Life Imitates Art Good evening, everyone! Tomorrow is the…
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Life Imitates Art
Good evening, everyone! Tomorrow is the last day of my vacation, so I gathered my strength and finished translating the last major text that continues the storyline about the metamorphoses of modernity. After that, I will focus on a couple of notes explicating the content of the book's key concepts. They will complement what has already been said and convey my thoughts in a more rigorous form, particularly on the spirit of the machine and fausin.
Let me address the inversion. I originally conceived the book itself as a model illustrating the nature of fausin and, along with it, our global culture. I was inspired by the distinction between Derrida's 'différance' and Deleuze's difference, which I attempted to slightly recalibrate in the book. I view inversion as the central method of contemporary culture, which is not impoverished; on the contrary, it is redundantly rich and saturated, much like the treasury of Babylon, holding all the treasures of different eras and corners of the world.
“Life Imitates Art” is not a summary of the book or an introduction to its terminology. Rather, this is where one of the methods used by the book is shown most openly. The title goes back to Oscar Wilde’s formula, but the argument itself begins with another operation: inversion.
Inversion here does not mean a simple reversal of hierarchies. It takes apart a whole whose parts have grown together, reveals the tension between its elements, and gradually shifts the point at which force is applied from the acting subject to the medium itself. At the limit, perspective and the point of impact coincide in the Nothing. By the Nothing I mean a mirror boundary, pure potentiality between two Natures: originary Nature and the Nature that the human being raises out of the city, technology, images, and ideas.
Within this construction, the direction of mimesis changes. Art no longer merely imitates life, because life acquires the capacity to imitate art. A simulation emerges that permits the imitation of what has never existed, along with a copy without an original. At the same time, the simulacrum is not necessarily an empty or false form. It can be genuine to the extent that it holds meaning for people and anchors the reality they have created.
I then distinguish two routes art can take. The first is transaesthetics: art dissolves into the everyday environment, where images, buildings, objects, signs, and interfaces exist within a common regime of visibility. The second is movement toward the Nothing. A performance, a ruin, a gesture, another malfunction, or an extremely simple form can bring about a collapse of everyday life - and with it, of the order of the urban Umwelt - and return the perceiver to themselves.
The chapter was written before the current triumph of generative culture, but today the formulas “the imitation of what has never existed” and “a copy without an original” inevitably sound different. This is not a text about artificial intelligence. Rather, it offers an ontological framework in which the generative image appears as one of the characteristic phenomena of new Nature.
**Four Possible Objections**
1. “Is this not simply a restatement of Baudrillard?”
The conceptual territory partly overlaps. But transaesthetics here is the territory. At the center of the chapter are two Natures, the Nothing as a mirror-like ontological boundary, and the simulacrum, which not only replaces reality but can also serve as its anchor.
2. “Why is it the Nothing rather than Nothingness?”
Because I am not speaking about a state of absence or an abstract condition of nothingness. The Nothing occupies a place within the construction: it separates, reflects, can be crossed, and serves as a space of pure potentiality. It is not merely a negative quality.
3. “If everything can become art, does art retain any distinction?”
The text distinguishes precisely between two processes. Transaesthetics makes virtually everything that enters the everyday environment aesthetic. But art’s movement toward the Nothing operates differently: it does not decorate or mark actuality; it breaks its coherence and the logic of appropriateness as that logic disintegrates.
4. “Where does originary Nature come from?”
In my account, new Nature is not merely a fiction. It has ontological efficacy: it sustains human reality, and simulacra can be genuine insofar as they mean something to people. Genuine Nature would therefore pass judgment in advance, making new Nature sound counterfeit or ontologically inferior. Originary indicates precedence without reserving authenticity for one Nature alone, and without suggesting a pristine essence untouched by history. It also names the material and potential field from which new Nature is raised. Finally, it avoids both the awkward tautology natural Nature and the original-copy hierarchy that original Nature would activate in a chapter devoted to copies without originals.
