Amateur mortality

ABSTRACT

Near the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi published three short meditations on the possible, not probable, outcome of the pandemic. Due to the sudden imposition of isolation and concrete needs, Berardi suggests that death has re-entered contemporary discourse. As a consequence, he speculates that the capitalist postponement of joy may be replaced by time as enjoyment. This text critically accompanies Berardi in imagining the possible outcome of the pandemic by suggesting that it is not death but mortality that offers a pivotal use of time and enjoyment. Mortality, as Hannah Arendt defines it, extends beyond the temporality of survivalist labour and into durable works that contribute to the construction of a human world. Here it is argued that this world and its work is held together by love, in a robust philosophical sense, that is embodied by amateur practice, primarily developed in relation to the work of Bernard Stiegler. Through the work of Stiegler, Donna Haraway and Byung-Chul Han, this paper argues that, masked by professionalism and marketing, amateurism lurks in the possible ruins of pre-COVID life, ready to emerge in the key areas identified by Berardi’s texts.

KEYWORDS:

• Love
• copying
• proliferation
• atomisation
• technics
• temporality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Berardi’s ‘Beyond the Breakdown: Three Meditations on a Possible Aftermath’ was originally published by e-flux on 31 March 2020.

2 The news-media’s obsessive reporting of deaths, even though the number of deaths is relatively small compared to diseases and afflictions we are more familiar with, bears witness to the significance of survival in the context of COVID-19. For an insightful and fascinating conversation about the reporting of numbers of infections and deaths during the early stages of America’s outbreak see Radiolab’s podcast, ‘Dispatch 1: Numbers,’ https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dispatch-numbers.

3 It is worth noting that professional survival is not the same as survival in general. As Peter Fleming has observed, we excessively equate money and life to the point of working ourselves to death (2017: 130, 142).

4 Arne De Boever, Kenneth Reinhard and Stephen Barker had invited Stiegler to deliver a series of talks at the California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, Irvine.

5 For example, see Byung-Chul Han’s The Agony of Eros, Bernard Stiegler’s Symbolic Misery, vol 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s The Soul at Work.

6 ‘Our epoch is characterized by the seizure of the symbolic by industrial technology, where aesthetics has become both theatre and weapon in the economic war. This has resulted in a misery where conditioning substitutes for experience’ (Stiegler 2014: vii).

7 For clarity, Stiegler uses ‘the word aesthetics here in its widest sense, where aisthesis means sensory perception, and where the question of aesthetics is, therefore, that of feeling and sensibility in general’ (Stiegler 2014: 1).

8 The poor image is much more than a meme. In Steyerl’s text, the poor image is primarily a way of discussing the value and valuation of suppressed and marginal films that are shared at low quality. It could be argued that these poor images are shared for the purpose of contemplation. Steyerl’s specific use of the poor image, then, has a spectrum of poverty. Here, I am speaking to the most impoverished, such as a meme that may have wide-spread usage now but no historical significance, as well as the general speed at which the poor image can be copied and proliferate.

9 For a summary of the problems Blackout Tuesday posed on social media see Jolynna Sinanan’s text in The Conversation, ‘Blackout Tuesday: the black square is a symbol of online activism for non-activists.’ For critical responses to Blackout Tuesday see Brooke Marine’s text in W magazine, ‘Why You Should Think Twice Before Sharing Your “Blackout Tuesday” Post on Instagram,’ and Zoe Haylock’s text in Vulture, ‘How Did #BlackOutTuesday Go So Wrong So Fast?.’

10 ‘Otherness’ is here meant to denote a metaphysical tissue that is deeply mystifying. Stiegler describes the need for this specifically in the form of mystagogy, in which art serves as a guide to life’s great mysteries. This is not to say that what is considered Other or what mystagogues guide us shouldn’t be questioned and subject to criticism.

11 ‘The achievement-subject gives itself over to freestanding compulsion in order to maximize performance. In this way, it exploits itself. Auto-exploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation because a deceptive feeling of freedom accompanies it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited’ (Han 2015: 49).

12 For example, see ‘The Rise and Fall of the Zoom Penis’ by Natasha Bernal, ‘since many people started working from home and interact with each other on Zoom rather than real life, the lines between private and professional life have collided — and the people exposing themselves are no longer strangers’ (Bernal 2020).

13 ‘Psychomotive knowledge’ is a term used by Stiegler in his text on proletarianization to describe ‘a generalized regression of the pychomotive knowledges that were characteristic of art amateurs’ (Stiegler 2017a: 6). This is a loss of knowledge in the motor coordination of intentional activity, connoting fine-tuned movements and chains of activity.

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Maxwell Hyett

Maxwell Hyett is a writer, artist and theorist, currently completing his PhD at The Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. His work explores issues of vision, meaning, possibility and the enmeshed limits between virtuality and reality. Hyett’s publications include the essays ‘Use(ful/less) Schematics’ in Drain 15.1 (2018) and ‘The Poking of Christ: Death, Fakes and the Digital’ in tba: Journal of Art, Media, and Visual Culture 1.1 (2019), as well as collaborative book reviews in Dada/Surrealism and Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy.