Participant: Mário Vieira de Carvalho
Affiliation: Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Format: Presentation and Conversation
Themes: recursion, paradigm, praxis

Stockhausen’s infamous comment that the destruction of the twin towers in New York in September 11, 2001, was “the greatest work of art that ever existed” raises crucial questions about the relationship between art and politics, art and ethics, also on the very concept of “artwork”. By focusing on art as a system of communication, I argue that the particular concept of artwork that is behind Stockhausen’s aestheticizing of destruction corresponds to the radicalization of the “organic metaphor”, which culminates by 1950 with Stockhausen’s paradigm shift to the ideal of a self-produced work of music (described in terms that are very similar avant la lettre to the concept of autopoiesis, coined by Maturana). Although produced by human labor, the artwork should emerge and act as if it was self-produced, “autopoietic”, like an organism, a second nature.

The focus of the avant-garde on the work of music as a dehumanized, reified object, in this most achieved version, has its counterpart in the Western hegemonic paradigm of artistic communication (both of “high” and mass culture) relying on devices of “perfect illusion” and leading the spectator’s or listener’s feed back only to what is represented, not to the code of representation.

So different and opposed paradigms of communication are both asymmetric and characterized by a drastic reduction of complexity, in that they either radicalize the “pure aesthetic gaze” or “pure aesthetic listening”, in terms of suppressing the structural coupling of art and life-world (its values, beliefs, emotional experiences), or they potentially expose the spectator or listener to manipulation, as if art had lost its autonomy as a communication system with its own code and dissolved entirely in its social environment. “Reification” and “illusion”, by concealing the production process involved in the artwork, could be described as “phantasmagorias” (similarly to Marx’s commodity fetishism). A cybernetic approach, by contrast, highlights the network of recursive processes involving all partners (including active, meaning-producing-listeners/spectators) and the truth-content of artistic communication (claimed by both Adorno and Bateson). It may, thus, contribute to better bring together artistic theory and praxis.