Decapitation, Acceleration and Conceptual Manifolds

7/29/2019 Decapitation, Acceleration and Conceptual Manifolds

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Decapitation, Acceleration and

Conceptual Manifolds: Aida Makotoand the Mori Art Museum.

001. Decapitation.

The act of decapitation and the subsequent display of the

severed appendage is one not unfamiliar to

anthropologists. Cranial dismemberment was rife

throughout the societies of ancient Mesoamerica and has

been traced in great detail by Christopher L. Moser in his

Human Decapitation in Ancient Mesoamerica:


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The concept that the head, the heart, and/or other parts of the

body contain certain physical/ psychic powers of the owner thatcan be transmitted to another person when those parts are

consumed or preserved is a very widespread cultural

phenomenon. The nearly worldwide occurrence of this concept

cannot be simply explained other than by assuming that several

distinct and independent process of logical thought have been

carried to similar conclusions.1

Moser goes on to give some grim examples:

(T)here are the Asmat of Dutch New Guinea, where a man

must kill a member of another village or territory in order to

obtain a trophy head and thereby a name for his offspring,

and the Upper Amazon Jivaro who take heads in similar raids,

shrinking them for preservation as trophies and indicators of

strength and power.2

This practice has continued undeterred across the globe:

Ciceros execution and the display of his head and hands

on the Rostra in the Forum Romanum in November of

43BC, the practice of gibbetting, or the public display of

recently executed criminals and enemies of the state in

17th Century England as well as the use of old LondonBridge as a display site for enemies of the hegemonic

1 Christopher Moser Human Decapitation in Ancient Meso

America, (Dumberton Oaks, Harvard University, 1973) P.

12 Ibid


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order featuring, amongst others; William Wallace,

Thomas Moore and Thomas Cromwell. At the same time,

the public display of the heads of the aristocracy during

the French revolution towards the end of the 18th Century

and despite its claims for enlightenment and civility, the

tradition of beheading and display is alive and well in late

Capitalist culture.

002. Kafkas two Death.

While the motives for such acts have remained, the

practice itself has become somewhat more sophisticated incongruence with the defamation of Capital punishment in

line with the rise of liberal ethical jurisprudence and the

deterratorialization and subsequent reterratorialization of

the concept of artist and artwork. With the emergence of

the artist-artwork dyad after the Renaissance the body and

the body of work were severed from their roots as

designers and works of craft and heterogenized into two

corporeally separate but subjectively interlocuted beings.

The body of work became an extension of the artists

subjectivity, as Manuel DeLanda might say, a residue of his

morphogenetic becoming-artist and becoming-individual.

Such an interlocution of phenomena leads to the notion

that the destruction of either the artist or the artwork

would amount for one of the two Lacanian deaths; that isto say the death in the symbolic (the destruction of the

body of work) and in the real(the destruction of the body

of the artist qua biological death). We could combine both

DeLandas and Lacans ontologies to posit the notion of


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the body of work as the residue of the artists becoming-

subject as artist. In other words, the residual evidence for

his relationship and inclusion in the symbolic order.

Franz Kafkas attempt to wipe his residue from the fabric

of the symbolic order in his request that Max Brod

cremate his body of work in the event of his death is an

attestation to the belief in the efficacy of such procedures.

Kafka wrote to Brod:

Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ...

in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'),

sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread3

Kafkas biological death was insufficient to realise his want

to disappear, to finally realise the isolation which had been

placed on him by the language he spoke, the religioustradition he was born into, and the emergence of his

socialist beliefs that ostracized him from Zionist circles

that had become occupied by, amongst others, his close

school friend Hugo Bergman. Kafka knew that biological

death alone would leave his presence floating in symbolic

space, fortified by the presence and circulation of his

corpus. The work of art and the artist have becomeintertwined in a way that was unthinkable in the times

before the renaissance.

3 Franz Kafka (source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/magazine/26kafka-

t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)


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003. The Weight of the Body of Work.

