Creative Theory, Radical Example: Criticisms and Essays for Culture in the Digital Paradigm

Copyright

Creative Theory, Radical Example: Criticisms and Essays for Culture in the Digital Paradigm

Justice Koolhaas

Smashwords Edition.

Copyright 2015 Justice Koolhaas.

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Dedication

In lieu of a dedication for this book being possible posthumously, the editor wishes to summon Clarice Lispector’s dedication to the great composers of the past. (Lispector 1992)

Acknowledgements

The translator would like to thank Sofietje and Jan for their indefatigability.

Cover design: D. Janssen.

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction Part 1: A Callout for New Theory Celebrities

Cablese

Language and Technology

Usability

Significance

Types of Subjects Covered in This Book

May 1968

Calling All Theory Celebrities

Regrounding

Kristeva and Infolution

Glitch and Poetics in Writing

Lyotard, the ‘Event’ and Art

The Free University

The Maverick Outsider

Criticisms

How this volume redresses the in-Justice

About This eBook

Introduction Part 2: Interpreting Koolhaas

How Can One Interpret Koolhaas?

Cybernetics: Nietzsche and Heidegger

Studying Media: Baudrillard and Science Fiction

Literature: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, and Joyce

What’s So Wrong About Rant?

Žižek and the Sex Between Emin and Hirst

Methodological Considerations

Nouveau Roman Excerpts: ‘Caliphornia’

The Essays and Literature

Cybernetics: Nietzsche and Heidegger

The Avatar

Cadavers

Realism

Engineering Life, Engineering Words (Part 1)

She

Nietzsche and the Freedom to be Transhuman

Engineering Life, Engineering Words (Part 2)

From Thing to Affect

Revelation Through Reason

Studying Media: Baudrillard and Science Fiction

Media Mass

Baudrillard Looking

Dust

Science Fiction

Literature: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, and Joyce

The Uncanny Experience Of Collective Value

Visceral Laughter

Kafka - The Castle as Writing, Unfinished, Perished

Whose Ulysses?

Fragment de Discours

What is There to Say?

What’s So Wrong About Rant?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Žižek and the Sex Between Emin and Hirst

Criticality

Man / Woman, Woman / Man

Langévénart After Philosophy

From Art and Sex to Money and Desire

Walking with Certeau and Kostabi

Methodological Considerations

Indubitably Dubious

Utopia (Part 1)

No More Grey Men

Nouveau Roman Excerpts: ‘Caliphornia’

Under Construction and Decidedly Raw

The Fish Has Been Misplaced

Snowed In

Exhilarated by Mankind in its Language

Each Corridor

Crying Clowns

Beautiful Black Shadows

As Fuckable as Us

A Quest Marked by an Immense Burden

From an Exile (Fragment)

Of Neutrality (Origin of Note Unknown)

Textual Connexivities

Introduction Part 1: A Callout for New Theory Celebrities

Cablese

In the early days when SMS messaging was gaining in popularity, I found myself talking to an understated woman at a conference about communications. I expressed my worry that the habitual use of texting could lead to sloppiness in the use of language. When I suggested that the young were particularly vulnerable, she cocked an eyebrow. Had I ever heard, she asked, the apocryphal tale of the editor and journalist in the days of telegraphy? During the 1940s, she explained, there was a journalist (Evelyn Waugh, allegedly) who had not sent any copy to his newspaper for some time. The editor duly sent him a message in what was known as ‘cablese’. This term referred to the way that telegraphy users modified the meanings of regular words with prefixes and suffixes in order to keep down the word count and thereby the high cost of transmission. And so it was that the impatient editor sent a terse reprimand: unwork, unjob. Proud and not one to be threatened, the journalist, quick as a flash, cabled back his equally uncompromising reply: upshove job arsewise.

Language and Technology

The woman who told me this story was Justice Koolhaas. Her point about the plasticity of language and technology typified her outlook. New technologies are readily assumed to be harbingers of danger rather than opportunities to reconfigure reality. Language is often thought of as a set of rules that must be preserved against infractions rather than as a medium whose invention always was and still is in a flux that reflects its time. This book is an introduction to Koolhaas’s theory.

Usability

Today’s student will not only find that it is creative and sets a radical example, as the title here suggests, but also that it is eminently quotable. Paradoxically, this is because of rather than despite poetic sensibilities that render any meaning as something that must be teased out: the scope for ambiguous or even downright contradictory interpretations is perhaps what makes this material irresistible to call upon. And although the essays reproduced here are only intended as an introduction for undergraduates, Koolhaas’s thought is exactly the kind of thought – resistant to interpretation while beckoning unto it – that will take tutors by surprise, particularly those who doubt that those in their charge have the initiative to seek out new voices.

