spectacle

The wreckage of design. On Alejandra Castillo’s Antropoceno como fin de diseño (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

Only in rare occasions the operation of thinking finds angular or lateral points of escape. This is the gesture that characterizes Alejandra Castillo’s theoretical writing, and is particularly bright in her most recent book Antropoceno como fin de diseño (La Cebra, 2025). The zigzagging entry is an intuition that is also a guiding thread: the force of real subsumption of capitalist domination depends on the operation of design. Of course, in design one hears not only blueprint and form, but also designation, and thus the specular regime of visibility, orderability, quantification. It is the world of physiocratic forestry. In fact, Castillo’s succinct definition of the metapolitical condition of design is offered to the reader at the entrance: “Design is the figure that thinks always in advance (por adelantado) (Castillo 12). Design calculates and locates. It is through the operation of design that legibility becomes adequated to political representation so that the state can manage and attenuate the deployment of its forms and the circulations of relations of totality (Castillo 13). The design is what is common to the worker, the engineer, and the lawyer. This is why design for Castillo design is an efficacious nexus that connects the separation of objectivity and the life worlds. Understood in this sense, “design” is analogous to the enframing of the world that intensifies in the age of technology and rhetoric. But in the watershed of the end of modernity, the hegemony of design collapses, while it becomes a temporal “self-design” submerged in all spheres of expressive enactments. 

The end of the second vector of the zigzag outlined in the essay is found precisely at this conjuncture: the anthropocene brings the humanist projections and design to a final wreckage. This is means that capitalist form is not formless because it has managed to subsume the time of life as exception to labour; time is a wreckage because design no longer coincides with the world of forms, as it has temporalized experience into total transparency without reminder. For Castillo this means that in the anthropocene there is no longer “struggle for visibility”, as everything has been rendered exposed and hollow; de-substantialized in the very fabric of subjectivity (in the early millennium some called this new hyperbolic figure the Bloom). Implicitly in Castillo’s writing is the assumption that the mediation between politics and design has been severed, and the new securitarian imperium can only immunize itself against the very site that in modern times granted its legitimacy (civil society, constituent power) (Castillo 37). 

The end of design means the absolutization of design, a new carceral imperative for adaptation that makes any claim to subjectivity an endorsement of the prison of the ego. To live in a post-designed unworldly condition means not only to come face to face with the homogenous space of cultural exchange into image; it is also a new imperative that requires that “you must submit, without knowing to what; subject to what is the case anyway, and which, as a reflex to its power and commonsense, everyone believes anyway” [1]. The end of design paves the way for new plastic forms of domination towards an integral planetary unity. 

Bordiga claimed throughout his work that the democratic design was perhaps the best fitting system for the versatility of capitalist accumulation and relentless expansion. This is why in all the political cases that Castillo introduces in a text in a manner of a shadow play do not pretend to offer a new theory of ideology, but rather show how democratic design is a one-piece suit that fits all without any needs for “ideal types” to fix normativity and institutional arrangements. Indeed, there is no longer anything like an “extreme political right” – and this is just a tweak from Castillo’s vocabulary, who does insist on the term throughout the essay – but rightward figures of the political that desperately cling to any form to distract from the abyss of social legitimation. Ultimately, the ruling over this void will be  – in many ways already is – the continuation of war in the social fabric; and stasis will require new stealth development of technologies of containment that Palantir’s Alex Karp has called the new “lethal form”. This means that democratic design is not only expressively a system of sentencing to death; it is in virtue of the exchange of social forms, an inverted negation of human finitude. The point of despair would incite some to look again in the cabinet of forms; a knee-jerk reaction to the irruption of the Anthropocene against the total sum of possible designs. 

