key: cord-0046811-52gowb10
authors: jagodzinski, jan
title: Aesthetic Wars: Between the Creative Industries and Nomadology
date: 2020-05-05
journal: Pedagogical Explorations in a Posthuman Age
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-48618-1_6
sha: fbcba9d4b2e12f39c17e001981b2ec8f4e3dbd2c
doc_id: 46811
cord_uid: 52gowb10

In this chapter, I argue that creativity has been exploited by the creative industries of designer capitalism. I try to show how a different formulation of creativity might be conceptualized by drawing on the nomadic philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. I end this essay with a speculation as to where art|education might invest its energies as a field of endeavor to forward a minoritarian political position

Writing about creativity and art and its education is a very difficult undertaking since so much has been written on the subject. I hope to bring something new to the table concerning creativity by drawing on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, who trouble philosophical positions that have been taken up by educators and artists in the past including phenomenology, hermeneutics, cognitive theories, and critical theory, each of which has a rich tradition of thought. All these positions continue to define the practices of the arts, education, as well as gallery and museum education. Deleuze and Guattari build upon and further both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, a position that I have supported for many years. I try to show the significance of their philosophy within a digital age of the image that changes the way art and its education has carried on its foundational principles based on representational and cognitive thought.

In 2012 Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism declared the twenty-first century to be focused of 'creativity.' Under the label 'Concept Korea,' Ministry of Culture, Sports & Tourism CHAPTER 6 Aesthetic Wars: Between the Creative Industries and Nomadology (MCST)/Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) with support from Samsung Fashion and Design Funds (SFDF), formed a two-year partnership to help American and Korean designers build competitive businesses at home and abroad. Such initiatives should come as no surprise for they speak directly to what is expected in all post-industrialized societies to put the arts to work as tied to the global market economy. Recall Chung Kyung-Won's initiative called 'designomics' mentioned in Chapter 3. The globalization of the information economy and the internationalization of cyberspace have made culture and creativity a top priority when competing on the global stage. Neoliberal capitalist forces, it seems, have captured creativity to continue a consumerist economy through what have become known by the general term the 'creative industries. ' The new capitalist economy of these 'creative industries' (Florida 2002 (Florida , 2010 Hartley 2005) brings together the mass scale of the cultural-entertainment industries with the individual talent of the creative arts to provide national and global distribution of culture as well as niche market designer products. The oxymoron 'mass customization' has now become a possibility. The context for this convergence takes place within the new media technologies (screen digitalized cultures) that are part of the larger 'knowledge' economy for the use of what is said to be 'interactive' citizen-consumers or 'prosumers' who are democratically 'free' to choose what it is they wish to consume, and who they wish to be represented by-such is the pluralist democracy of neoliberal political thought as supported by a capitalist world economy.

As my introduction to this book developed, we have now, in the neologism of Gregory Ulmer (2002) , a literacy that he calls 'electracy,' a portmanteau word that combines electricity with literacy. In a nutshell, we are living through a third stage of communication. Just as orality was displaced by print literacy, print literacy is being displaced by electracy. Electracy is to digital media what literacy is to alphabetic or ideographic writing. Jan Rune Holmevik (2012) maps out how electracy apparatus can be put to use when rethinking the intersections between rhetoric and game theory, via the signifier 'ludology.' The creative industries are all about electracy, a shift to the way the affective body and image structure performance. What is it that images can 'do,' is the order of the day. Entertainment is the primary institution of electracy. It is the way entertainment is used to manipulate and steer desire that has become the overarching game of politics. Trump is the prime example. Twitter use and the spectacularization of his own impeachment, hiring so-called tv lawyers that appear on Fox Television, assured him that the populace watching will be swayed by the cover-up that was taking place right in front of their eyes, and under their noses, a 'beautiful display' of scam politics. Alain Badiou (2019) calls it 'fascist democracy.'

