Terms of Recognition.

8.1

Entitative objects are not always recognized. Their opacity is compounded by their ability to hide in broad daylight. Accessing them can be as forbidding as reaching Machu Picchu’s hidden plateaus or glimpsing the mythic valley obscured by clouds. Relational objects, however, cluster in the simulated preponderance of Times Square, New York. They form an Olympiad of market-driven semi-gods, spelling their propositions in dazzling lights, and sometimes in a wild recreation of the mute boulders, silent deserts, and still mountains of absent landscapes. Just as Las Vegas embodies the cactus flower of the Mojave Desert, the techno-architectural theater showcases the cosmic proliferation of life within the confines of the urban petri dish. Relational objects are ubiquitous and easier to spot than the entities that masquerade behind the relations they propound. Entities, it could be said, adorn themselves with relational objects. Relations are “worn” in the sense that entities slip into them as into a second skin of behavioral cognition. Joy, fear, sorrow, and elation are sartorial modifications, whereas even the figure of the saint fails to capture an entity's essence, as does the saintliness at the core of what is most ordinary. Relational apparel is lined with an underlayer that tricks entities into internalizing the set of expectations associated with the costume’s shell. This can make entitative objects behave like relational shipwrecks. But whether fallen from grace or surreptitiously responsible, they are not to be idealized as incorruptible, since an ideal would only moor them to another relational dock. No matter the existential condition they find themselves in, the singularity of entitative objects consists in how they exceed any other being's assessment, including their own.

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes portrays love as the longing of beings split by Zeus to recover their original wholeness by reuniting with their missing halves. The beloved is thus imagined as the lost portion of oneself, implying an entitative deficiency. Yet love and friendship are relational objects that, at their best, enable beings to emphasize each other’s singularity and hence become more aware of their fundamental irreducibility. The paradigm of affective relations is thus consumed in an act of entitative recognition without requiring an unnecessary alchemy. Distinguishing entitative from relational objects implies that losing a relation does not make an entity incomplete. Intimacy need not culminate in fusion, nor must dependence cancel out singularity, especially when the opportunity presents itself to behold entitative irreducibility rather than the symmetry of joining two ailing halves in unison. Plato’s autochthonous rounded double beings, endowed with four legs, four arms, and two faces on a single head, answer to a dualism that regulates sexuality by accounting for the attraction between each sex and its sometimes opposite, and other times complementary other. They remain ultimately anthropomorphic in promoting an ideal that eludes the entitative reality of objects at large. The attraction between beings does not suffer an insufficiency at its root, nor is it motivated by lack. The true object of love for human and non-human entities alike is the fulfillment that comes with a shared recognition of the entitative singularity each brings to the relation, in which, rather than searching for their lost half, entities resonate by summoning their entitative core.

8.2

An entity can be influenced in multiple ways and relies on many relations to maintain its equilibrium. Only an entity with no outside can dispense with relations altogether, and even an unmoved mover must enter a primordial relation with itself. Entities cannot survive without relations, but relations can cluster to simulate an entity that lures other entities into a trap. While relational objects can outlive their expiration dates and skip their functions, entities bear a responsibility toward their relational counterparts to prevent them from bypassing their assignments. However, in some cases, an entity hoards relational objects to establish a power structure among other entities, defining itself through legislative dictates. Institutional complexes grow from these early efforts to harness entities into relational uniforms. Entities often face a meteor shower of relations, and their intrinsic drive to rule other entities largely depends on the relational objects they associate with. Since power is inherent to entities but manifests itself through their relations, everything changes once it is understood as a relational rather than an entitative object. As a relational object, power adheres to an entity’s self-assessment, obscuring the fact that it intrinsically exists in a realm of singularities beyond comparison. The power structure of domination disappears among entities when freed from the relational objects that bind them into a hegemonic order, and this adds to the definition of entitative objects, which, in addition to irreducibility, states the impossibility of establishing a pecking order among them, since that would require inherently relational comparative measures. Furthermore, the distinction between entitative and relational objects allows for a more comprehensive assessment of reality without sinking into contradiction, as the measuring capacity, comparative associations, and hegemonic distributions of relational objects are synchronic with the unquantifiable uniqueness and diversity of entities. Ironically, only when entities realize they have no last word over each other can they truly cooperate and enter non-coercive relations. A healthy maneuver in this regard would be to place entitative objects slightly out of reach, refusing to put the lid on them, so as not to interfere with their autonomy beyond the relations that bind us to them. Because of their co-production and dependence, entitative and relational objects are prone to conflation or mistaken identity, yet entities, unlike social institutions, are not fully accountable to relational ends and do not always answer their agonistic demands. Entities may need to free themselves from relational objects once sought for fulfillment, but which have eventually outlived their necessity. The reverse is far more troubling when relational objects bypass entities by relegating them to an altogether different registry than the one conditioning reality, cutting off any ties to hide the fact that they do not precede entities, nor can they meaningfully exist without them. Bypassing entities in this manner sets the ground for relational objects to become the grand engineers of simulation.

