Should we say, in a parody of Bachelard, that contemporary art does not have the philosophy it deserves? A certain number of incoherent theses can be found in circulation amidst the theoretical rumbling constituted by ordinary art discourse. These come in both naive and more learned forms. One of them, as suspect as the purported conflict between "figuration" and "abstraction," is the idea that the most authentically contemporary artistic practices are attempts to get beyond "representation," to reunify the scattered poles of the traditional set-up (subject/object, scene artist/viewer, etc.). Harold Rosenberg said that for every American painter there came a moment when the canvas ceased to appear to him as a flatly reproductive image but was instead a fact, or rather a field of operations, an arena opened up to his action. From Duchamp to Support/Surface, from performance to installation, from body art to transactional or relational art, and following the paradigm of action painting (but in a sense which goes well beyond any historically locatable movement), the diffuse interpretative tendency that emerges from this idea mixes the end of retinal art and the advent of transformative procedures, the destitution of the iconic structure (with its separate planes) and the quest for the fusion or primitive unity of the elements of art. Lyotard, in the good old days of the libidinal economy, suggested a more sophisticated version of this vulgate, even though at base it shared the same presuppositions. To his credit, he did at least recognize that the regime of representation and the series of separations effectively instituted by its different structures) rested precisely on a particular order or arrangement of actions and on the effects that were expected from them-that it was, then, essentially a pragmatics. More recently, Jacques Rancière cashed out all the implications of this by showing, conversely, the debt owed by certain readings of modern and contemporary art to Schopenhauer. So we have no excuses any more, and there is something theoretically naive about wanting to go on playing the action or the procedure off against representation. The whole issue, now, is to identify the kind of operations that can allow us to define a regime of art production and, to begin with, to identify artistic operations in general. For that is the root of the problem: we do not know what an operation is, and it is by maintaining the indeterminacy of words such as "gesture," "procedure" and "intervention" that we end up allowing ourselves to apply such debatable and generalist readings to both works and artists.
Before asking ourselves if such artistic operations are a matter of poles/s or praxis-in other words, whether the system from a poetics of works guided by rules, answerable to aesthetic evaluation) or from a practice that tends towards effects that are not outside the creating subject dispositions and attitudes immanent to the artistic "approach"), we need to be sure that we are using the concept of "operation" with sufficient precision so as not to have to accept literally what the artists tell us themselves (their "spontaneous philosophy" is often merely a personal reformulation of critical discourse), and not to get sucked in by the major narratives of contemporary art (generally speaking, the spontaneous art criticism of philosophers is no better than the spontaneous philosophy of critics and artists; when not busy censuring practices, it oscillates between didacticism and dogmatic overkill.

Phenomenologies of the Operation

In this regard, any phenomenology of the operation is doomed to naively repeat the learned truisms of the philosophy or interpretation that it unconsciously adopted beforehand. Thus collage is seen either as the irruption of real presence (newspaper, poster, waxed tablecloth) in the field of representation, or as a tangible sign of an intervention, a materialized action (cutting out, montage, sampling and insertion. It is the same with sampling (here I am deliberately choosing an example that is outside the sphere of usual artistic gestures one will dwell either on the moment of reappropriation and montage (mix), or on the act of cutting out and changing its finality (cut). But it is obvious that these descriptions are of a piece with a specific interpretation ('modern" in the first case, "postmodern" in the second).
In fact, these interpretative grids all share an assumption. In all these instances, it is imagined that one can deduce the aesthetic (or even political) consequences from a simple technical procedure without needing to make a precise analysis of its mode of operation and-and this is more serious-that this deduction can be made directly and immediately, independently of the practices and customs with which it is itself bound up. This feature reveals an idealist view of the artistic operation which continues to characterize many critical discourses, including those that aspire to be the east "formalist." As if we could grasp the effective nature of an operation, in and for itself, in the general form of its process, as if it were some kind of ideal mechanism. Wittgenstein, who knew a thing or two about machines, was constantly warning against this false conception of the operation.
But let's leave aside matters relating to the definition of the operation and concentrate for the time being on the problems surrounding its identification. In the case of sampling, the readings that "reveal" the operation are divided between the idea of a general availability of musical forms, which are identified in the noise of the word or the 'big background, and the idea of an active appropriation of meanings. On one sloe, the passive reproduction of forms and materials and the artist as a simple or operator or phase in a process of recycling or metamorphosis that infinitely transcends him 'sampling as copying, recycling, dissemination in the anonymity of the "machinic phylum or the universal fluxi: on the other, the cutting operation carried out by a sovereign performer held to have the power to transform materials to divert and redistribute signs: passive reproduction, active post-production.
This duality is of course a condition of the functioning of the romantic regime of art which, on the whole, still defines the aesthetic regime of the "contemporary." The contradiction, if there is one, exists only in our discourses, when we force the operation in a single interpretative direction, forgetting that operations can be identified only in the play of diverging interpretations. We cannot say simultaneously and from the same point of view that the electronic musician is an inventor of styles and techniques and that he is simply an agent of the digital panta-rei but it is essential for the aesthetic regime that the two interpretations should be able to coexist and refer to each other. The ontological vocabulary that translates aesthetic notions or simple physical ideas of surface, material and texture into "nomadic multiplicities' or "molecular fluxes" then turns out to be curiously entangled with the performative vocabulary of acts and operations. That is why the discourse on electronic music belongs to a "subjective physics" (Bastien Gallet) in which affective regimes, ruptures and sensorimotor stases induced by variations in tempo, rhythm and color, can just as easily be expressed in terms that are operation-based (the science of the mix and its techniques: break, cut, scratch, etc.) or physico-ontological (blocs of sound, molecular becomings).

