How is individuation possible when all knowledges are transmitted by machines? Is wanting “to be a machine” the ultimate articulation of this limit question? As for us, living as we do in the age of a new machinic turn of sensibility (the digital turn, which coincides with the end of mass media that are dying in a globally and industrially organized regressive movement in which the technical, transitional object becomes monstrous and pathetic), we will encounter a new age of care in which the amateur is the exemplary figure—traversing, as such, the field of contemporary art, producing exhibitions such as Amateurs, organized by Ralph Rugoff at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, or Enthusiasts, organized by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandoska at Chelsea College, London, or the installation by Michel Gondry at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This new epoch opens up a new organological age that requalifies amateurs as practitioners as well as critics. But the practitioner of art is first of all a critic, if it is true that to practice is to discern. This is why we must try to understand, both here and in my third and final text, “The Quarrel of Amateurs,” what the past, present, and future of the amateur actually are—that is, the connection between critique and desire, if it is true that amateur derives from “amor,” love.
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