In response I would begin by distinguishing between praxis (as an abstract concept) and praxis (as a particular set of strategies and techniques that would constitute a particular artists practice, or life).
Praxis as concept - Well I guess to begin with I was talking about praxis in the abstract. So with particular opposition to theory, praxis in the sense that only in action (changing material circumstances for instance, which includes the symbolic field), can one produce certain thoughts, theoretical leaps, experiences etc etc because only in making constitutive leaps does one change the conditions of one's own thought and action. I mean this is super standard stuff, but still an explanation of why a simple process of actualizing theory is necessarily a failure. And this concept is over theorised in a million different terms for "rupture". For me the critical component is the way it includes an aspect of non-agency, you are always acting in the name of the subjectivity to come. (There is an analogue here with credit money actually, in the way that the growth generated by today's debts will compound – but I'll save my ideas on why an artist is a type of currency for another post.)
Contemporaneity - I'm not sure what you mean by "calling oneself contemporary" – does this mean relevant and not outdated? In the sense of the creation of other worlds I would describe unreadability and dense lifestyle as particular techniques rather then necessary conditions.
Techniques – Perhaps we can set up a model as follows, where the strategy of Menard's Quixote can be opposed to Bourriourds "remixing of signs", and therefore be labelled "pre-production". Alongside this we may note that the position of "production" itself corresponds quite directly to Fordist production, hence to modernism, at least within the West. My question then is can we equate this strategy as being pre-industrial, in the sense it is concerned with the production of social relations above the production of the commodity? Or rather is pre-modern something else, and this is rather a type of fourth term (see 2nd schematic).
| Pre-production | Production | Post-production |
| Rearticulation of existing forms: Think for example of religious rituals, strictly formalist and unchanging, but meaning is clarified and changed over time. | Producing of forms: Best example is the constructivists who think that new meaning can be created with new form | Remixing of forms |
| Traditional (?) | Modernism | Post-modernism |
| Pre-industrial (?) | Fordist | Post-fordist |
| Reorganisation of signified | Production of signifier | Reorganisation of signifiers |
| | | |
| Collective subject: Social totality (?) | Individualist subject: Rise of interiority the novel | Decentered subject: Language, culture, big other speaks through the individual |
Alternative schematic:
The above model is fairly teleological and Western, although actually its ordering is focussed on the process of meaning production. However if you want something more generalised perhaps one could try to devise something along these lines:
| Production of Signifier | Reorganisation of Signifier |
| Production of Signified | Reorganisation of Signified |
Overall, I think we have both been in agreement for some time about the technique of disembowelling and refilling existing forms a la the Quixote. Although I have to say that I am not entirely able to articulate from first principles why I would necessarily preference this technique. In a sense all these techniques form a totality and I am not entirely convinced yet, well at least from first principles, that the preferencing of one is not just a trend My feeling is that in the wash up all these techniques might be more ideologically neutral than they now seem.
Perhaps one always has to be sensitive to specific conditions, and in the end having something to say and to say it with regard to the specificity of its annunciation might be more important. But as you've eluded to, its probably to do with the fact that preproduction is a technique relatively better at resisting the dissimulation of meaning posed by capital, or at least in the current conditions.
Non-West – I am overwhelmingly in agreement with you about resisting the fetishising of collectivity / relationality as an end in itself, and also note its particular appeal to an American and Western sensibilities. Having said this I do have doubts that traditional collective structures, even outside the West, have not been challenged by the process of capitalist industrialisation and I would expect that even in China there is probably more of an individualist streak than previously – is this the case?
Because on the one hand I agree that these things are extremely cultural, but also there is an element in which I can't help but be materialist and think that the way a society produces things is fairly determinative of culture. In this context, Bishop's Russians were resisting collectivity not only on the political level but on the material one as well. So in Ai Wei Wei's revolutionary individualism, (its true that his work always stresses the individual, such as the 1001 in fairytale, or the handmade seeds) it is maybe also crucial to think about how he is also critical of both the commodification and the destroying of China's collective heritage through modernisation (eg all the pots).
On Borges – if you wanted to take it one step further, then the best romanticisation is to consider The Theologians, from which one might say that you are rewriting it as Quixote and I am rewriting it as Panza.
It is interesting that you mention the garden of forking paths, because something that is appearing to me overlooked in Borges is the deep ambivalence put forth in his continual reference to the infinite, in the sense that he is always the thinker of the totality, that "one path is as good as another", that in the long run all books and non-books will be written side by side. There is a poverty of meaning in this idea, which is to say that the coincidence of Borges and Kafka might be in lacking the particularity brought about by desire, and hence their mutual interest in the Quixote, (this too for another post).
Tom Groenfeldt
Bill Singer
Halah Touryalai
Robert Passikoff