dOCUMENTA (13) nº 063. Critical art Ensemble. The Concerns of a R

“My sickness is my power.” This notebook is written from the perspective of a two-hundred-year-old human being, who grew up in the mid-nineteenth century and mistakenly relied on contemporary thinkers such as Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). Now, in the twenty-first century, he corrects his misapprehensions and describes his thinking as “a form of reasoning grounded in skepticism rather than in certitude.” Through this medium, Critical Art Ensemble announces an earnest warning: the currently circulating rhetoric shows patterns of argumentation that are problematic in similar ways to discredited evolutionary theories. The current problem is double-ended: on the one hand, “sickness” is associated with individuals or a “susceptible” population group; on the other hand, the backbiting politics of “prophylaxis” obscure the real causes. Critical Art Ensemble (CCA) was founded in 1987 by five media practitioner.