Art, as risky device

Abstract

My title alludes to “Art, as Device,” Victor Shklovsky’s foundational statement of Russian Formalism. The cornerstone of its contribution to modernist studies is the idea of defamiliarization (ostranenie or estrangement), a program in which form subtends risk and administration. My essay traces signals and homologies of modern art, as risky device, risk signal and homologies that cut across media modernity in an expanded, media theoretical sense. Giving special consideration to a Vorticist moment that stands “for the Reality of the Present – not or the sentimental Future”, it examines, inter alia, the gyroscopes, vortoscopes and whoroscopes devised by modernist tinker-hobbyists, who diagram past and future risks on the present metamedium. The essay’s payoff reconceives two nearly ubiquitous concepts in new literary and cultural studies: modernism and medium. On the one hand, the modernism concept, with its Anglo-American genealogies and receipts and cosmopolitical ambitions, describes a reflex to modernity in literature, art, culture and media; on the other, a better media-theoretical account of medium. The medium concept pulls modernism/modernity in several other directions: from the Greenbergian notion of modernist medium specificity and transparencies towards the opacities of a technical-medial a priori; from cybernetic environments towards mediation as interface effect with inhuman scalar possibilities. There is an acute sense that everything modern – every risky attempt to arrange our bodies and our lives – is about medium orientation. The task of literary-media-cultural criticism – critically reflexive human intelligence – in modernity’s second media mass-age, according to Vilém Flusser, is to uncover the apparatuses behind the apparatuses that program apparatuses. And, more than ever, to adapt Friedrich Kittler’s media theoretic claim that our literary tools are working our thoughts: our media-machines are administering our modern unconsciousness.