Federico Campagna

Prophetic Culture

Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher and writer based in London. In this podcast, he talks about his latest book called Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents, published in Bloomsbury in 2021. In 2009, he started a long term collaboration with the Italian Autonomia philosopher Franco Berardi, also known as “Bifo”. In that same year, he co-founded the now defunct multilingual platform for critical theory, called Through Europe.

FC: Well, it's always difficult to find only one theme in a book. Because it takes a long time to write, so many ideas kind of get together. But I think maybe the main idea has to do with the notion of worlds. What is a world? How worlds are made? but especially the fact that because worlds are made, they are not things that exist forever, “How worlds end?”. So the book looks at the idea of a world, not just as a planet or a universe or a group of material things, but the world as a meaning. The Greeks say “as a cosmos”, as a way of ordering chaos into something that looks meaningful order or beautiful —these are the senses of the term “cosmos” in Greek, somewhere that we can recognize that is familiar, a place where we can move around and act.

The world is not naturally like that. Reality in itself is not naturally perfectly aligned with our cognitive limits, with our biological limits, with our social ideas, with our preferences… We transform the avalanche of our perceptions about reality into something familiar: a world. The book is about this, but most importantly, I think, it's about how these kind of creations of worlds come to an end. And what is the position that a person finds themselves in, when they are inhabiting a world, when they're inhabiting the structure of sense, shared by many others, usually by a civilization with its own ideas about time, space, death, life… How does it feel to inhabit one of these visions in the moment when it's starting to decline and when it's about to come to an end?

A world as a story, as the singers of the story and the characters in the story and the particular position of the end of the last act of this play. What does it feel like to be in that moment? And especially if you are a cultural producer, somebody who participates in the creation of a world through their artistic and cultural means. What does it mean to continue doing that job in a moment when you know that that particular story is coming to an end and that might be nobody left to receive your artistic and cultural productions? Then you have to start to look beyond the world.

Interviewer: How is this related with the figure or the character of a prophet?

FC: Prophet is somebody who you encounter often. In today's parallax, we say somebody is a prophet when they predict things in advance. That's how we explain it usually in the common sense. But a prophet is not actually that, is not a forecaster, it's not like the guy of the weather forecast in the evening. A prophet is somebody —at least the way I see it, and I see it in this way— in line with other traditions that saw prophecy in this way, the biblical tradition, for example, but not only that… The prophet is somebody who is capable of seeing the fragility and the artificiality of any world or any construction of meaning, and is capable of seeing this because the prophet is capable of looking beyond. When you look beyond the world, you don't see anything. That's exactly the point. You see a very large —which is a wrong way of saying it, it’s an infinitely large, equally wrong— an eternally wide expanse of chaos, of things that are impossible to condense within the cosmos, within a language that makes sense, that is familiar. And you realize that this outside is not only “outside of the world”, but is also inside of the world, that had the basis at the foundation of all discourses, of all attempts to make sense. Underneath, there is a kernel that not only resists sense, that resists familiarity, but that is impossibly beyond, while at the same time is what supports anything.

You have a quick intuition of this when you think about the notion of existence. When you say that an object exists, you then proceed by saying all the things that that object is: “It is a human, it is a planet, is hot, is brown, it's green, it's ancient, as soon is heavy, it got this composition…”, these are all the things you can see about what it is, but that it is, “that it exists”. The fact of its pure existence, that one resists any possible attempted understanding. That thing is outside of the world. But of course existence, the fact of existence is what makes a world “be”.

The prophet is the one who is capable of looking with one eye at the fact of existence and with the other eye at the worlds, and the different ways of describing the worlds. And so when the prophet speaks to the worlds, the job of the prophet is to remind the inhabitants of any world that that world is very nice, but it's artificial, is very small, and that underneath it, inside it, there is something incomparably wider and darker or brighter, depends how you present it. That's what the prophet does, is a reminder of the limitations of structures of sense.

This is very useful, I believe, especially when we have a relationship with our worlds, with our hypotheses, with our ideas about nature or ideas about the things that populate the world; for example, states, nationalities, currencies... When we have a relationship with these ideas, that is idolatrous, when we believe them to be really naturally there.

I am not an artist, so it's difficult for me to say what an artist should do. Also, I'm aware that the definition of what is art is changing and put in question very heavily over the past century and a half. So when —if I am to speak about art is very vague of what exactly I am talking about, and I don't want to sound prescriptive—, so maybe we could say —I said we could and not we should—, we could imagine art as the modulation of perceptions through formal means.

I say modulation of perceptions because the word, the Greek word aisthesis from which esthetics has to do with perceptions. So I imagine that there is a modulation of these perceptions through formal means. In this sense —if this is the definition of art that we can adopt for the moment—, then art is the way I think to, on the one hand, modulating the form of the world. Because modulating perceptions is modulating the way in which we make sense out of chaos. Chaos comes to us as is undivided, esthetic wave, and then we make sense out of it. So, art, in this way (understood in this way), it is a form of creation of cosmos. So in this way, we can look at the function of art, as in contribution to the creation of worlds, or maybe as a specialism [field] in the creation of worlds.

More generally speaking, we can say that it is also a modulation of attention, because the way in which you modulate the perceptions that come in: when you select and you choose which ones you take, which ones you obliterate, is always that kind of choice… You cannot take them all at the same time. That's the point of the cosmos, you give your attention to one rather than another. That is a selective process, which also implies ethical and political elements. So you focus on certain parts at the expense of the others, not because they are the most important in themselves, but because they are part of a project that sees them as foundational. But, more generally, with these modulations, art creates —I think—, not so much objects, of course, that are just objects in themselves, but creates atmospheres.

The notion of an atmosphere is important, I believe, and it is particularly important, for example, in Hindu theories of art, especially theater, the idea that an artistic work contributes to modifying your way of making world, not only because it gives you some new information —it doesn't mean to give you any more information—, but because it gives you a different frame.

The idea that the frame is very important to making worlds, you are finding it psychology, Gestalt psychology, you are finding it in philosophy, with Heidegger, for example… A frame is that general atmosphere, which then becomes the general set of rules, the first is an atmosphere, and then you distill it into rules that makes you see certain things rather than others, and it makes you create worlds in one way rather than another.

So art is in this sense, the construction of this frame at the beginning, when it's still a nebula, a galaxy, you know, in a very fuzzy way. And the material on which it operates is attention, teaching you not so much to what in particular you should give your attention, but what criteria you use or what directions you use in using your attention elsewhere.

So the point is not so much the object on display, but everything else outside the object. Through that object, as if through a lens, you see differently all the things around it.

Interviewer: Thank you, I think we are done.