Restore the right of beauty to its hyper-existence by all means of artificiality.
The prostitution of the male body puts an end to the last heroic privilege of the woman – that of being sacrifizes to the gaze, thereby concealing herself, precisely in a second nudity. (Baudrillard, Cool Memories 4)
We really do live after the end. Baudrillard’s model has also passed away (The Left has never been interested in it). It has been razed to the ground by the casting industry, identity politics and ubiquitous soft porn that is everywhere. It’s just all over,. And not even sadness, after all, a sign that old Baudrillard was still banking on. remains. There is no longer a word for this horror, for this hell that has even destroyed the model.
What does Baudrillard write about fashion?
“The astonishing privilege accorded to fashion is due to a unanimous and definitive resolve. The acceleration of the simple play of signifiers in fashion becomes striking, to the point of enchanting us – the enchantment and vertigo of the loss of every system of reference. In this sense, it is the completed form of political economy, the cycle wherein the linearity of the commodity comes to be abolished. There is no longer any determinacy internal to the signs of fashion, hence they become free to commute and permutate without limit. At the term of this unprecedented enfranchisement, they obey, as if logically, a mad and meticulous recurrence. This applies to fashion as regards clothes, the body and objects – the sphere of ‘light’ signs. In the sphere of ‘heavy’ signs – politics, morals, economics, science, culture, sexuality – the principle of commutation nowhere plays with the same abandon …
Today, every principle of identity is affected by fashion, precisely because of its potential to revert all forms to non-origin and recurrence. Fashion is always rétro, but always on the basis of the abolition of the passé (the past): the spectral death and resurrection of forms. Its proper actuality (its ‘up-to-dateness’, its ‘relevance’) is not a reference to the present, but an immediate and total recycling. Paradoxically, fashion is the inactual (the ‘out-of-date’, the ‘irrelevant’). It always presupposes a dead time of forms, a kind of abstraction whereby they become, as if safe from time …
Fashion does the same thing in accordance with its cycle: it commutes all signs and causes an absolute play amongst them.”
This means also that the retro mode has finally become ubiquitous. Although there have been retro tendencies in Pop based on fashion from the beginning, but for a time, until the 1990s it was possible to distinguish »retro« from so-called contemporary, which captures the moods of a period. Today, all retro styles are sold as contemporary precisely because there are no truly contemporary alternatives. That was truly eerie. The retro mode has thus become the standard, i. e. styles, fashions and objects that are retro are sold as contemporary products, precisely because the real innovation no longer takes place in the present. If everything is retro, on the one hand it is pointless to call certain phenomena retro, on the other hand nothing is retro anymore. Time would be white.
What does Baudrillard write about the model?
“The mannequin is sex in its entirety, but sex without qualities. Fashion is its sex. Or rather, it is in fashion that sex is lost as difference but is generalised as reference (as simulation). Nothing is sexed any longer, everything is sexualised. The masculine and the feminine themselves rediscover, having once lost their particularity, the chance of an unlimited second existence. Sex is lost as difference but is generalised as reference (as simulation). Nothing is sexed any longer, everything is sexualised. The masculine and the feminine themselves rediscover, having once lost their particularity, the chance of an unlimited second existence.”
The model mutates into an interchangeable sign of desire, even more, the products and desires tend towards a “generalised hysteria”. The modell promotes a kind of objectless desire, a desire that insists even without the choice of object. Thus, the model is not oriented towards use value, but towards the production and manipulation of social signifiers, or, to put it another way, the model is a process of signification and communication based on a code that inscribes itself constantly and at the same time invisibly into consumption practices.
This was as the heroic last woman: The self-confident woman of today flirts with fashion like the model of the pret a porter, whereby fashion exposes the conservative speech of the naturalness of the female sex as a rhetorical effect by dislocating and shifting it. With fashion, the postmodern carnivalesque woman, who is thus not the woman, constantly differentiates and performs the anyway varying models of the fashionable and their manifold denials and distinctions by idendity-shifting and flexibly hyperbolically advancing the look. This is what is really new, what is really stunning about our time, namely that the superfeminised woman no longer makes herself an exhibit of man’s genital abysses, even though he continues to adore the most attractive specimens of the species in films or advertisements; no, the woman quite skilfully withdraws in her standardised womanhood, as if she were dancing like a space dancer in a vacuum, in order to ultimately deconstruct man’s feelings even more skilfully. The woman plays with withdrawal because she finally understands that it’s about the use of manifold self-deprecating magical devices, let’s calmly call them fetishes, where sign and meaning are one, in the sense of a perverted pornography on the street, which nevertheless does not completely give up the salvation of perfect love.