8.3

Just as there is no Archimedean point of neutral observation, entities are beyond comparison because none can have the last word on them. An entity's evaluation is limited by the scope of the assessing object. Being beyond comparison means entitative objects are impervious to the comparative methods of relational objects and resist use as exchange tokens. Entities are not subject to power structures without relational objects, but the latter have outpaced entities in a mad race toward an ideal they have created among themselves. As comparison displaces entitative objects and subjects them to the relational dictates of other objects, a complex of directives recuperates an entity's original relational appetition and replaces it with simulated interpretations. Relational objects begin to exude the tantalizing lure of entitative sublimation through reification and a generalized pornography that allows access to relations on demand, since their simulated availability greatly exceeds what can be generated or accessed locally. The extent to which relational objects have exploited the entitative dimension of the body is staggering, turning it into an insatiable pseudo-entity, always hungry for more gratification, desperately trying to become the perfect vehicle of the emancipated mind, yet precisely what being is not at its core. Pornography already lines supermarket shelves, and what people do with it when they take it home is protected under the rights of individual freedom. Propriety is a strange form of ethical composure, elastic enough to entertain its opposite in an implosion of private sectors. Entitative reality shrinks in these circumstances, and the more simulation grows, the more entitative presence recedes, leaving the ritual field, which is the engaged co-production of entitative and relational objects, at the mercy of the automated simulacrum.

The role model, as a type of celebrity and trend-setting influencer that metonymizes the popular state of fame, is a relational object that parades as an entitative ideal hallowed by the glow of public attention. The athlete, the newscast anchor, the seasoned songwriter, and the rising movie star alike partake of this proclivity, which eventually shifts the focus from what is being delivered to the messenger itself. A notorious starlet is only the entitative shard of a relational script. The recipient of fame does not qualify as a genuine entity because the relational prescription inherent in its proposal seeks to apply comparative measures, even when expressed as merit, inciting adulation and manic devotion, to entitative objects that remain beyond comparison. To be fair, the comparative measures exercised by the idol are seldom overt, lest they veer into the grotesque, but its followers internalize them as a channel of receptivity in a culture where the mythic hero and the porn star belong to the same relational genus. Entitative objects cannot structurally enter comparison without relation, but since the celebrity model projects its entity as a paradigm for others to adopt, it substitutes its betrayal of entitative irreducibility with the image of an ideal, ratified by the simulacrum’s insistence on appearing first. The algorithmic model, since that is what makes it go viral, straddles entitative and relational objects like an ambassador of the simulacrum. It takes on the role of representation with the added task of inciting emulation and is essentially a relational object that promotes an idealized form of objecthood. Its utopia of the exalted body is promoted by a consensus-derived aesthetic in which all entities and their differences are mere paths that lead to its shining citadel. Lastly, but perhaps first to consider, this paradigmatic object’s capacity to mirror its fans’ aspirations is invested with an iconic a priori to which they must initially adapt, a prerequisite whose adoption happens to be the main behavioral adjustment intended by its propaganda.

