This paper’s core concern is Boris Groys’ theory of the total art of Stalinism, which is devoted to rewriting Soviet art history and reinterpreting Socialist Realism from the perspective of the equal rights between political and artistic Art Power. The aim of this article is to decode Groys and the total art of Stalinism, based on answering the following three questions: 1) why did Groys want to rewrite Soviet art history? 2) How did Groys re-narrate Soviet (...) art history? 3) What are the pros and cons of his reordering of the total art of Stalinism? Groys offers an effective paradigm that could rethink two theoretical genres: a) other Socialist Realisms inside or outside the Soviet bloc, during or after the Soviet era; b) the aesthetical rights of political artworks before, during and after the Cold War, and the historical debates about art, especially about art for art’s sake, or art for political propaganda. However, Groys’ total art of Stalinism and its core theory of the Socialist Realism frame hides some dangers of aestheticizing Stalin and Stalinism. (shrink)

The public generally regards the media with suspicion and distrust. Therefore, the media's primary concern is to regain that trust through the production of sincerity. Advancing the field of media studies in a truly innovative way, Boris Groys focuses on the media's affect of sincerity and its manufacture of trust to appease skeptics. Groys identifies forms of media sincerity and its effect on politics, culture, society, and conceptions of the self. He relies on different philosophical writings thematizing the (...) gaze of the other, from the theories of Heidegger, Sartre, Mauss, and Bataille to the poststructuralist formulations of Lacan and Derrida. He also considers media "states of exception" and their creation of effects of sincerity--a strategy that feeds the media's predilection for the extraordinary and the sensational, further fueling the public's suspicions. Emphasizing the media's production of emotion over the presentation (or lack thereof) of "facts," Groys launches a timely study boldly challenging the presumed authenticity of the media's worldview. (shrink)

This chapter explores media-ontological suspicion as a specific manifestation of philosophical doubt. It begins by discussing how the suspicion that something is hidden behind the visible and experienceable surface of the world that cannot be observed or described by humans and that might be threatening to them has determined the entire history of Western philosophical discourse. At least since Plato, philosophy has tried again and again to recognize and name what is hidden so as to overcome the fear of it. (...) Yet the suspicion is a suspicion precisely because its object cannot be recognized but only presumed—and thus the suspicion can neither be confirmed nor refuted. This chapter examines how the transformation of ontological suspicion into philosophical, epistemological doubt eliminates the observer's anxiety with regard to his own fate. It also considers the degree to which one can administer his/her own doubt—a central question of every epistemological theory and media theory. Finally, it looks at the views of René Descartes, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Sigmund Freud concerning ontological suspicion. (shrink)

This chapter examines the case of exception and the truth of the medial. It begins with a discussion of different truth values that the signs on the surface of the media have: the truth of referentiality and the truth of submedial space. The truth of referentiality is scientific truth whereas medial truth concerns the truth of exception. The chapter proceeds by explaining how the truth of sincerity is lost through repetition and suggests that the truth of the submedial, of the (...) hidden subject, of media-ontological suspicion is the truth of the case of exception. It also considers how the avant-garde transports artwork into a state of exception, how the phenomenon of exception is related to the phenomenon of medial sincerity, and how new cases of exception are produced when claims of medial truth deduced from old cases of exception are critiqued. (shrink)

This chapter explores the imperceptible foundation of the play of signs that takes place on the medial surface. It begins by discussing submedial space as the space of suspicion as well as the space of subjectivity, suggesting that something invisible must be hidden behind the visible in the space beneath the medial surface. It then considers the poststructuralist philosophy of flux in relation to the problem of signification and how signification determines the relationship of the archive to the “reality” outside (...) the archive, a reality “signified” by means of archival signs. It argues that the philosophy of flux deconstructs the border between archive and profane space by emphasizing the materiality of signs, on the one hand, and by defining all ordinary things as signs, on the other. The philosophy of flux thus considers ordinary things and archival things to be interconnected via a play of differences. The media-ontological question does not concern if and how the signs on the medial surface are able to signify the submedial, hidden space. (shrink)

