Madness and Aesthetics: The Psycho-technology of Radical Otherness

1. The Sublime, similar to Unheimlichkeit

Beauty and decadence can be used to intercommunicate somewhere where the two different things become the same, but simultaneously, they are entirely opposed. Victor Hugo created the figure of Quasimodo in the novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame as a paradigmatic figure of the new era. The figure is no longer a solitary hero who, with the skill of the warrior of the Crusader wars with the Saracens, somewhere far away on the shores of Acre, begins an extended return to the homeland and his beloved, who, of course, is waiting with tears and unmarred virginity. Romanticism represents a great heritage of European art for displaying and presenting a religious and homogenous world in which Christianity conflicts with Islam, particularly in its western boundaries in Spain, turning it into a concept of beauty and the sublime, starting with the irony of the tragic subject. Nowhere does it feel so plastic as in poetry that invokes the metaphor of horror and lust for realising what has so generously disappeared in praising the technical era of machines. Quasimodo is not the opposite of the idea of beauty, some monster with the heart of an angel, cheerful and determined to preserve the beauty of Esmeralda forever from the outside world in his kingdom of appearance, in the environment of pure art as an ecstasy of the spiritual life. What Quasimodo symbolises is not any aesthetic of the ugly where decadence leads to the discovery of the damned body in the decay and the livelihood of the life force. He is an anti-hero of romanticism, and with that contemporary art, a sign of negativity and rebellion entered into the strangeness of the idea of the sublime. The aesthetic counterpoint to the religious perception of beauty must be constructed in conflict with nature as a purpose (telos), just as the monstrousness of superhumanity necessarily arises without a concept, purpose and final goal. Those scary and angry beings, which deny the possibility of peaceful contemplation, come from the cracks of the very thing from the new era that established the area of the pure aesthetic experience. What is left if the omnipresence of the sublime has not come to the term? It is impossible to define it except through its lack of a term. Despite this, anything that has a sublime feature is derived from the essence of unpredictable, emergent and contingent events (Mersch 2010, 68 96)

       In his poetic travel report of Greece entitled Augenblicke in Griechenland, the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote the most beautiful description of his experience. The poet describes his feelings in front of the statues of five women covered with long outfits. In the philosophical tradition of Burke, Kant, Mendelssohn, Hegel, and Nietzsche, the sublime (das Erhabene) is first perceived as an addition or even a contradiction to the central concept of aesthetics as beauty. The difference is that beauty could be determined by what is sensitively present in appearance as an idea. This tradition goes from Plato to Hegel. Therefore, the sublime is understood by termination or cut concerning the appearance of the concept of beauty. Having recaptured the empty place of beauty, the sublime does not change the subject of our knowledge in an aesthetic sense. What should be changing refers to the whole body-soul relationship between humans and the world. With the sublime emerges a rare moment (Augenblick) of ascension over appearance and reality.

       An analogy to this might be apparent in the ethical sense of humility to the divine in language and image. The spiritual experience of divinity goes beyond the aesthetic and the moral shock of encountering the thing itself. So, that experience must have something monstrous, terrible and horrible inherent. Without this condition of the possibility of the relationship between art and nature, it seems impossible to establish anything aesthetical per se. When we try to look at the representation of the religious art of different worlds, we see that all that von Hofmannsthal wrote in the poetic language of description is nothing other than what the ancient Greeks, then the Christian art of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Spanish Baroque, sought to count on the superhuman. Therefore, nothing subjective or objective exists in our inner world or outside it. From the sublime comes the uncanny experience of the infinite and nothing more, precisely as von Hofmannsthal wrote:

At that point, something happened to me: the unseen horror did not come up from the outside; it was like a lightning strike. The eyes of a statue were staring at me, and their faces reflected a smile I had never seen before [ ]. In these bodies, I answered with the certainty of the moonlighter, lies the mystery of the infinite. (von Hofmannsthal 2001, 120)

 The mystery of the infinite refers primarily to the uncanny event. However, the new era and the Aesthetica of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten date from 1735 until 1750, when he created this concept built on the idea of beauty as philosophical knowledge objects of nature and art, something in that establishment was already almost on the verge of feasibility. It is well-known that in the 18th century, the rationalist worldview ruled all aspects of life. Nature was no longer seen as it was by Aristotle. Isaac Newton physically adjusted nature by laying down mathematical laws of motion. The clock, therefore, is naturally suited to the mechanical motion model as an infinite line. In that sense, increasing and accelerating time played a crucial role. The linear time of the machine has ordered the space of mechanically-understood nature. Therefore, the human body is represented as a frame of reference.

       Infinity is derived from natural sciences, just like Baumgarten and Kant’s idea of beauty, which emerged from the concept of the purposefulness of nature. The law of causality creates, of course, the origin of the plan of the divine. Hence, it might be evident that beauty conceptualised in Kant’s aesthetics, for example, must be superior to the beauty already existing in art-created objects. Looking at this way, the notion of beauty has been legalised, starting from the principle of mindful acting, and since it has become self-evident to understand the arts as beautiful arts, quite opposed to technical mastery and crafts. Reconciling nature and art with Kant’s concept of purposefulness without purpose brought nature to ultimate harmony. Not, however, starting from outside, but from within, from the idea of the subject and the production of other nature and possibly other worlds.  The mystery of the infinite cannot be solved by rationally crafted art without everything that appears to be the dark side of the moon from the very beginning. Of course, in the foreground, the word/concept of the sublime stands beyond the subject and object. Indeed, within the transcendental metaphysics from Kant to Hegel, the place of that concept lies within an object or the thing in itself (Ding-an-sich) or absoluteness as a synthesis of spiritual experience and history.

       What might be sublime in the absence of its subject-like beauty and not understandable from a productive fantasy of the artist as a subject? That question extends from Longinus to Lyotard, from Neoplatonism to the postmodern dissensus (diff rend) of mind, and is represented by a severe ongoing discussion concerning the meaning of art. That is why it seems to be the second leading concept of aesthetics, which can be further explored within the discourse of the philosophy of art but without outcomes. Attempts to return to the highest level in contemporary art of painting and performativity of the body usually proved implausible. Lyotard reversed the notion of presenting the unpresentable by rehabilitating Kant and his way of thinking of art as aesthetic powers of the judgement of the very thing that can no longer be said either theoretically or practically (metaphysical-ethical-political), pointing to the technological creation of aesthetic illusion. Indeed, that was possible only by applying information communication technologies in everyday life. The American painter Barnett Newman provided an excellent example of turning the sublime into a postmodern painting. The visualisation of artificial light created by computer-aided information is strong evidence that the thing, or noumenon, is now being moved to areas of technically constructed reality (Lyotard 1983; 1991). Instead of the mystery of the infinite, we have entered the endless mystery of the self-production of something generated by  Nothing. The technosphere might no longer be displayed in the common terms of the metaphysical tradition (mimesis). Hence, the collective power of creating a new aesthetic will now be constructed as a sublime experience of creating things beyond the limits of nature and humans. The thing itself creates, and the things are not the same as things in themselves. The creature is created now by the technical reproduction of Being. It is conceived, however, as a technical object rather than a living object. However, the system’s applicability should give it specificity in the anthropomorphic world of functions and structures. Nowadays, it is represented as a techno-genetic phenomenon that emerges as a way of regulating social relations. An information circuit of communicative action was created, and a technical object must be created for human use. Both, however, form the cyberspace environment as the management system comprising artefacts and living things immersed in the network (Simondon 1958/1989).

       When, then, the boundaries between the notion of purposefulness and what is purpose without purpose become unsustainable, we have not only lost the beauty in contemporary art. It also drifted off its counterpole. Romanticism has established the leading aesthetic notion so strongly that Nietzsche already needed to shake it into the chaos of life’s living powers, where resides the god of darkness and unconscious, chaos and ecstasy, Dionysus, described as the figure of the darkness and madness. (Sloterdijk 1986). A machine of understanding cannot control the sublime, as in Kant’s concept of beauty. What was already known in German Romanticism by Schlegel and Novalis, and especially in the painting of Caspar David Friedrich, as a motif of the holy feeling goes beyond distinguishing the purpose of nature and art as a synthesis of the subject and object. It is best to call it using a German term that could be almost untranslatable into other languages. It was used by Schelling and then, in the 20th century, by Freud and Heidegger’s Unheimlichkeit. We can translate it with obscurity,  ambiguity,  strangeness, and  monstrousness, which causes unforgettable fear and admiration. It is not about something as an ontic object or Being in the world. What’s more interesting is that there is no point in the theories nor any particular fears or lies that have a source in the subject matter of the world. What makes Unheimlichkeit familiar comes from an anonymous Being. The thing of that holly experience might be indescribable and untold. It can, therefore, be said that what should create the feeling of an unusual inconsistency in humans in front of the mystery of the infinite should be the origin of aesthetics beyond nature and art.

       If we reduce our sense of self-existence to the religious event of faith in God, who transcends the phenomenon in the world, then such an interpretation seems like a journey on a one-way street. Unheimlichkeit goes beyond the notion of religious experience. The reason we can trace this is because belief in the transcendence of God must witness the sacrifice. Without it, the art remains empty. In artistic displays, pictures that address Christ in the crucifixion are often regarded as the best examples of the sublime in the history of painting. But it is not just about Christ and his sacrifice for the salvation of humanity. We have already said that in the essence of the metaphysical language of art, no word could adequately show us what is being done right there. Except, of course, when referring to something happening beyond the subject and object. The sublime, therefore, cannot be experienced as an object for any subject.  That might be sublime only by the openness of the ability to leave the false mind and body and break into the ecstatic body of life itself. What derived from the power of uprightness emerged as the beginning (arché) of Western metaphysics. Therefore, in between the mind and body, as well as in the upcoming period formerly entitled the mystery of the infinite by von Hofmannsthal, we cannot recognise anything other than the open sky without a horizon (Lipperheide 1999).

       As mentioned, aesthetics emerges as an independent philosophical discipline from the growing spiritual need to understand beautiful art. However, the emergence of meanings and what Schelling, in his philosophy of art, called un-founded or abyss  (Ab-grund) positively saturated the achievements of discipline. Namely, aesthetics did not lead to the discovery of the beautiful world in the time of rationality, science, and technology. According to Baumgarten’s definition of its topic, it is cognition sensitive or science about the sensitive appearance of beauty. Everything should be clear in advance. Beauty must fall into the domain of the concept. It must, therefore, become an idea or, in turn, bring down the decoration and ornamentation of nature as an artistic work in its purposeful ability. However, what is brave in constituting aesthetics might turn the concept’s activity into the idea’s development. It was clear to Hegel when, in his lectures dedicated to the history of aesthetics, he endeavoured to perform the sublime from something that, in its Greek origins, from Plato and Aristotle to the Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism of medieval theology, presupposes the existence of art-religion  (Kunstreligion). What could the relevance of this concept be? Hegel developed it guided by the era of Greek plastic art, sculpture, and architecture because it shaped the common being of people in the polis.

       It seems pretty appropriate for our purpose to apply the interpretation of Hans-Georg Gadamer from his discussion in  The Poetry and Mimesis from 1972, which refers to the Greek world of gods and the anthropomorphic representation of the divine through similarity to human appearance. But what art-religion seems to be for Hegel is an elusive historical experience of the occurrence of ideas, according to Gadamer, which could mean it’s bringing in daily life. It has been marked by the eternal present (nunc stans). So, that is how art can have an account of the assemblage of the divine and the profane community simultaneously. Consequently, politics does not serve some passive goal; it only serves the survival of the people in the light of their freedom as the truth of Being.  Art-religion refers to freedom as the most outstanding achievement of knowledge and skill devoted to something infinite, surpassing the human and enabling its existence (Gadamer 1993, 80). Regardless, the sublime is not represented as the monster of some unknown and demonic power that has ruled the entire history of humanity. In that sense, von Hofmannsthal’s description of meeting with Greek statues brings to light something very familiar. However, it is too late to address the final message of the mysterious encounter. However, such a description shows the same reach as any revival of what disappeared in the past and no longer belongs to the present.

       So that beauty as a sensible shining idea can enter the open world without art and religion supporting the pillars of its existence, the modern age must confront itself with aporias of its deconstruction. Thus, the autonomy of the artwork from which the mythical-religious enchantment of the world has disappeared turns over into its essence and tries to re-create the new God on a completely different ground. All that witnesses more evidence of the secret relationship between Romanticism and the historical avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century. We know the consequences of that astonishing self-procreation of the gods during the times of historical avant-garde movements. The totalitarian spectacles of fascism, Nazism and Stalinism testified to the pseudo-synthesis of ideas created in the age of Romanticism that Richard Wagner brought to the new cult of national heroism. It is about the concept of a total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) as a synthesis of beautiful art and the political ideology of the total state. Hitler’s Nazi-Kunst and Stalin’s Proletkult had almost the same intervention in cultural politics but different ways of forming a new society/community, starting with the aesthetic concept of eternal beauty.

       The idea of beauty experienced its second symbolic death, using a concept from Lacan’s psychoanalysis in totalitarian experiments. Every attempt to revive it from the ashes of Auschwitz and the frozen territory of Kolyma must count on the fact that new things cannot emerge without traumatic memories inscribed to the end of history (Adam 1992; Groys 2008). The twilight of the gods becomes an excuse for the revolutionary action substitution strategy. One encompasses the aestheticisation of politics (fascism-Nazism), and the other involves the politicisation of art (Stalin’s model of communism). In this context, we will omit the appearance of the kitsch as bad taste. The reason is that both concepts, tastes, and kitsch are just binary oppositions of something from which they are generated. It might be, of course, the aesthetic experience materialising twofold in art objects:

(a) as the sketch of original authenticity and

(b) as the imitation of nature in the naturalistic meaning of the main style in the late 19th century.

After the tastes of the historical avant-garde and the style that made it irrelevant to the aesthetic creation of new revolutionary art, it remains to conceal and imitate the result of social or technical construction. This is nothing but reality in the form of the aesthetic design of the world.

       It was built according to the model of hyperrealism. This style is precisely in the neo-avant-garde art dating from the 1960s to the 1970s. Its relics today are only effective in the figuration of the incomparable expressiveness of the human body in the mirror of the narcissism of the society of the spectacle (Jimenez 2005, 102, 113). The experimental nature of reality is sufficient to stretch like dough, from which one can concoct what Pop Art by Andy Warhol is doing and what has been going on in various ways since the 1990s right up to contemporary art with attempts at the return of the real and realism in the digital age (Foster 1996). When we consider that the disappearance of nature and, accordingly, the purpose of its idea as a model for classical art and aesthetics from the 18th century to Romanticism has deeply shaken the whole metaphysics of feelings and experiences, it is pretty sure that the ideal of beauty and norms of reality as aestheticisation today can be understood precisely as a replacement of the rule of mimesis and representation of the image related to its accomplishment in everyday life. For that reason, capturing reality seems like a troublesome attempt to overcome the cruelty of its transparency in what is left of the history of aesthetics. None of that is actually at work in contemporary art, though it seems to be in its very extreme form.

       I’m afraid I, therefore, have to disagree with the exceptionally stimulating analysis by Mario Perniola, an Italian theoretician of visuality and the philosophy of art. In his influential book Art and its Shadow, he claims that realistic art becomes an uncanny and traumatic experience, based on Lacan’s thesis, which encompasses the entire practice of contemporary art at the end of the 20th century (Perniola 2004, 25). Perniola’s philosophical intention deals with the problem of contemporary art from the 1960s. It shows that neo-Dada incorporated in Pop Art until the end of the 20th century is reduced to the calculation of the resurrected term reality . Similarly, Hal Foster attempted to establish the return of the real  after experiencing trans-vanguardism and postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s. The difference between these two approaches might be described as follows: Foster does not perform the Real concerning Lacan s theory but constantly points out the nexus of conceptual art after Warhol with film and performative actions directed at the transparency of the  living , what is happening in  real life  as a document of its scattering dynamism and ecstasy. Perniola, on the contrary, starts from the premise of philosophical aesthetics with its key notions of beauty and the sublime. With inventive use of the concepts, he concludes that art of the modern age, in close connection to science and technology, when aesthetics also emerged, gets a new framework or matrix of thinking and action. And following Heidegger s concept of Gestell (enframing), he calls it the  shadow  that falls into anything art has taken as the production and creation of a new world.

       The next step in his analysis seems extremely interesting and, of course, translucent. The connection of Heidegger and Lacan in considerations of contemporary art seems by no means very paradoxical. But it is no longer shocking. Therefore, if the sublime dating from Romanticism reminds us of the uncanny experience and alienation  (Unheimlichkeit), then the avant-garde, in the break with the metaphysical tradition of art, attacks the idea of beauty. Nevertheless, it did not leave it almost intact but slightly altered. Perniola is considering the rituals of ecstatic beauty not as an intervention to prevent a body from collapsing to techno-utopia, such as in the experiences of the French artist Orlan or the Australian cybernetic performer Stelarc, but the negative side of the sublime for which Lyotard no longer sees a place in The Differend between the mind and sensitivity. Instead, the notion of reality is soaked with the sacred irony of body transgression in the interface with the machine. What can be said about that?

       The shadows of contemporary art as a frame or matrix, determined by its transformation, pass through the change of the body, which, in this conflict with society, politics, ideology, aesthetics and religion, takes place paradoxically in the account of the art with the traumatic experience of the  Real. For Lacan, as is well known, the triad imaginary-symbolic-real represents the most challenging problem because it cannot be derived from language (logos, consciousness). The subversion of the subject s order has been created by language as an unconscious articulation in the collision with the  id  (or the Freudian  super-ego), which even allows communication between the subjects to be scheduled. That is the reason why it relates to the image of what Freud and Heidegger called Unheimlichkeit.

       What, ultimately, is happening then? Heidegger, as well as Lacan, are entering the grey zone of  shadows . Contemporary art no longer displays anything or represents anything. Instead, according to Perniola, everything is in the midst of the traumatic experience of the sublime. Therefore, searching for the meaning of language becomes the experiment of living thinking. Walter Benjamin’s statement about  the sex appeal of the inorganic implies precisely what was previously emphasised. In short, the realism of contemporary art by the end of the 20th century represented the sovereign rule of the world of art, although, nonetheless, this cannot be proof of the contradiction of the notion of supremacy. The reason lies in the fact that art has become a line that virtually connects to the network of extremely obscured objects. Any other symbolic meaning than physical appearance in the state of shock and provocation for the environment of their task is being reduced to chaos. It might not be surprising, therefore, that sexuality, not eroticism or hedonism, occupies the key position in this setting of the probability of the realisation of reality. Reality itself, at last, without the key supporting aesthetics that legitimised art in its foundation from the beginning, has lost its credibility.

       Why should any  return of the real, or, indeed, a return of the real ecstasy in extreme forms of discovery of the body of life itself since Nietzsche, refuse to confirm its application to the art? When we say  modern art , we might first of all mean the experiences of the 20th century that extend to nowadays (Agamben 2010, 21 35). The movements of historical avant-garde in its former main idea of modern art such as the autonomy of the work led to the realisation of complete abolition. Instead of the self-employed function of the work as an object that combines imagination and the symbolic order of language-image in history, with the avant-garde at the centre, the concept of the sovereignty of the event has arisen. It has become clear that contemporary art is oscillating between these two concepts, as the debate about the modern and postmodern from this horizon is equally missed. Both are parts of the same assemblage. Therefore, its autonomy and sovereignty, sublime and abjection, newness and recovery, progress and decline, are nothing more than an aesthetic phenomenon of the scientific and technical production of  real as a traumatic experience of art in a request for a change of life. The distinction between modern and postmodern would not be so important if things moved in a sociological direction. In this case, it is a dead straight line of aesthetics in the 20th century that goes through Jos  Ortega y Gasset via Arnold Gehlen to Pierre Bourdieu and Yves Michaud. Two main aesthetic theories thus outline the  spirit of the time  and its essential features, such as Adorno s and Lyotard s thinking of art. Therefore, Perniola, in his conjunction with Heidegger and Lacan for an explanation of current phenomena and tendencies in contemporary art, necessarily had to come to what in the other discourse the German philosopher of art and aesthetician Wolfgang Welsch called the process of aestheticisation (Welsch 1996, 9-61). If it is always self-contained and inaccessible, it cannot be psychoanalytically determined either as negative or positive in terms of the disposition of things. Rankings are real in themselves and break up as soon as we realise that their way of Being is the alike thing in itself (Ding-an-sich) or as absolute in which the same subject and substance. The Real, indeed, cannot be derived from its occurrences. So, the contemporary art world is a mere representation or commentary of what is  going on, as Gehlen once critiqued, that matters by introducing the notion of posthistory as a mixture of eclectic and synthetic styles.

       Instead, and in contrast to Perniola s intentions, it should be shown that what is still maintained by the contemporary art of life is not a critical milestone towards the society of the spectacle, a Pop Art attitude of subversion by accepting the form of capitalism and consumerism, and not theoretical criticism of the very  society of the spectacle  as the ideology of the pictorial representation of the gap of Being. These are two quite different versions of the same problem. From Duchamp s perspective, art must be both the witness of its own time and the anticipation of the future. If Duchamp himself decided to use aesthetic objects instead of painting, playing chess and doing nothing else, then that decision had something heroic and sacrificed in a secularised form of resignation. Conceptual art, which follows the end of painting as an idea beyond the boundaries of language, is closed in its principles of openness to all possible forms of change (Albero and Stimson 1999). The action does not leave visible traces of events without media, such as photography and film. Such an obsession with the discovery that the  real  one has in itself the suppressed dimensions of cruelty and frustration does not arise from the immediate pursuit of the very phenomenon of the world, such as terror and wars in today s media-constructed world. That was the focal point, which Virilio noted in his exhibition named  Ce qui arrive , which dealt with the media representation of terror and catastrophe in the globally connected world (Virilio 2005). The sublime denotes a traumatic zone of realism at the time of the disappearance of the gap with what is happening, and the observer loses the reason for its survival without the constant enlargement and overcoming of the measure. None of this is any more subversive in contemporary art and even experiments with posthuman bodies in the state of robotisation. Therefore, the problem is that it might be realistic in  Being  the aesthetic trauma of an event that happens to calculate, plan and construct what exists at the very heart of  reality  and its permanent transformation.

2. In the Kingdom of The Big Third

An ancient Chinese saying states that anyone who wants to buy a cat needs to buy its tail too. Well, if we want to dispose of the notion of the Heideggerian-Lacanian perspective, which denotes in itself a strikingly postmodern yet incompatible blend, we must address the request for a symbolic form of the real predetermined tail. It is not an addendum or a substitute for the twofold concept the trauma and interaction with the Other   but rather a totality made up of several assemblies of essentially altered aesthetic concepts. It could therefore be true that the traumatic interaction of the subject with the Big Other is a sign of facing the monstrous trace of the indomitable and unenforceable. What we are experiencing in the  Real  is not our illusion of a  real  but a clear look at an empty one. Yes, that is an emptiness that pervades us with anxiety. Because the postmodern artificial artwork is no longer faced with its own twofold   the autonomy of the work and the sovereignty of the event   with some phantom flattering the essence of God and its doubles. Instead of the plane of transcendence, there is a problem in the multitude of unplanned immanences, to paraphrase the fundamental notion of Deleuze s ontology of becoming. The Real does not appear only as a traumatic interaction with the Other. On the contrary, it might be constructed and arranged just as in Lacan s theory and his parody of Hegel s dialectics: imaginary (I)   symbolic (S)   Real (R) (Lacan 1977). From nature or the unconscious to culture or the consciousness of the necessity of law to the traumas of the entry-into-the-world as a monstrous area of transformation of Being so the entire history of mankind has been shaped. Or, to put it in other words, the third order of art after the classical and romantic epochs may just be an appropriate technique for the act of enframing (Gestell). That order is represented by the aesthetic configuration of the technosphere. It, in turn, functions as an autopoietic system for transferring information in the virtual space and in real-time. What else is left of the uncanny, the Real? Nothing but a clear sign of no other significance except the production-creation-construction of the new by the logic of aesthetic thinking. And that means getting rid of any apotheosis of the real. The reason is that we do not have the most realistic reality of the world, with all its extreme  realism  in performance art, installation and conceptual art, and cannot reach the  mystery of the infinite  without the help of the technosphere in the synthesis of technoscience and techno-arts. So, the living body is represented as the remaining territory of the sublime after the end of metaphysics in the avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century. It is not unusual to emphasise that Dadaism, in this respect, should have to open a vision of the future with far-reaching consequences for the construction of reality.

       The outlines of this essential notion of aesthetics that survive and the age of indifference to beauty can be noticed in a book that deliberately examines the problem of body and technology relationships from the perspective of posthumanism as the object of vision. Matthew Biro, namely, showed that the discovery of the Berlin Dada was a prototype of cybernetics and its fiction-reality, like the figure of the cyborg. The body is no longer understood by the natural continuation of human anatomy in the sense of anthropological media theory. The first intervention of Dadaism was already decisive for what would be the main proliferation of contemporary art in the 21st century. It might no longer be a matter of politics or religion in terms of substitute references instead of missing concepts of aesthetics. Since the concept of nature in the 20th century after quantum theory and Einstein, as well the new fractures of space-universe equations and the universal relativity theory, lost the mystical plane of divine transcendence, which has been replaced by multiperspective principles of the decentralised subject, the body can no longer be understood essentially as the substance in eternity. So, it should be proclaimed in technical dispositions of the construction of what goes beyond the difference between animals and humans in the relationship with the  Big Third. The body as a machine now becomes a machine of the new life that differs from this life  here  and  now  by being experimental and substitute. And in this condition, that is no longer a pure reproduction of the original because the whole adventure of contemporary art takes place at the time of the new media. The cyborg, which was born in Berlin s Dadaism, according to Biro, possesses the main features of that time: hybridity, primitivism, and identity (Biro 2009, 10).

       What is so crazy about that Chinese proverb about buying a cat along with its tail? Let us recall Hegel and his absolute irony, rather than any  weak opinion  of Kierkegaard, who  haunted  Hegel s metaphysics with the growth of the grandeur of the philosophical gigantomachy. At one point in the lectures of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts), Hegel explains the difference between the organism as a function of the totality of the body and the organism as a body itself (Hegel 2004). Looking from the bottom, the organs are self-contained, each having its function in the body, but cannot be isolated because the body is a totality that is clear to God and a marvellous creature. In punishing a criminal who killed a man for the sake of greed, the legal order of the state would amount to the severity of the crime and the manner of the perpetration of the act of punishment. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; it sounds so biblical. For example, a criminal deprived of righteous punishment would have his hands or head cut off if the murder was executed in such a cruel way. Hegel s argument against the  ethical life  (Sittllichkeit) of pre-modern tribal communities and their misappropriation of the principle of equality is the modern principle of total human dignity in the sense of its spiritual-mental structure that manages the body. But not like a patchwork of organs without which it is not possible to live alongside their substitution. It is about the whole. From it, the organism is carried out as part of the inside of the spiritual assemblage. The body, therefore, in the modern age, signifies the progress in the body s consciousness. And that means that its spiritual unity determines a condition for its physical ability (Leiblichkeit).

       In Corpus, Jean-Luc Nancy reversed the Hegelian matrix of body thinking and established an aesthetic view of the physicality of the singularity of the event as the contingency of the body that we are encountering. This reversal might not be the sacrifice of the whole on behalf of the new fragmentation of individuality as a principle. On the contrary, the body is a complex body of living humans. Therefore, in the human spiritual environment, it should be manifested by the authentic eccentricity of the subject (Nancy 2000). To think of the body as an uncanny zone of differentiation concerning the organism and the causal-teleological matrix in humans means to think from the wholeness of the whole. But the whole encompasses a living organism in its  mystery of the infinite . Approaches to the body in contemporary art from the end of the 20th century until the present have been determined by the ruling of the hidden origin of aesthetics as a cognitive or epistemic way of telling (language) and displaying (image) everything that might be unutterable and unshowable. Note that we did not use Lyotard s famous phrase  presenting the unpresentable  in that context. The reason lies in something that is deeply derived from the notion of art as an imitation (mimesis) of nature and inevitably carries a trace of the metaphors of wise understanding of the world. Instead, irresistibly and unenforceably, we have to point to the very image of  things  that is no longer seen if the process of techno-scientific visualisation progresses straightway, as shown by laser technologies and other optical  miracles  penetrating beyond the limits of visibility entirely (Boehm 2007; Mersch 2015).

