Extract

SUZANNE ANKER

The onslaught of viruses and their strategies have in a sense taken over the work of the unconscious.

Jean Baudrillard



Figure 99. In order to accomplish a critical fiction the functions of 'a' as subset and 'A' as matrix are self-reflexive.

Cryptograms and hyperfictions, cybersex and smart drugs, transpecies germlines, body-part-commodities… cultural buzzwords, all hovering in the media, encoding with its signature the information eruption of the cyborg and the technofix. From the metacognitive to the manic, from the substitutive to the social, codes have become our operative conductor. Our all and nothing mind material, haptically deciphering the complexities of the constructed world. Within this network what is culture? What is its composition? As an integrated and conglomerate pattern of human knowledge culture is comprised of history, the biological and physical sciences, anthropology, psychology, mathematics, poetry, geogra ← 215 | 216 → phy, philosophy, visual art et al. It is the sum total of activity recorded and reflected upon (produced, experienced and consumed) through a penetration with natural and artificial domains. As a subset of culture, art is a single species, a way of knowing the world through illusion or fiction, an imaginary infatigable narrative. However, art also functions simultaneously as a matrix, giving its subject the diagnostic ability of a paradox – the paradox of critical fiction (fig. 99).

What is the substance of 20th century art if not the texts of the whole culture, of other disciplines? By...