Part 1: The emptiness that becomes ritual is real.
After post-modernity comes, is now – real postmodernism! The replacement of rational decisions by aesthetic ones –
without a link. The reversal, the turning back to faith, the stupidity of self empowerment as and in therapeutic
impotence, inexperiencabilty of significate, realisations of multiple virtualities – into an easy standardising “pluralism
for the future”.
(Beautifully ideology-free?)
"What is done to our individual life experience by means of high-tech, namely to let it dissolve its own experience in its
experience, is also applied post-modernly to the social past, which thanks to high-tech becomes so recitable that it can
be received immediately, as if one had travelled to yesterday, so that one is no longer from yesterday, but from after
yesterday."2
Of this it must be said: what is presented as drafted is here already practically closed in the draft – never open. The
necessarily selective traversal of the always instantly different river as a polylogy of artistic aesthetic practices stabilises
into the constant outflow of productions that can/are allowed to be thematised and commented on as artistic decisions -
to become nonchalant but no longer negotiated (in the sense of processual vividness or, even more, actual – with respect
to their potentialities – presence). Above all, more and more technical (applied) new additions, whether as materials for
informing and information or as tools for doing this (the means justify the means, the end is mediocrity), have been and
are being integrated, concisely presented.
There is necessarily an overlapping of sense data, mixing and cancelling, a "cross-over esotericism" of pop-formalist
content evacuation. Even an opposition of form-statement-institutions within a few decades or even years. Levellingly
global in different places and for different groups. In relation to the Western industrialised and everyday digitalised art
world, however, the zenith is already well passed and tendencies are recognisable which, while not a retrogressive
movement, yet correspond to the actually usable potential of supposedly innovative technologies; weighed against the
statements actually obtained and produced in this way.
Was that the choice then? Virtual therapy (self-empowerment) and infantilism instead of rationalization and
technocracy? The living zoon politikon is desired dwindlingly small, should desire to give way to "anything goes",
adoring itself as an art figure, making aesthetic/more theological decisions or not making them, individualized
collectively and throwing around and away from itself. Rather art figure without conscience (historical
experienceability) than real (acting) person. Seen sociologically, a pseudo political "colour-blindness" independent of
class? Who is going to shoot whom virtually? Just so. The impatience of the bourgeoisie, jiggling at the world clasps,
has passed loss at the short-lived longeurs of the last decades of the last millennium; and how could it revolt otherwise
than as a history-less non-rebellion of the real postmodernist generations? To whom can all the utopias, efforts, constant
toil (formerly the civilizing project) be left now? Is the old time still young? (Post-modernness faked for real.)
Better one cannot ...Because this always has, what appears aesthetically charming, the consequence of justifying itself,
if at all possible, also ethically.3
Part 2: In the Balancing
Why is that? Did they – they who came after the Post-War Dream, the formerly post-modern accelerated cohort driven
to the point of fear and (oh dear!) rejuvenated by, through and on “media overload” – did they drop out of the world?
Out just like that? Out of the world that was theirs (yes, yours!), but which, according to that very credo, would only
ever let the young, that is, the perpetually irritable, have their way with it. And this, even for only a short historical
sojourn. For the World Ship, as a referent of the ecological-economic guest-host function, lists to one side; exposes its
and their diseased side as pure nature.6 (Pure or not pure? That is here the question!) Prevailing, hardly time-honoured
states of decay in the formerly innovative, pruriently circuiting “project of world-creation”, the civilisational project.
“For Western society, too, has produced something other than what the cynical system-theoretical gaze of a desperately
