Twelve (end-)notes on Ms. Education’s visit to The School of Athens, “in search of lost causes”
By Z. L.
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[i] The Bruce High Quality Foundation, In Search of Lost Causes (School of Athens), 2009; vinyl and paint, 71 3/4” by 125”. “Education”: Literally, of course, “to lead out of”; Ms Education, though, tends to get you bogged down into some-Thing.
[ii] This is a false analogy: what traditional initiation aimed to lead into, was a knowledge of freedom beyond bounds (that is why there were bounds)—or an actual experience of death as liberation-in-life.
[iii] What we get, instead, is in-struction—attempts to con-figure ‘lasting’ psychic constructions from without.
[iv] Economy: etymologically (and literally) the law (or dharma) of home—or dwelling. Thus, an ‘economy of education’ is in this sense a contradiction in terms, as education seeks to draw its conscripts out of their natural abodes. A “genealogy” of education is overdue, possibly in the lines traced by Giorgio Agamben for that of Western “governability”. See, on this, Ramòn Rodrìguez, “Teologìa y Politica”, review of G. Agamben, El Reino y la Gloria: Por una genealogìa teològica de la economìa y del gobierno, Pre-Textos, Valencia, 2009, in Revista de Libros, no. 156, diciembre 2009, pp.10-12.
[v] It could also be argued that education is (should be) about forgetting (one poet, whose name I forget, wrote “I remember much forgetting”); but it is not a simple matter to fathom what a truly non-Platonic education (not anti-Platonic, i.e., still mired in the dialectics of argument) might be. It is equally hard to imagine a ‘return’—still in life—to that after-death cleansing passage through the river Lethe, which might prepare one for an otherworldly rebirth. The ‘forgetting’ possibly envisaged by Ms. Education—one of her invaluable ‘lost causes’—would in fact remember everything, but as if this knowledge had been collected by an entomologist from an archaic culture.
[vi] This is the case of a movement from “to do or not to do” (Bhagavad Gita) to our “to be or not to be”. Now, after 400 years, our nihilistic uncertainty of being has taken root as a rootless (and ruthless) constitutive condition: that is, its roots, like those of certain exotic giant trees, have become aerial—reaching for new ground in other worlds, other spaces, so that perhaps, while they travel, it might be prudent to keep ms. education in a state of suspended animation…. Cfr. Massimo Cacciari, Hamletica, Milano, 2009.
“Scotty, beam me up!”: “It is here that speed, as a modern myth, meets the ancient myth of the journey. No longer, though, as itinerary, progressive conquest of a space ploughed through by time. Rather, the journey as rapid transferral, which ideally one would wish to be instantaneous.; flash without sound, instant of light which often becomes, even if in-adverted, the imaginary apex of the journey itself. {…] It is as if everyone already had a foretaste of interplanetary flight in their terrestrial travels, and crossed, in the blink of an eye, a pure, desert Space.” Elvio Falchinelli, La mente Estatica, Milano, 2009 (1989), p.93. He also quotes from Jean Baudrillard, L’America, Milano 1987, pp. 10-11, with its quasi-Futurist echoes: ”Speed creates pure objects, is itself a pure object, because it cancels the ground and territorial references, because it retraces back time so as to cancel it out, because it goes faster than its own cause and retraces its course so as to annihilate it […] to race on in a car creates a sort of invisibility, of transparency, of the transversal [movement] of things through a void.” “Here, then, America becomes a desert, not only a physical place to be traversed, but also a mental place, ‘desolate mental form’, ‘purified form of social desertion’. ‘Because the desert is nothing but this: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance”. Ibid. p. 94.
[vii] There wasn’t, actually, any “art” education in earlier and other times and places—except technically, perhaps, for musicians (but as Morton Feldman insisted that music was not ‘art’)—before the ‘Enlightenment’ and what Jacques Rastrière called the ensuing “aesthetic region of art” (the Politics of Esthetics, London / New York, 2004). So, now that we are moving into the ‘post-art’ (and the post-aesthetic), and that museums will become in the general consciousness what they have in fact been for a long time, the ‘tombs-of-beauty,’ what are we to do, e-ducationally, with all these mausoleums? Draw everybody out of them and into the streets, of course—but how, and what then? A nomadic post-art may be at once necessary and impossible when the metastasis and inflation of the global demos will have rendered most physical displacements highly impractical (if not unfeasible). And what mis-educational forms could/would the virtual post-artistic nomadic take? It is sufficient to wander among the still lingering tourist crowds in Rome, Venice, or Florence, to know that the pseudo-nomadic post-aesthetic has already taken over. Traditional nomadic journeys, like those of birds, were cyclical, revolving—even through vast expanses of land and time—around familiar landscapes and seasons.
[viii] The “School of Athens” which Raphael conflated into one synchronous tableau, was the first “Academy”: the East produced lineages of teachers, but no ‘academy’. An academy is first of all a place—the site of horizontal configurations of relations and discourse: i.e., the academy negates time. There are ‘masters’ within the academy, but dialogue is the dominant mode of its internal and external interaction. The academy rose on Socrates’ tomb, and the flowering of his ‘sacrifice’: As Plato makes him say at the end of his Apologia, “Which one of us will go towards a better destiny (pragma) is unknown to all except to god.”
[ix] Perhaps, now that we have moved ‘beyond history’, and ‘beyond politics’ (into so-called demo-cratic consensus,) the only still possible academy is one of anonymous presences—an academy of masks. The object hides behind its image, and the image becomes the mask of the Thing.
[x] “Society of Spectacle” (Guy Debord): But when did the show really start? In Venice (though certainly not at its Biennale) one can see almost one thousand years of ‘theatrical’ display—not by chance its closed, rigid, and oligarchic society eventually adopted widespread masking to allow for the play of less restricted interactions, and many of its women took to covering themselves head-to-foot, except for generous décolletés displaying the spectacle of their enticing breasts.
[xi] It is as if with the Greek-Roman emphasis on the visual Indo-European society had taken off its mask (persona) and literally become, hence, sfacciata (barefaced); but ours may be a time when the mask will once more have to come on, because all that is shown—and thus all beauty—is instantly ‘mediated’, and devoured.
[xii]It might be useful to remember here what BRUCE’s In Search of Lost Causes (School of Athens) is not:
— not a ‘work’ but the masked image of a work.
— not an original image but its reproduction
— not an analogous reproduction, but its trans-position on a different medium (a vinyl tarpaulin).
— not a site-specific, but a movable surface that can be rolled-up.
— not an identical reproduction (of the image) but one thoroughly modified, even subverted, by the application of white, quasi-identical, hand-painted masks over all the faces in the ‘picture’, including those of ‘decorative’ and possibly allegorical figures (putti and the like). Thus we could speak of an erasure of individual identity, but also of an eerie (and humorous) enhancement of its collective presence—though in concealment. Here, thought is impersonal, and thus can move freely in all directions. It is tempting to quote, in reference to it, from the supremely unquotable Samuel Beckett: “Bleached as one same wilderness they are so alike the eye cannot tell them apart. They carry face to face and relay each other often so that turn about they backwards lead the way. His who follows who knows to shape the course much as the coxswain with light touch the skiff. Let him veer to the north or other cardinal point and promptly the other by as much to the antipode. Let one stop short and the other about this pivot slew the litter through a semi-circle and thereon the roles are reversed. (S. Beckett, Fizzles, 1976, p. 57). Ms Education would approve of these instructions.
Z. L.
