The term “de-activation” in the title refers to that of Creazione e anarchia by Giorgio Agamben about the concept of the act of creation in an anarchic sense. In his work, Agamben describes a deactivating action that renders the operations of the functional, the pragmatic and the necessary inoperative, opening new possibilities to the human being. It is another way of being in incessant oscillation without origins and without ends. The concepts of impotence, inactivity and poverty, developed by Agamben on the basis of the formulations of Deleuze, Aristotle, Heidegger and Benjamin, embody as ontological categories already offered by the world to us, but which are very different from generally accepted meanings. In this regard, it will be opportune to observe a work of deactivation from an aesthetic point of view and to frame the deactivating practices in a concrete framework.

Agamben questions what remained unsaid in the Deleuzian idea of the act of creation as an act of resistance (1). To be more precise, Deleuze’s power is exercised through resistance to death and also to the propagation of information, that is to say to the system of control. Deleuze gives the term “resist” the more common meaning of opposing an external force or threat, while Agamben thinks that the act of resistance must be internal to the act of creation. Resistance, in Agamben’s opinion, acts as a critical instance that slows down the power towards the act, preventing it from blindly resolving itself in the act (2). One who possesses a power can either put it into action or not. In other words, every single work completed could also not have been done and that the act of creation is the result of a complexity in which impotence (power-of-not) and power (power-of) come together and agree. The power-of-not deactivates the ability but remains faithful to the inspiration. This is why the inspired artist is without artwork. On the one hand, the power-of-not cannot be transformed into an autonomous principle that would end up impeding the one who possesses a power. On the other hand, without resistance of power-of-not, art would decay in execution, proceeding with false ease and without inspiration towards the completed form. Therefore, the artwork always results from two intimately joined principles and every human power is constitutively impotence (3). This means that mastery is not formal perfection, but, on the contrary, the salvation of imperfection in perfect form. The master’s canvas possesses the seal of his contingency, what could not have been or could have been otherwise. It is that light tremor, imperceptible in the very immobility of the form. Present in every masterpiece, the resistance of the power of-non is marked in the artwork as the intimate mannerism. The power-of-not, through its resistance, exposes the form, just as the manner highlights the style (4). Agamben gives an example of Titian’s Annunciation who signed his work with an unusual formula: “made it and remade it”. This tremor of Titian is the supreme mastery that deactivates pre-existing potentialities of the act. For this reason, the power-of-not is the inactivity of the power-of, which results from the deactivation of the power/act scheme. By suspending the passage to the act, impotence simultaneously confers full freedom on the subject and allows a full exhibition of power to shine through.

In Agamben’s work, the term “inactivity” never ceases to come up in these reflections on the act of creation. He takes up Aristotle’s hypothesis that man is an essentially inactive animal, that is, the living being without artwork (p.5). It is a comparison of man with the sculptor or the shoemaker. While every craftsman has his own work and activity, for man no work and no vocation can be defined. Agamben proposes that we consequently think of man as the living being whose vocation is inactivity. Unlike the modern formulation of inactivity as rest or inertia, we can think of it as a practice which, in the artwork, first of all exposes and contemplates one’s own power to act and not to act (6). The properly human vocation or work is therefore this contemplative life which becomes inoperative in all its operations and specific functions of the living being. By making works inoperative, man makes things “run in vain”, that is, he deactivates biological and social functions to contemplate them as such and open them up to a new, possible use. Deactivation, in this sense, frees dimensions such as the political and artistic from the utilitarian and normative paradigm. In the task of deactivating the functional and the pragmatic, poetry is the model par excellence. Poetry means making the communicative and informative functions in language inactive in order to contemplate its power to say. In this sense, the poem is the contemplation of the language that opens up into new use. In the same way, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is the contemplation of art, for the reason that the artist had deactivated all the functions of the artistic machine. According to Agamben, Duchamp does not even operate as an artist, but as a philosopher, critic, a simple living person, proposing existential acts (7). Fountain is not the work, because it is any everyday object, a urinal, presented in a museum as a work of art. There is no artistic operation or production in any way, because this urinal has already been produced before the act of creation begins. Finally, it is not Duchamp as an artist who produced this urinal. Fountain has no artistic value, in Agamben’s opinion, since, by deactivating the work-artist-operation machine, the ready-made no longer takes place, neither in the artwork nor in the artist, nor in the operation. The only acquired value of that ready-made is that of being exhibited in the museum. And, however, I believe that one can perceive Duchamp as an artist if we consider his conceptual gesture as a constitutive property of the ready-made. Under the conceptual gesture I mean the description of Duchamp’s act of creation with an explanation of why it was done. Duchamp chose a urinal, removing its use value with a new title Fountain and a new point of view; therefore, Duchamp’s creation consists of a new thought of the object of everyday life. It is this deactivating gesture that the viewer should judge as a work of art. By making art inactive, Duchamp first of all exposes and contemplates his power. Suspended in the act of creation of the ready-made, art rests in itself and opens up to spectators as such. In this perspective, the artistic value of the Fountain would consist in his inactivity, that is, in contemplating the contemplation of Duchamp’s art which had deactivated all the specific functions of his artwork.