The creative industries collapse work into play and producer into consumer. In terms of the three communication shifts in behavior historically, play supplants worship (the orality of religions) and experiment (the explorations of science). Play works with entertainment, which supplants both religion and science. It is no longer a question of right/ wrong (the moralism of religions), nor the true/false dichotomy of science. These have been supplanted by joy/sadness (usually drawn from Spinozian ethics), or in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, jouissance; that is, the ambiguity of pleasure/pain. Julian Dibble (2007) has called this 'ludocapitalism.' Intelligence, knowledge, and creativity define four types of producer-consumers in what is a continuous dynamic spiral of production. First are the creators who form a series of new productive sectors such as advertising and all the different professionals involved (concept creators, photographers, graphic designers, audiovisual technicians, and so on). Second are the consulting professionals such as the business and marketing experts, headhunters, personnel managers, and the like. These two levels of the creative industries create 'image worlds' or 'life-styles' and ways to generate desire and seduction as a lack, as to what is missing in your life to make it complete. Competition among corporations becomes a form of creative play. The ecology for such creativity is all about relaxing, well-being, free space, open areas, and just the right amount of anxiety to create an atmosphere of expectation to design the next level of commodity (car, watch, computer, chip, television, and so on). Gambling and profit maximization replace safe investing and employment creation. The third level of producers consists of consumers who actualize these image worlds that are offered enabling the fourth level of producers to emerge-those who are the personal image makers: personal trainers, personal stylists, clothing stylists, fashion consultants, real estate agents, dermatologists, plastic surgeons, estheticians, designers, interior-architects, self-help professions, and so on.

Their job is to sell their services to consumers who believe that they can help them get ahead and achieve as new kind of flexible subjectivity needed to survive in such an economy.

Artists, to survive in this economic climate must learn to be self-promoting entrepreneurs who hire agents to 'push' their wares in galleries and museums. In the 'creative industries' they work in transdisciplinary teams in a complete 'ecosystem' (chip designers, artists, audience research, advertising agencies, finance, and business experts), much like the entrepreneurial teams found in business, and within interdisciplinary networks to develop R&D opportunities for business. Artists are given 'free' time as long as they produce (much like professors who are researchers). Art has now 'dedifferentiated' itself (lost specialization in form and function); that is, there is no longer artistic genres (painting, photography, sculpture, and so on). It has also 'dedifferentiated' itself from advertising and cooking. It becomes difficult to distinguish the two as in Nan Goldin's publicity campaign for SNCF-the French National Railway Company, for example, and Rirkrit Tiravanija's exercise in 'relational aesthetics'-cooking and serving noodles in galleries for art collectors and visitors. Relationality itself becomes aestheticized. It's not what you do, but also 'how' you do it. In the third communicative wave of electracy, style has replaced method (associated with literacy) and ritual (the orality of religion). Style now becomes an overriding factor when it comes to presentation, dependent of the 'problem' that is at hand. With truth/falsity replaced with joy/sadness, the question is how to affect the body in a way which increases one to 'feel good' or 'be happy'. A great example of this emergence of style has been On Becoming a God in Central Florida (2019), a television series starring Kirsten Dunst that satirizes the selling of products like Amway and Mary Kay in the 1990s.

Such displays of 'relational aesthetics' (Bourriaud 1998 ) have now become part of the service industry. Relational aesthetics, especially as developed by Nicolas Bourriaud, was targeted to the claims that art via micro-situations in art galleries was able to generate the emotional contact that had been lost due to the distancing effects of digitalized forms of communication, a questionable claim. Altermodernity was his way of riffing off Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the rhizome by introducing his own plant metaphor, the 'radicant' (jagodzinski 2014). Art now abandons its prior (industrial) object and shifts to the immaterial form of services. Art practices become a gas or liquid that enters like an aesthetic vapor into all facets of lived-life: fashion, design, politics, entrepreneurship, humanitarianism, and the environment (Michaud 2007) . Aesthetics is primary in electracy, overcoming its expressions as mythology (in oral cultures) and epistemology (in the cultures of literacy, book cultures). Aesthetics of designer capitalism override all aspects of life; the Earth is for sale as it becomes completely aestheticized by way of a series of communication satellites launched by SkySat now owned by Google. The surveillance of the Earth is now a reality.

