Prometheus has long been the modern muse, thumbing his nose at the gods with his grand larceny, his stolen fire standing easy cipher for inspiration, in his audacity humbling Caliope to second fiddle, in his eternal Titanic torture a model of artistic sacrifice. Even his name, the fore-thinker, appeals in its marriage to eureka as a mark of well-rounded creativity. How easily these merry dancing flames impressed us. Epimetheus is what makes the myth interesting. It is in the act of forgetting to grant us any one extraordinary virtue that Epimetheus gave us our mortality, our awareness that our existence on earth is finite. By prevailing on his brother, he provided us with techne – with art, and the artistry to create. By depriving us of anything else, he made it essential to our survival.
In his 1994 book Technics and Time, vol. 1, Bernard Stiegler, the French philosopher and former bank robber argues that technics develops faster than culture, that man and technics are indissociable, and that the phenomenon of hominization is the phenomenon of the technicisation of living. He argues that until the industrial revolution mankind lived in a technological milieu which experienced progress so slowly and infrequently that it failed to realise it lived within historical time, and that it took this technological rupture to awaken us, through Hegel, to historical consciousness. Before this the main train of western philosophical thought ploughed the firm line that stability was the essence of reality, and all change or revolution was accidental. After this rupture, through Marx and Nietzsche, we understand that stability is the exception, and change is the norm. Change, revolution and creation: these acts of becoming are essential to our state of being.
So here we see two stories about birth, one of the human, one of the modern, and the show sets out to reassert the value of both, using their genesis as ours. It is therefore important we put these ideas in the context of contemporary culture, in which 'modern' seems to have been reduced to a mere signifier for implied alienation through atomisation. By industrialising so much of our lives and deaths, ie, taking it out of human hands and placing it in the metaphorical hands of machines, we fear we are sacrificing something essential to our nature. On the contrary, this show would argue that it has afforded us far greater personal liberty, and this freedom to think has merely left many scared of the revealed Nietzschean abyss. It would be contrary to argue that mass media wasn't an instrument of control, but on the other hand it is utterly facile to claim that within western culture it is inescapable. It is through arguments like this that the modernist program of personal liberation has been stalled, and converted into a non-progressive post-modernism. In light of the present major global corrections to the course of late capitalism, we have decided to attempt to recapture a sense of progressive urgency by considering Marx's demand for an evolutionary sense of human technics comparable to our understanding of biology.
For much of the recent period there has been a drawn out squabble on the nature of so called late capitalism, and the emergence of a post-modernist aesthetic to compliment it. One prevalent strain of accepted wisdom has run that the automatized culture of late capitalism causes the subject to with draw into itself, the atom severing its surrounding molecular links, reducing the superstructure to incoherence, and as a result it can only define itself through consumption, building bridges by wearing badges. This is all straight forward to the lay sociologist; so far, so much the better. It is, however, the response to this, the conscious methodology which sets out to examine culture entirely through reference to itself, that has led to a barely bitter entropy. The assumption that it is possible to construct a discourse of any lasting coherence that is founded on itself is one that is entirely circular, cyclical, repetitive and regressive. Couple this with a sceptical attitude towards technological progress, and weʼre left with intellectual nano-mush. By embracing technics this show would attempt to dispel the insidious feeling that optimism, in its broadest sense, is naive, stemming from the natural, if entirely reactionary human sensibility that things are always getting worse.
The culture of the modernist period was preoccupied with trying to articulate the nature of contemporary existence. As such, post-modernism, the sick joke at the expense of avant gardism, canʼt be criticised for attempting to reflect a world it is unable to comprehend. It is its presupposition of reactive withdrawal that makes it unacceptable. The empty time made available for leisure through western progress has opened up huge vistas of empty mental space on which to project wild fantasies of bright futures. Instead, it is the default mode to retreat in fear, connecting only with the television, and a popular culture enchained to debasement and vulgarity. The prevalence of the cute and garish in visual culture, and the incestuous forced marriage of fun with childishness that this arises from, pure white flecked with contaminating fluo-pink, are a sure marker of how long weʼve avoided the serious and interesting questions that come with adult responsibility. The whole era of cheap credit has borne a mindless generation nauseous from a glut of entitlement. As it ends, we must seize the chance to embrace change, development and progress through art and technology as our Epimethean largesse.
To conclude, Iʼd like to rest upon the contradictory figure of Martin Heidegger at once both so modern and so reactionary, who determined that it was as important to understand what it is to be, as it was to figure out what sort of environment that being was in. Dasein, that glorious exclamation of existence, is an intriguing concordance of the ideas discussed above and very much else besides, which asserts an active being within a temporal framework. All the work exhibited is in some way concerned with marking our cultural progress through technology, and using this relationship to explore the very nature of our existence. In this marriage of the concepts of techne and episteme, therefore, let us absorb the past, revel in dasein, and thrill to the future.
Jackson Boxer
October 2008
