Raymond Pettibon: Return to Disorder and Disfiguration

At the moment of the 1980s when the collective desire to acquire linguistic competence was increasingly and aggressively shifted to an enforced simulation of technological competence, the parameters of the production of visual culture changed dramatically. With this shift toward a myth of self-constitution within the containment of advanced forms of techno-scientific operating systems, even a residual legitimacy of enlightenment aspirations in cultural production seemed to have disappeared. Since the 1960s, these aspirations have defined artistic practices and cultural sites with renewed vigor as emancipatory spaces where the dialectics of subjective imaginary and social symbolic could be productively contested and alternate, future relations could be rehearsed. The neo-futuristic myth of innovative forms of communication, of a technological progress undreamt of by any prior generation within advanced industrialized capitalism, delivered a universally governing techno-scientific pseudo-competence as the substitute for a linguistic constitution of the self. By collapsing each and every act of linguistic articulation within pre-established formulaic systems that exerted total control and were inexorably linked with ever-more-totalizing demands of consumption, these systems of control seemingly foreclosed the validity of all other cultural conventions. At the same time they eroded the legitimacy, if not the credibility, of those practices and cultural institutions in which the dialectic