No Need To Be To Be: On 'Kandinsky' and Playboi Carti

On the 'no need to be to be' (nntbtb) of abstract art without abstract art, and '2024: music'.

Playboi Carti’s song ‘2024’ acts as a perfectly formal aesthetic template. Given the superfluity of all content in 2024, the only real content that can be adequate to the moment would be pure contentlessness in itself. In other words, the only name that could ever be given to content in 2024 is the name ‘2024’, the title of Playboi Carti’s song.¹

Insofar as ‘2024’ itself must perhaps have some content, in order to be enough of something to be at all, the song—by which we also mean its official video—is the expression of the suspended but still perhaps necessary dream Tom Cohen once confessed, of the boycotting of all relapsing hermeneutic regimes.²

It is impossible to encounter the world in 2024 without sometimes wishing to utterly destroy its premises—however much that constitutes a fantasy. In Fred Moten’s work on cinematic migrations he states that the entire imago of cinema is a twentieth-century regime that has to be gone beyond.³ To take any content at all seriously in 2024 is itself risible (to use Moten’s own word for 12 Years A Slave), except there where that content would itself be named ‘2024’.

The boycotting of all relapsing hermeneutic regimes is directly expressed in ‘2024’ in the line ‘put em on the news’ which first spread on the internet in its misheard version as ‘put em on a noose’. Genius says, ‘The enunciation of the word “news” is done so that it sounds like “noose” simultaneously.’ The exceedingly formal trigger-hieroglyph in the middle of the song, ‘2024: music’, which might be written out as

2024 | music

is also a news/noose super-performative. Since all content must be ‘2024’ in 2024 or be nothing, all content is put on a noose and this is the boycotting of all relapsing hermeneutic regimes without exception. But since noose is not noose (it’s news), then that thought is embargoed and left till later on. You are let off the rope, even though you are the hostis humani generis, the generic enemy of the whole of humanity. The one who does not empty content out in 2024 is the opp of all mankind.

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What happens when we fully get to grips with the radical nonexistence of content, what Kandinsky and Michel Henry perhaps meant (as we shall see) by invisible content? If it is indeed—for more than aesthetic, ontological and political reasons—impossible to post content in 2024, then would the only remaining content, a type of thoroughly invisible content therefore, be something called ‘2024’? We are saying yes. The complete non-existence of content is not something we have to take seriously in 2024 because the complete non-existence of content is already something being taken seriously in 2024 as ‘2024’. Everywhere, content is becoming invisible, superfluous, universally ‘retarded’. Content in 2024 is ‘2024’ because the radical nonexistence of content is being taken seriously.

There is still no way out of the immense ongoing recognition of this fact of pure contentlessness, a re-cognition that might be called (following Cohen) an extinction unconscious or even an online extinction physics. There is still no way out of this, the realization being enacted beyond all content that all content has been subjected to an epiphenomenal ‘put em on a noose’ that can’t not be heard, seen, abstracted from and to. Is a song called ‘2024’ in 2024 an abstraction of a deabstraction of the abstract?

‘Put em on a noose’ is a perfect fake mondogreen in 2024 precisely because, next to Ye’s KKK hood in the video for Carti’s ‘2024’, it goes without needing to be said. Ye’s hood is determining here in that it decides for us the content of the song: noose, ultimately, not news. That content is too much so it gets deabstracted back into ‘the news’. Nobody wants the real news, which is that rope is now ubiquitous. The only thing you can call any content in 2024 is ‘2024’, but we can only say that at the end of 2024; which means there again that, this end is not the end we get to see or go to willingly in various contemporary theories and scenes, which is to say the end of present-day capitalism. The post-ultimate end is itself an abstract end, and not the one you think.⁴

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In his book on Kandinsky, Seeing the Invisible, Michel Henry makes a series of thrillingly but unbelievably definitive claims about the history and meanings of abstract art. These claims are recognized by Henry himself in their radicality. When it comes to a certain invisibility of painting’s content for example (what Kandinsky calls ‘invisible content’), there is a reference to ‘two seemingly mad ideas’. On the same page Henry comments that ‘we cannot hide our surprise any longer’.

What Henry contends in the name of ‘Kandinsky’s singularity’—but let’s just call it the Kandinsky Singularity for now—is in fact so ‘mad’ and ‘surprising’ that, at its most important points, it threatens to leave painting itself and Kandinsky’s name behind.⁵

Seeing the Invisible is, then, properly unbelievable in the way that God must be imagined to be; in fact, it is no coincidence that Henry’s final work Words of Christ focuses on the language of Christ as if it were a direct replacement for—and not just equivalent of—the abstraction of Kandinsky.