       The  craziness of the Chinese parable, in our case, is precisely in the fact that the cat might be independent of the tail and tail of the cat; the cat can now be bought with a tiger’s tail, a tiger with a lion s tail, and so on to the bad infinite. We did not buy a cat in a sack because we live in the era of hybrid circuits and the connection of the incompatible. The lesson should be pretty clear to anyone. What was impossible in the time of Classical and Romantic art, although latent in their vision of the sublime century and without foundation, has now become very much possible. Even so, it seems familiar that the identity of a cyborg-doll in the Dadaist era, which Biro speaks of, is precisely the hybrid primitivism of its duplicate doubles. There are interesting attempts to form the history of this discomfort with the emergence of ethics and its change in the epistemic thinking of the technosphere by solving the return of something that has already passed, so it might be thought that it can be revived. Forget about those naive illusions. Aesthetics without the Unheimlichkeit machine cannot reach the Real. For that reason, it would be misleading to circulate the surface and absorb the depth of time if the surface has become smooth and opaque if it encompasses the non-surface of all things.

       From the very beginning, the career of the sublime in the art of painting and sculpture, architecture and new media can be understood as the thing beyond the mind and rationalist grid of language. If we observe that strange and uncanny assemblage of ideas at the very essence of aesthetics of modern art, which extends to the character of the historical avant-garde and the current forms of contemporary art in performance, installation and conceptualism as synesthesia of language and images in the cybernetic body of the technosphere, we will enter into the dark kingdom where the sovereign rule is represented by Dionysian destruction in all directions and with all conceivable performative strategies. It is a proper name for what is beyond Being or an absolute nuisance principle of dissolving the subject’s idea in the symbolic order of language power.  The One, where the Unheimlichkeit machine dwells in its creative-destructive transformation of the eternal chain of Being, is determined by the topology of frenzy. With it begins a cut with a straight-line idea of history. In the different versions of modern thinking, for example, by Antonin Artaud and Pierre Klossowski, it might be named greatness in the tyranny of newness. What we speak about in the history of art is always there. Visuality, however, is derived only from the reverse perspective.  The transgression of the boundary between the mind and the body determines that. The border passes through the pictorial language of very different meanings from the sublime narrative of the beauty of contemplation and the pleasure in the work purified of all life forms, crystal clear shadow without shadow and the matrix of the technical apparatus of power.

       The sublime cannot be shown without an uncanny trauma in the real that we call the sickness of madness or frenzy. It is not, therefore, a sick body in the classical metaphysical determination of the difference between the mind and the transverse substance. What is involved with the illness represents the very mind or epistemic-cognitive organ, a matrix of life on Earth without which there is no philosophy, religion or art. The body does not suffer. It suffers quite differently because it feels the mental vibrations between heaven and earth, immortals and mortals. Only the spirit as a whole body and soul, if we are still talking in the manner of the metaphysical categories of the mind, may be able to do some things quite frenetically when, hovering and plunging, it goes below the real because it encompasses the matrix of computing, planning and construction. Art means the emergence of aesthetics and its notion of greatness as sublime (das Erhabene) in a permanent state of transition from one state of consciousness to another, from the cognitive gaps in epistemic madness, from the reign of abstraction to the power of concretisation.  That is not expressed and shows nothing other than in the language picture of the event. And the event itself, as Hugo von Hofmannsthal said, poetically imitates the mystery of the infinite. To reach the path of openness to art in the age of the technosphere, we must separate the work from the event, divide autonomy from sovereignty, and, finally, linguistically demonstrate the irreducible and unbearable while, however, going beyond the rational foundation of the aesthetical construction of the real . Is it still possible, and does it help our efforts to free modern art from its fall into the vanity of banality, triviality and everyday boredom?

       Let us not forget that in modern philosophy since Heidegger’s fundamental book Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), published in 1927, when it was not such a topic of reflection as it would become during the 1930s, art has seemed to be fatal and, at the same time, undeniably decisive for the existential project of humanity. Heidegger reveals in time the primordial dimension of the future. For human existence, it belongs to the structure of care (Sorge) and Being-to-death (Sein-zum-Tode). What might be most significant here is the sharp separation of the authenticity of the existence of humans (Dasein) as self-contained individuals in the community versus vulgar living in the everyday life of mass society ruled by the ontologically meaningless the They  (das Man) (Heidegger 1976). How could such authentic authenticity be possible if not in the form of a sovereign decision by a single individual to contradict the logic of the technical power? Might that and such existence necessarily be the same as what it should be in its astonishment, impossible to the massive indifference of immersion in the everyday Being of things such as the banality of sensitivity, the triviality of the experience of the outside world and ultimately, the profound boredom (tiefe Langeweile)? Heidegger exhausted the latter to differentiate the human world from the animal world in the lectures he held in 1929/1930 entitled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World-Finitude-Solitude (Der Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit) (Heidegger 1983). The authenticity of existence in the face of the vulgarity of belonging to the machine of mass society requires a reversal of the understanding of the role of art as an autonomous artwork. Nothing is more monstrous than art, and artists attribute what appears to be a feature of existence in the form of function and means for some other purpose. The only things and objects of mass industrial production must have a form of ready-made aesthetic objects, which Marcel Duchamp transformed into new relics of a technological civilisation of consumption. The danger comes when humans, in their freedom and existential abstraction of the open possibilities of the world, fall into the gears of what Heidegger initially termed machination (Machenschaft) and later signified with the crucial concept of his thinking enframing (Gestell). The repression of the reign of planetary technology represents the difficulty in finding the right word for second beginnings. Therefore, Being has been transformed into raw material for the production of information, and humans will lose their substance. After that, the difference between humans and nonhumans becomes pretty unclear. The problem of contemporary art in that light might be the search for the authentic existence of art and artists in the reign of an inexhaustible machine of the technosphere. But could madness be the available path to freedom beyond aesthetics as a computing-planning construction of the uncanny world?

3. Objectlessness without an object

The turnaround in the founding of aesthetics came thanks to Schelling’s thinking. His intercession of the renewal of art-religion as a condition of opportunity for art to give up to the time of the present, the shining of the beauty of the idea itself becomes crucial to the failures of the future. Unlike Hegel, he did not ascribe the end of art to the disappearance of the highest spiritual need for it in the era of absolute science. Instead, he opened up the possibility of having the paradoxical sentiments of the philosophy of art: to simultaneously open and close the possibilities of what is contemporary from itself, from the displacement to the vulgar dimension of the ecstasy of temporality as the actuality of the present, and to release the artist space, for it emerges with the idea of the primordial event of what both art and philosophy essentially have surpassed. The interpretations of its turn are indeed complex and varied in contemporary philosophy. However, what Heidegger left in his lectures for our purpose seems to be of far-reaching importance. By analysing the notion of freedom in Schelling and thereby indirectly the fate of thinking of all German idealism, Heidegger has opened the space for art through Schelling with the thesis that there are no longer any fixed foundations or even a metaphysical understanding of God in an ontological sense as perseverance and eternity, the invincibility of the first initiator, the first cause, and the sole purpose of Being as such (arch ). Instead of this metaphysical tyranny,  for Schelling but not for Hegel, the time of un-foundation and contingency in the very event of art that draws the gods from themselves in the preparatory thinking of the second beginnings has come. Therefore, Heidegger’s Schelling could be represented as someone who introduced all the basic concepts and categories, and thus the otherwise perceived sublime, into contemporary thinking. It no longer lurks out of the object or subject but has opened itself as the frenzy of openness, as the mystery of the thing itself (das Ding selbst). Why is it so mad to be something that makes sense and is corporeal but is not reduced to the soul and its manifestations in the world? Any rationalisation of Being might radically counteract an acceptable response. The Logos is not apophantic but concealed behind a secular or occult knowledge of the thing (mantiké episteme). We will see how it should be incorporated into the thoughts and creative experiments of contemporary artists who long ago left a modern myth about the fragmentation of reality and the acting of functions in the totality of the organism. The romantic notion of art is alive and does not justify it anymore today as long as there exists a desire for genius and total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk). But art without the living God cannot reverse the metaphysics in other directions that would have been irreversible, thereby emancipating the idea of the mystery of the infinite.

       Summarised, instead of the system and method of history, with Schelling, we witness the last Messianic call that comes from the immortal past. Thus, art becomes the destiny of philosophy and freedom through the existential project of humans as artists. It is already falling below the level of time. Schelling is not a hidden founder of postmodernism, as Wolfgang Welsch effectively tried to perceive in his commentary on the aesthetic change of metaphysics from romanticism to the 20th century (Welsch 2012, 25). This thought allows infinity, freedom and existence to be assembled similarly. Indeed, we must start from the fact that nothing else holds them together except art. Like the poet Arthur Rimbaud in A Season in Hell (Une saison en enfer), only art greedily awaits a God . What should be saved here? Art with philosophy or philosophy using art? The latter might be the case, but art as an instrument of philosophy takes quite a different function, unlike how it usually appears.

       The place within which the frenzy reveals the rational core of tradition is nothing fixed and persistent. Just like infinity, freedom and existence, it should be dislocated worldwide. That is why it is derived from something beyond the human and organic. It permeates life by focusing on the inexperienced, almost fictitiously objectified elements in sacral things as objects of religious worship. Existence and the uncanny determine the topology of the sublime. With this comes the proper term without purpose whereby aesthetics is precisely defined not as what appears as the sensible shining of the idea but as the thing itself (to autó, das Ding, Tycho, automaton) in its self-development. Surprisingness does not come from the consciousness of a human who has become obsessed with the illness of the soul, as it does with psychoses ranging from neurasthenia to schizophrenia. It should be clear that rationality is not represented as a living mind in its highest reach of absolute knowledge. Therefore, the real problem arises when it is alive and transformed into a machine that calculates, plans and constructs artificial life, as in the techno-scientific production of artificial intelligence.

