My name is Claire Cical and I am a working-class Fluxus artist.
My practice is one of assemblage and fabrication, using cheap, old, and discarded technologies to make creative machines.
At a time when anthropomorphized capitalism is dominating all areas of reality and thoughts, I think it is critical for art to center its inquiries on the situation of humankind in the world and its modes of existence.
Topology of the Homo Sapiens genus
I use topology as a visual and conceptual basis to support a reflection on the specificity of the Homo genus, referring to Plessner's idea of the eccentric positionality of man.
Unlike rocks, living organisms aren't simply worn down by their environment; rather, they are shaped, affected, and permeated by it. Life begins with the establishment of a boundary that creates a distinction between inside and outside, a boundary that remains permeable. Because of this permeability, living beings resemble a Moebius strip in a topological sense. The boundary of the Moebius strip forms a continuous loop, represented by a single circle.
What is perceived as inside communicates with the outside, leaving only one side. There is a coupling between the input and the output. The boundary is the space where beings interact with their milieu, where they enter into contact with their Umwelt. The boundary situates the being in space and time.
The specificities of Homo Sapiens appear after the species faces an imminent risk of extinction with a severe drop in the population, and the awareness of the threat of the disappearance of the specie. The Homo Genus then developps a number of strategies and technologies that allowed for the survival of the species.
With the rise of agriculture, livestock breeding, and pottery, production has become the fundamental mode of doing of the human specie. This creates a separation from nature and the emergence of discontinuity, with the appearance of the dynamic of substitution. Then arises the creation of artificial links to link the discontinued, an artificialized coupling.
Consider the Klein bottle. This topological object exists without tearing, in a space that escapes us. The Klein bottle can be seen as the conjunction of two Moebius ribbons, facing each other in symmetry.
Like the Moebius strip, the Klein bottle has only one surface. A continuous surface. Unlike the Moebius strip, the Klein bottle has no border.
To materialize the Klein bottle, we must add a dimension, and thus make it an object that we can perceive. This object contains a pierce that does not exist in the original figure. We can fabricate a pseudo-Klein bottle, a Klein bottle with an added dimension, by blowing it into glass to make an unusual wine carafe that is almost impossible to clean.
It is in this fallacious “inside” that Homo Sapiens stores its history and the memory of the threat which led to the multiple processes of veiling, substitution, and to the psychosis of the species, called speciosis.
This vision of the world as containing a threat is the basis for the rise of enmity and oppression.
The Logic of Inversion
Jacques Camatte, through his extensive and meticulous work on the texts of Marx (in particular the Grundrisse) and Bordiga, showed the impossibility of revolution in the face of Autonomized Capital.
The process of liberation ends up in dispossessing and the revolution re-enforces repression.
On one hand the conservative revolution is the one that exerts oppression for the « greater good », a revolution that maintains the continuity with the past.
On the other hand, the innovative revolution, appearing after the 68 events, is one that exerts oppression for the good of each individual, in order to create a better future.
« The revolutionnaries are expelled from the future which becomes property and deposit of capitalization, virtualization , for the proponents of repression. » Jacques Camatte, Substitution and Extinction, 2022.
Revolution is a substitution process and rests on enmity. It has been colonized by the autonomized capital and its values of incrementation and oppression.
After revolution has been rendered ineffective to fight capitalism, inversion becomes the next logical process. This notion of inversion is also found in the work of Ivan Illich, "Tools for Conviviality".
To achieve inversion, there is a need for the end of enmity. Homo Gemeinwesen will be able to emerge when repression ceases, and the dynamic of enmity stops.
Inversion is not a return to a previous situation, but rather an access to a new mode of existence and of participation in the cosmos as humanity. It is an unfolding.
The inversion arises in the materiality of the situation. It takes place locally, and jointly with the process of unveiling.
Enaction as described by Francisco Varela depends on two elements, the loop and the coupling. Coupling can be perfect or imperfect. The veiling of the artificial complexification induced by the layer of language and culture makes for an imperfect coupling.
The relationship that organisms engage with their environment through enaction entails a loop of both feedback and feedforward, with the presence of a filter, constituted by the embodiment. Human psyche depends on its embodiment.
Inversion will find its roots in the human psyche. Human psyche is the disconnected resistance. It is the space of resistance against the oppression of abstraction. Resistance as a filter, a limitation, not an opposition or a negation.
Abstraction reshapes the material world. Data is compressed not only in terms of quantity but also quality. There’s a dynamic relationship between abstraction and data, a continuous feedback and feedforward loop. This process mirrors the oscillation between the contemplative and the practical, between the dreamlike and the waking state, between imagination’s creation and reality’s implementation.
Utopia emerges within this oscillation between reality and its models, between data and conceptualization.
To break free from universalism and the reductive, dangerous tendencies of machinic abstraction, utopia must embrace a form of 'fuzzy' abstraction. It should be a utopia of localized, embodied noise, one that incorporates randomness and deviation from the norm, valuing the particularities of place and the richness of difference.
Repression follows the incremental fractal trajectory engaged by the anthropomorphization of capital. Through the multiplication of micro-intensities and miniaturisation, repression creates micro-categories and enters every level of the human modes of existence, including the unconscious.
The absence of repression doesn't mean that every behavior will exist.
Repression appears from the mode of questioning and the shunning of bifurcation through formatting.
A useful tool for perceiving all the bifurcations, getting out of the mode of questioning (See Jean-Yves Girard), and getting out of repression, is the practice of empathy.
Empathy is an ability to situate oneself into the boundary, the space of contact with the Umwelt. Through the practice of empathy one can perceive the unique surface of the Klein bottle and thus escape from confinement.
It is not a way of understanding other modes of being since there can not be any knowledge outside of ourselves.
It is not an implementation of an additional dimension.
It is a practice of unveiling. It is a practice of contact, that is to say of the unique surface, and the absence of borders, by mean of navigating the boundary.
It is a practice of intuition, an opening to bifurcations and emergence.
Emergent Love
As Henri Atlan suggests, for emergence to occur, both complexity and randomness are essential. Complexity serves as a foundation or environment—it is a space.
For randomness to manifest, repetition is required, a kind of "ritournelle" or recurring pattern. Randomness is intrinsically tied to time.
Homo sapiens, viewing time as a finite resource, seeks to reduce randomness while simultaneously increasing complexity. This drive has been present throughout the history of life.
Every complex cognitive system is naturally drawn toward what is unavailable to its immediate grasp in the cosmos. Through processes like bifurcation, selection, and evolution, what was once out of reach has now been assimilated by the species.
Through acts of extraction, combination, calculation, and concentration, Homo sapiens strives to structure and stabilize both itself as a species and its surrounding environment.
This need of organization arises from the trauma caused by the chaos created by the break in continuity which expelled the being from totality and eternity.
It is from this loss of contact with immediacy that enmity arises. As we face our inability to make the world available, points of aggression develop due to our desire to know.
Faced with the renewed threat of extinction, it becomes crucial for the continuity of the Homo genus to operate the inversion described by Camatte. If there is no verticality in a hierarchy, then love can be inseminated into the systems of oppression.
Insemination, rather than toxicity, offers a path to end enmity, emphasizing love and connectivity.
Everything on Earth is affected by gravity. Gravity is the force of touch and contact. Through translative touch, everything is in contact with everything. It offers opportunities for the insemination of the idea of inversion into various systems and spaces, akin to the growth of rhizomes.
The emergence of love will be situated in the boundary, the area of contact.
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