A memorable and surprising moment from the last year, for me, was attending a seminar with the philosopher François Laruelle—a very serious, venerable septuagenarian Parisian thinker whose writing is extremely dense, abstract, and complex—and his giving a PowerPoint presentation. It really is a universal language! And thus deserves more attention from artists—so it’s interesting to see it as one of the components in the work today.
What I’d like to talk about is the following: One of the most tempting, but also the most difficult things to do when you’re faced with work that seems interesting and complex, is to try and understand the procedure, the way in which it’s been put together. And I think one of the things I always found remarkable about Amanda’s work is the way in which she assembles and deploys her materials—in a broad sense, cultural materials.
Being here today, this is the first time I’ve seen the work—I’ve seen early drafts of the video component on one screen at home, but it was very striking to me how here the gallery space and the city of Coventry itself had also become cultural materials which were deployed in the installation. Amanda has a very interesting way of sampling, citing, distilling, refracting, and collapsing different cultures into one other: pulp crime novels and critical theory, cop shows and political philosophy, slick thrillers and philosophers’ sombre meditations on human destiny…but without this ever being reductive or ironic: this is neither juxtaposition (a comedy of high and low culture) nor simple superposition (as if popular fictions or political sequences merely dramatised or illustrated what had already been argued discursively). Nor does it attempt to produce a neat didactic image of the ‘whole’ of a culture in which multiple forms of media exert their forces on us, vying for our attention, trying to make some kind of global presentation of it. That is, it doesn’t assumed the power of art to rise above and critique the world of the image, the materials it uses.
I would call this a kind of sculpture. I was tempted to say that what Amanda does is a sort of abstract sculpture, but this is not really the case, because although these are cultural materials, they’re all very concrete. But it’s a kind of sculpture in which these cultural materials are patiently manipulated and blended—a scene from Columbo, a politician’s speech, an episode in international affaires or intellectual history, a figure of speech from a philosophical essay, a concept, a camera angle, a colour…sculpted them into something that has consistency but is not homogenous—the tonalities of all these different discourses and modes of presentation still remain discernible in the work, their rough edges can still be felt; but somehow at the core, parts of them lock together tightly, and something else comes into view.
The work delivers a new kind of experience of images and of words, or rather, an experiment which, by heightening and layering normal services, disrupts them. An experiment that preserves the motive force of the constituent elements while smearing their contents, through an intemperate acceleration.
So what is it that allows these popular fictions, theoretical programmes, and political rhetorics to lock together at escape velocity? The fact of their performatively producing of a constituency, an ‘us’: their seductive addressing of the audience, the receptive and active subject positions they invite, enjoin, and urge us to inhabit. And this touches on the central question of political philosophy: how do we reconcile the subject to the political metasubject, the Leviathan, how do we bring an ‘us’ together? For in order to endure, the political body has to convince, seduce, it has to mobilise desire towards law—it has, in a certain way, to deliver pleasure in the convergence of subjective freedom and the law. Power can only be installed intimately through the use of force, pleasure, and desire.
So, when theory, TV, or movies excite us, why are we so compelled by the moment when the TV detective, whether it’s Inspector Morse or Jack Bauer, where their personal life locks in completely to their pursuit of justice, so there is no remainder and they are flush up against. the law? Why do we enjoy so much the thrill of knocking down the phony edicts of those penpushers down at city hall, and facing up to the real down and dirty reality of the street, the moment when institutions, rules, principles are thrown aside and the protagonist comes face to face with the real, there are no choices to be made, only actions to be taken. These maverick redescriptions of the world, these ways in which the world is presented to us and we are invited to inhabit it as a certain type of subject, deploy the rhetoric of force to ensure the force of rhetoric, deploying images of force which are also images that convey force. To what end?
Specifically in Final Machine, we find locked into each other (just to mention a few of the component parts) French Marxist Louis Althusser, some kind of shady CIA recruitment campaign or peptalk, a PowerPoint-style presentation, and a Miami Vice movie—and then this dehumanised, stark landscape that we only ever view selectively, through circles, bulletpoints, coldly and from a distance.
In 1967, Althusser had gathered an audience of specialists from other fields into the lecture theatre for his ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’, which he described as an ‘initiation into philosophy’: he wanted to teach them how philosophy was able to excise itselfa, and them, from the matrix of ideology. All the time circumspectly examining his own discourse, what he had said in the previous sentence. He issues warnings, caveats, points out snares, reaffirms the correctness of the parth followed.
‘We entered into the necessary circle deliberately’, he says; he is initiating them into what was already running them; we all start from inside the game, half-blind; we are all prey to what he calls ‘spontaneous philosophy’—that set of ideological demarcations that cut up and parcel out the world behind our back, into what will then appear, in front of our eyes, magically, as ‘natural’. As he says, a nature that ‘is spontaneous because it is not’. But we shall operate cuts in this body of cuts, because only we—the philosophers—recognise that the cut is all that is real…we, the specialists.
The audience the Parisian sage addresses and engenders and, indeed, hypnotizes with his endless circling, now become Westpoint rookies in thrall to a post-Cold-War military strategist: there is nothing behind the curtain; the gloves are off; the cards are on the table. In a world where there is no common foundation for the political, there is only force; and I am reluctantly obliged to use the force of these words to drag you sorry-ass muthafuckers into the real world—a world with no need for ideas, self-conscious reflection, or political representation. These operations—it is driven home again and again—are necessary and beyond reproach. You can’t reason with bulletpoints. We are constrained to act, to operate on the information available to us.
The new state of play conveyed by this aggressive peptalk is now taken up by a disenchanted movie director or an avant-garde materialist filmmaker. For chrissakes we need to move beyond lame conceptions of ‘realism’ onscreen: the audiences’ conviction can only be engendered by searing reality itself into the celluloid.
So what do we want from the real? A feel for the outside, something sharp and cold, like a desert night? Just what is it that will find itself enabled by this conviction? What do these narratives of the real tell us about what we want?—bullet points from a world in which ideological BS walks when the motivational speaker talks; a world in which incomplete information and insuperable contingency demand our capitulation to a unilateral power.
Beech doesn’t offer easy answers or an escape from this forcefield. In fact the major operation of this work is to avoid the fallacies of critique, the fallacies of art’s self-importance, which could be enumerated as follows:
- Claiming a higher ground, claiming freedom from the affects mobilised in these motivational sequences, by mocking, ironising or condenscending to them.
- Retreating into paranoia and suspicion, into a sclerosis of circumspection, only to wait in poetic hope for a break in the transmission.
- Thinking that one could represent this world of contingent forces as a whole, in some higher register, thereby somehow mastering and giving a final account, a global image, of it, making things final.
Beech’s handling of her materials and their assemblage within her work instead heightens and radicalizes their operations. It exposes us to the ubiquitous force of both ideas and images by interrogating and experimenting with diverse ideas and images of force. It intensifies their tendencies to the point of rendering them oppressive, overdemanding, opaque—to the point, as Amanda was saying, of potentially losing the audience.
But then something locks in at the core of the work: the very mechanism that endlessly switches up enjoyment and subjection, freedom and passivity, the delirious rush of the real and the immobile authority of the ideal.