Significance

However, to speak of her thought in this way reduces it to academic fairy dust. Her work is not there to evidence ‘knowledge of current thinking’ or ‘original thought’ or ‘independent research’ or any other criteria for assignments or papers. I encourage students to fully immerse themselves in her essays rather than merely quote from them (or, for that matter, from my attempts here at paraphrasing them). The themes that she explores (such as we can say there are ‘themes’ and ‘exploration’) are as vital as those explored by any established author. Her handiwork is, I would suggest, as crafted as any great thinker’s. The result is an oeuvre that demonstrates eclectic scholarship of the most significant authors of the 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries across disciplines ranging from philosophy to sociology to anthropology to cultural studies to media studies to her most beloved subject area of all, art.

Subjects Covered in This Book

Her radical theory in this book is a dizzying and breakneck tour (de force). Her subjects include, in no particular order: digital identity, ethical shopping, self-publishing, transhumanism, sexuality, blue-chip art celebrities, and the shifting relationships between the media and the ‘masses’. Again in no particular order, the span of theorists and writers in this book alone includes Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Žižek, Karl Marx, and Franz Kafka. To a lesser extent, or implied without direct reference, the discussions here also touch on the work of Michel de Certeau, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Guy Debord, Plato, Maurice Blanchot, Marshall McLuhan, Donna Haraway, G.W.F. Hegel, Pierre Bourdieu, and Hélène Cixous.

May 1968

She was lucky enough to embark on this rich scholarly life in the midst of an intellectual earthquake: Paris, 1968. The protests that erupted in Paris have shaped the intelligentsia around the world ever since. She went on marches, defended barricades, pamphleteered in the streets, organised and disrupted meetings, sat in on sit-ins; she involved herself, in short, as deeply as anyone whose theoretical work imbibed that moment in which revolution seemed as imminent as it seemed inevitable.

She then proceeded from this maelstrom to vigorously dissect the world with the same commitment as her better known contemporaries. Like them, she was an anti-essentialist who cast doubt on Enlightenment rationality and progress. She problematised secure notions of truth, reality and identity through intertextual investigations of hybridity, discontinuities, subtexts, and false oppositions. Her re-orientations regularly decentred authority, authorship, and any universalisations that seemed to do violence to contingency. Her writings, lectures, and campaign involvement took in the now so familiar class-of-’68 figures: Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault among others.

Calling All Theory Celebrities

So why do we need another theorist’s work on these subjects and authors? Well, rightly or wrongly, new theorists are quickly exhausted in an academic culture that is accelerated by globalisation. Slavoj Žižek, ever the doyen of Lacanians and Hegelians alike, has, one might be forgiven for feeling, been done to death. Even Koolhaas herself wrote on his work; indeed, one of these papers, originally intended for an uncompleted project on psychoanalysis and art, is included in the present volume. Further exhaustion can be found in the now mature industries in leading lights whose work was ripe for interpretation just a few years ago. On the danger list for becoming passé are: Étienne Balibar, Alenka Zupančič, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and Georgio Agamben to name but a few. Each has had and continues to have their work pored over in the minutest detail. It is true that they offer a common frame of reference. The flip-side, however, is a growing lack of freshness to perspectives.

Creative Theory, Radical Example can be read in this context as less an introduction of Koolhaas as a new theorist than a platform for her plea for more theorists. This book is an injunction to its readers to become ‘Theory Celebrities’. This plea can be thought of as a call for papers to an imaginary conference that in turn can be thought of as a future to which everybody is welcome. She was from a generation that grew up in a culture in which something called ‘knowledge’ was controlled by gatekeepers. This means that her unfinished and unpublished works belong to what she increasingly saw as the disappearing world of the text. The present book could be said to occupy a transitionary status between that world and an emerging one in which there is something called information that has no gatekeepers to hold the Theory Celebrity back. Furthermore, in the screen age, there will need to be theorists who can transcend the transitionary objects such as the one you are reading with digital ones.

Similar arguments were put forward twenty years ago in an ‘anti-book’ that was deliberately shunned by academia. Imagologies: Media Philosophy (Taylor and Saarinen 1994) was an experiment in which two lecturers, one in the US and the other in Finland, discussed a series of seminars in a series of emails. The designerly book that resulted prefigures much that has come to pass both technologically and culturally. Creative Theory, Radical Example, as a testimony to how Taylor and Saarinen’s project was borne out by recent history, is also a testimony to how that which is repressed will always return.