Of course, this is also what Alejandra Castillo’s Antropoceno como fin de diseño (2025) avoids at all costs. Towards the last pages of the book, Castillo calls for a transformative turn that departs from the body; a corporeal insurrection that, in refusing the rectilinear and heteronormative political corpus of the modern epoch (no coincidence that Hobbes was both the founder of the autonomy of civil as well as of the physics of the body of matter in space), is capable of responding to the call of the anthropocene in all of its profuse conflictivity. Castillo proposes the necessity to gravitate towards a “maximum distance” against the general design of orderability of public domination (Castillo 77). But this can only be understood as an incommensurable distance that dissolves the ontotheological separation of subject and object of the state of confinement.

The political constitution of a corpus appears as the promise of an exit from the temporalization of the post-auratic literalism that, according to Michel Fried, dominated the structure of the object-oriented work of art, as compensatory to the corrosion of political forms and presentist autonomy [2]. Castillo does not seek to revive a last gasp of auratic objectification, which amounts to the sleepwalking condition of the image world of mere survival. In soliciting a maximum distance to what is closest (in fact, a body), Castillo invites us, as both promise and commitment, to think at the end of nondependency – not the “independence” that carries the traces of the fictitious individuality- from the crutches of design to finally conquer another liberty beyond terror and prevention; a life imbricated in the nonbeing of place (ecology) with others.

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Notes 

1. Thedor W. Adorno. “The Cultural Industry: A Resumé”, in Without Model (Seagull Books, 2023), 58.

2. Michael Fried. “Art and Objecthood”, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 172.

The decaying sublime. On Gónzalez Sainz’s Por así decirlo (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

José González Sainz’s new collection of short stories, Por así decirlo (Anagrama, 2024) offers a magisterial elaboration of the ongoing nihilism that has absorbed humanity into an autonomous object of its own shipwreck. Throughout the stylistically intricate narratives, it is easy to see that for Sainz the problem is not just about the extinction of humanity – its decline and fall, but rather about stumbling into the spectacle as if nothing is taking place. The consummation of nothingness exerts itself into the very consciousness to the point that the death of the living becomes transactional for the ongoing fictions regulated by expectation and prevention. 

Obviously, these are broad strokes that say little of Sainz’s well-known narrative pointillism, in which not only every object but every distance is carved out and polished with striking vivacity (this opposition between style and worldliness underpins the sharp contrast of the process of absorption); but, there is a moment in the first story of the book that can arguably be elevated as an emblem of Sainz’s outlook towards a world that has ceased to be so. Without giving too much of the plot, the scene takes place in a plaza of a Spanish provincial town where a pseudo-conductor has taken over a classical music show and who will commit a horrifying act that day. The narrative will minimize the conductor’s act in order to focus on the mass of spectators who continue enjoying the spectacle with mounting euphoria. At the peak moment of the narrative event we read this elaboration on truth and music:

“Había leído alguna vez que la verdad es el auténtico principio de la música, y que está conmueve no es tanto porque complaza al odio como porque expresa las verdaderas tonalidades afectivas del alma. Eso es, porque su objeto es el alma. Pero si el alma está hoy desfigurada, se dejó continuar, si ya no es más que su propio espectáculo o su farce o bien ya no es nada y a lo mejor, puestos a pensar, no lo ha sido nunca, por qué no iba  a ser lo que oía la verdadera musica. Se convenció y no se convenció; es decir, se convenció de que no estaba convencido de nada” (Sainz 45-46). 

Reacting to his own bewildered reaction to the spectators’ absorption in the fictitious, the character of the pater familias realizes that perhaps even the musical redemptive quality – and that for this very reason that Plato wanted to regulate the distinct tonalities of the instruments in the Laws to charm the souls of the youth- now encompasses an immense rhetorical environment where elucidation of the sublime of art’s truth becomes impossible. As the irreducible communication between souls fades away, there is only a vicarious subject that echoes the resonances of the intruder conductor. For anyone that reads the story, it is quite obvious that Sainz is rewriting Elias Canetti’s figure of the orchestra conductor from Crowds and Power (1983). As a hypoerbolic figure of absolute power and the ‘illusion of persuasion’, for Canetti the gestural figure of the orchestra conductor embodies mastery of the objectivation of the world who cuts through the two sides of the moral predicament: what should take place, and what will never occur [1]. And very much in the vein of the kubernetes, the conductor exerts his power as the unifier of the events in the world. In other words, the dominion of the orchestra conductor is absolutely omniscient: he can not only order what comes out in every instrument, but he can also regulate the effects of the musical discharge into an enchanted uniform audience.

