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Slavoj Zizek - 'Schelling-in-itself: The Orgasm of Forces'

The reading ‘Schelling-in-itself: The Orgasm of Forces’ written by critical theorist Slavoj Zizek is from a book titled ‘The Invisible Remainder, An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters’. The essay addresses the idea of freedom, based upon German Idealism and looking more specifically at the philosophical contributions from Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling.

The material of the essay is dense however presents a logical sequence in the development of concepts of freedom. I have on a few of the key concepts helpful in relation to thinking about studio practice.

He discusses Schelling’s supposition that mans act of decision is not mans himself, but is actually a repetition of God’s act, of god willing, choosing himself. Zizek goes on to describe the primordial contraction by means of which God acquires being. ‘This contraction of/into being is necessarily followed by a counter stroke of expansion’ that is a tension between the will that wants something and the will that wants nothing. Zizek outlines here Schelling's definition of anxiety: to Schelling anxiety is caused by the simultaneous lack of the possibility to close, and the lack of the ability to open up, that he describes as a ‘vicious cycle of pulsation’. What is the significance of this cycle? Zizek emphasises Schelling's belief that this cycle underlies reality. Reality, he suggests, is ‘inherently fragile’ and is a result of a temporal occupation of the space between contraction and expansion which could, at any time, ‘run amok and explode into one of the extremes’.

How does one respond to this situation of anxiety? Zizek talks about the relief that arrives in the form of a preconceived conceptual schema, whereby if the rules of a given game are already defined, then one can devote creative or intellectual energy to the game itself. The relief is being freed from the burden of continuous decision and choice; the individual only needs to act. Zizek states ‘our intellectual creativity can be set free only within the confines of some imposed notional framework in which, precisely, we are able to ‘move freely’’.

Local art critic Jon Bywater suggests it is possible to locate an opening, a freedom, and individual agency by way of an investment in existing structures. The structures that he refers to are those of both artistic traditions and of capitalist economics. In the article ‘Work-Life Balance: Recent Exhibitions by Dan Arps’ Bywater draws parallels between modernist avant garde practise and capital market demand. Referencing theorists Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, Bywater raises the issue of why ‘newness’ is valued in both consumer capitalism and artistic modernism, and he considers Arps’ practise in relation to this question. He develops the idea that new developments in art garner an aesthetic effectiveness that is somehow bound to newness, and this coinciding with the consumer demand for novelty, begs the question as to whether ‘artistic invention is merely another symptom of a hegemonic capitalist mode of production’. This is no new news, as Bywater observes, the collective concern for ‘making it new’ has been noted by more than a few.

Bywater talks of how Arps, by engaging in these ‘cultural sets of conventions’ activates a set of rules, that in playing out, reveal themselves in both ‘their conventionality and their groundlessness’. What is the groundlessness that Bywater refers to? Bywater refers to Paolo Virno and his interest in cynicism as a redemptive tool. Virno discusses how rules will ultimately reveal themselves as naked and artificial and therefore one cannot participate in a predetermined game with true allegiance, but more a momentary alliegence for a specified purpose.

So what is the relationship between Zizek's ‘freedom’ and Bywater's ‘new’? I’m interested in this idea that newness, initially presenting itself as a type of freedom actually pertains to a distinct system of order –a kind of grinding new as driven by both market and modernist mechanisms - but that this is an order that can be redressed and politicized.

Bywater locates the new in the newness – suggesting that a practise can make newness something ‘relative to its own open-ended terms’ and can go beyond a mere reduction to a product, thereby creating some resistance to market assertion over art discourse. That it is possible to regain individual agency in the new in a way that bypasses the drive of the market, and whims of fashion. Bywater sees in Arps' work a rejection of capitalist pressures of production - through his barely handled but significantly repositioned readymades of consumer culture - generating a kind of disruption of our experience of a part of our culture that is usually sanitized, ordered and organized. This is done through a direct engagement and reconstitution of corporate order as opposed to a rejection of it.

Initially my sense was that Bywater and Zizek were talking about the same issue, that is, about ways to engage freedom from within systems of order. In the process of writing I wonder if there is more of a distinction in the areas they address. Is Zizek's freedom about how as an individual to conduct oneself, and Bywater's new more about the way to address the system that one conducts oneself within as an individual?

There seems to be a sense of unconscious engagement in Zizek's idea of habit and routine, whereas Bywater's research suggests that a conscious engagement (an agitated engagement that often generates cynicism) could awaken the real new within the destitute and systematized new. Zizek's freedom is hopeful and yet may propose a danger in it’s lack of critique of the system operated within. Bywater's new holds hope and possibility with a more tentative grip, but with potentially more political and social agency than Zizek's freedom allows for.


REFERENCES

Zizek, Slavoj, ‘Schelling-in-itself: The Orgasm of Forces’ The Indivisible Remainder An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters, Verso, 1996.

Bywater, Jon, ‘Work-Life Balance: Recent Exhibitions by Dan Arps’ ....