Straightway an invisible acceleration occurs between Kandinsky and Christ as if both were forms of the same abstract content and means. The question ultimately becomes, is a painting of Christ an abstraction of a deabstraction of the abstract?⁶

When Boris Groys speaks of Van Gogh and the computer it’s as if he says the same thing. Groys discards the brushstroke as inessential to painting since what painting really is, distinguishing itself from the computer, is the ability to cut off an ear. ‘And the computer cannot cut off its ear. That’s the difference.’⁷ This difference is itself thoroughly abstractive.⁸

In October 2022, Phoebe Plummer threw soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers 1888. Plummer, now imprisoned for a two-year term, asked ‘What is worth more, art or life?’ The question is so simple, it is missed. Henry’s book marks itself out by constantly answering that life—the Internal—is worth more; and then relapsing back into painting as that which which makes the abstractive difference essential.

In Isiah Medina’s He Thought He Died—which is a film about painting⁹—this dialectic of life and art revolves quickly through a series of compatible and incompatible options, but always with the main option of returning to the aesthetic ideology of Medina’s film itself. We know this because it was made.¹⁰¹¹ Or as Andilib Khan says at one point in the film, ‘I wouldn’t attack art in favor of earth.’

A series of dialogic variations take place in He Thought He Died between Khan and Kelly Dong, none of which appear to be possible resting places (this is art, after all, and art as such always mortgages itself out to ambiguity or, on a different level, to what the film calls ‘the nuances of the infinite’), save that aesthetic ideology itself is what lets the artwork off the hook of ever having to say anything else.¹² ‘Art lives in the mind’, says Dong, ‘and if there are no minds, it does not change the fact there was a time when this art was mind.’

Yet, art is no less impermanent than mind, and removal of mind does indeed—in mind now and then, in the future, without us—terminally abstract the memory of art. The film must know this and the dialogue in this part of the film develops first by a foreseeable rejection of mere life and then by an even more predictable confirmation—because it is a repetition within the scene—of aesthetic ideology’s own self-preference. An ‘artless planet’ is said to be ‘much more frightening’ than a picturable ‘planetless art’, all the while stopping to note that both options are still—and already—in play. ‘You can picture both, we know both exist.’

Cinema would distinguish itself as the dialogue—almost Platonic—between artless planet and planetless art. Such is cinematic abstraction as erotetic and declarative dialogue that allows us to picture both now, through expediency and elegance. Montage does nothing more or less than superimpose planetlessness and artlessness on top of one another, sliding them around atop shared auras like transparent plates. We know now that, on this planet, there is planetless art, since art is a world without planet that can contain pictures of the removal of our basis; and yet what cinema or painting picture is artless too, on a planet or world in which the presence of art is broadly not known by the world. The world does not know that art or the planet exist. No need to be to be.

The relation between an artless planet and a planetless art is, however, much less nuanced when the very existence of a film opts out of wishing to know anything other than the favoring of art itself.¹³ Henry’s book on Kandinsky becomes both more and less interesting when we view it by the same lights.

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Perhaps what is beautiful—in a necessarily altered sense—about Henry’s two books—and therefore about the Kandinsky and Christ singularities—is that they share an abstraction-ferocity so unbelievable¹⁴ it becomes invisible—in order to be this Abstraction Singularity—at its most breakaway, vulnerable moments.

As a result, these moments (of vulnerability) must be the true meaning of an abstraction which has no need of being beautiful or aesthetic to be beautiful or aesthetic at all. Unbelievable abstraction is itself abstraction’s no need to be to be.¹⁵

Everytime Henry approaches that zone in Seeing the Invisible, he misses, or rather lets us and it down in failing to draw it out—and this is something we must become amenable to, in order to see the invisibility of what he indicates as part of something that leaves behind fixed nominal and visual examples and shapes.

Another way of saying it is that you will only really understand what I am saying here about abstract art (without abstract art) if you are blind. ‘The closest you get to it is Stevie [Wonder]’, says Ye at the end of the leak-doc 500 Days in UCLA (2018). Ye continues,

He was able to get there quicker because he had to see [didn’t have to see] all this bullshit. Think about it. That’s why he made probably arguably the greatest album of all time.

Like, are there really good blind painters? A.I. is blind I guess? Can A.I. see? The ‘it is over’ that 2024 art or rather general plasticity carries with it in 2024 is like a question relayed to A.I. art as a formal realm, a transcendental aesthetics. Can A.I. see it’s over? Can I see? Can I see the no need to be to be, so that I can see the end of the world in good time? So that I can see ‘it’s over’ so that the over can be changed, so that the over may perhaps be changed in and as the end, before then? Folly for to see afaint afar away over there this change?