Zygmunt Bauman (2007) , a former teacher of mine, points to the 'liquidity' of contemporary art. On his visit to Paris in 2006, he cites three artists who were given prominence in galleries all around Paris: Jacques Villeglé goes around Paris with a camera and takes pictures of billboards or empty walls that have already been filled in with information. Gallery walls now become the city walls. Manolo Valdes paints or rather collages one thing: a face, always the same face on canvases made of jute or hemp. You cannot tell if these works are being created or in a state of decomposition (destruction). Lastly, Herman Braun-Vega paints impossible encounters; that is fragments are taken from historical eras and put together in a comfortable habitation. In all three cases, life and death lose their meaning-bestowing distinctions. For Bauman, these are representative arts of liquid capitalism. They are temporal, mark constant change with no particular direction, with a final disposition of the object already built in. The opposition between the creative and destructive arts, between learning and forgetting, forwards and backwards seems to no longer hold. Some have called such a direction, after Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodernism, a global phenomenon where 'information' is constantly reworked through artistic formats. Information becomes the 'new AI materiality' for many artists working with the digital.

From a Deleuzian perspective, Kane Faucher (2013) tries to make sense of this changed AI reality by maintaining that information for Deleuze is the Idea and its actualizations; it is a quasi-organizational principle. The Idea (as introduced in Chapter 2) becomes an information problematic at the virtual level where solutions are never fully exhausted. Each solution, as part of a multiplicity, enables a repeated return to the source Idea. The unfolding of actualizations gives sense to the event of art. This makes for a problem-solution nexus, not unlike the Nietzschean destruction-creation nexus where a meta-state persists, ready for the next actualization. As Faucher concludes, "The virtual is a black box filled with white noise, but it is the specific type of noise that is infinitely generative (even if it is governed by rules as much as it imposes a rule set on the process of unfolding)" (90). The kernel to creativity in Deleuze's case, following Faucher, is that information and noise (as Idea, as problematic) are not to be differentiated. "Noise may 'disorganize' a system, but it also introduces something new to that system that permits a constant reorganization -if not a reterritorialization that begets new relations that form and break according to a pattern of singularities where what differs repeats, and what repeats must differ" (ibid., emphasis added).

In the context of Altermodernism, the artist becomes nomadic as a collapse occurs between the specific (local) and the global (universal). Cultural landscapes are traversed, blurring artistic identity regardless where they find themselves geographically located. Mobility, travel, and trespassing, while all pertinent to these global trotting artists, it is confined to a very small elite. It is also the case that any location is imploded by global communication via the Internet. This pertains to both East/ West exchanges happening in major urban areas via signature galleries in Seoul, Hong Kong, Berlin, New York, and so on. It could be said that globalization can provide for a great leveling effect. However, nationalistic pressure to represent one's country, most famously at sites like the Venice Biennale or Kassel's documenta festival, presents the paradox of the very Idea of Altermodernity.