The female body designed through make-up, clothing, hairstyle, ondulation and fashion appears thoroughly tragic. The body modelled in this way, the more surfaces it has, the more artificial it appears and the more it merges with an image, the more hermetically sealed it appears, both internally and externally, and today the body is literally covered in make-up or bandaged dead with signs, and so the body is ultimately threatened with joyless stasis. In pure coexistence, cosmetics, wellness and plastic surgery would separate feelings, emotions and even affects from the (artificial) physicality of the woman, thus neutralising both the inward and the outward side of the subject (who is constantly turning on a one-sided Möbius strip), which is anyway plastered with signs, giving the impression that there is a space behind the mask that is filled with virtual meanings, But these never really come to the fore, so it is purely a matter of constructing a semiological body that is once an inside, where feelings, memory or consciousness are formed as the spiritual and remain alien to the body, and at the same time the signifying outside, an organon of signs that can be stuffed with intentions, and so the inside and the outside turn the body back and forth in an impotent turn, without letting it be as a site, extended and manifest.
Nowadays the model gets finished by th casting industry and exists as a sterile soft porno. The media system adjacent to the casting shows functions so perfectly today as guilty pleasure, exploitation and trash also because in this country there are not even the terms to describe it, let alone a social project to oppose such a press product, which is officially labelled as an aberration, so to speak, with restriction and criticism. The casting show and the adjacent media system have long since succeeded in becoming mainstream with trash, intimacy and exploitation.
In the feature pages of the major dailies, it has become standard phrase to compare casting shows to the financial capital bubble in terms of axiomatics, practices and functional mechanisms, in terms of the cyclicality and interdependencies of media, market and money, with certain journalists always emphasising, that with a single telephone call the television viewer can act in a similar way to the reference person of a consumer loan or to a small investor on the stock exchange table, but that the risk of the television viewer, apart from the (exorbitant) telephone charges or the time wasted, which thus screws up the last light needles of one’s life, is considerably lower than that of a borrower, but the return on investment is zero, and in this respect the casting dispositive remains, which controls the production of consumer desires in terms of distraction, whereby their illusions are permanently modulated in the structure of visibilities and concentrated on the box office magnate superstar, who in turn intends to turn these illusions into money in the shortest possible time, This illusionistic procedure would thus remain without any lasting political-economic effect for the viewer, and nothing but pure hopelessness would remain with the viewer at the end, or the bitter psychological aftertaste that through interactive participation in the speculative bubble of casting, one had only driven it even higher. However, the whole thing is much more complicated, because a certain gratification has to be granted to the audience, who, regardless of whether they have time or not, pay for the enjoyment of the casting show by stealing time, whereby no accumulation of time is possible, but they are not only rewarded with adorably sweet gadgets, but they are made aware that everything is already okay, and above all that the audience itself is okay, in this strange world and the happy awareness of it.
The body (in casting) is controlled by the gaze, the direction, the actors and the produced arrangement of the bodies, and only the body that eludes the market is forbidden. Shamelessness and revelation are virtually demanded as control insignia of the body as media staging and performance, whereby the exposure of the individual body in the image generates public excitement. This image exposes and conceals the body in the dispositifs of service, efficiency and entertainment. What is generated is not only consensus, but the divergence of stupidity that feels authentic in the semiotic war of images. Stupid machines, a force of control, transform this into an impulse to want to be controlled. Subjectification sans phrase, whereby hysteria and boredom mutually envelop each other. The entertainment machine is an in-between world, a transfer machine that produces cleverness and stupidity on a daily basis. The machine has to legitimise itself, because it is a feel-good and fear machine at the same time. It needs and produces economic and technical efficiency, but to a certain extent it remains bound up in a networked plurality of finalities, since the machine constantly tries to make itself the only telos by invoking transcendence, happiness and even reason. The conflicts between technical and economic profitability are also evident in the fact that the machines, as derivatives of perception and inference machines in cybernetic control circuits (machines for the production of perception, opinion and communication), in order to ensure collective participation and their own growth, have to use strategies such as irony and subversion; they are paradoxical symptoms of the activation of the Bödheitsmaschine itself. Luhmann introduces the concept of freedom in the context of double contingency: something is possible as it is, but could also be otherwise. This is unfolded in the encounter of two systems. There arises an interesting bridge to Althusser: the only necessity is the necessity of the absolute purity of contingency, which is always already an encounter rather than the spontaneous generation of a necessary sequence whose origin would be a subject. Freedom can take the form of an encounter that does not take hold, a brief encounter, or an encounter that lasts. It can solidify into law. In a sense, post-democracy has then liquefied this legality again in Berlusconism, in that politics presents itself in the media, and the media subordinate themselves to the state. The machine, so to speak, constantly vaporises freedom and law; is the law then so variable between chance and manipulation that it governs from case to case)?