The orchestra conductor is the figure of an acoustic mastery where the price to be paid will be the collapse of the original sublime (hypsos) unto the autonomous form silencing the truth of the soul. This is why Gianni Carchia, reading Longine’s treatise of the sublime, defines the ancient conception of musical redemption a the condition of the communication between souls capable of repairing maladies while moving towards love (eros)” [2]. And the narrator asks rather naively: “But why can’t I not enjoy this as well? What do I see?” (Sainz 47). However, Sainz’s intruder conductor depersonalizes Canetti’s figure, since it is no longer about an illusionary act of generalized hysteria or collective hypnotism; the experience of the truth, granted by the by the sublime (hypnos), has become a matter of the steering of opinion, and the transference of brute force of decomposition. Ultimately, it is also the decomposition of language that turns the pseudo-sublime as a vessel of meaning. The movement of the tragic suspended produces a life without accidents, and the word of Lukács: “a flat and sterile, an endless plan without any elevations…dull repose in the lap of dry common sense” [3]. Through the orchestra conductor, the allure of animation becomes the last resort to bear the crushing weight of the flatness of fictitious living.

In the threshold of total integration of the spectacle, the dialectical force of absorption that once provided grounds for the aesthetic veneration of the work of art, unleashes the form of artificial sublime to endure the absence of beauty and truth once guarantee by the soul’s touch with the melodic. The fall of the sublime into a movable feast of a social attraction discloses the last stage of humanity’s errancy: living in the wordless night of endurance to merely survive.

It is no surprise that, in fact, the story ends with the pater familias retreating to his home to sleep. And from that from that day on – that is, after the conflagration with the orchestra conductor – he will become a sort vigil watchman for his son who, drenched in sweat, recounts sleepless nights haunted by nightmares of the traumatic afternoon. And he concludes: “Velar, que hermosa palabra” (Sainz 51). A trembling insistence of the pulsating hypnos in the psychotic night of a collapsed humanity? Or, on the contrary, a self-reflection on the kalos that has dissipated only to return as a reified word? Is this Sainz’s last attempt to hand out to offer the possibility of an enacted sublime through proximity – it is the proximity of fathers and sons, after all – that gathers the pain in a silent and defaced nocturnal vigil? We do know from Longinus that in some cases, silence can also be more sublime than any words [4]. It could very well be that, at least today, this answer remains veiled (velada) in the intimacy of its own untransmittable experience.

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Notes 

1. Elias Canetti. Masa y poder (Alianza editorial, 2013), 559.

2. Gianni Carchia. “De lo sublime de la poesía a la poesía de lo sublime: para una relectura del Pseudo-Longino”, en Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1994), 112.

3. Georg Lukács. “The metaphysics of tragedy”, in Soul and Form (Columbia University Press, 2010), 179.

4. Longinus. On the sublime (Clarendon Press, 1926), 14-15.

Commentary on Monica Ferrando & Michele Dantini’s dialogue on painting and theology. by Gerardo Muñoz

The fourth issue of the journal De Pictura (Quodlibet, 2024) has just been published, and among a dozen of illuminating articles there is a very substantive and rich conversation between Monica Ferrando and the art historian Michele Dantini on theology and painting that solicits required attention, and that I can only emphatically recommend. As the very title suggests, the conversation is about the unity (and posterior historical divorce?) between painting and theology in the Western tradition, but it is also about another problem that never goes out of fashion, if ever rarely attended by a handful of scholars: mainly,  the light of the genesis of modernity vis-à-vis the aesthetic mediation with Antiquity. (Is it fair to say that this is an undeveloped path in post-Nietzschean thought? For now this is a broad question that we can only bracket, and it is needless to say that Ferrando’s own work already amounts to an indispensable barrister to take up this very concern). Be it as it may, there are two problems that I want to flag from this conversation — these are idiosyncratic concerns, as perhaps all attempts to condense a vast area of study obviously are. 