Another deactivation concept developed by Agamben in Creazione e Anarchia is poverty. For Agamben, thinking about poverty means thinking about it not only in relation to having, but also and above all in relation to being. It is an ontological category already offered by the world to the human being. It is starting from Heigegger’s concept of poverty and Benjamin’s justice that Agamben arrives at his definition: “Poverty is the relationship with something inappropriable; to be poor means to be in relation to an inappropriable good” (8). Inappropriable means something that cannot be appropriated or become possession of somebody. Keeping oneself in relationship with something inappropriable means using, but not in the sense of consuming, that is, it doesn’t involve a consumption of the good, nor any form of profit. Agamben’s essay dedicated to the Franciscan friars is an example of this mode of relating to the inappropriable. Franciscan theorists rejected property and sought to ensure legitimacy for a life outside of law. They had been able to demonstrate that it is possible to use something without having not only ownership, but not even the right to use it. The Franciscans used things they needed without having any right, like a horse eats oats. In this way, they had separated use from ownership and questioned the order of law, as it was based on the possibility of appropriation. In order to show that the inappropriable elements are aspects of reality and they are already in action of the human being, Agamben provides three examples: the body, language and landscape. I will try to observe them here.

The contradictory nature of the relationship with the body, which cannot be appropriated, consists in the intrusiveness of an “impropriety”, as if my body becomes foreign and inappropriable to me (9). In the empathic experience, I do not feel any original joy or sadness, but this has the character of something I lived as my non-original experience. This means that, living in joy or sadness in the other, the own body casts a foreign shadow. Agamben observes the works of Husserl and Lips on the problem of the perception of one’s body and concludes that none of their attempts to trace the originality of the body is ultimately convincing. On the other hand, Levinas’s essay on bodily experiences such as shame, nausea, and needing to pee reach a critical juncture in the inappropriable nature of the body. If, in nakedness, we feel ashamed, it is because our body, irreparably exposed, appears to us as the most alien thing that we want to hide. Our presence to ourselves is shameful. This experience is even more evident in nausea, where the more the vomiting delivers me to my solitude and inescapable reality, the more it becomes inappropriable to me. A revolting presence of myself, a stranger to myself, seems insurmountable to me. The moment I feel an uncontainable urge to urinate, I am nailed to myself with no escape, and my own body becomes foreign and inappropriable to me. The moment of the urge to urinate places one’s body between polar tensions which are impossible to assume. And so Agamben sums up that our body was originally given to us as the most proper thing, but absolutely inappropriable (10).