The Koolhaas student should remember that institutions are under threat from the popularity of informal networks that cannot be sanctioned against. Creative Theory therefore threatens the status quo with its viral contagion. And its most Radical Example is, arguably, its potential for new Theory Celebrities to emerge over these networks. Perhaps this is why so many thinkers currently employ conceptual frameworks that treat technology with suspicion by default. One need only think of (the conspiratorial) Evgeny Morozov, (the anti-corporate) Donna Haraway, (the pessimistic) Andrew Keen, and (the balanced yet caveat-obsessed) Aleks Krotoski. At the other end of the scale there are uncritically optimistic authors such as Chris Anderson and Clay Shirky. What Koolhaas was concerned with was that students would be able respond in an informed and balanced way. The weight of philosophical history is a powerful tool for manipulating the new information environment creatively. But it demands a suitable method.

Regrounding

The short essays here all showcase her radical methodology: ‘regrounding’. To discuss this, we will need, of course, to park the knotty term ‘theory’. There are plenty of other books that can attend to it in appropriate detail. It is sufficient for our purposes here to take it, however crudely, as a shorthand for the (increasingly non-empirical) research that is often led by philosophy and usually undertaken in humanities and social sciences such as literature, sociology, cultural/gender/media/film studies and art. However, this fails to park theory, for it is intrinsically unparkable in any ‘adequate’ way. Were we to be able to do so, we would straightaway look for a theory to examine … theory parking. Nonetheless we have other business to attend to. So to finally press the point (and its contradictions) home: the fact that nothing adequately condenses the term explains the need to park it!

As a method for ‘theory’, then, regrounding develops a notion of how texts and ‘truth’ need to be (re)understood in a technological age. The ‘re’ is important here. Regrounding involved frenzied writing sessions whose delirium resulted in new insights into texts. She was increasingly aware of the need for these new insights as the need arose for more people to work in the so-called ‘knowledge-economy’ that emerged towards the new millennium. Her concern was with the responsibilities that these workers held with their access to media and culture. Would they support the ideological apparatuses of corporate interests, or combat them? The 21st century was thus pitted by her as an information war. She saw the students under her wing as potential players in a vanguard that needed textual visionaries and operatives to subvert politics and culture with interventions into media and, thereby, culture.

The aim of regrounding is to avoid making direct reference to the usual subjects while, simultaneously, finding ways to foreground whatever was put into the background by them. Whence the foregrounding of previously backgrounded issues is where the ‘regrounding’ occurs. Her method for achieving this was drastic. Sometimes she started with an existing text that was scanned for her so she that could re-write it in her word processor. Sometimes she would start by writing a parallel commentary. In all cases she would re-write what she wrote as another parallel document. This could continue through multiple versions, each one getting more distant from her ‘original’. This amount of output demanded writing at a frenetic pace without self-censorship, and then repeatedly reading through and editing – also at a frenetic pace – until delirium set in. Readers of Surrealist texts will notice the similarity with the practice of ‘automatic writing’. However, with regrounding, her objective was always to write about the subjects around the ones she was thinking about. This mixture of delirium and thinking around thought resulted in disjunctions that surprise with their new conjunctions of language. For example, on James Joyce:

‘Outside stories with ivory-like purity lies the conclusion that all Ulysses’s voices construct the act of genius that breaks the prestigious tradition. The initial thrust of the conversations is a shifting mosaic of the careening momentum implied by what we might define as the geometrical progression of Dublin.’ (See the essay entitled ‘Literature: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, and Joyce’)

And then there is this comment on consumers’ inability to sleep because of debt:

‘The generative power which relates consumption is the morality where credit, rather than impoverished reserve, is the extortion of a generation which resets its alarm in the hope that it never goes off.’ (See the essay entitled ‘Studying Media: McLuhan and Baudrillard’)

Koolhaas turned, in part, to Henri Bergson’s work on consciousness and creativity when she first practiced and theorised regrounding (Bergson 2001). Her methodology can be understood thus: our states of mind that occur as an amorphous whole cannot be fully sequenced into logical units; so, by disrupting the usual brain processes that sequence experience (and usually fail), it is possible to encounter alternative linguistic sequences that run counter to the conventional logic of grammar and, correspondingly, articulate in new ways those experiences that normally escape grammatical limitations.

In other words, regrounding results in thought that is impossible to arrive at by reasoning alone.

The political implication to this is that ‘All texts are con-texts’ (Koolhaas 2016a forthcoming: Anti-Statement 2). What she meant was that texts are implicated both in lies – the ‘con’ that precedes them – and the idea that the context to a text is indissociable from it. This is a vital point. It means that the act of reading places a demand on a reader to read around. Koolhaas’s development of regrounding, which entails writing around a subject, concentrates this demand. Feminisms frequently refer to how woman is cast as the object in both language and society. Regrounding takes this further by appealing to