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Vases of illumination
300 x 150
Electronic Image
Parisian and Haitian societies in the early 1790s. This grand cosmographic schema displays the economic, political, and cultural relations on both sides of the Atlantic, integrating the multiple aspects that contributed to the cultural process known as the Enlightenment, which culminates in the introduction of modern institutions and culture.
In a Veblenian dichotomy, the lower quadrants separate the world of labor, where the forces of production and the bodies that compose it have become an impersonal mass that sustains and nourishes cultural life, or liberated time—that is, the political-vital disputes of desiring bodies stripped of the necessities and urgencies of their own survival. The institutions of revolution forge their way through a world rabid for change, wherein social classes throw themselves into a reordering of their relations, and generational ambitions crystallize in a process of creative destruction and a new ideological configuration.
The drawing employs the concept of the Leisure Class introduced by Thorstein Veblen as both a classification of social groups and as a division of bodily time, and its cultural performance in the production of the new order, attending to the principal question of how modern ideology is generated, represented as a cryptic third level that refers to intellectual crystallizations.
The new iconographies conjured in the drawing struggle to contain aspects and synchronicities of political life that habitually remain latent and concealed in the Written Text. They twist at the edge of meaning, attempting to conceive and articulate how modern society is produced in a narrative that repositions social categories within an ontology concerned with their ideological production.
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