       If frenzy is not a thing of the so-called disturbing consciousness or disease that we ordinarily call madness, what then? The source or place from which the frenzy becomes the air we breathe in all areas of modern art and its calculations with the aesthetics of work and events can be nothing but the transformation of the body from the soul-spiritual constitution of humans into the construction of things/creatures in the posthuman condition. Indeed, we cannot assume the marvellous human body in the state of extravagant reality to be the only actual reality, for it would be a metaphorical and visually epistemic definition of ideology. Quite the contrary, the mark of astonishment assumes a hypertrophy of madness. And it cannot be controlled by psychoanalytic exercises of drive from the unconscious (language) to the symbolic creation of the real as the place of absolute consciousness, which Sigmund Freud determined with a remarkable saying:  Where id was, ego shall be  (Wo Es war, soll Ich werden). Instead of that psycho-enlightenment, there is something uncanny in the act. Heidegger spent the end of his life dealing with the art and painting of Paul Klee as a counter-movement in the advancement of planetary technology and wrote that the essence of the technique becomes frenzy without consolation  (trostlosen Raserei) (Paić  2021, 86).

       The source of such an anomaly, which has an autopoietic character and is not a thing of a logically articulated language as a means of communication, lies in the unprecedented event in the history of Western metaphysics. That event cannot be limited to its scope of action but must be extended to the whole world in the planetary technology mobilisation. In essence, those who want to talk about aesthetics as the epistemology of sensitivity in observing the real must not forget that its origin is not derived from the idea of beauty. Instead of a peaceful contemplation that denotes classical art, the aesthetic experience of romanticism has, until the present, represented a sign of a reversal of the metaphysical scheme in which art has been determined since the arché. The essence of the technosphere is the event that shows the sublime in its indestructibility and unenforceability. Nothing other than frenzy without consolation might be a condition for the possibility of that mystery of the infinite that von Hofmannsthal has yet to catch in dreams. However, this condition is no longer found in the experience of a religious or even philosophically understood God. In its place has emerged the self-production of the technosphere. In the calculating, planning and construction of what might be neither nature nor culture, neither the imagination nor narrative nor symbolic, nor, of course, anything real, its closed circle of meanings has taken its place. We cannot use Lacan for that purpose anymore as the body of psychoanalysis for reliable access to things as technical artefacts. In other words, whoever wants to talk about the reign of planetary technology as a cybernetically oriented technosphere in life without the illusion of the endurance of Being and the appropriate consciousness, even in the state of the decentralised subject, must reject any dichotomy of substance and subtle consciousness and madness. Ultimately, one must admit that one knows nothing more about it. Robots, androids and cyborgs are not crazy. These are not rational beings who control their own emotions. However, in the further development of artificial intelligence and robotics, we could expect the construction of multifaceted creatures connected to the artificial brain embedded in the programme of collective artificial intuition. So, the only reality that might be real is generated from technical objects in a state of objectivity. They could serve the inversion of Artaud’s concept of pictograms as a subject (Derrida and Thèvenin 1998). This means that spiritual differences should be overcome.

       The difference that holds the chaotic order of the digital network entropy as objects of aesthetics of posthumanism/transhumanism comes from a completely different construction of their ontological status than in the metaphysics established by Plato until cybernetics. Contemporary art is, therefore, a reckoning of old solutions in a new cloak. However, its current production, which in its performance and theoretical reflection is still in the archives of the avant-garde, finds a warm water port in the notion of re-politicising the re-establishment of reality with social, political or other mystical strategies of its justification. The real problem of its sovereignty lies in the fact that it has reached the other side of the dark moon. It has dissolved in the closeness of an open structure. There is nothing more to it than the new aesthetics of the emergence and contingency of artificial life. The technosphere is, in fact, no rational technique or irrational possibility of transforming its power from a project into a projectile. All that became obsolete, just like the man who travels into infinity without a mystery as a useless companion in interstellar spacecraft. The frenzy represents the uncontrolled control of the object of madness as a reversed order of the subject. The subversion in the concept of aesthetics about which we are talking does not mean any rejection of beauty at the expense of sublimity nor, in turn, leaving aesthetic works in favour of the aesthetics of the event due to the insight that the body as a medium in contemporary art has become a performative event of shock and provocation for life itself in front of the unliving aesthetic object (ready-mades). What must be addressed in this consideration is that the process of transformation of the body of beauty to monstrous deformities, extreme performance in the society of the spectacle, and even the delirium of abjection in performance and film on networking digital media (urine, secretion, sperm, blood) might be nothing more than the result of the rule of the art of order as the pure objectivity of a technical object. We must say in advance that there is nothing more than a change of the signifier. For instance, to replace the apologia of the subject in Lacan and Neomarxism with the indescribable recognition of the object’s reign as the power disposition. In the contemporary ontologies of the new realism and materialistic objectivism with which humans are presented, as well as in Gnosticism, the mistake of a cruel God in creative evolution will be commonplace (Gray 2003).

       Let us return to the Dionysian madness of art at the time of the most significant visual reach of the historical avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century. The secret of the thing in its powerful performance of Unheimlichkeit is not hidden in the painting of improperness or aesthetics from which the object is derived (Malevich-Duchamp). Likewise, we will not find it in advanced art photography, for which the narrative of the scenes from so-called reality still has the power of the leading principle of aesthetic reality. Namely, photographs until the 1960s and the appearance of television were a mimic-representational practice of reality as a substitute for Bildungsroman. In them, the epic of telling family life is mixed with the poetics of melancholy and regret of the lost love object after death in the violent death of war or suicide. Nor is there an epic-poetic meta-referential text in which the civil style of art photography developed after the First World War in Europe and around the most powerful and prosperous West, as in the best theoretical picked up by Siegfried Kracauer. It does not represent reality. But it is inscribed on its real illusion of the perpetuation of dead objects from the exterior landscape of the modern city to the inner perspective of organising the social relationships of individuals behind drawn curtains. The productive melancholy of the golden age of Art Deco capitalism constructs photography. Hence, the spatial continuum of photography corresponds to the period of that time. Neohistoricism conquered the last oasis of human life from that period and transformed it into a pictorial play with scenes of an individual’s subjectivity (Kracauer 1995, 45). To be pictured in an inscribed space of history as a scene remarkable to civic drama becomes a responsibility of leaving a trace of identity, not the heart of decadent aristocracy in mass industrial society. The observer always represents photography as a sign of peaceful contemplation. Isn’t being cold and objective in observing the world beyond called an objective in the technical language of the image reproduction apparatus? This might be indirect proof that new media are objects of technical construction. In the cognitive-perceptive sense, they always work on the principles of extinguishing any intervention of the subject into nature and the world. The Native Americans believe that photographing denotes the act by which the human soul is taken away or appropriated from the person. So, they do not allow themselves to be photographed. Artaud had nothing else in mind in his radical attitude against the Western concept of art and metaphysics of the subject when he said that a primordial person (I am was stolen by the act of being born.

       The Dionysian art of experimental madness became the European silent film in the 1920s. The lack of technical performance and the inability to reproduce sound made these early avant-garde films a perfect motion-creating madness. At that time, the most remarkable career was in the form of avant-garde films reaching out to such works as Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dalí’s An Andalusian Dog (Un chien andalou, 1929) and the film made by Germain Dulac with a script by Antonin Artaud, The Seashell and the Clergyman (La coquille et le clergyman, 1928). It appears that these two films directly counterbalance the radical avant-garde with its two dominant directions in the Soviet and German cases: the politicisation of art in the historical-music spectacle, Sergey Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin, 1925), and the aestheticisation of politics in Leni Riefenstahl s documentary film Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935). Counterweight here should be understood as an attempt to realise the ideas of the movie but, against its function as political propaganda, ideology and spectacle related to the totalitarian system of power (Stalinist communism and Nazism), refocuses its goals on religious mysticism in art as the sovereignty of new events. Within the historical avant-garde, Berlin s Dadaism was probably a special case. The reason lies in the fact that the performance of the body in a public space expressly arrived on the scene for the first time. But, more importantly, the idea of Dadaism denotes the denial of the fundamental principles of the Soviet avant-garde concerning the question of the possibilities of changing society through the artistic turn of life.

       While An Andalusian Dog was a perfect example of the method and system of avant-garde art that reality is constructed like a surrealistic dream with the help of shock and provokes the viewer, in the case of The Seashell and the Clergyman, Deleuze’s assumption that the film represents a secular religion of modernity can be confirmed. Cinema replaces the theatre hall. However, it does so by perceiving the perceptual-social differences already recorded in the architecture of national theatres since the Renaissance. The beginning of new media in the 20th century with film and screening in the cinema hall marks the beginning of mass culture as a media production event. Moreover, the logic of (art) images in the creation of the event is shifted from the sanctity of holiness (temple, cathedral) to secular spaces of substitute holiness  (museums, galleries). The film represents the third order of this metaphysical substitution. Therefore, it is the best example of the end of the work’s aesthetics with its cult of originality and genius as a creator. With the film as the reproduction of the original and the cinema as a non-place of performance, because the projection spaces are temporary, not persistent or eternal like God’s houses, we have an awareness of the loss of aura and its substitution technical or mechanical reproducibility, as first discussed in the 20th century by Walter Benjamin. Moving images in the film takes place as a time and space gap between here and now. The film has never been and never will be the space-time continuum of the scene created by the installation because it does not rest in the past but has to turn to the bad infinite of actuality (Benjamin 1996).

       The second feature of films with the surrealist signature of the 1920s is directed at what we call the Unheimlichkeit machine. This includes a series of experiments with the actor’s body as a subject/actor of conflict with spooky representations, mysterious dreams, the flicker of the Other in the mirror, and the enchanting reality of moonlighting between heaven and earth. In general, shock and provocation belong to the practices of the deep body, from the human cut of the eye with the razor to the scalpel that slices the nipples. Shocking scenes directly provoke the observer’s observation system. From the beginning, the beauty of the quiet look in all the jets on the canvas shows an illusion. The movement of images, the cinematic mode of production of consciousness, presupposes the occurrence of cognitive-sensitive network sequences. They aim to create a collective catharsis in reversing the meaning of the concept of the sublime. Therefore, instead of politicising reality, the mystification of cinematic transcendence occurs at the heart of modern movie-making.

