The Death of the Audience

The Death of the Audience

The Death of the Audience – English versionSračok & Pohlmann, studio 1.1, London, October 4th, 2018(voice: Keran James, on the photo, right: Sandra Marjančević, in the background David Horowitz from War is Not the Natural Condition of Mankind)…………………………………………THE DEATH OF THE AUDIENCE“Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a ‘secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.”(From the essay “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes, 1967)The time of ambiguous “writing,” the one that implies, that is hiding behind the texture and structure of the media, the one that asks questions, the one that does not give answers, the one that expects its fulfillment from critics and audience, and that “refuses to arrest meaning” is over. It is over with the division into “performers” and “spectators,” artists and audience.These two positions merge into one that stands in direct relation to life.Everyone takes full responsibility of their own words.I declare THE DEATH OF THE AUDIENCE!There are two options ahead. The first is the one generated by man, and that is the point of direct connection with digital space, the moment of the abolition of humanity, total control and insight into inner critical thought, incentive and intention. The option that is probable, visible, we live it, though unconscious of the intensity and speed of its realization.This option abolishes the artist, the audience and art for it abolishes the space of freedom and introduces the censorship of art at the level of thought, idea.The second option is seemingly less probable, “not even an option;” it is not taken into account at the “serious,” realpolitikal level; it is an intervention of the extraterrestrial God by disrupting the “progress” of the abolition of man and the possibility of free choice.In both cases, the individual stands alone before the point of the final judgment, they are not and will not be spectators, they must go through final lustration alone, and take their position in relation to it, whether human's or God's.In the relations thus set up, the artist disappears, the illusion behind which he has hidden his lack of cognition disappears.He is a man who, through his clear speaking up, anticipating artificial intelligence, reaches Absolute Cognition which constitutes the fundamental truth about the nature of things and man.Through such clear action, he assumes the risk of determining meaning, accepting God and his foundations – reason, science, the law.

Posted by Tomislav Brajnovic on Sunday, October 14, 2018