reviving Antonio Gramsci’s formula—written in an even worse time than this—of pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will. I’m not convinced, myself, that this comes down to much more than whistling in the dark; but such bravado, or refusal to give in, is surely better than the alternative of (to use another lamentable cliché) rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. In slaying the clichés of a false comfort, and in refusing to give up even when all the objective signs tell us that the game is over, Jaffe works to preserve, nourish, and revitalize the creative imagination in the twenty-first century. Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of...