Text page
CCRU- Pomophobia
A critique of over-curated art culture that reads surveillance, simulation, and aesthetic self-consciousness as symptoms of a flattened cultural sensorium.
Archive condition
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Core idea
Pomophobia treats late twentieth-century art space as a regime of managed reflexivity. The target is not simply bad art but a condition in which performance, observation, and self-display feed each other until nothing unpredictable can happen.
The essay works by moving from scene description to theory and back again. Baudrillard, panopticism, and exhibition culture are forced together so that the gallery becomes a machine for producing monitored, exhausted subjects.
For the Warwick section, the text matters because it captures the negative side of early self-description: the archive is defining itself against a deadened art world of simulated eventfulness. It helps explain why CCRU writing keeps chasing intensity, contamination, and escape velocity.
How to read this text
Start with the opening scene-setting and keep track of the shift into Baudrillard. The strongest passages are the ones that show aesthetic fatigue as a technical problem of feedback and display.
Read it alongside the more exuberant CCRU texts. Pomophobia is useful because it shows what kinds of cultural enclosure the group thought it was trying to outrun.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 4
"Any object, any individual, any situation today could be a virtual ready-made ..." (VI 99) The ready-made, Baudrillard writes, "extracted from its context, from its idea, from its function, becomes more real than real (hyperrreal) and more art than art (it enters into the transaesthetics of banality, of insignificance, of nullity, where today the pure and indifferent form of art is to be seen)." (VI 99) Your body feels unbearably heavy.
Definition · paragraph 33
The miserable relativism of PoMo is already invited by the inherent pathos of Kant's metaphysics, backed up by the barely disguised theocide of rationally enforced regulative principles and transcendental simulations (the as if). As the grund falls away, you have to learn to police yourself.
Definition · paragraph 41
The arbitrariness of transcendental simstim regulations does not itself necessitate the reification and metaphorensic examination of this lack of a ground (which itself serves as the basis of transcendental miserabilist aesthetics/ philosophy/ theory). This is more the product of the already existing bourgeois culture and its decadent tendency to translate its own petty problems into grand gestures.
Stakes · paragraph 39
Capitalism displays antithetical tendencies, tenaciously reaffirming redundant cultural forms with one hand while ruthlessly decommissioning them with the other. Bourgeois tragic culture revels in a retro-reactive fascination for these archaisms (kitsch), building them back into the system at the level of ironic simulation (which further strengthens the reflection-reproduction of a self-satisfied human interiority under the great weight of its own poignant degeneration).
History · paragraph 56
ALD - Greil Marcus, "Art of the Living Dead", Wire 109, March 1993 AO - Deleuze/ Guattari, Anti-Oedipus PCS - Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" TE - Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil VI - Baudrillard, "The Virtual Illusion: Or the Automatic Writing of the World"
Appears in sections
Warwick and Formation Primary section
How the CCRU emerged around Warwick, Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and an unstable collaborative scene.