8.4

Love and friendship preserve the granularity of being, but simulation already jumps to what the relationship ought to be and how to enhance it. Simulation hops over sacrifice. It is no longer defined by sameness, having already crossed the bridge of difference, but by a relentless, frenetic adherence to originality, as if to never stop the shock of the new, to borrow the title of Robert Hughes's critique of the institutionalization of the avant-garde. Lovers and friends resist the copycat prerogatives of simulation but struggle to survive its all-encompassing ambition to convert the world into fungible data. Simulation has no tolerance for heterogeneous arrangements and seeks to partake in all things. It enters reality like an atmospheric fog that permeates the entire context, releasing its viscosity and clinging to everything it touches. It seems that the aesthetic code in contemporary cultural media production is to have just enough reserve to prevent slipping into pornography, implying an inevitability counter to which virtue can strike a pose. Against this backdrop bordering on calamity, and self-promotion propped in a protected foreground, a link is established between simulation and pornography. The latter’s etymology in ancient Greek suggests fornication and its recording for later consumption, hence its parentage to simulation. Pornography is a relational object that latches on to the tail end of entities, that is, at their weakest state of differentiation, leveling them to a common substrate for unhindered access to the body, baptized into a commodity. Characterized by skipping the gravity of entities altogether for a carnal smorgasbord, the pornography endemic to Western culture colludes with its other modes of reducing beings to maximize its relational monopolies. As counterintuitive as it may seem to talk about pornography as a relational object, its force stems from its ability to bypass entities for a relation that becomes an end in itself. It is rooted in sexuality, which is usually thought of as polarizing entities rather than yet another relational object that does not define the sexes as much as endow them with an orientation, leaving their entitative primacy intact. Pornography has a rich past and significance in various other cultures that maintain its connection with the sacred. Initially, Kama in Hinduism and Buddhism refers to sensory enjoyment without being strictly sexual; thus, its subsequent celebration of sex has roots in a tight conjugation of mind and body, in parallel to entities and relations. In Tantric rites, the divinity is reconstituted by the dissolution of distinct bodies into a relational orgy. Shakti initiates men to attain self-realization in exchange for their entitative recognition of the subjective feminine and the observance of the primacy of her desires. This reveals an important aspect of the relational object: an entity exists at the end of its relational arc, and its fulfillment causes the arousal that drives the transaction. An entirely different motivation directs the conversion of the European ingenue into the emancipated libertine of Western culture. Her denigration of social ties does not redeem entities but condemns them to the relational hell of the Marquis de Sade, whose perversity mirrors the noble ideals civilization expresses best in orgiastic bestiality. Nowadays, pornography has become “a widespread recreational activity in line with other digital activities like social media and video games” (Wikipedia), as the industry puts unsimulated sex at the service of a simulated relational outcome. 1969 to1984 span 15 years of porno-chic that marked the “golden age” of the industry, ushered in by Warhol’s Blue Movie and, if we are to take him at his word, distilled into the eroticism of 1972’s Last Tango in Paris. The internet and smartphones have since contributed to the exponential growth of porn, which in return, as an early adopter and provider of financial capital, has consistently held a vanguard role in developing cutting-edge communication technologies. Pornography is almost becoming prescriptive, having earned a list of legitimations equal in tenure to the Civil Rights Movement. Yet most of the reasons offered to explain its continued use fail to justify its magnitude and ubiquity. The erosion of cultural taboos and the overcoming of religious repression, or the utilitarian safe outlet for unsatisfied desires, does not quite explain the increasingly seamless integration of pornography in cultural production. What seems rather at stake is a pact with simulation technologies to put into effect an entitative economy that maximizes the availability of ready-made surrogacy.

