A secret society including Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, and Callois. Because of its very nature, it is difficult to describe the society’s acts. Bataille referred several times to Marcel Mauss who had studied secret societies in Africa, describing them as a “total social phenomenon”. On this model, he organized several nocturnal meetings in the woods, near an oak which had been struck by lightning. Members of the Acéphale society were required to adopt several rituals, such as refusing to shake hand with anti-semites and celebrating the decapitation of Louis XVI, an event which prefigured the “chiefless crowd” targeted by “acéphalité”. Members of the society were also invited to meditation, on texts of Nietzsche, Freud, Sade and Mauss read during the assemblies. There was discussion amongst members about the possibility of carrying out a human sacrifice, but these discussions were never put into action.
“JJ: Some of the art that’s had the biggest impact on me comes out of a history of critique, using strategies of self-reflexivity, or deconstructing the systems through which an artwork accrues value. I think now, though, those kinds of operations leave me more self-satisfied than curious. And what I really want from art at the end of the day is to be pushed to place that I don’t yet understand. That’s not to say that I’m after some sublime or mystical experience from art, or that art is better when it obscures reality. I think that the best curiosity-inducing art probably makes me want to live in the world differently in the end, so in that way, it’s productive for me in ways that “critical” art once was. I’m very interested in looking for the effects an artwork sets off—in my thinking, but also in the things it’s connected to.
AEB: I think that there’s a false binary between art that is critical and art that is undetermined or open-ended, and the notion that the former expresses itself didactically or straightforwardly to its object of critique, and the latter is frivolous and superficial. I think that a type of underdetermined play can in fact be a means towards critical understanding. The idea of being able to devolve into associative play and non-directed play is itself a form of critique, this is an idea I’m adapting from the psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, who posits it at the intimate, psychological level; what we’ve been calling this kind of non-directional engineer, he’d simply call the analyst, but I think it also works as an aesthetic theory about the way that people come to a better understanding of their world.
That’s another way of saying what Jenny was saying about curiosity, which is a more flexible and usable form of critique.
MP: Curiosity is a nice word, because perhaps the kind of critique that falls short for us is one that doesn’t demonstrate or encourage curiosity.TC: I agree. What I like about your 27 Gnosis project, for instance, is how it reminds that there is plenitude in the world, plenitude in language. We may encounter this plenitude more often in its absences and elisions, in our dissatisfaction with how the contemporary is choosing to narrate itself. But this should not suggest that those absent things are irrecoverable. The task of art, in other words, may be to open channels of access to that plenitude.
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