The politics of affect of the casting show, which relates fear and desire, consists less in appealing to desire than to the (sexual) body by subjecting it to round-the-clock control. This staging, which cannot be separated from the production of the (sexual) body, is a strategy of the microphysics of power. The contestants are constantly asked or provoked to evaluate their bodies, while leaving them open to evaluation by the other contestants. This has distinctly sportive and pathological features, which build up each other so that a candidate like Anny can at some point appear as a sexualised, freaky doll of exposure, authentication and obscenity. Revelation and control enter into a conditional relationship that situates a politics of affect beyond shamelessness. The body is a medium within the medium that forms its element, sex, horror and message into a structure. Individualisation is part of a cybernetic mediatisation, whereby the model-oriented body politics of TopGirl differs from that of The Belover in that it virtualises and at the same time authenticates the control of the orifices and the painting of the body, from the tolerance of nose piercing to tramp stamp. At the same time, the pornographed candidate in particular tends to insist as a zombie in the media space, once she has crossed a certain threshold – – , and from then on is forced to constantly readjust or vary the pornographic performance, an artistry that is still far too euphemistically paraphrased as a tightrope act. Above all, the female sex performance demands permanent looking in a behaviourist manner, although this collective gaze is completely obscene. The exposed body is also supposed to demonstrate efficiency when it surrenders itself to public performance, a variable norm that must always comply with its own shocks. This performance must be presented as a sacrificial or technologised work on the ego without neglecting the trashy, sweaty and masochistic elements, even these must be integrated into the media structure and differentiated there at the same time. Media produce not only consensus (integral), but divergence, whereby in the struggle for positions, signs, language (as immanent action), those whose narrative and image somehow arrive may feel authentic, although sharply defined social places and strategies are less and less recognisable. Bulimia and anorexa nervosa relate to each other like hysteria and boredom; one gorges oneself with entertainment and vomits in order to be ready for self-optimisation again, just as self-optimisation serves to gorge oneself with entertainment again. Down to the finest detail, the problem of credit points, programmes of evaluation and optimisation enter their gentle regime, proliferate into the offices and the corporate situation – – -, power becomes fluidal, it becomes “gaseous”, as Deleuze says, it organises itself in networks, It becomes micrological or even nanotechnical, it becomes “interactive” by setting in motion an incessant game of action and reaction in which the actors plug the gaps and pores of control through techniques of self-control.
But there is not only the fashion mannequin, but also the labour mannequin. Paolo Virno thus points to the fact that the customer of the “Modern Service in the Labour Market” has long since already corresponded to the subject dubbed by Günther Anders as the “automation servant” or the “labour mannequin” described by Baudrillard, who simulates the non-existent work as if it were there, or acts as if it were not there at all, despite too much work being there. A widespread form of employment today that is entirely integrated into machine complexes is that of the employment mannequin, which performs the activity of waiting or pressing keys in certain cycles that are dependent on a sequence programmed elsewhere by a machine feedback system. Thus, the agility, cleverness and speed of today’s dividend, a Prozak and Ritalin mutant, often consists in the devastating wait, in waiting to be allowed to press the red button, while elsewhere the decision has long since expired or been made, namely in the recursive loops of the machine system itself.
