Radicalism as Ego Ideal: Oedipus and Narcissist. Some notes.
Diederichsen has caught the bug that a lot of //his generation// must feel when they hit the midlife – the inverse Ferdydurkian crisis: you can treat the thirty year old like the kid by pulling his ear, but you can also treat the fifty year old like a doddering idiot, by pointing out his white hairs and excess skin. Both of which are games but 2 games may follow: I can’t keep up with the new codes – youth is too new and terrifying therefore I’m past it OR I don’t want to listen to the youth because the dog years are over for me and I’m over those petty crises. Diederichsen chose the right of the ‘yes to age’ fork.
Kim Gordon: Your self portrait
Diederichsen creates a false dichotomy of tagging the oepidal on the older generation and the narcissist on those artists born post 1980s but if we subscribe to the dichotomy to begin with, the reality is wrong. The type of narcissism that Diederichsen describes in the article is a shallow narcissism. He claims ‘for narcissistic artists, the foundation of their work is a point of stability produced by a self relation’ however this is not the case – the case is that there exists a fundamental void within the players of this generation – the void of having an empty starting point on the inside that needs to be filled by trawling out ‘trends’ in order to maximise one’s outside (and for those commercially orientated, to form a ‘better’ product).
young people´s shoes
Diederichsen claims that the position is “I use my own criteria to fashion my own brand of nobility - one to which I ultimately wish to be heir.” This may also be true, but it is only an effect.
Authenticity isn’t authenticity in the sense of fighting some political or patriarchial position – he is right on that – but it is also not just the pursuit of business ideals on an existential level. On the zero sum game level – there exists only a void where appropriation gives temporary relief. This is where Bernadette Corporation/Reena Spaulings are absolutely to blame rather than Mike Kelley, Michael Krebber or Cosima v. Bonin. They claim – even though there is a void, one gets up in the morning and goes to work whereas the former have mostly only legitimised radical arcana as a position of extremity within the ‘game’. The position of BC/RS is a more destructive attitude – one that has shook radicality (for even what that’s worth) to its core.
The wreckage that BC/RS delivered is that certain existential philosophies/positions have been appropriated into the corporate machine - where the state of play of the younger generation begins. It is a different thing that ‘artist’s artists’ are thrown in (which include many characters who had extreme or ‘radical’ lifestyles in practice) but to throw in the imaginary i.e. even the possibility of hypothetical radicalism is to go even further. You can throw a body and its ‘real’ history into the washing machine, but once you also throw in his ideas and fantasies – then there is an absolute containment of all radical experience that can exist.
The affront that BC/RS have made is not just material (even on the material side they are somewhat thin) but when it comes to the linguistics side, there exists a greater danger of totalising and containing radicalism. In doing that of course – they have created their own Oedipus that they were trying to avoid – mediocrity/the confrontation with their middle class biopolitic. When it comes to Oedipus for the narcissistic generation, there are questions of where to place-hold one’s leap of faith when its all been done before or everyone else’s seem to be a sham…?
It is almost too soon to tell whether actually the David Joselit figures are the Grandfathers of the narcissistic/post 1980s generation but with younger artists emerging right now who are in direct incest with their siblings/fathers – it is difficult to say whether BC/RS is a father or a brother. What is clear, is that the generations forthwith have been dealing with the fictional artist, post modern theory, radical material as any other material that is in circulation, new tricks in commercialism. Mercurial younger teenage flesh is a symbol used by Bernadette Corporation in their photography – imagine the Ferdydurkian reaction when a teenager is presented their own image – when a child is treated like a child who is also a child.
What I want to claim is that Diederichsen is less generous in forming a dichotomy in the narcissist generation even though he is very fond of using dichotomies in general❢. Whereas he claims that the ‘normative narcissism’ which is at the backbone of the ‘mini-entrepreneur’ generation – i.e. the necessity for ‘self evaluation’ in order to pursue ‘the new self employed business owners’, he doesn’t see a breed of new artists that could intend narcissism as something like a desire for self preservation/cryonics. But this could be a visibility issue.
He fails to see the artists that ask other questions: what happens if the entrepreneur doesn’t want to do ‘business’ but instead wants to create a totally ambiguous narcissistic axle for himself in his own proximate landscape? What happens when the narcissist wants to pursue interests different from the social network’s interests, which support the network of artists who are deemed artists by the social network? This latter type of artistic status is one which is held up by the notions of artist as authorised because everyone believes that others believe they are authorised – it is a relative artist status and one extremely fickle.
Sometimes collective representations come to be experienced as real things, and those things are seen to be the only representations that exist. Diederichsen in no way self-recognises he also perpetuates this hall of mirrors (with, it appears, Andy Warhol at his apex in this article) but not in heralding the role of the double sided nature of a poser which unites his two halves but in taking such a role of passivity of language❦, in creating totalising dichotomies and having such a historical predeterministic axle – an axle that is quintessentially //postmodernist//.
What if your father isn’t your father but your grandfather but he doesn’t even know he isn’t your father but you do and then he claims that you don’t even have a father?
❡Generation Younger Than Jesus, Seth Price Teen Image, internet art curating
❢“Oedipus/Narcissus, repression/ forced stimulation, command/abuse, and Fordism/post-Fordism (others would be disciplinary society / control society, subjugation/governmentality, and social critique / artistic critique)”
❦ “one might say that the various attempts to react to the psychological systems in which we live and work cannot do much more than merely acknowledge them”.
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