In 1942, Hedy Lamarr, the famous Hollywood actress, and George Antheil, composer and musician invented an encryption device, patented as Secret Communication System. This would become the basis for the unique capacities of high speed wi-fi telecommunications today. This invention explicates: a) how our everyday exchanges hold implicit and undisclosed conditions that are necessary for us to communicate with each other (Brandom); and b) how capitalism also generates “the implicit” in that it obfuscates its own technologies, mystifying itself as a space of irrationality and desire (Marx).
Different materialist theories respond to the homology of these strands of the implicit. The tendency for anti-representational views (seen in the turn to use in neo-pragmatic empiricism, poststructuralism subjectivism and new materialist theories more recently) is to identify that all actions are context-dependent, doubling down on the collapse of meaning and use, and thinking and doing. I argue that they risk naturalizing everything we do as a form of capitalist pathology. But trying to pull away from relativism and indifference in dialectical forms of critical theory seems only to underscore this problem further, as well as confirming the exhaustion of its own theoretical labor (Althusser, Lyotard). Lamarr and Antheil’l invention explicates how everything works by manufacturing the implicit. This frustrating dynamic brings us to ask if any ‘metaphysical’ scientific modelling of this dialectic--a realist meta-vocabulary--seen in such theories from Brandom, Sellars, or a possible artwork, can manifest the political and social hope to emancipate the human from capital.
Bio
Amanda Beech is an artist and writer. Her work proposes a new realist politics of the artwork and its possibilities in the context of contingency and neo-rationalist conceptions of power. Her artist’s books include First Machine, Final Machine, 2015 (Urbanomic Press) Sanity Assassin 2010 (Urbanomic Press), and Final Machine (Urbanomic Press) 2013. Other critical writing on art, critique and realism includes, ‘Culture Without Mirrors’, Glass Bead: The Game of Ends and Means, 2016, ‘Space is No Object’ in Re-Inventing Horizons, 2016; ‘Concept Without Difference, the Promise of the Generic’ in Realism, Materialism, Art, 2014; ‘Last Rights, The Non Tragic Image and the Law’ in The Flood of Rights, Sternberg, 2014; and, ‘Curatorial Futures with the image: Overcoming Scepticism and Unbinding the Relational’ Journal of Visual Arts Practice, Volume 9.2: pp. 139-151, Intellect, 2011. She is contributing co-editor to the anthologies Cold War Cold World, 2017, (Urbanomic Press) and Episode, Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens Based Media, 2008 (Artwords). Beech regularly speaks at conferences, and her work can be accessed on you-tube broadcasts. These include Art and Reason: How Art Thinks Parts I and II, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and Baltic Museum, 2015-16; and her keynote for Generative Constraints, ‘Art Habit and Rule’, Royal Holloway and Kingston University, UK, Nov, 2013.