First, there is an important moment in the exchange where the problem of “perfection” is discussed as a watershed schism between the politics of representation in the wake of post-Renaissance development of painting. A notion of “perfection” that derived from the theological sphere was unequivocally different from technical mastery; it was understood as a problem of distance and proximity of pathos inherited from the great tradition of Antiquity and its canons of beauty and virtue. How else to read Poussin’s one of a kind theory of the modes of the Ancient in his famous letter to Chantelou? Of course there is also Hölderlin’s gaze towards the Greeks and Pindaric poetry decades later in the dawn of the nineteenth century only to succumb into madness. The theology grounding distance is the condition of possibility of ‘aura’, but also what Ferrando, at the highest point in the conversation, superbly defines as: “…pura della differenze temendo di riconoscere e irriducibili” (137). The liquidation of perfection into mastery of the “work of art” (and perhaps work should be overly stressed, which is linked to all the metaphysical dispensations over creation) implied that “distance” would become standardized, homogeneous, autonomous to regulated form, and finally absorbed unto the objecthood of creator and spectator in the coupling the force of secularization. Whether it is the vicarious image of the Hollywood spectacle, or the factorization of the socialized art object in the Russian avant-garde, the movement towards absorption is one-directional and open to the validity of an external justification of truth. 

What I find interesting is that the emphasis on perfection allows us to say that painting clearly put into view the history of an error about representation and its negation. As it has been noted, in the outset of Protestantism – for instance in Noa Turell’s excellent Living Pictures: Jan van Eyck and Painting’s First Century (2020) – there took place a new struggle over representation of perfection oriented towards “bringing painting into life”. The Northern superiority hinges upon the effectual perfection of a new legibility of the world that suspends the distance between thought, hand and the idea of pictorial praxis. The valorization of justified truth in perfection is paid by the occlusion of the truth of unintentional appearance. And the consequences are catastrophic: Ferrando at one point claims that the painting is about retaining the invisible; an argument that she has also displayed in relation to Poussin’s landscapes in her L’oro e le ombre (2015). In other words, the development of the dialectical autonomization of the very unit of pictorial space is integrated only be rationalized as an obstacle to be wrestled with and eventually overcome (an endpoint being Jackson Pollock’s outpouring of the line into a vanishing mist over white space). Prometheus unbound. Indeed, über die linie.  The “farewell to modern painting” (so elegantly trumpeted by T.J.Clark at the turn of this century) remains right on track with the only caveat that it did not began in the “age of the machines”, but at the outset of the secularization polemic over the impasse of the responses to the crisis of transcendence and the eclipse of myth.

Now, the second point can be stated briefly: the extension of autonomization implied turning away from what the tradition has offered; especially a tradition that is “pre-historical”, according to Ferrando, since painting is previous to historical consciousness and not the other way around (painting is always without a grounding principle). In the words of Stevens, this tradition can be understood as the “love ascending the humane” that attests to the authenticity of what appears-there in the disclosure of the world. A definition of painting emerges here, although not pursued in the dialogue between Ferrando and Dantini. However, for Dantini this means that the whole history of art / pictorial representation needs to be rethought and reorganized and possibly returned to its proper theological sphere. Of course, it will depend on how we understand the vertical axis of theology converging with the horizontal axis of appearance.