This chapter offers a philosophical reflection on the truth of the medial and the state of exception. It begins with the notion that every single media carrier—be it “natural” or produced by technical means—basically allows for only two operations with signs: to save and to transfer. The entire medial economy that operates with signs makes use of these two operations. All signs have a meaningless, nonsemantic, purely formal, and simultaneously material side beyond all signification. When we confront the media, we (...) are constantly aware of the hidden presence of submedial space. Yet we are structurally incapable of seeing through it as long as we are busy looking at the medial surface. This chapter argues that the media-ontological suspicion is “objective” in the phenomenological sense, because it necessarily appears during the act of observing the medial surface. It also examines the truth of media-ontology as well as the truth of the state of exception in relation to the media-ontological suspicion that defines our perception of the medial surface. (shrink)

Proceeding from Lessing’s distinction between poetry and visual art, Boris Groys argues that language is not external to, but resides behind, the image. The image constitutes the scene of a frustrated linguistic desire. Modern visual art sought to avoid the obscenity of staging this unfulfilled desire by conducting a systematic ascetic repression of the linguistic impulse. This negation of linguistic desire culminated in Judd’s ‘specific ob jects’. Y et the modern image, Groys emphasizes with reference to Greenberg and (...) McLuhan, still transmits a message, namely that of its medium bearer. Modern artists torture the image and put it into a state of emergency or exception in which it confesses its interior. In the image’s sub-medium space, in turn, resides language. Avantgarde artists and modern media theorists share the wish to achieve durability by becoming the media of the media. The border between the image and language, Groys closes, can neither be stabilized nor abolished. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Paragrana Jahrgang: 26 Heft: 1 Seiten: 17-27.

Résumé L’artiste Peter Weibel s’inscrit dans un prolongement paradoxal des avant-gardes du vingtième siècle. Les institutions de l’art sont mortes? Il propose le devenir-institution des artistes. Le regardeur s’est émancipé? Il s’efforce de le contrôler. Les techniques traditionnelles sont périmées? Il recourt à l’art numérique, seul à même de figurer les processus de pensée.

Ces dernières années, des musées d’art contemporain sont apparus partout dans le monde occidental et au-delà. Le nombre de ce genre de musées augmente en permanence. Le touriste d’aujourd’hui, qui se rend dans une grande ville, s’attend à y trouver un musée d’art contemporain, de la même manière qu’il s’attend à y trouver un restaurant italien ou un cinéma. Dans la plupart des cas, ces attentes sont confirmées. Dans le pire des cas, le touriste va apprendre que le musée d’art (...) contemporain est encore en construction et qu’il sera ouvert l’année suivante. Quoi qu’il en soit, cette acceptation si facile de la notion de « musée d’art contemporain » par la culture d’aujourd’hui n’est pas sans importance. Traditionnellement, le musée d’art constituait un endroit dans lequel l’art du passé était collecté, conservé et montré au beau milieu de la vie contemporaine. Mais que signifie construire un musée d’art contemporain ? Que signifie « muséographier » la contemporanéité elle-même?Museums of contemporary art have appeared everywhere in the Western world and beyond in recent years, and they are constantly increasing in number. Any tourist visiting a major city today expects to find a museum of contemporary art, just as they expect to find an Italian restaurant or a cinema. In most cases, this is indeed what they find. At the very least, tourists will find that the city’s museum of contemporary art is still under construction and will open the following year. Whatever the case, the ready acceptance of the “museum of contemporary art” in today’s culture is significant. Traditionally, an art museum was a place where the art of the past could be collected, curated and displayed right in the heart of the contemporary world. But what does creating a museum of contemporary art really mean? In other words, what does it mean “to make a museum exhibit” of contemporaneity itself? (shrink)

This chapter first surveys general issues in the epistemic internalism / externalism debate: what is the distinction, what motivates it, and what arguments can be given on both sides. -/- The second part of the chapter will examine the internalism / externalism debate as regards to the specific case of the epistemology of memory belief.

The acquisition of a new skill usually proceeds through five stages, from novice to expert, with a sixth stage of mastery available for highly motivated performers. In this chapter, we re-state the six stages of the Dreyfus Skill Model, paying new attention to the transitions and interrelations between them. While discussing the fifth stage, expertise, we unpack the claim that, “when things are proceeding normally, experts don’t solve problems and don’t make decisions; they do what normally works” (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, (...) 1988, pp. 30 – 31). This leads us to offer an account of the “perspectival deliberation” that arises for experts and masters and that is distinct from the calculative deliberation characteristic of the lower stages of skillfulness. (shrink)