       With a superficial view, we can see that by the end of the 1920s, the paradigmatic films of surrealist artists, including Artaud, were permeated by the attempt to break the body into the illusion of film projection, replacing the monstrousness of the look of what in the tradition of modern aesthetics was indescribable and uninhabitable. Instead of the anger of the oppressed class who wants to come to power to radically change the social order, the body’s gesture does not refer to the political ideas of equality and justice, as was the case for Eisenstein, or to the ideas of the total state in the homogeneity of the nation, as was precisely performed by Riefenstahl. Bunuel and Dalí with An Andalusian Dog and Dulac and Artaud with The Seashell and the Clergyman join the encounter with the sublime in deconstructing the selfhood, the body and obscenities. Politics and ideology create art from the total power of painting as an ornament, if we may apply the terminology used by Kracauer. Conversely, religion and obscene require efforts from the eye to overcome their innocence. That is why the subjects/actors of these films in the ecstatic scene look just like Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous ecstatic statues. The pervasive power of their appearance in pathetic gestures appears on canvas projections as fanatical envy or astonishment. Anyone who has seen a view of Artaud in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc (La passion de Jeanne d Arc, 1928) saw pure religious ecstasy, madness, obsessive body, resolve and malediction. Note that Gilles Deleuze is almost photographically precise, but not from empirical experience, from the logic of the thing itself when he concluded there to be a significant difference in the acting of European and American actors and in the meanings of movement and time in European and American films.

       This was precisely the case in the 1920s with the so-called silent film. European films and their protagonists are theatre subjects/actors who strive to overcome the technical defect  of the film with an expressive gesture by constantly looking at the  undescribable and unpresentable, which drives the camera to heights and depths. Thus, dreams and admiration are not merely an artful immersion of the subject into their imaginary worlds but a result of the religious transcendence of the film as a secular theodicy in a moving image. Meanwhile, American films and their actors confer lively motion and immanence, and their movement might be expressed as  natural even when they produce situations so far away from any kind of spontaneity. Instead of God in the ecstasy of physical suffering, the parody and irony of elevation seem so realistic  if the reality itself looks more documentary. Thus, it is clear that the body, instead of being dramatically split and cut into parts to be served on the plates of protagonists and eaten, revives in pseudo-mythical beings incorporated with a massive frenzy of horror. Deleuze, therefore, understood the Bergsonian film as an image. It can be technically related to questions of the perception and realisation of the logic of events.

       There are two types of images ontologically responsive to the transformation of the body from the persistence of Being to becoming a difference: image-movement and image-time (Deleuze 1986). Did we come close to answering the question of the relationship of holiness, obscenity and transcendence with which An Andalusian Dog, The Seashell and the Clergyman were concerned? Of course, assuming that the underlying ideas of the films above are in the atheological attempt to deconstruct the body as a metaphysical rhythm of tabula rasa. There is no doubt that these films do not insult  beauty  nor kneeling on one s knees like Rimbaud in A Season in Hell. Their mission is much more complex than the mere activity of deconstructing Being and its metaphysical schematic classifications. We will gain nothing if we go into the boring ritual of reciting the so-called content of these movies. Although it might have been necessary to analyse films to trace the allegorical meaning of the cinematic image by the 1920s, and although we evidently cannot imagine a serious business of film criticism and even film theory without it, we will suggest something scandalous and assume that it could be possible from the understanding of the film as an event and to say, like Ludwig Wittgenstein, that the contemporary film is a  coloured and intense epoch  (Wittgenstein 1980).

4.  It, or on the technosphere as an art event

What does that mean? First of all, a picture that does not imitate reality as a source of astonishment but points to the meta-referential nature of the medium itself, which has its cause of survival in the technical way of disclosing the Being, is not a means of some phantom narrative. It does not talk about anything. Instead,  what  is happening here stems from the technical transformation of reality from nature to the disposition of artificial life as a culture. Let us add that this is about the mass culture of the industrial society of the reproduction of objects. Therefore, it should be clear from all the objects of that culture that relics are no longer stored in churches and cathedrals; artefacts of art from a distant past are exposed in museum chambers. A place to keep events from real life is essentially deployed from the sacred space to the spaces of intimate obscenity. The naked body becomes more than an aesthetic object. It is not surprising, therefore, that the secret history of pornography, from glamorous private parties to the transparency of sexuality without borders at the time of democratised digital culture, might be one that no longer inhabits the spiritual need for art but the cultural need for the total aesthetics of  sin .

       The picture in the cinematic form is not depicted and does not represent the obsessed man in the mass society of systematic madness. What is truly monstrous in this meta-referential turn from language to painting, and begins with two films of surrealistic poetics in the late 1920s, could be just such a surprise as the essence of the corporeality of contemporary art. Films that have, therefore, mystical-religious themes do not undermine the belief that the place of holiness establishes a cult of an exalted body in ecstasy, such as the performative version of Bernini s sculpture of the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. A true task of these films consists of adapting the cognitive-sensitive maps of a modern observer to the effect of derealisation. This must happen to be contemporary in the self-justifiability which justifies itself from the sovereignty of the events of the bodily inscription of suffering and pain as the greatest possible jouissance. The sublime does not come from the objective camera. Nor does it hide in the projection of the fascinating view of Artaud, who, in The Passion of Joan of Arc, plays the crazy monk who is confident that Joan of Arc represents pure embodied evil, which means she deserves to burn at the stake. Sublime in the form of frenzy comes from the objectility of the image as an event. That is what goes beyond any subjectivity of the film and, at the same time, every objectivity technique. Although the technique is the formal cause of the film s image, we can find what is lacking in its technical indifference in the dark chamber of the  soul (psyché). The exercises within the psycho-technology of life nowadays have become an outspoken image of contemporary art. It is reduced to  here  and space to  now  thanks to the advancement of the technosphere and the absolute visualisation of reality. In a nuanced analysis of this philosophical problem, Mario Perniola even discusses the possibilities of  visual philosophy  that will succeed in overcoming the correlations between language and the world of images, sounds, actions, and places. The best example of such a reflection on the possibilities of the total philosophical film beyond teaching and propaganda, as well as religion and mysticism, is found in Wim Wenders  film Lisbon Story (1994) (Perniola 2004, 34 35).

       If, then, the  thing  that is not calling into the human incorporation of holiness and intimacy is rooted in the spirit as logos (soul, mind, and language), what is left? As we have already said: the psycho-technology of life. When the spirit is  obsessed  with the systemic madness of rationalising a technically contingent world, the only sanctuary of freedom represents the escape to the dreams and its topology of frenzy. It has been deployed from the world into the spiritual underground. That place is called and connected in all European countries with something that is  mobile . What moves still possesses the features with which Aristotle defined a god in terms of the attributes of  the unmoved mover . Namely, it is not located anywhere and yet exists everywhere. The cinema (movie) is a place of projecting the film as a moving image. It might not be a series of novels, drama or poetry by other means, as it is not a  visual philosophy  in any form of a cognitive-perception matrix. Today’s numerous attempts to establish the philosophy of film as the ontology, epistemology or phenomenology of moving images should, therefore, be eliminated methodically. But no longer like Wittgenstein, who borrowed an expression from Husserl to show what the film is, but to protrude from any reconstruction of metaphysics in its visual cloak. There is only one reason for this. If metaphysics should be completed in cybernetics, as Heidegger has credibly demonstrated, then technique as reframing (Gestell) signified the last word of philosophy just before the emergence of the technosphere. No philosophies that operate with old schemes, even with a new language, can get exactly what the movie  is  if they do not realise that the event that allows the image of its character of visualization of the universe does not come from the eye of the observer but from the uncanny frenzy of the selfhood that allows body transformations and pleasure in this process of participation in becoming a difference. The soul is mad because it drives the body out of its way. Instead, the body in its life represents the habitat of the soul. With the disappearance of its irreducible quality, the whole psycho-technology of life ultimately ends in the aesthetic object of the creature/thing. The order of art that is right for this monstrous body transformation is the visualisation of absolute madness. No one has ever developed it to the ultimate limits of the sovereignty of the event at the time of the emergence of new media like Artaud (Barber 2001). Objectility without a soul (psyché) can only be the end of the possibility of the film s time as a constructed event and its transition to the emergence of inhumane technical existence. It was not just the vision of Dadaism, the projection of surrealism, and the constructivist plan of the historical avant-garde. It was also the inner consequence of the thing of philosophy and art since its realisation in life. Ernst Jünger describes this in Across the Line (Über die Linie, 1950) as follows:

The sense of art cannot ignore the world we live in   and this brings with it that it is less valuable. Spiritual overcoming and overcoming time will not be reflected in the fact that perfect machines will crown progress but that the epic of art will gain shape. It is repaired. However, the machine can never become an artwork, but the metaphysical driving force that raises the entire machine world can surely gain the highest meaning in the artwork and thereby bring peace to it. [ ] We are looking for mutations, the possibilities in which life in a new era should lead, become tolerable, perhaps even happy. The scientific experiment is dealing with issues with questions. We all know the unanswered answers it has given and which endanger represents the equilibrium of the world. It can only be reestablished by thinking that it receives answers from the spiritual cosmos that are even more prevalent than the material ones. (Jűnger 2014, 41 and 43)

Why should we talk about the psycho-technology of life within what exists in the context of Artaud s  concept  of the objectile called the state of objectility without an object? To arrive close to the open abyss within which the chaos of modern philosophy and art lies, and without which we cannot understand why the infinite, the freedom and the existential project in contemporary art events are more important than the fixed work for eternity. Just like in Honor  de Balzac s artistic masterpiece The Unknown Masterpiece (Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, 1831), it would first be necessary to sketch the relationship between language and image against the derived source of frenzy itself   the technosphere. It is easy to agree with J nger that the epoch of machines would have little more than the image of time for the sense of contemporary art unless it is realised in an epochal figure. We cannot agree, however, with the premise that the machine should not become an artwork because it lacks a metaphysical excitement for what is meant by the term  artwork .