In a further step, according to Klossowski, the translation of the celebrity or the model (which Klossowski calls industrial slave) into living money can be understood analogously to the Marxian transformation of gold into money, whereby gold as money is exclusively opposed to all other commodities, in which the commodities express their wealth in it; at the same time, the model must become the sign of general wealth, whereby it still remains part of the wage system, however. The next step, the decisive and at the same time conceivable step, would now be that the model knows how to use for itself the general excitement directed towards it, which expresses itself in solvent demand, in order to put itself in the place of money, more precisely, in order to embody the general equivalent (money) itself, whereby the model would actually mutate into a living coin. But gold is useless in itself, it is money that gives value to gold, makes it valuable. So it is not surprising that Klossowski finally speaks again of money as a sign. Here we are with Baudrillard. Klossowski writes: “As “living money”, the industrial slave is at once a sign that guarantees wealth and this wealth itself. As a sign, it stands for all kinds of material wealth, but as wealth it excludes any other demand if it is not the demand whose satisfaction it represents. “In contrast to the industrial slave, living money will thus directly claim the status of the sign, indeed will directly embody the sign, and in doing so, living money not only embodies the sign of abstract wealth, but also represents wealth itself with its body. But as long as the star only serves to raise the price of arbitrary commodities (sunglasses, shoes, TV shows, toothpaste, etc.), it remains what Klossowski calls an “industrial slave”. However, because the model remains the target of the masses’ desire, he still represents unattainable wealth and can thus at least potentially set himself as living money. Money and star thus converge in the pure semiotics (of money), the sign of an empty phantasm that represents everything and nothing. At the same time, both money and model represent value as a void, which is to be understood here as completely arbitrary/virtual. And this is also what Klossowski’s arbitrary/virtual value qua money aims at in the book “The Living Coin”, which is like a phantasm that answers to another phantasm. For Klossowski, the value-money phantasm is the better conception than the commodity fetish, whereby both contain anything but subjective illusions, but are to be understood purely objectively, also in the sense of how the objects actually appear to the consumer, namely endowed with a power/magic, that is, with phantasms that are not only based on answering other phantasms, those of desire, but on disposing of this in all its opacity for the subject. And it is precisely this power that living money now exploits in order to put itself in the place of dead money. And if prices now largely detach themselves from the value-setting of commodities qua abstract labour, which today applies among other things to branded goods, and prices thus mutate purely as a result of the willingness to pay of marketing-and advertising-infested customers, then it seems only logical to endorse Pierre Klossowski’s statement: “In the world of industrial manufacture, it is no longer what seems naturally free that makes the appeal, but the price of what is naturally free.” However, Klossowski is not primarily alluding to the fact that consumers today are willing to pay extremely high prices for the image or information value of a product, but to the fact that body/pleasure/sex/emotion are rising in price, especially when not everyone has the means to rent a body for the sexual act, for example.
What about the body? The technological procedures of the medical, wellness and fitness industries take the human body itself as material. Beyond ascetic self-intensification practices or neo-Buddhist gimmicks, those technologies generate new formats of neuronally mapped happiness that clients/consumers can access in the form of biopolitical, surgical and chemical service programmes. These generate practices and symbolisms that operate in the areas of the cortex and express themselves in feelings of happiness, the enhancement of self-esteem and the potentiation of cognitive performance, that substrate of the imaginary ego that must gain recognition or validity in order, paradoxically, to help the organic composition of the human being (Theodor W. Adorno), its segmentation, to break through, into which narcissistic structuring is built. This mode resembles the logic of surplus production in that affects and emotions are accumulated here for the purpose of one’s own validity, on the one hand to drive the process of “self-enhancement”, and on the other to be able to operate molecular fine-tuning of bodies and subjectivity on the part of the system, which always places deviations in relation to the norm. In his book “The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”, the Italian philosopher Mario Perniola describes, among other things, the fakelore surrounding the idea of body dress, in which the leading figure of eternal youth is wrapped: clothing conceals less than it reveals, namely, the intensification of the body, which is first and foremost produced and regulated by athletics & sports, fitness management, tattooing, dietetics or the above-mentioned accesses. One accesses, leases and consumes countless offers in order to get as close as possible to the ideal of beauty as something very vital, sensual or neo-spiritual, and to achieve the complexity of a high artificiality and artistry that man sets as the goal of his own practices. The opposition between body and soul has never been one, because from Aristotle to Spinoza, the soul does not represent the other of the body, but what the body is for itself and in itself (cf. Jean-Luc Nancy). For thought, the body is the outside in its relation to time; the body itself only is an externality. Perniola says that the body is also an extension and enlargement of our clothes. “In the look, the experience of the dress as body extends, stretches and radicalises into that of the body as dress.” (Mario Perniola: The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic) Innovation of body should be organised systematically.
