Consumption and Dialogues - Tahi Moore

Bourriaud makes use of the word utopia; its scale has come down to something that seems manageable which, outside of examinations of our relationships to utopias and our ideas about them, might bring in the idea that we can and should be having them.

A utopia, in being the end-point of a struggle, is a full stop, much like Ad Reinhart’s black squares as full stops to painting. Painting of course continues, but if one is in the business of producing the painting rather than a painting, his grids are as good as anything.

Things, like the perfect thing, are to be consumed.

Things, as points in a dialogue, further language.

When a utopia is some country to reside in, it consumes the preceding struggle. It is also a thing to be consumed. When it is an idea that arises in relation to one’s conditions, it extends the language and opens up dialogue around the conditions that prompted its arrival. The purpose of the dialogue, in the sense here, is to further its language. The enlightened monk is never enlightened as a state, but engages in the action of becoming enlightened. Abandoning the distant shore of the enlightenment, he throws away the world, which returns immediately. The action of leaping into the void is the action of leaping into the world.

Freedom is the act of not choosing. Utopia is the full stop of declaring ones position as being enough; as good as anything; without anything further to add; and then it enters the language of the continuing dialogue.

We are hypnotized by language – it fools us as with any other sleight of hand – people die for ideas.

We could remain outside of any game, and be outside of all situations in a refusal of sociability. By entering relations, entering dialogues, we enter their particular languages, which are their rules and conditions.

Certainly: if we try to achieve the state of how things should be; when our life conditions are things to be overcome and pushed firmly into the tears of history; and as long as the struggle against time is something that will be dispelled in an immanence of the moment-continuing, as if opposing forces, shifting conditions, and death would disperse along with them.

The working conditions of life, of which we are made, would be denied in any moment of enlightenment where we are able to see our better selves and act accordingly. Dialogues in action are material and context. Our conditions are our being.

There are constant struggles between improvement and self-interest – it is messy.

There is something inherently sinister about the language of self-help books. Even before I begin to read one, I sense that there will be something within it that will wash away the troubling conditions of my psyche. Like well meaning friends and utopias, solutions to existential questions seem to be in the offering.

Utopias offer idealized social structures, trying to return to the mythic womb of the Garden of Eden. Micro–utopias might pose as idealized social structures, in the way that paintings would be presented as the ultimate goal of all painting. Where the paintings dealt with the face of the void, are social engagements a confrontation with loneliness? Mother Theresa said loneliness of people in nursing homes often made for worse lives than those of people that she worked with, people living off garbage dumps.

Ultimately, solutions to humanity are non-communicative responses that will consume the solution-as-a-problem. Problems are very often conditions to be negotiated amongst other conditions, including solutions. Utopias are, in this context, points in a network of dialogues and negotiations and we are our relations to the conditions and situations that we find ourselves in.

Utopias might offer pictures of how life might be with universal cooperation and good will. But really, Voltaire’s struggle towards justice was manifested as mobilizations against injustices done to persons and in particular situations. Increasing comfort, confronting dissatisfaction and exploitation are laudable, if not essential to our wellbeing; but to reify abstract notions and ideas like justice is to think that we are something else. It is as if we were not a particular kind of animal; but creatures of reason, made of ideas brought to life, having descended from outer space or on high, waiting for our eventual return.

Right - Sarah Gruiters , Piece, 2006