Call NOW! CHANGE YOUR LIFe NOW! Professor Boris Groys lecture On the Use of Theory by Art and Use of Art by Theory
Issue #1 Who let my fish loose? opens a possibility of exchange and makes it unavoidable. I give to the others what I have, and do not have, and the others give me what they have and I do not have. A society of difference, is a society of commodity exchange, but also, exchange of communication. Communication as exchange of information and also a market of opinions. We exchange discourses and information items as we exchange all other commodities. This operation leaves our identities unchanged. So an act of exchange itself, be it in the market or within the framework of communication leaves our own identity unchanged. We require freedom of information and communication and these are very important goals. But an actual, initial goal of theoretical discourse (and i speak now today as a theoretician) is not merely to inform the others about what opinions I personally have. The scene of theoretical discourse does not coincide with the scene of communication. Rather one stars a theoretical discourse with a hope that it will change the attitude of an audience. The The Critical theory calls for action. To change the world instead of trying to understand it. (a very famous Marxist slogan) To actively change life instead of wasting time for contemplation and passively to live fully and actively instead of merely surviving. How is theory formulated? it is not formulated as a theory, but as a call. theoretical discourse wants to be not informative, but transformative discourse. Thus, every theoretician is necessarily interested in the transformative power of discourse as such. In fact, every theoretical discourse can be read as the description of the conditions of its own persuasiveness, and of transformative power of word in general. So, an explanation of why a discourse can be transformative and not only informative. Every discourse offers a scenario, a set of conditions under which one can expect that a discourse becomes transformative. Here, a philosopher, theoretician, a thinker, discovers an uncanny similarity between his or her own discourse and the advertisement that calls its listeners to change and transform themselves. The theoretician shares, with the advertisement and fashion a common possibility of a transformative call. Transformative word. At the same time, the traditional philosophy attempts to accuse all the non-philosophical transformative discourses of being based not on reason and logic, but exclusively on seduction and manipulation. So if you look at the history of religion if you look at the history of philosophy and theoretical thought it always operates by this kind of command: Come now Change your attitude Change your life. If you go back to Christianity to the period of enlightenment and you read philosophers like Deleuze of Derrida, even they suggest similar things; Don’t think in this direction, begin to think in another direction and so on. It is not so much an argumentation to call the change of your direction of attention and your mind. There is a common ground between all these beauty contests and reality shows or what ever, that we experience in our meditated culture in a very fundamental attitude of any speaker including the speaker attempting a critique on this very subject; Let us not believe them, let us believe to criticise them, Criticise them now. Do not delay your critique. The artists answer this call in its ambiguity. Why would I say that this call is ambiguous? 15
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