The inappropriable, similar to the body, also manifests itself in the language. In fact, the mother tongue appears to us as what is most intimate and proper. And yet, language occurs to human being from the outside, it is rather imposed on the infant. In some cases, a process of transmitting and learning the mother tongue can be arduous and painful, as evidenced by pronunciation errors, stammers and sudden forgetfulness. Showing the impossibility of perfect mastery, language refers to a common use shared by others. At this point, the poet tries to master and make the language his own, that is, to become its expropriator par excellence. In his artistic act, the writer must abandon conventions and common usage and make that familiar language foreign. The mother tongue appears to us in the forms of a “homeland”, while an artist oscillates between homeland and foreignness to dominate it. Agamben gives an example of this “expropriation” in Goethe’s works, observing the evident transformation of the language in his late works (11). Similarly, in Melville’s last novels we can see how the form of the novel itself moves towards other less readable genres, as if we read the philosophical treatise. Tensions of this kind are also encountered in the work of artists such as Titian or Michelangelo. Critics had already classified the late paintings of these artists as mannerism. It defines a field of polar forces, a tension between stereotypy and uniqueness, between repetition and strangeness. The Mannerist denies a style that he wants to adhere to at all costs and tries, instead, to avoid it to gain his own ground and identity. In this case, style refers to a sublime negligence or forgetting of what is proper, while manner is a remembering of what is improper. These two poles, appropriation and loss, manifest themselves not only in the poet’s gesture, but in every speaking man with respect to his language and in every living person with respect to his body. In this sense, using the language or the body means an oscillation without origins and without ends, a wandering between a homeland and an exile, that is living. As Marìa Zambrano writes, exile is mental territory in multiple languages and living in a multiplicity of times (12). Man discovers in exile a second homeland, a pre-natal homeland, which actualizes a revelation of being. The time of the loss of belonging brings man to his ontological rather than historical truth. It is the existential suspension in which logical categories are annulled and the total nakedness of being is exposed outside of history. The exiled is therefore in a continuous rebirth, which leads him to the place of the possibility of the beginning (13).

Finally, the landscape is presented as a third example of the inappropriable. Agamben attempts to define landscape from its relationship with the environment and the world. In Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics there is a description of a bee which, overeating the honey, cuts its abdomen and, despite this, does not interrupt its meal, that is relationship with its disinhibitor (14). It’s about stunning of the animal in front of a series of elements that its receptive organs have selected from the environment. And by necessarily concentrating its attention on the disinhibiting elements, the animal is closed in its environment. It, unlike man, is incapable of suspending and deactivating its relationship with these disinhibitors and of perceiving it as something that objectively exists in and for itself. For this reason, the world is opened up to man only through the interruption and nullification of the immediate relationship with the environment. This means that openness to the world is not something radically different compared to the non-openness of the animal. Through man’s contemplation, all the elements that make up the landscape are no longer part of an animal environment. They are deactivated one by one on the field of being and perceived in a new dimension. The landscape as being is no longer animal, nor the human world, which is also suspended and deactivated. Man contemplates the landscape and only landscape. In this case, if the world was the inactivity of the animal environment, the landscape is the inactivity of the world, that is, it is the inactivity of the inactivity. Being, in a state of landscape, is ontologically neutral and has become perfectly inappropriable. In Benjamin’s formulation, the landscape is compatible with a vision of justice that the world offers us (15). According to Benjamin, justice is a condition of a good, which cannot be possessed. Based on this definition, the landscape is fair in itself because it has no masters and no property rights. It is the dwelling in the inappropriable as a form of life. Precisely for this reason Agamben concludes that man in the landscape is finally at home, that is, at the home of being (16).