       The entire flux of the 20th century is proof against J nger. It might not be necessary to line up the most significant projects of machine-as-artwork, from Fritz Lang s Metropolis (1927) to the mega computer HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The art of installation and conceptuality rests on this idea, as the concept of the machine no longer belongs to the mechanistic paradigm of the 18th century articulated in French materialism and the correlation between the body and mechanical apparatus. The machine in Deleuze s ontology of becoming is deployed from one territory to another, from one plateau to another. There is now no way of reducing it to the causal-teleological model of producing  new  as having been derived by Newton and Guttenberg. The machine signifies an autopoietic body. It can be driven by the imminence of desire. So, the idea of the machine could be defined as the vitalist-spiritual cosmos. Animals and humans were separated as physical and spiritual substances by René Descartes. Hence, the horizontality of the body as a machine might be now understood by the possibility of transforming life itself from  nature  to culture. Life is not just a gift of nature and gods. It could be understood as an uncanny sublime event that gathers areas of freedom and contingency. In that assemblage, we have to accomplish the control of already performed social processes as a cybernetic system governed by the rule of information. The system controls the environment, starting with the technical articulation of social relations. Therefore, the machine as a technical device does not fall into the technical one. The essence of the machine lies in its ability to undertake the self-organisation and self-production of life from the constellation of philosophy, art and science. In a world determined by the functioning of new technologies, the machine becomes a robust technical object.

       Finally, in their most important work entitled Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II (Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizopfrénie II), Gilles Deleuze and F lix Guattari carry out the fundamental premise that capitalism as a social order of the rule of abstract values is organised as an emerging machine of deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The additional credibility of the argument that avant-garde art is the sign of the paradoxical duplicity of the return of primordial chaos and direction towards the future has to be found in what the Unheimlichkeit machine contributed to the development of the form of artistic development. Since the body appears as a place of encounter of chaos and order, experience and the foregoing, then the sovereignty of sacrifice and devotion to perfection without the share of organic in a new context is closely related to what forms the indispensable relationship of animal (psyché) and technical (t chne). It is precisely  that  which is ordinarily called inhuman in posthumanist/transhumanist theories, and it relates to all information and life. The bio-cybernetical code of contemporary art lies in the concept of a digital image that does not exist in reality. In that framework, it is no longer possible to separate a picture from the emerging matrix of new virtual worlds. In this way, of course, the notion of the machine loses all metaphysical, inhuman  terms as such. Instead, it should now be conceptualised in the logic of the technosphere. As mentioned above, the technosphere itself emanates the meanings of the mystery of the infinite, not the event attributed to God, the Omega Point, or any other substitute of the onto-theological schema of metaphysics. The living machine no longer functions. Its mission might be to produce information and transform the conditions of communication. The synthetic  nature  of new media corresponds to the synthetic structure of complex forms of life, so it is quite understandable that the sciences that deal with the present condition can only be the ones that are integrated into this synthetic research assemblage of a multitude of worlds and their differences.

       Let us not forget that objectivity goes beyond the concept of an object such as the objectile undermining the power of a subject in contemporary philosophy and art. This was clear to Jacques Derrida when he undertook a detailed elaboration of Artaud’s case. It is impossible, however, to separate Artaud as an artist from Artaud s psycho-life. No doubt, he had schizophrenia. At a psychiatric clinic in Rodez, he was treated for a while by none other than Jacques Lacan. But it seems too flat if one orderly reduces the sublime as the Unheimlichkeit machine to schizophrenia in the history of contemporary art and philosophy. Breaking up and duplicating identity in an upright perspective, such as the ontology of Deleuze, requires a different understanding, and not only of schizophrenia as a subversion of the entire order of the subject in psychiatry and society. Moreover, this  illness  might be the key to understanding the abstract machine of capitalism in the digital age. The reason lies in the fact that modern times in thought and art do not take place in a single and homogeneous reflection. Instead of this approach, we are witnessing a multitude of outward-looking perspectives. It is like a chart that can be described as a structurally self-organising network in chaotic situations. Thus, schizophrenia is not just an illness of averted consciousness that cannot be taken as a traumatic core of life without its symbolic transformation into the imaginary.

       The psycho-technology of the life of the Other in global capitalism paradoxically assumes that the reality of schizophrenia is that awareness of this and such a reality should be necessarily duplicated. On the one hand, accepting reality as the symbolic power of the Law in the form of emergent networks culture signifies the continuation of everything productive since the aestheticisation of the object from Duchamp through Pop Art to post-conceptual art without a facility. On the other hand, the side of the critical overcoming of the real signifies confrontation with the dark side of consciousness, which, from the moment when the avant-garde is essentially the subversion and the turn towards the sovereignty of the physical event of freedom, strives to open the world through the transgression of its aesthetic construction. The only thing left in this struggle between integration and apocalypse is to overcome the binary oppositions of mind and body. With the radical sexuality of life itself, anything becomes fluid and apparent.

       In the case of Artaud, however, sexuality represents the abyss of the singularity of Being. This means his malediction in the world because every duplication as an act of  nature  has been determined at the same time by the act of sinfulness in the ontological meaning. Neither religion nor politics, neither ideology nor aesthetics can reach the centre of the uncanny madness that drives the Unheimlichkeit machine. In the analysis of the subjectile as a writing of Artaud s soul, his pictograph and pictogram, Derrida tries to disclose why his madness, even in the linguistic sense of the word, originates from the impossibility of meaning within the supreme signifier. If, in German, the word  madness  comes from what is not meaningful in the sense of the word Ohne-Sinn (senseless), then language is already metaphysically determined by its logical-rational foundation. We are obsessed with the beginning language (arché) as a language from which all of clarity s brightness is revealed. That was the intention of Descartes and his rationalism. But language as a subjectile indicates the  obsession  in quite another manner, just like the dispositive of power that does not let the language of metaphysics be its supreme law but searches for alternative routes out of the labyrinth of life itself.

       Derrida, thus, separates what belongs to the subject and what is an inscription of the event of the subjectile. This is not a mere negation of a subject and a drop in irrationality (Derrida 1998, 59 170). Without going into details in that subtle analysis of the image created by scripture as a new language and what it truly signified to Artaud in creative terms of communication, it might be sufficient to say that modern conceptual and post-conceptual art in close connection with the technosphere takes off in pictograms as a substitute for the idea. Art without works and its replacement with text, gesture and sound, moving the picture in experimental avant-garde films, focuses on something essentially different from the shock and provocation of the interactive public. This occurred a long time ago, and it finished forever. That is why some insightful aestheticians criticise contemporary art and assume that it only constantly attaches to the function of institutionalising the rebellion (Michaud 2011). What happened in the streets as a subversion of the black holes of the liberal-democratic order has now been re-politicised in museums. And what is called shock and provocation nowadays becomes a continuous media production event in the emptiness of reality. Without media enchantment, they would remain banal and trivial as well.

       However, in a very radical manner, we can say things and still be quite  shocking  and  provocative . By this time, art, however, has become redundant in the era of the technosphere because it produces works/events and places them alone within the biocybernetic machine of life as aesthetic objects without objects. Museums have become, therefore, quite obsolete institutions of art. The reason is that in the age of reproduction, a work of art can no longer have the status of a religious relic. Hence, such institutions are condemned to the retro-future of their un-foundation. Precisely, the museum represents the substitute institution of the sacral in the secular age. And that is why this does not fit the idea of the technosphere as the end of history (of art). Mega computers with increased memory today are the only real museums of contemporary art. Their place has been determined outside the real space-time continuum in the operative part of the artificial mind (AI). Since the essence of information technology is the essence of what is left of the idea of art in the event of interacting with interactive publicity   visual communication a possible scenario of the further musealisation of reality will probably be as follows: parallel development of the experimental architecture in the space of the  real  and the advancement of information technology, especially in the field of the visualisation of all remaining senses (sound, touch, cognition, tune); cities will be built on the edges of the desert; and their architecture will rise in the air like the fluid buildings created by Luc Besson in The Fifth Element (1997). Digital architecture, no doubt, corresponds to the extension of the posthuman body (Oxman and Oxman 2014). What Artaud wanted with his  pictorial writing  and the urge for freedom was nothing but what went beyond the closed body structure as a machine. Madness comes from the  mystery of the infinite. But freedom as a contingency and existence as a project still represents the last zones in support of contemporary art against the irresistible process of aestheticisation. Its aspiration has attempted to be universal. Transform everything into inhumanity! And do the same with the fetishistic character of the technosphere, which is so much more monstrous if it is aesthetically  prettier  than the artwork comprising its template. Is aesthetics, as cognitio sensitiva, more than the designing of the world?

       If design is perceived as the productive-creative-constructive essence of aesthetics from the new era to the contemporary art of events, it is clear that the whole problem of the  astonishment  of modern technology might be that it and its language have abandoned the pragmatics of knowledge and become epistemic strategies of life itself. The design does not beautify the surrounding world. The construction of a singular identity has been born from the aesthetic forms of life. Its function has become the very form of the emergence of the  new , so it is clear that the old categories of means and purposes, truths and illusions should be abandoned.  New  is obsolete at the moment of its emergence. Though it can formally be perpetuated in the illusion of infinity,  all eternity  in the virtual reality of its appearance, the problem is that it quickly expires what gives the  new  the appeal and power of aesthetic fantasy. It rejects the need for the new as a need for innovation and invention per se. Instead, it is about staging the need for enjoyment as a democratic right of everyone at the cost of the banality and triviality of the elevated object of pleasure. In Brett Easton Ellis novel American Psycho (1991) about a serial killer in Manhattan, a member of the oligarchic elite, psychopathology is focused on crime as an aesthetic fascination with flesh (corpus), not with the body, infinitely bored in the emptiness of the spectacle. It is therefore about the decline of victims and the pleasure of the metaphysics of capitalism of the sublime catharsis of the inhuman as such, not just a crazy individual with the sadistic desire to obey the Other. The psycho-technology of life with which contemporary art deals in its diverse biopolitical experiments ends with an autoimmune system of balance of order and chaos.

