Olivier Sorrentino

CRUX DISSIMULATA
Ann Onymous

"En tirant à pile ou face", 1995
installation
téléviseur, pièces de monnaie et dessin sur papier

Representation is not only an aesthetic problem; it is also a political issue. It is language severed from all practical, all immediate applicability which teaches us that words are the ultimate symbols of ideas and that the power of life and death lies in the tongue People have undoubtedly been more mobile and identities less fixed than the static and topologising approaches of classical anthropologies would suggest. [...J conventional anthropological approach allowed the power of topography to conceal successfully the topography of power. What is significant about Japan is its ethnicity, and the fact that it is the first non-white country to have inserted itself into modernity on its own terms. In so doing it has exposed the racist foundations of modernity as it has hitherto been constructed. Perhaps European and American ideas about the 'non-western' world are exceptional only in that during the past several centuries Europe and America have had the military power to put them into action. . We often hear statements that world information technologies and the possibility of instantaneous communications have helped broadcast democratic ideals, as in the case of the C.N.N. broadcasting, in 1989, of the Tien An Men occupation. [...] But communication techniques in themselves are neutral in regards to values. The reactionary ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini were introduced in Iran well before 1978, thanks to tape recorders that the economic modernization of the shah rendered available to most people. If television and world scale instantaneous communications had existed in the 1930s, Nazi propagandists like Leni Riefenstahl and Joseph Goebbels to promote their ideology instead of democratic ideals would have used them massively. History has become either an anecdote, or an attraction. To watch a documentary of the Holocaust nowadays denotes a strange similitude with the act of viewing a horror film. The media presented Saddam as the embodiment of evil, of all that "we" are not, in terms which stand diametrically opposed to our civilization and culture. He was "imagined" as absolutely and monstrously "other". Thus, we must approach the problem from the fundamental recognition that the units of language, which we wish to understand, are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively, by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not. The notion that there are geographical spaces with indigenous, radically "different» inhabitants who can be defined on the basis of some religion, culture or racial essence, proper to that geographical space is a highly debatable idea. Wiser and more cultured men than me have discerned a path in history, a rhythm, a predetermined diagram. These harmonies remain shunned to my eyes: I cannot see but an urgency following up to another, like the wave follows the wave. And a task is in this way circumscribed: to make humanity suitably adapted to very complex means of feeling, of understanding and of doing that exceed what they request. This implicates, at a minimum, resistance to simplism, to simplifying slogans, to demands of clarity and of easiness, to desires to restore reliable values. Simplification already appears as barbaric, reactive. The "political class» will have to, it already does, count on this requirement, if it does not want to fall into abeyance. The accumulation of knowledge confers no superiority, but only a greater responsibility.

Taylor & Saarinen, Anshen, Gupta & Furguson, Morley & Robins, Minear, Fukuyama, Sorrentino, Morley & Robins, Saussure, Saussure, Said, Fisher, Lyotard, Champey.