8.5

There is not only the simultaneity of events but also the synchronicity of the interpretive frameworks that allow an occurrence to be appraised from different points of view. Love and simulation proceed from two divergent types of recognition. Love and friendship are relations that lead to the entitative recognition of the protagonists, whereas simulation substitutes their entities for the relation. The type of recognition that belongs to the latter is a mix of popularity, celebrity, and fame. Simulation puts a meter on its rendering of reality, and in peer-to-peer interactions, relations march on in the dead sleep of entities. The simulacrum represents the most accomplished version of existence, in the eternal optimism of Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds. But only the cash cow behind the infamous Green Door quells the devil so that Miss Jones can swallow her pride. Primary concerns cannot get through and are made to wait for their number to be called, like when a life-or-death issue gets scheduled for a yearly review. Simulation’s collusion with capital, having already locked the door and thrown away the key, now seeks to recreate the cohesiveness of what motivates the lover and the friend, in what may be its final conquest. Love stutters and raises many a question, but the simulacrum always has an answer, informed by the election of a perfect solution, only curtailed by its price. Its incontrovertible logic, though detrimental, marches on regardless, offering no surprise beyond a constant stream of synthetic novelty. Does Étienne de La Boétie denounce voluntary servitude to prevent it from infecting the entitative irreducibility of his friendship with Michel de Montaigne? Do Romeo and Juliette only live on because they die for each other? Regardless, it seems, the Montagues and Capulets are in a terminal détente that has institutionalized their relations. Simulation becomes seamless when it is no longer the product of labor but the effect of its own redundancy. Yet love and friendship are not impervious to friction. Relations hurt, but the entities involved, despite their partial perspective, are left more than intact, each having reaffirmed its ground. The fusion into an undifferentiated unity is the kind of pipe dream only worthy of an eight-episode drama series, nowadays better served by porn. Some have theorized that the contemporary sex industry is an inversion of “the intimation of hierophany”: the manifestation of the sacred theorized as the origin of the techno-consumerist state of entitative non-differentiation. Whatever the case may be, the march of the profane has made pornography and its active partnership with simulation hollow out the body into an armor that is contemptuous of its particularity. Love remains alien to their meritorious self-assuredness and lacks the confidence of their optimized lifestyles. When an interference of relations simulates political individuals, they can generate the figures of Adolf Hitler, Trump, or Netanyahu, the latter deliriously spouting out that “accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century”, and the former threatening to “annihilate” the Islamic Republic of Iran. These blatant distortions of reality are made possible by a regime of simulacra that can substitute their hollowed-out entities with copycat versions of themselves. Simulation proposes the privilege of an affair that substitutes reaching out to others with memberships and upgrades. Entitative love, by sharp contrast, is enacted by being happy that something or someone simply exists in the world, even with little or no observable relation. It has nothing to do with upholding an ideal, which remains a relational distillation, but with a receptiveness to the ecstasy that pertains to the granular particularity of being and joins the sacred in its carnal passage to entities.

8.6

They have placed the carts ahead of the horses, now running helter-skelter, while the stationary carts, arranged in a circular interval of minute-by-minute global happenings, match curated destinations suspended in time. Social media has a new suitor for the elusive bride walking past her bachelors, down the catwalk of contemporary art. The art influencer is a new breed of cultural broker that curates artistic experience with a panoply of relational exigencies. A trend-setting aesthetic collector, obsessed with the process of artmaking, spanning studio tours, time-lapse video, and step-by-step installments, while bypassing traditional gallery gatekeepers to establish a sizable global online audience. The influencer monetizes by partnering with luxury brands, museums, and auction houses to drive sponsorships, bookings, and sales. But what is really produced is relational positioning. By matching a particular artist to a certain designer, a cause to a luxury brand, or an exhibition to a destination, the influencer becomes a sovereign tastemaker and custodian of this relational network of algorithms, brands, and institutions. Half a century after Robert Hughes’ rather conservative admonition that the avant-garde had succumbed to institutionalization, it has become apparent, despite its failure, that shock, transgression, anti-bourgeois posture, institutional critique, and the rhetoric of resistance have become genres of cultural production themselves. Opposition has proved extraordinarily easy for an economic apparatus to metabolize into one that can accommodate a surprisingly radical vocabulary without undergoing a corresponding transformation. Criticism has become infrastructural to the contemporary art scene, which not only tolerates it but has learned to aestheticize, monetize, and distribute it. Even as circulation masquerades as encounter, visibility as recognition, and connectivity as collectivity, the influencer’s art curation becomes an act of continuous relational production, connecting lifestyles and audiences into an aesthetic stream.