The development and accumulation of an artists body of

work and the circulation and the degree of intensity of

immanence of that body of work in the social conscience

amounts to the degree by which they are mandated the

signifier ofartist. While the subsumption of subjectivity to

this symbolic category must always remain incomplete, in

both the personal and public sphere, the perceived

completeness of the subsumption is evidenced in the

cultural weight applied to bodies of work by socio-culturalnetworks. This weight is not applied evenly throughout

the artists corpus, however, but intensified upon works

generally considered to have had a greater impact on the

continuum of historicized art as we currently understand

it or by sheer reproduction and circulation in the social

plane. In other words, while Jacques-Louis David is

accepted to be a great artist, works like Bonaparte

Crossing the St. Bernard Pass or The Death of Marat are

considered to be greater works of art than some of his

earlier paintings or indeed, even some of the sketches that

lead to his later paintings. The concentration of these

works and the exclusion of works with less cultural

weight attached to them can be said to amount to a more

accurate representation of that artists symbolicsubjectivity as perceived by the public. It is this

concentration of modules of identificatory association

with subjectivities that relates an artists body of work

with his body in the material world. Da Vincis Vitruvian


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Man or Mona Lisa are as distinctive a part of his

subjectivity for us, if not more so, than our figurative

perception of him.

As such, in cultural terminology, anatomical referents are

frequently used to symbolize an artists work in its various

assemblages; corpus, or body of work being the most

commonly used set-categorical variants. The headof this

body amounting for the work most often displayed in

artists retrospectives. Those exhibitions that present the

most accurate representation of the popularly digested

parts of the artists work and that which provide thegreatest support to the semblance of his subjectivity.

The corporeal head is, in the same way, the sight of the

most immediate form of aesthetic recognition of an

individual, the house of the mind, the container of a

subjects subjectivity, the mediator of our relationship with

the material world, a multi-sensory input/ output hub that

modulates information feedback loops and that allows us

to plug-in to the symbolic matrix. An invaluable piece of

hardware to any socio-politico-cultural antagonist, the

removal of which would amount to what Moser referred

to as similar conclusions. The body of works head

provides an equally tempting opportunity for decapitation

and display by hegemonies that deem its owner to requiresuch treatment. The success of capitalist-realisms affluent

reanimation of decapitation and display is its realignment

of the semiotics of such a practice; from monstrous anti-

human debasement to the pinnacle of artistic achievement


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and its realignment of the site of decapitation from the

corporeal to the symbolic. The display site has been

similarly shifted from bridges, spikes, city gates and

gibbeting cages to, amongst other places, art galleries.

004. Mombis Gallery.

Galleries, at their core, are inherently social spaces; intense

manifestations of psychogeographical manipulation that

are a determinate factor in socio-cultural relations. They

are spaces that regulate social and cultural categorization

and mediate the interpolation of the subject into thesymbolic plane. Rigorously categorising their visitors as

consumers of cultural Capital and placing them into a

network of organizational strata that is oppressive in its

instantiation.

005. Jurisprudential Incompleteness.

At this point there would appear to be something of a

lacunae in the comparison to artists retrospectives and

more traditional forms of decapitation and display.

According to the arguments above it would seem that the

destruction of an artists body of work would prove more

effective in quashing an attempted subversion of

hegemony than promoting and increasing the intensity ofcirculation and recognition that would ultimately result

from the organization of a retrospective exhibition. In

order to neutralize the threat of ideological insurgency

wouldnt the destruction of the symbolic assemblage of


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the artist-artwork dyad be the most effective way of

ensuring that those becoming-politicalor becoming-praxis

morphogenetic aspects of the work could not be realized?

To forcefully carry out the fate that Kafka had wished

upon his own body of work on the same work of those

artists who stand to subvert the ideologically reproductive

apparatuses of late Capitalist culture.

The answer to this problem is two-fold. The first and most

obvious answer is that which lies in the understanding of

the incompatibility of art destruction and neo-liberal

cultural politics. Throughout history those regimes thathave enforced, endorsed or encouraged the destruction of

art that is seen to be incompatible with the hegemonic

order are vigorously condoned as totalitarian or fascist by

modern liberal societies. Such practices are fundamentally

incompatible with the current formal axiomatic systems of

law and human rights standardized by neo-liberal

democratic convention and as such would create

unwanted and destructive associations with those regimes

that have been demonized for these reasons. The second

is that the mechanisms underway in such exhibitions

provide far more effective means of neutralization and

also contribute to the reproduction of late Capitalist

cultural ideology.


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006. Conceptual Morphogenesis and Conceptual

Manifolds.

This being resolved we can progress by positing the

notion that a body of work, particularly one with

culturally subversive tendencies, is conceptually

morphogenetically charged in that it is, at least

idealistically, constantly in the process ofbecomingin the

symbolic plane. Exactly in what direction that becoming

goes is contingent on an almost infinite list of exterior

factors. Its capacities to affect and be affected (in the

Deleuzian sense) are mediated by the perception of thebody of work and the capacity to be affected by those

interacting with that body of work. That is to say an

audience, or in this case, a viewing public with the

potential to become socially-unrested and civilly-

disobedient are more likely to be affected and unified into

a seditious assemblage by politically subversive work that

is framed in a way that accentuates and elucidates its

counter-cultural animus. It is thus the work of late-

capitalist culture to manipulate the conceptually

morphogenetic potential of the body of work into one that

is depleted of this subversive potentiality and, at the same

time, work to cultivate the processes that contribute to the

reproduction of its ideologies. And these are exactly the

processes at play in retrospective exhibitions.

These processes are ones that materialize concept-control

apparatuses with the aim of manipulating conceptual

manifolds. DeLanda has spoken at length about the


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ontological implications of morphogenesis in topology,

hydrodynamics and cellular biology and has gone a great

distance to edify concepts of virtual becoming in these

state-spaces and the use of manifolds in relation to them.

DeLanda defines a manifold in the realm of dynamical

systems as an object that becomes the space of possible

states which the physical system can have [M]anifolds

are connected to material reality by their use as models of

physical processes4 . This model of manifolds can be

transferred to the register of the symbolic. That is to say

we can understand a conceptual manifold as that which

becomes the space of possible symbolic states that asignifier can hold if we define a signifier as an ontological

object capable of carrying signification in a symbolic space.

The work of Capitalist realism is the attempt to control

this manifold and to channel and organize symbolic states

into a homogenous appropriation of mechanisms that

seek to undo its totality. The Situationists had formulated

a similar hypothesis in their work on the spectacle, Sadie

Plant crystalises their concerns:

Anything which resists alienation, separation, and

specialisation of the spectacle must be brought within the

confines of commodity exchange; challenges to the commodityform must be made to assume the vacuity and equivalence

necessary to the reproduction of commodity relations. The

Situationists argued that collapses of the marvelous into the

4 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy,

(Contiuum, London 2002)P. 13


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mundane or the critical into the counterrevolution are never

signs of natural destiny or apolitical degeneration. On the

contrary, such shifts are effected in order to remove theexplosive content from gestures and meanings which contest

the capitalist order5

What is important to note here is that it is not the gestures

and meanings themselves that are removed but rather the

explosive content from within them. That is to say thespectacle is a symbolic recoding mechanism, a

morphogenetic manipulating Trojan horse that works by

subsuming the manifold of symbolic becoming (the

conceptual manifold) to a restricted, recapitulated version

of itself, becoming ever more efficient at simulating thereal experience of conceptual multiplicity until total

replacement has been achieved. The multiplicity ofconceptual trajectory reduced to Capitalist-realist

singularity. The control of these multiplicities takes places

in all manner of cultural domains but it is within art and

specifically within retrospective exhibitions that the

investigative efforts of this essay take place.

5 Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist

International in a Postmodern Age, (Routledge, London,

1992)P. 79


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007. Aida Makoto and Roppongi Hills.

Such a retrospective recently took place in the Mori Art

Museum in Tokyos Roppongi district, situated on the

53nd floor of the crowning achievement of Roppongi Hills

culturo-corporate splicing apparatus, the Mori Building.