Exhibitions, live performance events, screen technologies, and learning workshops characterize the spectacularization of contemporary culture. The interface is between artistic practices, communities, education, and industry. What must be added to this is the educational imperative of 'learning to learn,' a tautology which means being a perpetual student needing to 'upgrade.' Postdoctoral research has become the new 'standing reserve' (Bestand) to use Heidegger's term for this 'creative class.' Art and its education are asked to abet this capitalist economy, which has become an aesthetic (libidinal) economy. Art schools are redesigning their curriculums to meet this demand, and public schools are under pressure to produce this 'flexible subject.' Parents, especially middle-class parents who want their children to succeed are held hostage to this demand by capital. In Korea, this entails going to the best schools and universities possible and engaging in 'shadow education' and private after-school education. Private after-school sector has emerged as the vanguard of unchecked privatization and marketization of education that magnify inequalities. In the United States and Canada, this situation is being changed through the privatization of schooling and the greater pressure to establish charter schools so that a specialized curriculum can be developed that is more congenial to these economic necessities. The Obama administration was heavily influenced in this direction by Bill Gates and Eli Broad, two key players as venture philanthropists and billionaires, who have heavily influenced education via the Broad Grant program and the Gates Foundation. Under the Trump administration, the billionaire appointee Betty DeVos, as his education secretary, is slowly devastating public education through privatization, for-profit universities, totally dismantling any progressive changes the Obama administration may have done. In Canada, education follows a similar trajectory. The OECD seems to run the agenda as to what is expected of education for the future of globalized capitalism (jagodzinski 2015).

While much more can be said concerning the 'creative industries,' the rest of this chapter is to present a 'line of flight' that tries to escape the clutches of neoliberal capitalism and its vampirist thirst for creative blood, a way of thinking of an ethico-political approach to art and its education that tries to escape the 'overcode' of 'designer capitalism' toward a new life economy (Holmes 2009 ). Perhaps the most important consideration is to recognize that art|education must now come to terms with 'new media' of these creative industries-here I am referring to video, performance, audiovisual, installation and multi-media art forms and the various software programs and interfaces that enable such a contemporary Kunstwollen [the will to art] to emerge. The result is a significant paradigmatic change of orientation for the way we have thought about art in general given that (as a commodity) it can now be endlessly reproduced, manipulated, and destroyed, as these 'immaterial' object relations of spectatorship and participation undergo change.

The first concern for art|education is that our understanding of the image has to undergo a change from a persistent visual essentialism that defines our field governed by representation and interpretation of images to a recognition that digitalization as information, as a mathematical process, confronts us with a 'frameless' image that is no longer analogical but also inhuman-that is to say, digital. It is machinic vision as already theorized by soviet cinematographer Dizga Vertov in 1929; a disembodied 'kino eye' that technologically (as soft, hard, and wetware) extends human vision and redistributes the senses, much as 'print' did for Enlightened modernism. In terms of electracy fantasy now supplants the 'faith' that governs oral cultures and the knowledge that is the overriding factor in literal print cultures where science is the dominating institution. In contrast to this, art|education in the twentieth century has been sheltered by a humanism, which paid less attention to the techné of art, celebrating and attributing creativity to self-expression and the skill of the 'human' hand.

We have now, however, reached a point where the technological mediation of 'making' art can no longer be ignored. The engineering aspects of art have become increasing important causing copyright issues between artists and engineers over the produced installations. What is of particular importance then is the 'staging' of the artwork, especially when it comes to installation. The 'staging' of what the viewer/spectator/reader/listener/interactor/participant experiences by manipulating the environment as a particular assemblage. Screen cultures present a moving-image. The body in relation to the image has drastically changed. It becomes choreographed. Within the electracy configuration, the totem of orality and the categorizations of literacy become replaced by chora. Chora refers to the spaces created through a mood, atmosphere or a Stimmung in the German. The medium of video, installation art and the changed urban environment present art|education with the challenge of understanding space|time and body in different terms in relation to the changed technologies and the redistribution of the senses. A completely different understanding of the subject is required from the one that has dominated the West's understanding of identity as the psychological cognitive and rational individual. The 'creative industries' of hypercapitalism are quite aware of the need for this shift in thinking as well, which is why there is an 'aesthetic war' (Venn 2010a) that opposes the cultivation of radical interventions and 'monstrous identities' to avoid capture. Deleuze and Guattari and those who further their theories are part of this opposition for another ethico-politics.