A counterexample here comes to mind, a sort of historical false exit: the Baroque, as a post-Renaissance paradigm of response to the crisis of the erotic and pagan image of the Renaissance paid the price of its exuberance, elliptical contortion, expenditure, and ornamentation through a reified and excessive field of self-ordered theatricality. As shown by the exemplary study of the Jesuit discipline in light of the modern state, La política del cielo: clericalismo jesuita y estado moderno (1999) by Antonio Rivera, the ascesis of the counterreformation Company required the split between director and practitioner that already presupposed the modern autonomization of spheres of signification. The baroque supra-theology (imago naturans notwithstanding) was also a reified theology whose anxiety about annihilation and total absorption of the community of the faithful would further drain the invisible outlook of the theos. Or to use the image favored by Carlo Michelstaedter: “the lamp burns out by the insufficiency of oil, but it drowns by having too much oil”. It is no coincidence, then, that the polarity of absorption and theatrically, used to understand the revolution of French modern painting, can only bring to life anything and everything under the sun of pictorial representation except its own sense of distance between appearance and what always remains unfathomable in the world.

The soul of things. On Alice Rohrwacher’s Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

In the the long conversation Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (Edizioni e/o, 2023) conducted by Goffredo Fofi, the contemporary Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher offers a series of reflections about the possibilities of artistic creation in the abysmal time of integrated spectacle that has fully brought to bear the erosion of the human capacity for attention and outward experience. Can cinema and film do anything in the wake of such humiliating and crushing reality? At first glance the late modernist critique of the value-driven image seems insufficient and merely rhetorical as the valence of dialectics has been dissolved in the pressure of real subsumption.  In a certain sense,  Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (2023) is a reflection written after the ambivalent commitment of cinema to awaken the spectator from the slumber of the absorption in order regime of standardization where the utopia of self-design realizes the objective abstraction in the acceleration of optimized and contained expressiveness. At no moment does Rohrwacher affirm that we are, indeed, “after cinema”, but throughout the dialogue the tone is that of  immediacy in an epoch that seems to be saturated by looping, real-time, and the intensification of life-exposure spectacle. If film is reduced to telling stories, then it falls into vulgarity, while contributing to the gigantic sedative layout that veils the annihilation of social reproduction. In  the last decade, Alice Rohrwacher has done a series of important and highly original films (Le meraviglie, Lazzaro felice, or La chimera) that signal a way out from the numbness of sight, relocating the  moving image to the mythic dialogue with the invisible, the mysterious, and the old craft of the fable narrative. Rohrwacher’s cinema is only magical to the extent that it subtract itself from the historical overindulgence that the autonomous historical man had to endure in its separation from nature.  

Filmmaking is no privilege site of creation, but if Ruíz was right, there are plenty of chamanic energies circumventing the cinematic experience. This is a prehistoric residue that, in her own style, Rohrwacher wants to hold on to. In Dopo il cinema  (2023), she admits that  any attempt to organize a new “political” cinema is out of question, as it was always grounded in the idealism of ‘consciousness’, which is now realized in the self-narcissistic exposition of the free-floating subject of market equivalence. Political cinema could only be arrogant and superfluous pedagogy at the mercy of the furious chatter of “cultural wars”. Is there a higher poverty? And yet this is what appears as ‘necessary ideological critique’ in some circles. In this sense, cinema is not the leading instrument for the work of imagination and Rohrwacher insistence on ‘creation’ drives the point home. Citing Elsa Morante (and perhaps implicitly Cristina Campo) Rohwacher defends the creation as an ongoing effort of a common intelligence to grasp the invisible and allow the eruption of joy in the life of characters. Similar to Robert Bresson who wanted the characters of his films to have an outlook as if they were castaways from the time of the first Adam in the earthly paradise; for Rohrwacher the thicket of creativity for our times is rooted in a contemplative gaze through which the external elements of the world can hone the one and true destiny of the irreducibility of the human species [1]. Rohrwacher’s assertion that she wants creation to establish proximity with the outside – devoid of attachment to religion, political parties, or moral principles –  presupposes a sound critique of all forms of idolatry that have modeled aesthetic production at the service of abstract historical needs (Rohrwacher 33). 