The head on display in question was that of Makoto Aida,

whose rigorously anti-consumerist, skepto-occidentalist

lan seems jarringly at odds with Roppongis modus

operandi which wholeheartedly cultivates itself on such an

ideologies antithesis. The result of the exhibition was one

of rendering impotent the anti-consumerist impetus atplay in Aidas work, a manipulation of the morphogenetic

potential by means of deterratorialization and

reterratorialization of the nomadic, destratifying elements

of Aidas work.

The most obvious example of this was in the geography of

the exhibition itself. The Roppongi district of Tokyo is

well known as an attractor to wealthy foreign and

domestic consumers, home to some of the most expensive

residential housing in the city, as well as large retail stores

for top-end international fashion houses like Michael

Kors, Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton (one of the first

paintings seen in the exhibition is named after this

ubiquitous French label and clearly critical of thefetishistic hold the designers famous logo has over the

Japanese consumer). It is also the location of the

headquarters for large international corporations and

investment banks: Yahoo, Google, Ferrari, TV Asahi,


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Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs to name a few. The

Mori Building and the surrounding Roppongi Hills area is

a sutureless splicing of globalized ultra-consumerist,

corporate and cultural activity, fusing cinemas, concert

halls, art galleries, fashionable high end restaurants and

corporate headquarters that serve as an aesthetic that has

done much to do away with the circulation of associations

with Yakuza and examples of corporate corruption that

led to the filing of arrest warrants against the ISP Livedoor

in 2006. The entire area is a sophisticated matrix of the

very assemblages and mechanisms that Aida has done his

most to protest through his work and that continue tothrive and germinate in spite of the widely circulated

motivations of his corpus.

The second site of morphogenetic manipulation is the

gallery itself. Aidas work occupies a nomadic space in the

art world, built to be interacted with and adapted as time

progresses, with a motive to reterratorialize notions of

social and urban space. A prime example of this is the

temporary sculptures located in the exhibitions central

display room. Huge cardboard constructs modeled on the

aesthetic of traditional Japanese castles and built as living

spaces for the homeless in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo. In

their originally designated setting these cardboard castles

would have drastically altered not only the physical spaceof the locals in which they were placed but also served as a

marker for the consideration of the economic underclass

that exists in the mires of Tokyos social strata. There is an

instantaneous reunderstanding of the notion of the


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artwork as precious in accordance with its market

exchangeability. These structures are cheaply and quickly

constructed and extremely temporary, not only due to the

structural integrity of the material itself but also in the

understanding that the Tokyo Municipal Police would

quickly remove them. This clear inversion of the typical

sanctity and interactive restriction normally endowed on

works of art is a refreshing reappropriation of bourgeois,

business-class lounge sensitivities to art in general. By

placing such works back into the space of the gallery,

behind the boarders and signs that limit the very tactility

that catalyzes the animus of the work, Aidas socio-political motivations are rendered impotent, placed into

conceptually restrictive strata and back into the

mechanism of market exchange, the damage of which he

has done so much to try to elucidate. The same line of

thinking can be applied to Aidas paintings. The

seditiousness of their message ultimately laid to rest by

their presence in the corporate sponsored gallery space.

While the works themselves lie kettled and out of reach in

the physical plane so to do their messages in the symbolic.

Any serious invocation of the self-destructive tendencies

of ultra-consumerism and western-centric cultural and

linguistic globalization are ultimately pacified by the

abundance and spectacle of the corporate space in which

they are framed. As we leave the exhibition we arereminded of the extent to which we are indebted to capital

for the experience. Mark Fisher, in relation to the London

Olympics, has made the implications of such a mechanism

explicit. He writes:


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The point of capitals sponsorship of cultural and sporting

events is not only the banal one of accruing brand awareness.Its more important function is to make it seem that capitals

involvement is a precondition for culture as such. The presence

of capitalist sigils on advertising for events forces a quasi-

behaviouristic association, registered at the level of the nervous

system more than of cognition, between capital and cultural. It

is a pervasive reinforcement of capitalist realism.6

These sigils function not only to enforce this quasi-

behavioristic association outlined by Fisher but also to

nullify implicit concerns as to the damaging effects of

global culturo-corporate empire by encouraging theassociation that this empire is inherently supportive of

critical thinking of its own mechanisms. To borrow a

phrase from

iek, this allowance of criticism of Capitalby Capital itself in a sense, does the protesting for us,

allowing us to continue to consume the commodities of

late-capitalism, free of the guilt that is associated with

passivity. Implicitly, the taking place of Aidas exhibition

allows Roppongi to continue to function as a symbolic

space. Giving the illusion of the existence of the

conceptual manifold while in reality having replaced itcompletely. As Fisher states:

6 Mark Fisher, The London Hunger Games, (from http://k-

punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/2012_08.html)


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[this] exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called interpassivity.

[It] performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue

to consume with impunity.

The replication and subsumption of the conceptual

manifold by late-capitalism renders the gallery space as a

spectacular singularity of subjective experience, a

synecdoche of wider cultural collapse, or in another sense,

a hyper-structuring of cultural produce, and a synonymic

model of what Fisher has termed Capitalist Realism.

Judith Butler has similarly surmised the fate of Kafkas

works, to an extent justifying his want for the annihilation

of his corpus:

It was however not just the spectres of technology that would

eagerly feed on Kafkas work, but those forms of profit-makingthat exploit even the most anti-instrumental forms of art, and

those forms of nationalism that seek to appropriate even the

modes of writing that most rigorously resist them. An irony

then, to be sure, that Kafkas writings finally became someone

elses stuff, packed into a closet or a vault, transmogrified into

exchange value, awaiting their afterlife as an icon of national

belonging or, quite simply, as money.7

7 Judith Butler, Who Owns Kafka, (from

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/judith-butler/who-owns-

kafka)


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008. Always Already Headless.

The implicit tragedy of such singularity is that

decapitation in this symbolic sense has always already

happened. There is no escaping it. The creation of the

work of art itself, its preconditioned inclusion into the

politics of market exchangeability and the network of

wider culture is the means of its own conceptual

infertility and impotence. The means of decapitation have

accelerated to such an extent that they happen even before

the act or event, the birth of a work of art or even an artist

has taken place. The gallery does not so much representthe location of post hoc display but rather a manifestation

of the eternally immanent conditions of subjectivities own

death by manifold replication. Braveheart born on the

spike. The point is not that galleries represent an

autonomous space that presents the conditions and results

of the becoming singularity of conceptual manifolds but

rather that they act as a continuation of social space itself.

Late capitalist consciousness subsumed to a singularized

conceptual manifold in fact projects the everyday onto the

gallery space. It is immanent, inescapable, and ubiquitous

and has been sold to us wholesale:

The current revolutions index themselves on the immediately

prior phase of the system. They arm themselves with a nostalgic

resurrection of the real in all its forms; in other words, with

simulacra of the second order: dialectics, use value, the

transparency and finality of production, the "liberation" of the

unconscious, or of repressed meaning (of the signifier, or of the


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signified called desire), and so on. All of these liberations offer,

as ideal content, the phantoms which the system has devoured

in successive revolutions and which it subtly resuscitates asrevolutionary fantasies. All these liberations are just transitions

toward a generalized manipulation. The revolution itself is

meaningless at the present level of random processes of

control.8

009. Acceleration and Collapse?

If, as has been discussed above, even revolutionary or

rebellious socio-cultural activity is contributive to the

processes that it attempts to undo, then where and howmight the collapse of the singularized conceptual manifold

take place. InAnti Oedipus, Deleuze and Guatarri provide

us with a potential answer:

But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?To

withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third

World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist

economic solution? Or might it be to go in the opposite

direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the

market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the

flows are not yet de territorialized enough, not decoded

enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of ahighly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the

process, but to go further, to accelerate the process, as

8 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (extract

fromJean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Stanford

University Press, 1988) P. 121


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Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we havent seen

anything yet.9

Advocating a speeding of the processes of the apoptosis of

capitalism by destratisfying, deterratorializing and

decodifying rather than by revolutionary force. In his

essay On the Fault of Accelerationist Aesthetics from the

Point of view of the Body, Franco Berandi Bifo makes

claims contra those of a small group of current politicalphilosophers thinking within the philosophical space

opened by Deleuze and GuattarisAnti Oedipus, Lyotards

Libidinal Economy and Baudrillards Symbolic Exchangeand Death. Bifo identifies inherent contradictions in the

analyses of current accelerationist thought processes that

understand the acceleration of the mechanisms of Capital

to lead ultimately to the destabilization and collapse ofCapital itself. For Bifo, the fundamental inconsistency that

undoes accelerationism at the level of praxis is the

inversion this idea. It is in fact these very schizo-

mechanics that allow for capitalism to function and grow.

The train of hypercapitalism cannot be stopped, it is going

faster and faster, and we can no longer run at the same pace.The only strategy, therefore, is based on the expectation that the

train is going to crash at some point, and the capitalist

trajectory is going to lead to the subversion of its own inner

9 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,Anti-Oedipus,

(University of Minnesota Press, 1983)p. 239.


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dynamics. This is an interesting proposition to consider, but it

is ultimately untrue, because the process of autonomous

subjectivation is jeopardized by chaotic acceleration, and socialsubjectivity is captured and subjugated by capitalist

governance, which is a system of automatic mechanisms

running at blinding speed.10

The perceived downfall of the accelerationist program,

according to Bifo, is a misunderstanding of the means by

which Capital allows itself to germinate.Neither Aida, nor his contemporaries of the Super Flat

movement (Takashi Murakami or Hiroki Azuma)

contribute to the slowing down or derailment of Capitalby making us aware of its means and machineries but

rather contribute to the very schizo-acceleration thatallows capitalism to function. This is not the apoptosis of

late-capitalism but the inversion of it. Capitalismproduces the very mechanisms that allow it to grow.

However, it is not the case that Aida or his

contemporaries point to a concluded fatalism with regard

to the loss of the conceptual manifold. They instead act as

examples of the failure of current mechanisms of concept

creation and the concepts that they have birthed. In factthe Deleuzian project of the flow of concept creation,

10 Franco Berandi Bifo,Accelerationism Questioned from

the Point of View of the Body, (from http://www.e-

flux.com/journal/accelerationism-questioned-from-the-

point-of-view-of-the-body/)


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deterratorialization, and decodification should work

toward fracturing the semiotic associations that constrict

the conceptual manifold to singularity. The structure of

late capitalist subjectivity is a paradoxical one. The

having-become-singularity of the conceptual manifold

points towards a hyper structuring of symbolic space but

Deleuzes schizo-analysis of desiring machines and

Baudrillards explication of simulacra points to a more

entropic, chaotic model of the same manifold. Entropic

mechanisms structure symbolic space towards

negentropic ends. When the chaotic creates hyper-

structure an unveiling of the real of the situation isnecessary. Creations of new associations, both

linguistically and conceptually, the presentation of that

which is excluded by types of representation, and the

opening up of the conceptual manifold are all necessary

projects to be considered. The singularization of the

creation of concepts, that is to say, the creation of any

concept at all, creates an outside to that concept, an

exterior plane that is occupied by the not-concept of the

new concept. In other words, the creation of concepts is

always an instantly double process. The creation of the

concept always already also creates the concept of thatwhich is not . The not of the current conceptual

manifold may well be a small territory but it is a territorythat can be occupied and expanded upon. But there must

be a jump-start. As Alex Williams has proposed:


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[M]uch of the initial labor must be around the composition of

powerful visions able to reorient populist desire away from the

libidinal dead end which seeks to identify modernity as suchwith neoliberalism, and modernizing measures as intrinsically

synonymous with neoliberalizing ones (for example,

privatization, marketization, and outsourcing).11

The creation of the concept of capitalist-conceptual-

manifold-singularity () creates its own notand it is to

this that we must find a cognitive jack and attempt toaccrue connective intensity.

11 Alex William, Escape Velocities, (from http://www.e-

flux.com/journal/escape-velocities/)

Decapitation, Acceleration and Conceptual Manifolds

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