Synopsis
‘To Set Out For’ considers making’s challenge to responsive writing.
Hopefully the voice of Blanchot can be heard echoing from the far nearby between the words of this text.
Writing is challenged to refuse external models, methods, and authorities in its response to making’s gests.
Its defining challenge is two-fold: firstly, to write for and thus seek to show and preserve the ‘otherness’ of art’s gests (their troubling attempts to move us out of the grip of everyday knowledges); secondly, to explore their relation to and penetration by the appropriating machinery of representation.
As art’s gests are now routinely appropriated, placed and valued by the calculative machinery of the info-spectacle (Debord’s latter-day ‘society of the spectacle’), both making and writing responsive to it face the challenge of finding ways of secreting their ‘hope’ for art’s ‘difference’. They have to do this in the face of the appropriating machinery’s power to ‘place’ art according to the machinery’s ‘interests’ and the latter’s consequent ability to make art’s ‘otherness’ disappear.
The active ‘tense’ of both ‘making-for-art’ and, hopefully, writing responsive to its needs, is offered as a ‘performing’ that makes its appearance only in the infinitive on the way towards an ‘elsewhere’ yet to come.