Let me outline in a very general way the paradigm shift that has taken place with digitalization and the 'new' media (or technological arts). Many have called this paradigm shift an 'affective turn' (Clough 2007; Featherstone 2010; Venn 2010b) where consumer culture targets the affective body as well as the body image. The affective body (what Deleuze|Guattari called Body without Organs [BwO] in the 1970s) is a moving body without image, which communicates through proprioceptive senses and intensities of affect. It can override the perception of the imagined body. The affective body is an intrinsic body, a body schema as opposed to an extrinsic body image, yet both bodies are intimately related to one another. Affect, in this understanding is an unconscious (non-conscious) phenomena that goes below the level of consciousness. Affect is 'half-object and half-subject' (Guattari 1995, p. 92 ). As such this body can be at odds with cognition thereby presenting the existential paradoxes, ambiguities, indecisions of everyday life and so on. There is something nonhuman about this affective body since we cannot control this aspect of ourselves as the realm of viruses, bacteria, cell growth, and the etiology of diseases testify. Many artists have now explored their 'portraiture' by growing the colonies of bacteria that inhabit each body in a unique way. (I explore bioart in chapter eleven.) Deleuze and Guattari called this level of reality a 'plane of immanence' at the molecular level-a vital clamor of life. They call it involution rather than evolution for this is where creativity proper happens, where accident, mutation, heterogeneous couplings, interkingdoms can take place producing something entirely new. On this molecular level, there is Zoë, energy as free life, which has not been captured as bios … or biopower (as Foucault theorized it) where life is contained and constrained (civilized) by the social order and the laws of the state. Life in this state has been 'molarized' in their terms, but Zoë always leaks out of its confinement. Life remain excessive and not controllable by us humans. In the context of this book, I have been equating Zoë with Chi.

The intrinsic body thought this way is not yet organized, it is 'schizophrenic' in the sense that this is a level of sounds, abstractions, and rhythms-what Deleuze|Guattari called 'multiplicity' and Jacques Lacan called the Real. Affective resonances happen between bodies at this level so that something new may emerge. One is drawn in or repelled by another body depending on the molecular chemistry-love, hate, anxiety as Lacan once said are the primary psychic states. Spinoza identified desire, joy, and sadness as the 'primitive' affects that constitute human behavior. Some would refer to this affective level as being 'authentic' because it can't be faked since it is involuntary. In my writings, I have used the term Xpression rather than expression for affect; self-refleXion rather than self-reflexion to identify this bodily realm of intrinsic virtuality. Affects are not emotions. Affects are the intensities of feelingvitality effects, tonalities of the voice and sound. Emotion is already processed feeling, an established generalized body pattern like being sad or happy. Affects are more abstract, not yet formulated. It is sensation itself, as Zoë or a 'bare life' force. Giorgio Agamben (1998) 

So why is this so important for art|education? We can begin by saying that affects are sensations that have their own particular logic, a 'logic of sensation' as Deleuze calls it, and this logic of sensation-as aisthetics-sets it apart from aesthetics of designer capitalism, which has been the usual playing field for representational art at the level of body image. Here we have a different understanding of the image facilitated by the inhuman apparati of digitalization as well as the nonhuman 'biological' body that has no image. It exists at degree zero. Deleuze draws on the philosopher Henri Bergson to comprehend this more processual body in distinction to the body of representational cognition, which explains images through discursive meanings that dominate art history and criticism. This processual body is most affected by threshold affects, a bodily experience that is not subject to chronological time but to a different sense of time-what Bergson called durée and Deleuze called Aion. Such time cannot be 'measured' but felt immediately by the intrinsic body's nervous system. It is a phenomenon of the present, consciously registered as an experience that comes either too early or too late since it has already happened at a moment of presence when our bodies undergo such disruption, and we must reflect back on what happened. It becomes a memory of the past. Trauma and falling in love are 'events' of this sort, subject to a different 'time' than the measured time of capitalism. With trauma, we cannot remember since the schematic nerval visceral body becomes overwhelmed with stimuli. Love on the other hand, the moment of lovers meeting, the first kiss and so on is always repeatedly remembered. We can, however, never pinpoint when precisely this 'love event' happened. We can see that 'creativity' is subject to such an understanding of time. Creativity in this account always has happened and we discover it after the fact, even when we cry 'eureka!' (Archimedes) the event has already happened.

