MACHINIC VIRTUOSITY
Gerald Raunig
[Inside the book, p.122]
"But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labor passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages."
(Karl Marx, Maschinenfragment, 1957/58)
And once again: "A smart artist makes the machine do the work." To start with, Cornelia Sollfrank's frequently quoted marketing slogan for the net.art generator-as well as for herself-is a reference to and a test case of the partially enjoyable, partially bitter battles fought over the question concerning the origin of the new in the field of twentieth century art. A late highlight of these battles were the neoist anti-originality programs and their biting satires regarding conventional notions of the artist, in which dully diligent claims to originality, which have meanwhile reached the middle of capitalist modes of production, are placed next to the idle artist as a complementary position: "Originality is for losers. Don't waste time on researching and developing new ideas: let others do it for you," says one of the most important neoist strategies. If the name of one of the most peripheral of all post-avant-gardes of the twentieth century, neoism, means anything, then it means questioning a pure production of the new ex nihilo, the criticism of the idea of an invention beyond imitation, the new beyond appropriation, difference beyond repetition.
Of course, there is a certain break in neoist praxis: whereas the assault on the ideologies of originality and creativity is not least of all also an attack on the heteronormative order of the cultural sector as well as on the construction of the eternal creativity of the male genius that is central to it, the excessively self-historicizing neoists (gangs) affiliated with Stewart Home or Istvan Kantor are also not much more than rival boy groups or lone wolves. Cornelia Sollfrank links the line of the anti-original avant-gardes, postavant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes with feminist historiography that is arranged in a cluster around similar aspects. [...]