Profile-oriented models are currently presented by the enhancement industry in trendy or soft-core loops as possible subjects who, as parts of the middle classes, are connected to the pleasure terminals of commodity and image worlds as well as those of eccentric shopping worlds. The body industry, the illusion machine par excellence, which takes every tiny act of disillusionment of individuals as an occasion to move on to the next stage of perfection, designs the extended body, which is sorted, stored and retrieved, burned and born and reorganised by means of folding, folding in and out, superimpositions and assemblages; it is, in a certain sense, an amputated body that remains connected to the information machines, internet and computer, to possible machinic conjunctions and disjunctions. The fact that the ensoulment of the machines corresponds to a de-ensoulment does not yet say much, but virtually requires artificiality to be pushed to dizzying dimensions, whereby only virtual availability gives the body the potency to virtually steal individual organs in order to perceive or produce them as artificiality/organless body in order to in turn de-functionalise the body. Under such conditions, the sacred body, which is always a sacrificed body, the body of metamorphoses and the sexualised body of metaphor, dies. Rather, the body is currently the model of a cybernetically and streamlined operationalised surface, i.e. an artefact to be managed medically and cosmetically. The all-round setting within the conjunction of film, photography, fashion & design, cosmetics, surgery, doping, science etc. permanently produces incorporeal effects, whereby the body is digitally produced, even performed, on its surfaces. At the same time, the mathem of power plasters the brains with Buddhophilic-neoliberal-influenced self-management programmes or guides that fulfil the same function as mood-boosting thymoleptics, and with which neuronal networks are triggered that are related to hyperactivity, flexibility, dynamism and self-fashioning. Mental health as a commitment. The performance of the global enhancement industries is to place exercisers in the status of productive consumers who take advantage of programmes to increase their own psychodynamic fitness as well as those to complement their own physical attractiveness as a service. The intensification techniques are driven incessantly towards the purchase and subsequent consumption of actual training programmes and procedures. The self techniques are complemented in the innumerable calls to be I-self, provided one’s self does not stray too far from the self of others. There is a matrix of both soft and hard body technologies (of surgical, biotechnical and chemical provenance) by means of which bodies are deterritorialised and reterritorialised at the same time. Body design lives from the continuous, differential transit of bodies and technologies. We are talking about transcatalysis.
Where surgery takes place, for example in Orlan’s case, who undergoes facial surgery in front of a running camera and still partially programs it while reciting Jacques Lacan, the message is: “Down with pain. Long live morphine. My body is my software.” So the cuts to the flesh are short-circuited with the binary code. The skin is all I have, underneath there is no I, no soul, no truth. The ego is an image, a deceptive one at that, which we always misjudge, that is, we never perceive it as it really is, but as we would like to be seen (cf. Jacques Lacan). And even the skin can be shaped and changed, especially if one inoculates or administers quantities of data to the body. It is true that the scalpel cuts into the flesh and draws the lines into the flesh, but cosmetic surgery is no longer preceded by (image) cuts, but only by the pixels of digitally produced matrices. Aesthetic surgery models the body images, while the digital image machines calculate the fluidum of beauty and cool attractiveness. A matrix is implemented into the skin from operation to operation, which Orlan creates first and foremost as an artificial doll, which is filled up with computer software or the implementation of chips. Ultimately, digital medicine is concerned with eliminating the wounds that can still be seen in Orlan because it wants to exhibit them. Literalisation of the flesh. Flesh made number. Ecstasy of morphing and facial modelling. Continuous metastatic flow, 0/1 stagings. End of oppositions. The digital dolls generate a fictional bulimia insofar as they sample the material in order to transform it into data; these dolls devour inconceivable amounts of data in order to give the data, conversely, the digitised appearance of the material. Even Orlan as a resistance fighter is eaten up by this sly type of power. These fluid images of bodies and faces thus testify to the disappearance of the computer – the discreteness of the digital code – at its interfaces. Witness the audacities of computer-calculated liquefaction, electronic precision work stored on silicon chips. However, neither the sectional images nor the surgical interventions play the decisive role in the inscription, contextualisation and coding of the digital dolls (a labelling by means of the data flows), but it is the doll images themselves that configure the digital dolls as a symbolised conception of beauty, with the mathematical coordination systems and information codes fading out. Masculine and feminine intertwine in the digital spaces. The body is a data machine. In the future, the digital Adam and Eve will replicate themselves in a genderless matrix of the autosexual. And even painting today must take its cue from the photograph, film and computer art. Deleuze says that the depiction of the flesh falling off people’s bones in Bacon’s paintings generates the desire to escape one’s own body, to slide from the field of visibility into the medium of the invisible. With technical media, the desire slides from one visibility into the next visibility, whereby the repetition can be an immanent falsification because it produces something other than what it (falsely) appears to repeat.