Henri Bergson offers Deleuze a way to understand the complexity of images that are no longer theorized by modernist concepts of representation, but enable us to understand the complexity of the image that is registered below the level of consciousness, in the nonconscious body before it becomes a form with a particular content. This means the pre-conscious image as it is affected by memory and non-chronological time. For Bergson the image is never the image of movement, rather the image is movement as such: image = movement. In contemporary screen cultures, the affective nonhuman body is activated directly by the inhuman digital images. This becomes especially evident with digital cameras that are used more to scan the environment to capture a series of moments of time rather than 'stilling' time. Just as 'the image is movement' opens up a new dimension of understanding, the understanding of space is also no longer representational as it is perceived 'naturally' through our conscious cognition; rather space becomes more disorientating (the experience of vertigo for example, or déjà vu). It has many possible topological virtual potentialities. Such space addresses the many nuances chora [khora] can take and the atmospheric change depending on the haecceities that emerge.

We come to one last theoretical concern, and that is to recognize that this 'split' of the two bodies: the conscious body image and the unconscious affective body are relationally informed by one another, however it is the split, chasm, gap or what Guattari called the 'transversal' where profound creativity or change occurs, where something new comes into existence. This is not a dialectical process where a 'higher' (Aufhebung) state of existence is created that overcomes the opposition or conflict of the 'two bodies,' but what Deleuze and Guattari call a 'line of flight.' This is a nomadic line, a line that draws one into new unknown territory breaking out from the structure that held it in place. Such a line is charged with Zoë (free creative life). This means that a threshold has been overcome, something has been released, an escape toward the creation of something new. Deleuze and Guattari call this 'becoming,' emerging always in this interval between affect and cognition. We can see here that both aspects-the affective and the imagined body are in play relationally. Deleuze and Guaratti called this the virtual|actual dimensions. Both are necessary for art|educators to engage in the capitalist 'aesthetic wars' of control. Currently, visual culture remains caught by representational thinking, a humanism which ignores the inhuman and the technological, or recognizes them in instrumental terms as productivity rather than post-productivity (here Nicolas Bourriaud (2006) has it right) where the release of 'life' is sought for.

This dimension of the affective body opens up the potential for creative experience for our own bodies to encounter with new intensities and affects through 'new|old' media. It expands what the body can 'do' and experience. Aisthetic experience is a 'temporary event'-a time-image in some case and a movement-image in others depending what is being extracted. Deleuze (1986 Deleuze ( , 1989 ) wrote a two-volume book on cinema to show how to theorize the difference between the two forms of images. It is the dynamical interface between the body and the image as digitalized screened information that creates an affective response by the viewer| spectator| participant| interactor. Video, in particular, can be seen as opening up the pre-individual affect exposing the aisthetic dimensions of the sensible. As a medium, video recording has the ability to slow time down (slow-motion), freeze-frame time, repeat a circuit of time endlessly by looping tracks. Maurizo Lazzatto (2019) has examined this brilliantly through what he calls "videophilosophy." "Video technology is a machinic assemblage that establishes a relationship between asignifying flows (waves) and signifying flows (images). It is the first technical means of image production that corresponds to the generalized decoding of flows" (81-82). Perception is opened up through delay, acceleration, and contraction via our intrinsic sensorial embodiment. It requires a disjunction between cognition and affect; that is between body image of 'normative' perception and the proprioceptivity of the non-imaged body to bring about thinking. Thinking here is a creative experience-what I call self-refleXion to distinguish it from normative self-reflection only at the cognitive level. Lazzarato offers a "Cinema 3," building on the work of Bergson, Deleuze (Cinemas 1 and 2), Walter Benjamin, and inspired by Nietzsche. He moves past the optical image to recognize the way time is "crystallized" by the machines in electracy. The Vertrovian kino-eye is politicized as a 'war machine.' He uses the word "crystallization" to describe the Bergsonian contraction and relaxation of time-matter that produces images (to recall image = movement). All images-including human subjects-are these assembled contractions and relaxations of time-matter. Technologies of photography, cinema, video, and electronic media, like the human body as it couples into the various potential assemblages, present various images that are expressions of the power of time in post-Fordism (electracy). Lazarrato recognizes the "machinic enslavement" that capitalism manages by capturing the asemiotic dimension of affect to manipulate the neurological level; he searches for ways to subvert this capture through video artists like Bill Viola and Nam June Paik, to be discussed in Chapter 10 and below. His videophilosophy makes visible the onto-aesthetics of asignifying semiotics of electracy.