Contemporary art, no matter how subversive, is like a sublime ballet performance enclosed in a pristine glass case pulled by the sooty henchmen of investment capital, in keeping with the airtight displays of exotic indigeneity that colonialism is so fond of. Art's incapacity to affect dominant social order and power structures, despite both the allegations and negations regarding the role ascribed to it, stems from a built-in limitation of the aesthetic category itself, as it is made subordinate to both ethics and politics, and further set back by the divide between them which, with no surprise, occupies center stage. Thus, expecting art to instigate a social revolution stems from the often-overlooked mistake of addressing the wrong register. Counterculture runs alongside the mainstream without affecting it, like a parallel category that operates so smoothly that the idea of aesthetics bridging the ethical and the political seems far-fetched. Instead, as the alternative to traditional institutions becomes the sum of all subcultures rolled into the institutional order par excellence, and enough reification has coaxed the commodity with the euphemisms of content, intervention, and iconographic discourse, art influencers as sought-after opinion leaders make a name for themselves, turning the art object into the ultimate fetish, and merchandising it as a coveted cultural product. And yet they do not suspect they are the new soldiers marching on the front line of the implacable logic of simulation. Wielding position, content, and iconography, visibility, engagement, and cultural capital, simulation is the relational automation produced through an entitative reduction, in which beings are compressed into no more than the necessary traits required for their circulation, until the relation takes a life of its own and reproduces itself with no meaningful recourse to the entities that first informed it. It is the type of relation that seeks to eliminate the opacity of its participants and, by ceasing to mediate entities, begins to manufacture substitutes for them. Simulation is hyper-commodification and can look extraordinarily active while remaining structurally static, as constant novelty does not contradict its underlying grammar of value production, validation, and circulation.

