Better than life - My '80s - Sylvere Lotringer recounts the 80s - Biography

As editor of Semitext(e) for close to three decades, SYLVERE LOTRINGER has introduced American readers to Continental theorists from Gilles Deleuze to Michel Foucault, from Paul Virilio to Antonio Negri. But when it comes to the '80s, Lotringer, who here recounts his passage through the decade, will probably always be remembered for his Foreign Agents series--those little black books through which the art world first learned the name Jean Baudrillard.

The '80s began in 1983, with the publication of Jean Baudrillard's Simulations, which propelled a kind of weightless nebula into culture just before a charge of Orwellian paranoia took over. At the time, there was this lingering anxiety: Would 1984 keep its appointment? The answer was no. The society of the spectacle had already become a society of spectators, and Foucault's panopticon a Mobius strip. Everyone was waiting for George Orwell, but Baudrillard arrived instead.

Orwell envisaged a permanent war for peace, but by the '80s we had "pure war"-- politics itself had become war by other means. Ronald Reagan passed his Star Wars budget, domestic social programs withered, and the Soviet Union simply began to implode. But then came America's turn to implode--in slow motion--and Simulations laid out the self-destruct program. The "precession of simulacra" and the "desert of the real" perfectly described the new landscape: The mirage preceded the image. America was there to hide the fact that it never existed. Was the president of the United States for real? Being an actor, Reagan seemed like a real person, but he was beyond fiction and reality, beyond good and evil. He was his own pure simulacrum. Ordinary people were no longer themselves either; they were being emptied out. While the poor had been tossed onto the streets, and so disappeared from social discourse, the non-poor cheerfully signed on for voluntary slavery. The "assembly life" replaced the assembly line. The '80s w ere a nonstop carnival of Career, driven by the New Economy.

How did such an abrupt change in the social climate come about? Consider the course of art and the art world in New York. At the end of the '70s, the city was still a dump, a pothole, and everyone was bracing for survival. But it was cheap, fluid, wide open. Artists were living as a kind of tribe. They were white, smart, and "pure," professionally poor. There was a sense that they were in it together, participating in a privileged experience. Dwelling in cavernous downtown lofts, they made art that wasn't meant to sell. (They talked about money all the time because they didn't have any.) However, while artists were oblivious, living exclusively off concepts, developers were warehousing buildings, betting on the city's ultimate recovery. In just a few years, the situation had reversed itself, as artists were flushed out of their hideouts and their work was placed in the hands of dealers: a rematerialization of art that coincided with a deterritorialization of the art world reaching all the way to the stock mar ket. (In other words, artists' work was now speaking the language of money.) One didn't have to look hard to see flows of capital moving outward, swallowing new territories, wiping out entire lifestyles, and then spitting out clubs, galleries, luxury stores.

For me, this was the kind of phenomena that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari first mapped out in Anti-Oedipus (1972), which articulated the anarchy inherent in late capitalism, the multiplicity of its deterritorialized. flows. The book directly registered the impact of the ideas of May '68, upping the ante on Marx by observing that capital, far from being a purely repressive, ruthless mechanism meant to extract surplus-value, was constantly creating new values and new possibilities. And since capitalism absorbed everything, the trick was to counter it from within, redirecting its flows, ceaselessly moving ground. This created novel perspectives, more strategic than ideological: In order to examine more closely how late capitalism worked, Deleuze and Guattari abandoned traditional binary oppositions, class struggles, war machines, and party bureaucracies that were prone to fossilize. In France, of course, with its long history of overcentralization and bureaucracy, Deleuze and Guattari's theories were pure science fiction. But on the other side of the Atlantic they were uncannily realistic: New York, as it moved toward the '80s, was the laboratory of capital and natural destination for the two theorists, even though they'd never set foot in the city. All that was needed was a bridge. This is what I set out to provide by publishing a new magazine, called Semiotext(e).

It took me some time to reach that conclusion, and I had to overcome a few major hurdles. I had arrived in the city to teach at Columbia University just a few months after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, and, while I formed a study group in epistemological semiology almost immediately--with the likes of Wlad Godzich, Denis Hollier, and John Rajchman--it wasn't until 1974 that I even considered the idea of publishing French philosophy. (I had been involved with "theory" in France from the start, studying with Roland Barthes and Lucien Goldmann at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes before structuralism took off in the mid-'6os and organizing lecture series with new critics and philosophers for ten years at the Faculte des Lettres of the Sorbonne.) In the beginning, there was almost no support. The original Semiotext(e) editorial board included ten people, mostly graduate students in French, who chipped in fifty dollars apiece to get the journal started. The publication quickly outgrew its academic ambitions, however, when it sponsored its first public forum: the 1975 "Schizo-Culture" conference on prisons (a la Foucault) and madness (Deleuze/Guattari), a gathering intended less to simply "debate" ideas than to reach out to the last vestiges of the '6os counterculture in America. The event was also intended to include individuals outside the university--writers, artists, and activists--who were reflecting on society in less rational but often far more creative and perceptive ways than those within the academic sphere. To me, figures in America like John Cage and William S. Burroughs, both of whom participated in the conference, seemed the closest equivalent to French thinkers. They were "philosopher-artists" in the Nietzschean sense, deriving from their artistic practices a very incisive and clinical vision of the world.