       What is lacking in life itself should not be a stoic exercise of existence, reconceptualised by Foucault and Deleuze in the impotence of advanced technology to discipline and control modern society. What is missing is exactly what Deleuze announced as the immediate future in his last and crucial text for the whole idea of the digital age entitled  Postscript on the societies of Control (Post-scriptum sur le sociètè  du controle ) (Deleuze 1992, 3 and 7). We no longer have the concept of society. Instead, network communications are replacing society. Many societal relations are intertwined with a series of post-industrial complex values. When society has become a social network, it can no longer turn in the direction of any utopia of upcoming times. Control should no longer be collective. Now, the techno-genesis might be addressed to anyone in the interaction request even when we stand in the fullness of the machine before such a machine of the inhuman. If there is no  society,  contemporary art emerges as a source of more solidarity and public commons. And behind its back and the last shelter of the museum s institution lies the  Big Third of global capitalism the corporation. Bitter cynicism for the enthusiasm that supports  it no longer concerns the transcendence or immanence of life itself that can only be a simulacrum of the already seen verse of multiplication to the  mystery of the infinite. Behind anything, there is only das Man or the spirit of the corporation. So, because contemporary art is a swiftly moving, autonomous and sovereign circle in the definitive chain of transformation, God is replenishing the rule of capital. In addition, since global neoliberal capitalism is determined as a sign of the speculative financial exchange of money from the accumulated surplus value of immaterial work, contemporary art as a visual construction of the real world becomes what gives the corporation an aesthetic appearance the pervasiveness of perfection.

       Why did shock and provocation become aesthetic means for the psycho-technology of life, not art’s substitutes for beauty and the sublime? The reason probably lies in the fact that it no longer fulfils the purpose of an autonomous artwork at the centre of the relations between creation and enjoyment. The destruction of works in the sovereign right to an emancipated body life requires other interaction methods between artists and the public. Sexuality and amusement are counterpoints to politics and ideology in the form of critical social participation in film. Hence, the gloomy body in corporate property, such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, might only be excessively and scandalous conditional. We must see that it represents a real problem that the aesthetics of a corporately defined global order become a sign of an uncanny synthesis of the creation and destruction of artificial reality. Therefore, the balance of chaos and order, as well as the mutual coexistence of politics and religion, ideology, and mystics of the posthuman body, has been articulated in its transformations.

       The corporate body cannot be, however, somewhere fixed on Earth. On the contrary, it has entered its voids and emptiness. Metaphorically speaking, what is  Nothing should not be like the real thing that only produces-creates-constructs as an emergent-contingent logic of the technosphere. All that arises in this process is null and void in its existence, as are the materials utilised in the art at the end of history. The synthetic period requires synthetic materials, digital strings and immaterial information. In his concept of mimesis, where he placed the essence of art, especially poetry, Plato assumed his association between harmony and the existence of Being as an idea (eidos). Every idea has its appearance and, at the same time, the materiality of its appearance. From this, things like a good idea, truth, justice and beauty shine or are seen.

       However, quite contrary to that, the digital era no longer has ideas or concepts, nor the materiality of that which could be measured with the majestic stone plinth and the architecture of the Parthenon in Athens. Nevertheless, it might be immersion in the immaturity of the technosphere, which means being exposed to the information. At the end of information history, it does not replace the substance with the substance. Instead, it calculates-creates-constructs things as aesthetic objects. In addition, it gives them the illusion of eternity in the circular motion of information. But the uncanny thing, the madness of the difference between mind and body, lies in a simultaneously cosmological-physical and media-informational problem of the highest ontological rank. Where do they come from, and where is the information shaping our media world going? The metaphysical origin of thought in that matter might be completely inverse. Source as the beginning (arché) and disappearance as the end of a circular process (eschaton-telos) annulled the cybernetic concept of feedback. The effect produces its cause. This means that the essence of information is not in its explosion as a projectile but in the implosion, such as how white holes swallow dark matter in the universe. Everything comes together and comes down to something else. The effect of the reduction of contemporary art stems from the impact of reducing technology. In the general simplicity of one other thing and the reciprocal autonomy of areas such as politics, religion, art, and culture, the complexity of life passes into modern times. Reducing assumes the freedom of the autonomous regions of human activity, the animals’ surrounding worlds and the objects’ technical landscape. However, a problem arises when the plurality of the ontology of the multitude and the difference paradigmatically constructed in the thinking of Deleuze seeks to open up the possibility of contemporary art to be anything much more than the technosphere. It seems that these should be remnants of the ancient Gnostic science of matter and wisdom of the world, of the birth of Being and the creation of beings, which has resulted in the apathy of the relationship of philosophy, science and art to questions of the creation and construction of new worlds (Jonas 2008).

Epilogue

From the remarkable controversy between ancients and moderns within the Academie Française at the end of the 17th century, known as La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, when we inherited both the binary oppositions of classical and new in understanding art and the method of metaphysically justifying two different epochs and worlds, emerged a somewhat disturbing problem alluded to in the preceding. The problem of the time was not just the problem of modern philosophy and science but also felt the full power of what set out the essence of the Western world, which today is largely self-evidently circumventing the enumeration of the spiritual sources of Europe and the West. What is so worn out every day seems to be the profanity of capitalism and the transcendental axiomatic of the new era. Capitalism, therefore, is not just a social order based on economic laws of production, distribution, exchange and consumption but is also something more than the mere economy as a secularised grace of theology. In his article  The Future of Capitalism  (Die Zukunft des Kapitalismus) from 1914, Max Scheler considered that capitalism cannot be the economic system of ownership distribution but the whole life and culture system. This system has come from setting targets and value assessments of a particular biophysical and human type, namely from the bourgeois and therefore relies on their traditions. (Scheler 2015, 8)

Suppose capitalism represents a psychophysical type of man who gives him a driving force. This anthropology of culture proves that ruling images of morality, social relationships, aesthetic preferences, and thought matrices should characterise any single era. Art in capitalism, in its two faces, modern and postmodern, appears to be a conflict between old and new, ornaments and functions, the autonomy of work, and the sovereignty of the event of the body itself. But there is something else: capitalism in the form of the radical admiration of its corporate network of relationships gives the cultural power of sublimation more than the aesthetic perception of world-designed objects. This means that Lyotard recognised the place of differences and drift (diff rend) between mind and body, cognitive maps of the world and synthetic sensibility in his analysis of the sublime and the avant-garde (Lyotard 1991, 89, 107). The experience of the sublime feeling presupposes the possibility that the place of difference is genuinely happening that it is movable and creates a whole series of sensory responses as an inspiration to what is neither a term nor an idea, yet essentially defines the event of an occult character. In the case of the modern or postmodern character of capitalism, it is impossible to establish flatly that art is a sign of innovation and irony, autonomy and sovereignty of the act of events, and to describe what capitalism, in general, has with the experience of the sublime except for the uncanny gap in Being itself. Nevertheless, the idea of capital might be a strong driver of world history expressed in economic terms. Likewise, it is the inner driver of something demonic and profound, the will to power in the desire to increase the object’s value. The sublime object of capitalism should be precisely that objectile without an object. In difference-different contemporary art, the form of conceptualism has determined the negative as the entity or pictogram in the labelling process. Capitalism, therefore, is represented as a place of distinction-drift (difference-different) between mind and sensibility. The reason lies in the fact that it crosses all possible boundaries and is embedded in the technosphere’s essence as the moon’s dark side.

       There might be only a single major disadvantage to what has been said. It refers to the subject of events that Scheler saw in the character of the bourgeois or capitalist: there is no real capitalism. Well, that is the point. Capital exists as an idea, and after the social relations of labour exploitation disappear as a political obstacle in the sparse system and environment, it will be realised in a form that represents a condition of modern society’s ability to make transformations. That form is called a corporation. It has the structure of an emerging network without a centre and edges. So, the true character and form of contemporary art is nothing more than artistic and nothing philosophical, but rather something that could be a result of the creation of technoscience and its experiments with artificial life. Thinking and production-creation (poiesis and creation ex nihilo) have become a form of technology with new construction techniques.

       When neither philosophy nor art gives rise to the world’s mythic-poetic justification of its uncontrollable insanity, as when Saint Paul, in the First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 1:28), talks with exaltation about how God chose what is foolish of the world to shame the wise, it remains just techno-scientifical thinking and the producing-creation of Dionysus’s eye, astonishing the god when looking at himself. That place is now empty. There is something completely different from the metaphysical history of the world we have experienced, and we are still talking about it as a golden age. However, a modern bourgeois or venture capitalist (entrepreneur) is, just as Marx knew, the essence of the idea. When the technosphere assumes the powers of science and the technology of pure immateriality that takes place in a tour of the digital age of cybernetic machines, it is clear that we have only aesthetic production facilities instead of art—a network of beautifully designed worlds with stunning smooth surfaces and an enduring loss of depth. Just like capitalism without capital, contemporary art is becoming more and more aesthetic without its subject. And if there is someone today who could measure the significance of its ideas with the great artists, then it might be only a living machine of the anonymous technosphere. In conjunction with the corporation and the sublime without the event, all the novelty of this constructive livelihood of life has passed away. The worst curse that ancient Chinese people intended for a man of their own time was as follows:

May you live in interesting times.

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Note

  „Dadaism is a mystic rather than political movement despite the public political manifestation and the rigorocity of its actions.“  (Mersch 2010, 36).