Intentional fallacy.

That’s really all it takes to open the problem. But we can then move through the death of the author, the death of the subject, symptomatic readings, and all the critical-theoretical approaches to symptomatology. The result is a humanistic approach that drastically mutes the artist’s claim to agency in art-making. It does not permit artists to claim special knowledge of their art. Unique perspectives as participants perhaps, but no special “truth” about the “reality” of an artwork.

Like anyone with a humanities PhD, I can chop up anyone’s writing, artwork, or action in a dozen different ways. That’s the mise en place of scholarship. But it’s not only a disciplinary or epistemological rupture. It’s an ontological one. Critical theory doesn’t really permit the kinds of beings that artists claim to be. Critical theory describes artists as material and cultural functions.

So what should I tell the MFA students who present their work to me? Are they asking me to describe to them how they are dupes of capitalism? Or how they are participating in a cultural narrative which provides art practices and work with value? Of course not. Fundamentally, I imagine they want me to believe in them as artists and as artists with potential to become better artists. But I don’t really have a way to believe that, so these conversations, if and when they occur, just remain superficial.

Generally we address this problem the way humans do most problems. We pretend it doesn’t exist. We say things like “critical theory provides insights into culture that inspire artists” and “critical theory owes much of its concepts to interactions with art.” These are true enough as far as they go, and as long as we don’t press on them. But what we end up with are things like the Baudrillard-inspired Matrix. And while it is true theorists generate concepts from interacting with art, the specifics of that generation are not necessarily positive for the artists.

Consider the examples: in the 80s English graduate students spent their time “deconstructing” every Romantic poet they could find. How many of those folks attempted to develop an understanding of Derrida as opposed to picking up deconstruction as a tool?

In media arts that, an entire field seems to hinge on citing selected passages from Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image to assert an intellectual-philosophical role for art film. I wonder if they recognize how Deleuze and Guattari articulate the role of Art in relation to Philosophy in What is Philosophy? Because if they did, then I don’t know how they could keep making the same arguments that they do.

For example, folks in this field are fond of citing page 156 of Cinema 2. The phrase “shock to thought” is found here. That’s often referenced but here are the key quotes, all from the first page of chapter 7.

“Automatic movement gives rise to a spiritual automaton in us, which reacts in turn on movement.” 

“It is only when movement becomes automatic that the artistic essence of the image is realized: producing a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly.” 

“It is as if cinema were telling us: with me, with the movement-image, you can’t escape the shock which arouses the thinker in you.”

This is all closer to Kittler than anything an artist would ever want to be. Deleuze’s shock to thought is more about neurology and media. It’s not about “thought” in some humanistic sense. The whole basic point here is that advancements in cognitive and neuro-science (through the scientific design and use of media) present us with a posthuman condition. Thoughts aren’t “ours.” To the contrary we are “shocked” when we encounter them. Film technologies appropriate/hack that neurology.

Are we still talking about art and artists? I don’t think so. There is simply no way to make Deleuze point at you and say “You are a scholar.” Or an artist or a scholar-artist. Or a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker. The impasse occurs when concepts are instrumentalized to produce cultural value. We can talk about why certain academics may have adopted this citational strategy for institutional purposes, but we don’t need to look under that rock today.

As I said above, carving this stuff up is easy. If you can diagram a sentence then you can figure out how to diagram cultural and material power relations. It’s always already prepositioned.