Badiou has pointed out that there are two possibilities with regard to the signs of eternal youth, namely, on the one hand, the burgeoning youthful terrorism due to demographic developments and underdeveloped areas where money circulation is diminished, and on the other hand, the affirmation of the maxim “Have Fun” in the capitalist metropolises. In doing so, he certainly underestimates the neo-narcissistic intensification techniques as well as the compulsion to model oneself into profit-oriented risk subjects. Moreover, in the metropolises themselves, the design of life correlates with a production of death, which Deleuze/Guattari have described as follows: “The only modern myth is that of the zombis – deadly schizos who, brought back to their senses, are good for work. In this sense, the savage and the barbarian, with their way of encoding death, represent children vis-à-vis modern man and his axiomatics (it takes so many unemployed, so many dead, the Algerian war kills no more than the weekend traffic accidents, than the planned murder in Bengal … ). Modern man is even more delirious. His delirium is like a telephone system with thirteen telephones. He gives orders to the world, He does not love the ladies. He is also well-behaved. He is decorated with all his might. In man’s game the death instinct, the silent instinct, is safely employed, perhaps alongside egoism. It takes the field of zero in roulette. The casino always wins. So does death.” (Deleuze/Guattari: Anti-Oedipus)
These zombies are certainly not the ones George A. Romero presents in his film Land of the Dead. Romero creates the scenario of a city in which the rich have taken up residence in a tower where they enjoy the usual luxuries, while the masses below the tower languish in squalor. This kind of class structure can only be maintained because the land is occupied by zombies who threaten any escape from the Tower with death. Deleuze/Guattari’s zombies, however, sit in the Luxustower itself, designing their digital dolls and going about their work at the same time. Among them there is indeed another kind of zombie, but one that hardly threatens the luxury zombies and their digital dolls. it consists of the mass of labour nomads for whom global capital no longer finds any use.
Immaculateness and emptiness are, in my humble opinion, the historical aprioris of the construction of beauty as a dispositive or structure. Or is immaculateness anchored in the DNA? Think of the Golden Phi and the studies of Stephen Marquardt’s studies. If the concept of flawlessness is the condition for the absence of a deficiency (in the body), then the concept of emptiness is the constitutive condition for an indifference, such as one recognises in the gaze of the model.
But no, maltreated, collapsing, bleeding and emaciated bodies, grotesque bodies of so-called risky existences are considered all the rage today, actually a very beautiful image of thought; they are mostly extremely strange aliens and hybrids, strangely amphoteric beings with a body image that has been or constructed body image, which is the idiomatic toughness of the soft – skills or softness of bodily techniques and at the same time brings them forth. Feature films in 3-D format or organs printed on glossy paper of the ubiquitousactually a very beautiful image of thought; they are mostly extremely strange aliens and hybrids, strangely amphoteric beings with a body image that has been destroyed or or constructed body image, which is the idiomatic toughness of the soft-skills or softness of bodily techniques and at the same time brings them forth. Feature films in 3-D format or organs printed on glossy paper of the ubiquitous the pavement and out of the ass runs blood. As a supplement, we experience the virtual real-time war in front of the screens as a remote-controlled data and information process, as if the world were quantifiable, that is, purely translatable into information flows, as if the world were quantifiable, i.e. purely translatable and thus switchable, as the wounds and scars of war in contemporary art are brought into the limelight.