As a creator Alice Rohrwacher’s own point departure is thoroughly subtractive. This means leaving behind the subject of consciousness (the internal and self-sufficient producer of images, which today appears with the empty label of content creator), while opening the cinematic possibilities to the luminosity of a collective imagination in which the contemplation touches, albeit for a moment, the thought of the world (‘pensieri del mundo’) (Rohwacher 36). Obviously, this is no longer an artifice of cinema in its industrial and technological capacities; rather, it is the impersonal general intellect that refuses the integral planning that forecloses the wayward route of imagination, discovery, happiness, and the uncharted land in which the characters and spectators are taken by the seduction of the possibility of events (Rohrwacher 39). Whenever film, like a fairy tale, touches the truth of a not-yet administered world (an inapprehensible excess that resembles prophecy), then visual pedagogy ceases to be a task of cinema; rather, the process of film is one of “ex-ducere, cioè portare fuori, educare” (Rohrwacher 52). And as Cristina Campo understood well, the fairy tale (analogous to cinema for Rohrwacher) has at the center of its making the “raw material of existence…this material is the mystery of character…which maintains its traits to the end, and only be transformed by repeating the same errors, suffering the same defeats. The nature of this mystery is sometimes suggested with enchanting ambiguity” [2]. It is this ambiguity what expresses the caesura between existence and world – their strange noncoincidence – that has colored the experiential texture of Rohrwacher’s poetical cinema. 

The central characters of Rohrwahcer’s films (Lazzaro felice, La chimera) are symbolic personifications of forms of life that are neither alive nor dead; neither mythic nor mundane; neither fictional nor historical determined (each of her films are also landscapes of specific territorial Italian communes); there are both things at once, and they maintain their musical tonality in their own symbolic protuberance, precisely because they cannot be divided and forced into the civilizational narrative at the expense of the exhaustion of the mystery of form (Rohrwacher 63). In fact, Rohrwacher, so attuned to Joseph Roth’s indictment of the Hollywood’s hollow gestalt announced in the The Antichrist (1933), reminds us that the word “devil” (diaballo) implies cut and division; whereas, the symbol, cultivates and renews the mysterious enchanted dimension of the world in which no reified image (any image that could be potentially any other) can hold the human species as hostage in the  cacophonous prison of senselessness. And is not this radical evil – an assumed and distributed morality of the active consumer, who always works “for his own interest” – the most basic unit of the transmission of the image-spectacle from which one has to flee from? The mythic or fairy-tale-like leveling in Rohrwacher is no metaphoric transport; it becomes the cinematic potential to see the world with a clear third eye. 

No easy task of course. Deposing the fictitious machine entails exerting a movement of exodus towards the outside, which Rohrwacher assuredly calls the invisible as that which restitutes the soul of things. The symbol is a passage against the seduction of the pleasure principle of self-enjoyment and parodic personal heroisms. And this is perhaps the most powerful and original testament of Rohrwacher aesthetic sensibility in Dopo il cinema (2023): “Ma nel memento in qui quella cose emanano – direi irradiano – un’anima, subito ne abbiamo più cura, e la cura come abbiamo detto è un atto eversivo. Un’azione poetica” (Rohrwacher 64). And poetry remains not only the dwelling place of human beings; but, fundamentally, the lacuna in a world that refuses to come to completion. Perhaps ‘cinema’ – or, rather, ‘cinema after cinema’ – in Rohrwacher’s view only emerges as a gnostic symbol that prepares the birth of a new earth, as if planting a seed for seasonal germination (Rohrwacher 64). In each character, image, symbol, and gesture, Rohrwacher’s filmmaking plunders into the position of redemption against the cruel reduction of the objective madhouse: restituting the soul in things dignifies the inheritance of terrestrial human species as if it is always coming into presence for the very first time. The eros of cinema becoming an enduring task — and is not ultimately what we feel in each of Rohrwacher’s films? The joyous spirit of the saltimbanca: in and outside the world’s reality, the symbol lives and outlives the fixation of this world.

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Notes 

1. Robert Bresson. Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983 (nyrb, 2013), 277.

2. Cristina Campo. “On Fairy Tales”, in The Unforgivable (nyrb, 2024), 33.