Procedure and Interpretation

This means that a phenomenological description of the procedures implemented by electronic musicians can never be what it claims to be: a neutral description, capturing the operation in and for itself. Even a purely "technical" reading always unwittingly presupposes a general interpretation of the processes which is its true principle. This is generally the case for all the operation-oriented approaches to contemporary art. Thus most of the operations of the aesthetic "doxa," as analyzed by Anne Cauquelin 14) under the name "tool box" seem-no doubt because it is from there that they draw their principle-to confirm the interpretative system set up by German Romanticism, be it the practice of the fragment, of quotation, or even interactivity, which only superficially contests the Romantic definition of the artist as genius, and once again sends us back to the idea of a work/process whose functioning would then mirror the immanent operations within life itself.
You can replace Nature with the Web without changing the basic parameters of the problem. There is no such thing as a pure discourse of operations to which, at a later stage, one would then try to adjust one's interpretations. Any operation, insofar as it is a singularity that is relevant to the description of an artistic work and is not purely and simply the same thing as any old bit of gesticulation or material event is immediately reapprehended through an inter operation. We could say that this is the basic Nietzschean idea (no facts, only interpretations). All right, but we should actually read Nietzsche and not stop now we have come this far. The analysis of the procedure of punishment in Genealogy of Morals, says in effect something more, namely that the process itself crystallizes a multiplicity of "meanings" whose elements "change value and are alike" in a different way in each singular case: "one single procedure can be used, interpreted, adjusted and adapted to fundamentally different intentions," and the ideas of sin and guilt are late grafts. Thus the only guarantee we have that we are indeed dealing with a process is that it gives rise to readings and uses that, if not contradictory, are at least divergent. Its own particular operation can only appear at the bifurcation of different interpretations and uses. It is a differential of interpretations. We can therefore keep the notion of gesture for that singularity which emerges from between the technical set-up and use, between the sequence of material or symbolic acts and the interpretation that adheres to them, Or-and this is really the same thing-we will give the name "gesture" to that which interprets what it is applied to, to that which frees up a new interpretation, a new use value, out of the same procedure.
Given over to the play of interpretations, which are projected onto it, the process therefore remains strictly indefinable: it is impossible to distinguish it from the acts that institute it. We do not know what sampling is, but we can at least recognize it as a procedure, by paying attention to the concurrent supports with which it 's involved in the context of particular practices where these appear objects of controversy: direct performance (DJ club) and recording (electronic musician, home studio), scene (hip-hop) and fusion (rave), vinyl and MP3, head )ambient( and living music (dance), electronic manipulation and the search for pure sound. Here is Nietzsche again: "any history of a 'thing,' of an organ, a custom, can thus constitute an incessant chain of signs, of reinterpretations and readjustments, the cause of which may not necessarily be interrelated."

Processual and Performative

The problem is complicated by the fact that the concept of the artistic operation or procedure is itself torn between two interpretative regimes, two discursive regimes of the operational. On one side, there is what we could call a processual regime in which the operation or whatever name we want to give it: gesture, intervention, action, etc.; always manifests the virtualization of the work, the erasing of the material or object structure to the advantage of the process of its own production of its sometimes unpredictable effects and its interaction with an environment or viewe/performer. (The operation can of course be delegated to a natural agent, as in the piece by Jean-Pierre Bertrand in which a pile of metal boxes is slowly oxidized by its contact with salt, an interesting example of a work that could be defined by the process of its own disintegration.) On the other side, there is a performative regime in which the object and language are inseparably tied together, in which the act, decision and convention, but also the assembly instructions, the protocol and the manual, end up standing in for the work by instituting the conditions for an aesthetic experience through a series of procedures. We could say that these are the two sides of the same coin, and that many installations, performances or actions combine the two orientations. Indeed, that was what readymades set about doing, and we know well that they did not rest content with underscoring the role played by conventions and the gaze of the spectator in instituting art, but that they desubstantialized art in general by equating it with its procedure. We need to think of Fountain in relation to Given 1) The Waterfall, 2) The Illuminating Gas: the primacy of artistic doing is inseparable from the transfiguration wrought by word play. The historical interconnectedness of process art and concept art attests in another way to the fact that process is fated to be overtaken by the acts of language by which it is instituted, if not as an art, then at least as an aesthetic experience. Whether it is the open work, reduced to its possible operations or orderings, or the indefinitely under-elaboration work in process, in all these instances we conceive of the work as being absorbed by its own process, that is to say, disseminated through the Traces of its project or the signs of its functioning.