8.7

Iris, the inveterate art influencer, high priestess of Nova Persona, the groundbreaking creative talent agency, is holding a virtual event to entertain her new acquaintances. She has been lauded as a post-iconoclastic aesthetic DJ, and the range of her interventions imparts a carefully curated image of cultural authority. Aristophanes’ avatar, summoned for love advice, left the podcast in a huff after she curtly asked whether his half-being was allowed to decline its longed-for reunion. An arresting automated sculpture is at the centerpiece of the instant gallery drop, featuring an imposing biped clad in shining armor next to a supine fur-covered quadruped. A flexible and luminous wand wraps around them, twisting with their movements to suggest configurations ranging from an umbilical cord to a collar and a leash. The mirrored surface of the armored biped reflects fragments of the guests, while the alluring quadruped invites them to assign it a gender, a sexuality, and a position of submission. One sees a patriarch displaying his concubine, and another a dominatrix leading her slave. Historicism is de rigueur in these cross-cultural sessions and deployed to facilitate the sometimes unlikely encounters of the guests. Étienne de la Boétie and Michel de Montaigne sit beside each other, across the Greek playwright’s empty chair and the glass of wine he knocked off in his abrupt departure, leaving it lying on a darkening ruby stain. The other two attendees are public figures, by choice in the case of TP, the ambitious senator who is making congressional politics an online platform, and by inadvertent notoriety in the case of Svelta, his partner in crime and former infamous madam who is monopolizing online porn. Dirty news got out concerning the senator’s involvement not only with his old friend’s virtual networks but with the much more sinister trafficking networks that involve a massive exploitation of hand-picked multiethnic sampling of minors. Iris is thrilled she got this group of guests together, just for the incongruity she relentlessly pursues, if only to keep up with the brand of offbeat and radical dissociation that has become her signature. Pensively turning to the mime-like moving sculpture, Etienne asks what keeps this stolid arrangement in motion: habit, reward, fear, protection, or the advantages of proximity to power? Michel heartily offers friendship as an attachment that escapes this infernal economy. But his language of merged souls prompts Etienne to draw Iris’s attention and, in a triangular exchange of glances, ask Michel if he must agree with him to remain the friend he describes. TP and Svelta appear immensely amused by the artwork, from which they seem to draw perverse satisfaction, as they stumble on an allegory that not only encapsulates their predicament but, quite interestingly, exerts a fascination that diverts attention from the brewing scandal about to go viral. Exclamations of awe and surprise circulate among the guests as the quadruped, writhing on the floor with the lascivious circumvolutions of its long-furred limbs, lets off provocative flashes of smooth naked skin. Meanwhile, its upright counterpart, standing stiff like the eternal knight in shining armor, occasionally decompresses in a hydraulic squat, and slowly rises to resume its Vitruvian stature. Handling the eerie luminous cord, however, leaves their acrobatics in suspense as it settles on no final function, alternating between a noose, a lasso, a handle, or a collar. Nor is there an orifice where they can permanently tuck its loose ends. Fascinated by the animalistic creature, Michel is reminded of the many times he thought his cat was entertaining herself with him, rather than him being the master of the ceremony, implying that, here again, the animal is conspicuously represented but almost entirely overlooked. The measure of all things nevertheless condemns the four-legged creature to fulfill the role of human sexuality. In the blind encounter Iris initiates around art, love, and sexuality, which the protagonists agreed upon for separate reasons, Etienne’s and Michel’s friendship collides with TP and Svelta’s shady camaraderie, built on their lucrative partnership and growing enterprise, scandal notwithstanding. To avoid small talk and navigate the awkward situation, the four guests direct vague, easily agreed-upon observations at the persistent sculptural amalgam of spectacle and commodity. At the biped’s next collapse, Svelta bursts out laughing. “Everyone assumes the one standing holds the power, but some people enjoy being led!” she exclaims, “And some enjoy leading long after the game is over” retorts Michel. TP leans forward, declaring, “That is precisely what public life denies us. Everyone decides what we are, and then everything we do confirms it. Svelta and I have known each other for years, and apparently, nothing remains of it but a lousy headline.” Turning to Etienne, Svelta adjusts her glass and bluntly asks, “Would you destroy your friend to preserve your idea of friendship?” But before either friend could answer, Iris intervenes with the satisfaction of someone who has found the usable part of a difficult conversation. Their rapport was not meant to be guaranteed, and the experiment was precisely to test the waters between a crude, notorious procurer and an exemplary friend, a cultural innovator dedicated to resisting tyranny, and a corrupt politician gambling his career for another cheap thrill. TP and Svelta’s recognition of their own predicament in the artwork they enthusiastically chose to sponsor becomes desirable. It temporarily discharges them from responsibility, making their victims disappear beneath the weight of an allegory. In this pursuit of incongruity, Iris assembled an inventory whose methodology aligned with an operation that produced a radically different level of consequence, facilitating outright exploitation through a mix of calculated distance and feigned ignorance. All the while, the quadruped writhes on the floor as the armored biped collapses from prolonged standing, then slowly pumps back up to his majestic pose, their identities left intact by their uncoordinated movements, save for their twitching at every tug of the attention-grabbing, orphan ligament.

Explore the artworks

of Ely Tahan on social media:

CONTACT

artprojects@elytahan.net

© 2025. All rights reserved.

My post content