It is possible to think, in this perspective, of the act of creation as an ontological act where impotence, inactivity and poverty present themselves as constituent elements of being. This way of operating assumes the deactivating process of the technocratic paradigm to turn the functions of the living being in vain. Deactivating the action means a specific action without arché, that is, without principle and without government (17). Arché, like the origin, commands and governs what it has brought into being. The act of creation therefore should be constitutively anarchic to free the living being from any biological or social destiny and from any predetermined task. In the moment of creating in a strenuous resistance to the synchronization of pragmatic and normative systems, an anarchist artwork opens up possibilities as something that places man in a new ontological description of being. It’s about the anarchy of power in which construction and destruction coincide without residue. This dimension cannot have a true end and is therefore always in the process of ending. At the same time, the anarchy of power knows no principle or beginning, and yet, precisely for this reason, it is always in the act of starting again. Hence an incessant need for innovation in anarchist action. In this regard, Agamben underlines the anarchic character of capitalist society which shows its parasitic dependence on Christian theology (18). What functions as a paradigm of capitalist anarchy is Christology, that is, a fundamental part of Christian theology that studies and defines the human and divine nature of Jesus Christ. In the Church, there is a particular controversy over Arianism which affirms the Father as absolutely anarchic, while the Son is in the principle, since he has his foundation in the Father. Therefore, this implies that the Son of God is a being who partakes of the nature of the Father, but in an inferior and derivative way. He was created by God at the beginning of time. Against this heretical thesis, the Church clearly states that the Son is also “anarchist” and, as such, reigns together with the Father (19). The Christian religion is based on the assumption that the history of humanity and the world is essentially over. But, in the same time, the Church proclaims another event in which every moment announces the imminent end of life on earth, experiences Judgment Day, which is however also a new beginning. This means that Christianity never ceases to begin, but at the same time it is always in the process of ending. In this sense, capitalism inherited and pushed the anarchic character of Christianity to the extreme. The capitalist religion proclaims a state of permanent crisis which etymologically means “final judgment”. Capitalism has no end and, therefore, never ceases to end. It is intimately anarchic, since capitalist practice and economy have no foundation in being. Commodity-producing capital fictitiously feeds itself by its own future. What makes capitalism a religion is credit that replaces faith in God. And for this religion, the decision to suspend convertibility into gold means the purification and crystallization of the proper faith, erasing every external referent. A symbol to demonstrate that Christianity and capitalism are closely intertwined could be Cristo Petrolero, an iron sculpture in Barrancabermeja, Colombia (20). It was donated by Ecopetrol S.A. in 1995 for a decoration of the swamp in front of the largest oil refinery in the country. The sculpture was produced by oil company workers using the recycled metal bars of the refinery. Fernando Fernández who designed Cristo Petrolero defined it as the Resurrected Christ with the twelve apostles at his feet. He raises hands up as if he blesses Barrancabermeja and brings the swamp to life. In this sense, it can be considered as an artwork of capitalist religion that supports its faith on the faith of Christianity.

That Christ is an anarchist means that nowadays being and acting separate their paths. In the classical world ontology and praxis were closely linked, while today human action is no longer founded in being. The human being is free and condemned to chance, affirming the anarchy of power. But an orderly government of the world would be impossible in this absolutely anarchic dimension and would have to be something that could place a limitation on power, that is something that could command. In this case, Agamben takes up Nietzche’s hypothesis, according to which commanding actually means volition (21). Ancient Greek philosophy had power and possibility at its center. For this reason, ancient man is a being of power, that is, the man who can. In contrast to it, modern philosophy with Christian theology places the will at its core. Modern man is therefore a being of will, a being that wants. The passage from the sphere of power to that of will refers to the problem of God’s omnipotence. According to a dogma of Christianity, God is omnipotent, that is, he can do everything, absolutely and unconditionally everything (22). From this it follows that he could do anything evil or irrational. To quell the scandal of divine omnipotence and remove its dark shadow, theologians divided power into absolute power and ordinary power. Absolute power is what concerns power considered in itself, in the abstract. Power can will and, once it has willed, it must obey its command. From the moment the power obeys its command, it becomes ordinary. In other words, God can do everything, but like man he imposed the command on the power with his will. In this way, the will sets a limit to the chaos and immensity of omnipotence, commanding it. In the sphere of technological devices, the subject believes he commands, but in truth he only obeys in the very gesture with which he gives a command. He presses buttons defined as commands, obeying a command imposed in the same structure of the device. In the act of will, however, a subject does not obey a divine injunction or a transcendent ability to produce artworks. After all, it is a question of the use of the body that a subject discovers as a world around him, experiencing himself.