The Kandinsky singularity—invisible abstract art as distinct from all other attempts at abstraction in the history of art, including a geometric abstraction that Henry describes in strongly Husserlian¹⁶ terms—radically overshoots, yes, but does Henry accept by just how much? The ‘invisible content’ the word ‘Kandinsky’ evokes may also be called ‘the Internal’ and this ‘determination by the Internal’ is specifically said to be radical. But again, do Henry and Kandinsky and Christ believe in just how unbelievable all this is?

At the point of writing a book about the most invisible aspects of abstract painting, including ‘abstract colors’, Henry points directly to the possibility of leaving painting aside and then fails to do so with a consistency that is as if sublime, and it is at these junctures of relapsing that something else surges, the very fine art of the no need to be to be.¹⁷

If painting has no need to be to be, is that itself abstract art? Or is abstract art the very expression of the secret of the no need to be to be? In other words, if painting has no need to be to be, is that itself abstract art’s invisible content? Is the no need to be to be invisible color(s)?¹⁸

Or rather, does painting (as the equal abstraction of Christ, or the painting of Christ, as if by Christ, ex-abstracted) have no need to be to be tout court? It could well be that there is only one reason nobody ever succeeds in writing about the no need to be to be directly, because to do so means immediately abandoning where one is: if Henry abandons the place of painting in the name or place of the no need to be to be then he abandons or will already have abandoned (and not written) the book called Seeing the Invisible which sustains itself from the example and the exemplary illusion of he, the painter, who is called Wassily Kandinsky, and this extends to our attempt to describe Henry’s inability to see his own problem right there save in the secret laboratory of painting.

At the same time, we see that ‘invisible content’ may itself be the expression of the inner pulsation of the very fine art of the no need to be to be, the state-of-the-art art of one artwork per century, and that really Henry’s book, as with so many others, does not need to be read.¹⁹²⁰ Henry sees—as all of us do—the movement of the no need to be to be without seeing it or wanting to see it at all.²¹ It is as if his book about the determination of form by the invisible is itself—from the outside—determined by the superior invisibility of the NNTBTB. May we leave the NNTBTB to itself for now, like a tube or gush or stroke or graze of invisible color? Where is it, then? This invisible thing?

We can only perhaps think it will apply too—in unbelievable abstraction exactly—to other forms such as the cinematic, and with regard to what Fred Moten calls ‘a practice of filmmaking that wasn’t predicated on the actual finished object of the film itself’.²² Close to the true and all too real problem of the Kantian sublime, the no need to be to be breaks free from the aesthetic irreversibly, indignantly, invisibly and without producing a new object. What we are seeing, en vif, is the creation of a new art which has no need of any object at all and, in so doing, the thing of the invisible describes the impermanence of pure space to us. Since such impermanence leaves even pure space behind, no example cuts itself out here.

Therefore, it is no wonder ‘Kandinksy’ leaves Kandinsky behind there in Henry’s eyes without being able to give the slip. He (but who?) is caught in a kind of artefactual freeze-frame of painting after the fact, a loop that keeps Henry on (as a ‘slave’ of sorts: Hegel) writing the book. In the same way, the word of Christ is said to be totally different and yet is still found in Christ’s name.²³ The hyperbolic quality of these radical breaks (I mean moments where Henry might have left painting itself behind but does not, or might have said goodbye to the word of Christ but does not) are the blushes of Henry’s text, what makes it go, giving the nod to the breakaway asset (nntbtb) as real. The word of Christ does not speak in the world; it is internal. In the same way, the Kandinsky singularity has nothing to do with (for example) Rothko’s transition to pure form and color which seemed already a suicide, since the existential collateral of the no need to be to be is a common mistake. The no need to be to be is, unbelievably, the only thing we need.²⁴²⁵

1. We might say something like: Content in 2024 is ‘2024’ or it is nothing else at all. All other content is hating and opposition work. ‘Instantly, bait everywhere.’ The ubiquity of bait (the deliciousness of hate) is simply the extinction drive. But as we shall see, the noose is not quite the same as the news here. ‘[P]ut em on the noose is fucking wild bro imagine getting noosed by your opps’.

2. The dream is recounted—and suspended—in Cohen’s essay ‘Toxic Assets: de Man’s Remains and the Ecocatastrophic Imaginary (an American Fable)’, in Theory and the Disappearing Future.

3. I riffed on this idea of Moten’s—itself taken from the work of Kara Keeling—in my text ‘Principles of Film01: How to Shoot Angelicism Cinema’.

4. For another type of reading of Carti in terms of AI, see Nolan Kelly’s recent ‘Playboi Carti Against His Own Game’.

5. See ‘Convergence’, 13 September 2021.

6. I thank 14kilo196kilo14 for this formulation.

7. The full quote is: ‘I don’t know if a brushstroke is relevant here. What is relevant is the one fact that Van Gogh cut his ear off. And the computer cannot cut off its ear. That’s the difference.’ I can’t find the source.