Let me offer an example of Bill Viola as a video artist who recognizes the primacy of affect in image reception, one of the go-to artists for Lazarrato. Viola tackles the changed media of electracy by claiming that the new forms of (synthetic) image production have to abandon the models of the eye and ear; they need to be redirected toward the models of the processes of thought; that is, the conceptual structures of the brain. He recognizes, like Warren Neidich (2003; www.artbrain.org) , the realm of neuroaesthetics and its capitalist capture. The Quintet of the Astonished (2000) is part of a longer series of works called the Passions (2000) (2001) (2002) (see Walsh 2003) , an exploration of the primary emotions of joy, sorrow, anger, and fear. It is a well known and much-discussed work that illustrates brilliantly how the gap or interstice between imaginary body and the affective body can be opened up through the digitalized media of video. The art-piece shows five people undergoing intense emotional agony. The action unfolds in ultra-slow motion. The scene is shot on 35 mm high-speed film at the extraordinary speed of 384 frames per second (ordinary perception registers 24 frames per second). In chronological time, the action takes 30 seconds but here it is stretched to about 16 minutes, 32 times slower than normal speed.

Viola's The Quintet of the Astonished demonstrate a disruption of time, an opening up of the interval between normative perception of cognition and the working of the bodily affects. 'Stilled time' that is found in the portrait paintings of the Renaissance is the primary material for his 'special-effects' videos. The group portraits are displayed on screens at supra slow motion, which forces viewers to be 'out-of-phase' with themselves as they are caught by the animation of the picture moving in an almost indiscernible pace. Spectators become aware of their own motions in front of the screen, as they must become immobile to grasp the changing facial expressions as they appear microscopically on the screen. The affective flow between the video and the spectators begins to take place. However, the change is so slow, each serial shift confirms just how nonhuman the face truly is whether or not the spectator comes at the beginning, middle, or end of the looping video. A zone between the spectator and the screen now becomes a situation, an interactive exchange, which is more than simply a visual field. There is an exchange of energies. The aisthetic force of the situation that arrests the body makes the spectator|interactor realize what is going on behind the reach of the eye alone, beyond mere optical visuality.

