Text 21 – Codetta

Synopsis

‘Codetta’ returns to ‘Art’s Plight’s’ guiding theme: how making-for-art across the contemporary arts makes its way through the challenges posed to it as it struggles to create paths through the institutions of a culture organised around the representing machinery of capitalised technoscience.

The intertwining of ‘power’ with ‘electronics’ under the rule of ‘technical’ knowledges infiltrates all zones of activity, including making-for-art’s leap toward Art’s ‘elsewhere’ Body, and sets the terms for their performance. Making’s possibilities thus turn on its tactic of avoidance and interruption – of becoming differently: how to hold to the intimacy and urgency of its archaic origins in the face of the demands placed on it by calculative representation.

The texts of ‘Art’s Plight’ have focussed making’s response through the difference of its relations to the representing languages of knowledge and everyday life. While trying to survive within the machinery of representation making-for-art challenges itself to expose, through a decreative undoing, the machinery’s modes of calculative repetition. Making travels, by way of a self-fracturing ‘meridian’ (Celan), to constitute gests that transliterate its obscure originating charges into something-like-a-language that is irreconcilable with the languages of everyday life. Its only chance lies in espousing something that is other to the surrounding all-infiltrating powers, now globally digital-electronic, of culture’s whatever-representation.