8. Abstractive in this case might mean super-arguable. From unpublished writing: ‘I think briefly of Jordan Wolfson’s new suicide cube object and want to write about it. The problem of artificial suicide is a real one. Perhaps AGI would have been nothing but inertia and unwillingness to continue (doing nothing fr).’ An AI suicide cube may be imagined cutting off its own ear.

9. It would be more accurate to say it is film as, of, about and through painting. The film contains painterly cuts and montages of Medina himself painting.

10. Yes, I simply mean I am choosing to abbreviate everything here by pointing out that being a filmmaker as generic decision is, in 2024, a strongly (fatally) ideological decision. Cinematic ideology comes down to this: the assumption of film, the making of a film. The alleged suppositionlessness of art is nothing but aesthetic ideology itself, the suicidal (ecocidal) epistemology of tropes. No artwork, however much it moves around within the domain of the mathematical sublime, can escape this matrix in 2024.

11. We also know it because of the interview Medina gave to Andrei Pora after He Thought He Died, ‘Three Questions’, which immediately becomes entangled in the necessary allegory of cinema denying away its own non-immanent relation with cinematic theory.

12. In order to keep making art, Medina has to keep saying and believing in ‘art’. Aesthetic ideology really is nothing else but the ideology of that.

13. It would be relevant here to re-read and supplement this passage: ‘Badiou’s critique of “growth” in L’immanence des vérités is not necessarily consistent with his post-Cantorian ontology. To be against all economic growth in a generalized fashion has more to do with the ideology of finitude. Growth can be decoupled from the market and the figure of repetition much like infinity can be decoupled from the one.’

14. This term again. But think about a simple sentence like the following: God is unbelievable.

15. That this would would take some explaining should not dissuade us from—on one level—leaving it there. It is also almost impossible to not think here of the analytic of the sublime in Kant, and how it comes after the analytic of the beautiful. Beautiful, first; then, sublime. But at this point in Kant’s itinerary, in the analytic of the sublime, why does either category fall on either side? Why does beautiful not name the escape of the sublime from the world of objects that art almost always is? We would have to learn to read this moment in de Man’s essay ‘Hegel on the Sublime’: ‘The sublime for Hegel is the absolutely beautiful. Yet nothing sounds less sublime, in our current use of the term, than the sublime in Hegel.’ That is, the sublime, which comes after the beautiful, and is not beautiful, and may not be found in an aesthetic object at all, is the absolutely beautiful. This would essentially mean that the absolutely beautiful is reading de Man (Hegel, Cohen, Warminski) on the relation of the sublime to the beautiful and its lack of dependence on an aesthetic object.

16. Henry, we might say, is dissatisfied with an abstract art that does little more than work with what Husserl (and then Derrida, crucially) called the origin of geometry. Abstract art is not the process of idealization that takes the first geometer from the rough shape of roundness in nature to a perfect mathematical circle.

17. I wrote about the sublime (and the beautiful) in the context of the end of Zachary German’s writing in ‘“Legalize Heroin”: Notes on NYC Literature, Old and New’.

18. Let’s note ‘Invisible Colors’ is the title of a chapter in Seeing the Invisible, but Henry never allows the idea directly into the body of the text. The color of the no need to be to be of abstract art without abstract art is a color you have no need to see to see.

19. There would be a fine difference here, perhaps, between a text that does not need to be read to be read and one that does not need to be read (to be read). Perhaps we are simply saying that nobody really needs to read Michel Henry’s Seeing the Invisible—or anything else for that matter—to know what invisible art, content and color are.

20. I guess we mean that the no need to be to be is the state-of-the-art of art, high late technics, a very fine art at that. 1000 years from now you’ll log on to the interplanetary outernet to observe the post-effulgence stage telepolis, which, in a shape of total unpredictability, namelessness, and contentlessness—remains the post-ultimate apex realm of humanity, aka, the hyper-effulgence anti-singularity, from which, it will have posted only one singular dynamically sublime post per century.

21. It’s a question of seeing it—or not—in good time. Of being here to see the no need to be to be at the end of the world, for the end of the world, in good time. Extinction changes, but only though inscription.

22. Some work might be done distinguishing Moten’s idea of the cinematic without-object and what Harmony Korine means and doesn’t mean by post-cinema and by . See, for example, Pietro Bianchi’s recent ‘Aggro Dr1ft, the Intolerance of Harmony Korine’. Fwiw I don’t think what Korine calls ‘what comes after cinema’ and what Moten calls ‘cinematic migrations’ are at all the same thing. Tbc.

23. Christ is reduced, in the after-name of abstract painting, to a mere insistence of just one name; painting, meanwhile, is constantly left behind in a book that does not need to be read. We could basically stop—or never start—the description there. Is even just that abstract painting?

24. Or all you need to know.

25. See for example.