Scars of war come into the limelight in contemporary art. The already dying AIDS face. Will Self. Dorian Gray. Orlan’s plastic surgeries, which drag that bring no ego but pain into the limelight. How long will violence remain remain the fantasy of the 21st century, we ask ourselves with and against J. G. Ballard? The aesthetics of the drastic are thus concentrated around a hyper-medial neo- Expressionism. Exhumanise the model as the mutilated, the normal as the addict, pervert the clean to the ugly and vice versa. Disgust as a 24-hour endless loop provocatively covers the critical consumer, but in no way triggers aversion in him, rather an unconscious attraction. Disgust covers the negative land of fractal subjectivities like a media jellyfish; disaster hermeneutics & social-therapeutic soft-skillness reinforce & fight each other ; games of staged communication, which in virtual real-time war in front of the screens as a remote-controlled data and information process, as if the world were quantifiable, that is, purely translatable into information flows, as the wounds and scars of war in contemporary art are brought into the limelight.
Disgusting is the claim of a vital, which the media spectacles thicken withwith authentification effects that are as much a part of splatter culture as of neo-spiritual therapists, leading to mutual collision and reinforcement effects.
Deviation is the be-all and end-all, determines the criteria for the selection of that which isstability and at the same time increases the complexity of the posthistoire media. No text ever stands still, because every understanding ex- and implies commentary & critique, an entirelyand unstable criterion, and the Derridean différance encourages us to constantly the unclosable fabric of texts for further information-processing capacities. Communication as retrospective criticism and commentary outstrip the text, which remains forever bound up in an exponentia proliferating cybernetic feedback loop.
The attempt to place the impulse to act (of the author) before the inhibiting factors (of the critics). However, no critic-alien without a reference to its anti-humanist pervertedness, as if the critic-alien pervertedness, as if the critic-alien stood for evil capital itself.
The fascination with the critic-alien, however, cannot conceal the fact that it is the capitalincluding the distinction profiteers themselves, who are excluded from the life of the critic alien and their clone. Media and information capitalsfeed deviations into their trendsetting machines under enormous time pressure, also as self-generated correctors of their own processes, which remain completely immanent to them.
Glamour, its mythological history, by the way, refers to a figure that always articulates itself magically,realises the blending of software and magic. Scientific & Organic-Beauty becomes driven into the zone of intensifications, displacements and mediations.
Admittedly, the beauty icons spend a lot of time bathing, caring for their skin. care of their skin. Have you heard of the inhabitants of a South Sea island whobathe day and night and stop feeding their ugly babies? A lut hat we unfortunately cannot afford, even if it is not unacceptable from the demographic points of view, instead we bring in the far more effective machines.
Instead, we bring in the far more effective machines of the cosmetics and design industry into play. Restore the right of beauty to its hyper-existence by all means of artificiality.
It remains difficult to fathom the abysses between the decidable and that which eludes any distinction between the decidable and the undecidable. In the pathetic context of dialectics, this would mean that it is difficult to discern how the artificial translates into the biological and how biology translates
loops its potential paths into the artificial. A heavenly experiment where the artificial body laboratories are linked to one’s own life forces.
But binary structures, by which both the conflict and the mediations are conflict and mediations are determined, dissolve, there are mixtures, multiplications and branching, singularities appear in zones of indistinguishability. As desire eliminates lack, it has indifference as a prerequisite, in order to desire this or that. And nothing is easier than to eliminate the concepts associated with the beautiful, associated with beauty, flawlessness and indifference, with the matrix of technology and informationand information science. The virtual mask of Stephen Marquardt, in which the face is measured according to the Golden Phi. The result is a network of lines that precisely defines the “correct” distance between the mouth, eyes, chin and nose, and even the distance between the eyebrows. Themask template as a perfect face, which measures the deviations of the real faces and compares the mask and face. Think of the beauty of the interfaces that reveal nothing about how the computer works. Finally, emptiness disappears as transcendental and flows completely into the biopolitical level of immanence, which is the differentiating and field unfolds and on which the most diverse policies of beauty develop. Beauty politics are biopolitics that not only provide the participants with technologies, forms of knowledge, medical discourses and practices, and ways of actingand ways of acting, but also produce a technology of the self, or rather, stage it, in that the beautiful individuals willingly take up rules in order to become acosmetic-cosmological procedure to transform and reestablish their bodies, and re-establish themselves in the markets of the attention industries.
translation by deepl.
Foto: Sylvia John