Link
#science
source
Good evening, everyone! Tomorrow is the last day of my vacation, so I gathered my strength and finished translating the last major text that continues the storyline about the metamorphoses of modernity. After that, I will focus on a couple of notes explicating the content of the book's key concepts. They will complement what has already been said and convey my thoughts in a more rigorous form, particularly on the spirit of the machine and fausin.
Let me address the inversion. I originally conceived the book itself as a model illustrating the nature of fausin and, along with it, our global culture. I was inspired by the distinction between Derrida's 'différance' and Deleuze's difference, which I attempted to slightly recalibrate in the book. I view inversion as the central method of contemporary culture, which is not impoverished; on the contrary, it is redundantly rich and saturated, much like the treasury of Babylon, holding all the treasures of different eras and corners of the world.
“Life Imitates Art” is not a summary of the book or an introduction to its terminology. Rather, this is where one of the methods used by the book is shown most openly. The title goes back to Oscar Wilde’s formula, but the argument itself begins with another operation: inversion.
Inversion here does not mean a simple reversal of hierarchies. It takes apart a whole whose parts have grown together, reveals the tension between its elements, and gradually shifts the point at which force is applied from the acting subject to the medium itself. At the limit, perspective and the point of impact coincide in the Nothing. By the Nothing I mean a mirror boundary, pure potentiality between two Natures: originary Nature and the Nature that the human being raises out of the city, technology, images, and ideas.
Within this construction, the direction of mimesis changes. Art no longer merely imitates life, because life acquires the capacity to imitate art. A simulation emerges that permits the imitation of what has never existed, along with a copy without an original. At the same time, the simulacrum is not necessarily an empty or false form. It can be genuine to the extent that it holds meaning for people and anchors the reality they have created.
I then distinguish two routes art can take. The first is transaesthetics: art dissolves into the everyday environment, where images, buildings, objects, signs, and interfaces exist within a common regime of visibility. The second is movement toward the Nothing. A performance, a ruin, a gesture, another malfunction, or an extremely simple form can bring about a collapse of everyday life - and with it, of the order of the urban Umwelt - and return the perceiver to themselves.
The chapter was written before the current triumph of generative culture, but today the formulas “the imitation of what has never existed” and “a copy without an original” inevitably sound different. This is not a text about artificial intelligence. Rather, it offers an ontological framework in which the generative image appears as one of the characteristic phenomena of new Nature.
**Four Possible Objections**
1. “Is this not simply a restatement of Baudrillard?”
The conceptual territory partly overlaps. But transaesthetics here is the territory. At the center of the chapter are two Natures, the Nothing as a mirror-like ontological boundary, and the simulacrum, which not only replaces reality but can also serve as its anchor.
2. “Why is it the Nothing rather than Nothingness?”
Because I am not speaking about a state of absence or an abstract condition of nothingness. The Nothing occupies a place within the construction: it separates, reflects, can be crossed, and serves as a space of pure potentiality. It is not merely a negative quality.
3. “If everything can become art, does art retain any distinction?”
The text distinguishes precisely between two processes. Transaesthetics makes virtually everything that enters the everyday environment aesthetic. But art’s movement toward the Nothing operates differently: it does not decorate or mark actuality; it breaks its coherence and the logic of appropriateness as that logic disintegrates.
4. “Where does originary Nature come from?”
In my account, new Nature is not merely a fiction. It has ontological efficacy: it sustains human reality, and simulacra can be genuine insofar as they mean something to people. Genuine Nature would therefore pass judgment in advance, making new Nature sound counterfeit or ontologically inferior. Originary indicates precedence without reserving authenticity for one Nature alone, and without suggesting a pristine essence untouched by history. It also names the material and potential field from which new Nature is raised. Finally, it avoids both the awkward tautology natural Nature and the original-copy hierarchy that original Nature would activate in a chapter devoted to copies without originals.
Link
#science
source
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