----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Dissembling, passing-as, representing-as-if…….. Johanna Drucker puts so well
the condition we are blind to and yet complicit in----
"The politics of capta, therefore, are the cultural politics of all semiosis,
in which the fundamental processes of sense-making and sign systems come into
being so that they pass themselves off as "what is" rather than "what has been
represented to appear to be what is". Such a politics is always freighted with
the baggage of any and every hegemony at work, and the "nothing is ever/never
natural" assertion has to be taken literally here as a way to undo the easy
habit of familiar thought. For though we "know" that data is constructed, we do
not always know how that knowing encodes the blindness that keeps unfamiliarity
at bay, keeps the "otherness" of the world at a distance in all of its true
profundity.”
To ‘undo the easy habit of familiar thought’— such is the enormous task of this
conversation and the work of the scholars and artists coming together here.
We’re asking, what’s feminist about this visualization? Drucker charges us
with understanding that ‘display itself is conceived to embody qualitative
expressions, and that the information is graphically constituted’ (Drucker,
Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, Harvard, 2014).
This gets at the deepest crisis of our time and moment! How many levels of
‘undo’ are there… infinitely or indefinately— and this is the horror from which
we recoil— when like little children touching a burning piece of hot asphalt
with our toes and screaming with fascination and the sharp allure of pain— is
there ANY ethical position possible if we realize each level of blindness is
acceded to another level? The horror, the horror, as Joseph Conrad foretold.
Drucker goes on, nevertheless: "Our "of course" we know statements are almost
all framed within the terms of our social world, an acknowledgement of the
instrumental and operationalized terms on which structuring occurs. We turn
nature into a fantastic term, "otherness" into a political category through
which to guide apparently ethical actions, but we have few ways to undo the
ways that knowing has already been produced to create knowledge according to
terms programmed in advance. My argument does not resolve into a set of
discursive metaphors in which geographies of "beyondness" or "limits" can be
invoked. The unfamiliar is in the normative, the immediate, and the habitual,
not what lies "outside" these realms. What is most "known" is what is most
"unknown" because we do not think about the ways in which we know. Hard to see
ontological blindness.”
In the heady days of cybernetics in the post-war, post-Bauhaus, Gyorgy Kepes
promoted the notion that visual literacy could rest on the empirical objectives
of identifying patterning in ‘nature’ — a necessity of all taxonomies in the
natural sciences, surely.— but Kepes and others hoped for such within an
understanding of the ‘nature of culture’. As evidently this cannot be, not now
at least, we have to ask how to ‘capta-mine’ , to mine what we can see in the
dark, even as we know our own blindness exceeds what we can see .
"The challenge for visualization is to simultaneously intensify the
representationalism of its methods--call them to attention in a graphical,
critical, way while undoing the belief system that representationalism
supports--that a world can be known in some stable way.” — Drucker’s challenge
causes me to ask what element in this semiosis is ‘stable’. I think, perhaps
that she is onto something when she asks, in another post about enunciation and
voicing.
Christina
Christina McPhee
http://christinamcphee.net
Christina McPhee
naxsm...@mac.com <mailto:naxsm...@mac.com>
http://christinamcphee.net <http://christinamcphee.net/>
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