the compulsion of self-production

by Edoardo Takacs 

In this collage I aimed to reflect the modern “compulsion” of consumption and production. In the bottom of the central panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights we can see a duck feeding a man, and his face seems to be one overtly without shame or care for the space around him, his focus is simply on the fruit. Thus sins such as gluttony and sloth are evoked as he is completely transfixed on the fruit. When examining this part of Bosch’s painting I was immediately reminded of Han’s Disappearance of Rituals and his explanations and warnings of our loss of community in the backdrop of a neoliberal system. To evoke Han’s theme of Compulsion of Self Production I sought to find paintings where the subjects reach for something. This led me to use Theodore Gericault’s and Jean Francois’ paintings  because each of their paintings the figures are reaching for something. In Gericault’s painting (bottom right and left, respectively) they are calling for help because they are stranded at sea. Then in Francois’ Hermes is leading Paris to choose between Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera, a choice which ultimately led to the breaking out of war and bloodshed. Ultimately, both paintings represent scenes of desperation and of great consequence. In both paintings the subjects are desperately reaching for a form of salvation; however, in my collage I flip this notion on its head. Instead of reaching for fruit, which represents copulation and abundance, they are reaching for something else that means something very different. In my collage I chose to use tea because I wanted to mirror this quote in Han’s book: “change the world while drinking tea… That would be the end of the revolution”(5). Han states that values act as things for individual consumption. Values like “justice, humanity or sustainability are exploited for profit,” and tea, for example, is used to do this. However, this brings up the question, how can you change the world through consumption? Han believes “That would be the end of the revolution” (5). Neoliberalism takes advantage of morality for its own benefit, and so moral values are consumed as marks of distinction. They are credited to our own ego-account, increasing the value of self and narcissistic self-respect. Ultimately, through the commoditization of values we have been conditioned to only relate values to ourselves, not to community. What this means is that the Neoliberal system is self-sustaining because it relies on emotions, which are endless, and not things, on individuals and not communities. Thus in my Collage I wanted to demonstrate that all the figures are all reaching for the same things unknowingly and uncaring of the others around them. Like in Bosch’s original painting, they are all transfixed upon what is being fed to them and not the others that surround them. Then I chose to exchange the duck for a cyborg pig. I did this because I wanted to put emphasis on the fact that these divisive systems are man made, thus I chose to use a cyborg pig as it is partially man-made and pigs generally represent greed. Moreover, I chose to use a cyborg pig because I was inspired by a quote in the article Techno Libertarianism praying for Dystopia by Mark O’Connell:

“For Dark Transhumanists, as for the neo-reactionaries from whom they take their cues, egalitarianism is inherently incompatible with any posthuman future. Take Peter Thiel, the Facebook investor who in a 2009 essay for the libertarian journal Cato Unbound announced, ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.’ Asked in a 2011 New Yorker profile whether the kinds of life extension technologies he was investing in might exacerbate already grotesque levels of social inequality” 

In the eyes of some Transhumait’s equality will not be a part of a post human future, and so all sense of community will be lost with it, confirming Han’s warnings. Ultimately, this collage represents the divise nature of our neoliberal consumerist society and what role AI could play in intensifying this division and inequality.