I would like now to conclude my brief review of the deactivating acts in the act of creation by focusing for a moment on the concept of a work of art. Based on Aristotle’s terms of the artwork, Agamben speaks of art historical conflict that led to the crisis of contemporary art (23). In classical Greece, the Greeks did not hold the artist in high esteem. In their eyes the artist is a constitutively incomplete being who has his purpose in the work of art. The productive activity or energy does not reside in the artist, but in the artwork. The act of building resides in the house, because the architect’s goal is to build the house. The Greeks, however, appreciated the importance of unproductive activities, such as thinking, vision, contemplation. In activities without artwork, the subject perfectly possesses his goal not outside himself and therefore his praxis is in some way superior to productive activity. Starting from the end of the classical world, the artist becomes like the theorist and claims mastery of his creative activity. Through a slow process this transformation finds its model in the divine creation. In medieval theology the conception according to which the work resides in the artist’s mind in the form of an idea makes its way. God created the world according to his idea. Similarly, the architect created the house according to the model that existed in his mind. It is from this paradigm that the artist’s independence from the work derives. The productive activity, energeia, now resides in the artist, while his artwork is transformed into a residue, in some way unnecessary, of the genius, of the artist. In the last decades of the 19th century artists paid special attention to the act of creation in itself. It’s about the artistic and literary movements of the symbolists, aestheticists, decadents, in search of a pure art. Artists and poets begin to celebrate their creative activity as a real liturgical ritual. Just as in a service of adoration of Jesus, the artistic action acted for the simple fact of being celebrated, independent of any social and effective meaning. It was a performative dimension in which the spiritual salvation of the artist seemed to be involved. With the uses of the 20th century avant-garde and their contemporary derivatives, the artist’s action is entirely emancipated from its traditional productive purpose and claims to present itself as an artwork. The work of art is abolished in the name of something that often demands to be realized not in an artwork, but in life. Among these artistic movements we can mention, in particular, the Situationist International and performance art. In this way, art today presents itself as an activity without artwork, while artists and merchants continue to demand its price. Agamben points out that the reason why the place of the work of art fell apart is that a link between the artwork, the artist and the operation was deactivated (24). It is about an “artistic machine” of modernity that should function like a Borromean knot. It is not possible to release one of the three elements that compose it without exploding the entire knot. I would like to suggest at this point that it is not important whether an “artistic machine” “is deactivated or not until we can discern aesthetic and non-aesthetic qualities of the artwork, the artist or the operation. In other words, if some work of art does not need an artistic object, it can nevertheless possess certain values that can be appreciated. The presence of its values already implies a certain artistic character since they are attributed to a work in relation to the artist who created it. Consequently, questioning the ontology of the work of art makes sense when this approach favors aesthetic rationalization and the development of criteria for the judgment of taste (25). An example of this approach would be to consider that every work of art, as an act of deactivation, can be judged on the basis of its intrinsic value which is the “de-activation” itself, even if this art presents itself as an activity without artwork. “Deactivation” as the transgression of artistic rules establishes new standards of artistic creation within the new scale of appreciation. In this case, an act of deactivation in art means transformation into a new form of fruitful transgression that can be admired for its unpredictability and sensation.

References:

  1. Deleuze, Gilles, Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création ?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OyuMJMrCRw, the conference held on May 17, 1987.
  2. Agamben, Giorgio, Creazione e anarchia, Neri Pozza Editore, 2017, p. 39.
  3. Ibid. p. 41.
  4. Ibid. p. 42.
  5. Ibid. p. 47. Agamben takes up a passage from the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle raises the problem of what the work of man is.
  6. Ibid. p. 50.
  7. Ibid. p. 25.
  8. Ibid. p. 68.
  9. Ibid. p. 73.
  10. Ibid. p. 76.
  11. Ibid, p. 78.
  12. Zambrano, Maria, L’uomo e il divino, cit., p. 181.
  13. Zambrano, Maria, Lettera sull’esilio, in Per abitare l’esilio, Scritti italiani, Firenze, Le Lettere, 2006.
  14. Agamben, Giorgio, Creazione e anarchia, Neri Pozza Editore, 2017, p. 83.
  15. Ibid. p. 66. Agamben relies on the concept of justice of Benjamin in Appunti per un lavoro sulla categoria di giustizia.
  16. Ibid. p. 87.
  17. Ibid. p. 93.
  18. Ibid. p. 127.
  19. Ibid. p. 131.
  20. More on the artwork Cristo Petrolero by Fernando Fernández https://www.barrancabermeja.gov.co/publicaciones/385/cristo-petrolero/
  21. Agamben, Giorgio, Creazione e anarchia, Neri Pozza Editore, 2017, p. 107.
  22. Ibid. p. 110.
  23. Ibid. p. 13.
  24. Ibid. p. 20.
  25. More on aesthetic rationalization in my work Criteria of an aesthetic judgement of contemporary art https://postulat.org/category/by-theory/criteria-of-an-aesthetic-judgement-of-contemporary-art/