Viola's video productions are exceptional exemplars as to how it might be possible to think of 'transindividual subjectivity' as theorized by Gilbert Simondon (Scott 2014) ; that is, a 'subject-group' following Félix Guattari (Genosko 2002) in relation to the 'disaster culture' of the Anthropocene that we live in today. This is a thesis developed by Elena del Rio (2019), which has compelling merit in relation to an eco-politics that goes beyond identity interests of all possible kinds. Transindividual subjectivity and subject-group are two concepts that go beyond individuality or a collective that is a homogenized seriality. Transindividual subjectivity happens when a fusion takes place, a common praxis that recognizes common action required by each member of a group caught up in an event. In Simondon's view, transindividuality is pure relationality; it is metastable structure in its make-up, subject to change with an event. Such an event is contagious, arriving either too early or too late. Through the process of 'transduction' in Simondon's terms, members are affected. Psychosomatic forces and energies circulate between the human and nonhuman in events. Transindividuality is therefore not social being. Rather, it is an existential mode of 'transductive unity.' It's location dwells in a zone of pre-individual potential that is part of both the individual and the collective. The key here is to grasp affective life (or 'A Life' a Deleuze put it, pure immanence) that is quite apart from common intersubjective social symbolic functions. It is beyond identification, not caught up in the usual sociological signifiers (race, gender, sex, and so on). Del Rio shows us through Viola's works The Path, The Deluge, and especially The Raft how the process of collective individuation that is triggered by disaster draws on the affective relations that are based on pre-individuals (as already discussed in this chapter) can be the basis for an eco-politics. It is her conviction that the perpetual crisis of the Anthropocene requires such a reorientation; an attunement to Nature, quite different from Object Orientated Ontology (OOO) of Tim Morton's (2013) hyperobjects, being perceptually theorized, are impossible to grasp. The pandemic of the COVID-19 virus is such a contemporary test today of collective individuation.

The final point I simply wish to make is that art|education must begin to grapple with this Kunstwollen [will to art] of a changed space and time. For art|education, this means a more complex understanding of image creation and the affects of art in a digital age. It is no longer a question what art means, or what it represents but what the arts do, what experiences they can open up in terms of 'lines of flight.' This is the position Elena de Rio takes up when she discusses the power of Bill Viola's The Raft as a microcosm of eco-politics. Such lines of flight release 'life.' We become more enriched by the world and attuned to it when this happens as opposed to capturing Zoë for capitalist ends-in terms of biopower (Foucault)-that the creative industries are involved in. The potential future is open in the former whereas the possible future is already closed in the latter. We create a debt society by throwing away things so that we can renew then with a 'better' model. We are told that consumerist societies offer freedom and choice. Consumerism is most often assumed as a greed for acquisition, the desire to accumulate more and more things. But this is only part of the symptom of hypercapitalism where everything becomes short-lived and disposable-waste outstrips production. Of course, much of this is changing with the realization of 'climate change' being the anthropogenic activity of Man (discussed at the end of this book).

It is uncertain what art 'is' or what 'it' should be in a global capitalist world where everything converges into a single act of destructive creation or creative destruction to keep the system going. For Deleuze at least, it means finding a way to still have 'belief' in this world despite its nihilism and capitalist necrophilia where bodies become dispensable either through layoffs, firing, cheap labor, or outright entertainment as on so many reality television shows. Art should be creative for affirmative ends: to open up life … to let Zoë escape for new creative ends that are ethically sound in relation to the crisis of ecology that we are in. This is where Jacques Rancière's (2010) writings speak to me in the role of critical art contributing to the efficacy of 'dissensus.' "Dissensus is a conflict between sensory perception [realm of Zoë] and the way of making sense of it [cognition]" (p. 139). Video art like Viola's does create a 'dissensus.' His videos remain ethico-political and eco-political to the extent that a nomadic line opens up to a 'becoming' other (the nonhuman in this case) so that we might be open to other dimensions that enhance life (Zoë) to make the imperceptible perceptible. Or, the very least, attune us to ourselves and the nonhuman event that is taking place, like the pandemic of COVID-19. I would see this as the task of art|education that embraces creativity in its most open potentiality, a creativity that is at odds with the creativity of the 'creative industries.' But this plea is certainly a 'minoritarian one'; to call on Deleuze and Guattari (1987, pp. 291-309) again, where 'minoritarian art' calls for deterritorizations of identity (fixed images) so that a redistribution of the senses might take place for the benefit of psychic health rather than plunging us more and more into ecological disaster … and death.

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