----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Alexander et al,
To insist on focussing our ethics on a strategy of infinite (as in,
non-relational) withdrawal has antecedents in the Orthodox spiritual tradition
of the via negativa.
Your (AG’s) discussion of James Turrell’s light installations in ‘light of’
Laruelle’s theory of non-photography resonates with me to that tradition, and
even to the figure that LaRuelle throws up, the Son of Man. St. Matthew calls
Jesus the “Son of Man” rather than “Son of God” more often than not. Matthew
is writing in an attempt to link the story of Jesus to an historical geneology
of culture-heroes in the Hebraic written tradition and oral history and
community consciousness during a time of tremendous catastrophic and ongoing
loss of those community values. Perhaps also, if you can indulge a
psycho-history, to a loss of a sense of God’s presence among His chosen.
At the same time, Matthew’s invocation of “Son of Man” also radically points to
the transcendent arrival of an agent whose parentage is of “Man” , i. e. not
just the Jewish people or any tribe, but an ultimate Man. It’s not for nothing
that Pasolini chooses Matthew as his text for his film “The Gospel according to
St Matthew” : Pasolini rightly builds on the radical implications of the figure
of Christ as arising directly from a transcendence that gathers force not
alongside, or against, but “in, with, and under” the people—
transubstantiation. On the level of poetics if not politics, Pasolini’s
agnosticisms consider the possibility of accord with an ’too-innocent
philosophy’ — but, by means of making of the film itself, with Palestinians, in
‘Palestine” , reject a radicalism of extraction of the Logos; no, for PPP, the
Logos is in and among us qua film qua life qua body and blood. In contrast— an
opposite politics--- in your discourse on Turrell via LaRuelle, AG? I’d like
to explore this further, starting here:
As one blogger recently notes
…. the beginning of the determination of a too innocent philosophy, a
non-philosophy, a supra-rational innocence, which could only expressly mean the
immortalization of the Logos through the extraction of all its radical
conceivability in history, already practiced or imagined, the only reason, ne
plus
ultra.http://veraqivas.wordpress.com/category/immanent-philosophy/francois-laruelle/page/2/
Imagine this binary, just for a moment (it may or may not be provisional).
Let’s say : where Pasolini and Matthew remain on one side of a chasm, on the
other stands LaRuelle, the non-philosopher who may not presume to partake
(through history, through ethics, through the spoken word, through the moving
image..) community or communitarian values. If Matthew the historian, and
Pasolini, artist of proto-Christian atheism, stand for and with community--with
or without ‘God’ (AKA the noumenous) --through the figuration of relation and
partaking (taking part) (=transubstantiation) of the Son of Man; then on the
other side, LaRuelle proposes to stands in for, contra or at least in
figure/ground opposition, to community--with or without “Man” (AKA the human
community) . Alexander, are you also there with LaRuelle, or is this binary too
stark?
Listening to your talk, Alexander, on Incredible Machines, considering James
Turrell’s installations as evidence of LaRuelle’s theory of non-photography, I
immediately turned back to Laruelle’s desire for the Son of Man. (I must
confess I am relying on impressions I had when I listened to your live talk)
Alexander, your manifesto is “ to articulate a logic being that is not
reducible to a metaphysics of exchange… ‘there will be no more messages.” And
you go on to point to a “logic of relation..without the….model of exchange. “
It’s possible Laruelle espouses a (non)-figuration of the transcendent angel
en arrivant.
So: to propose a chasm here. No exchange, means no more messages, means in its
equal and opposite expression (since if there is no more x->y or y->x there
can only be x= not-x). Turrell’s light objects, in order to be understood as
new information, new knowledge…. need not require a St Matthew-esque
historicity with antecedents like Moholy-Nagy, Naum Gabo, El Lissitsky… They
can arrive, like angels… ?
I take it that 'the new meta-narrative to guide us’ — (AG, below) partakes of
this only-reason, this new plus ultra of an arrival of an angel in the
subject-site of theorist. Could Turrell’s space-time-image manifest the arrival
of something new, like this? A Logos, of a sort? The canard of art as
knowledge-production goes to something else, something very interesting. Since
always otherwise words partake of the play of the trace, the way from above is
to make the person-space-time of the Logos an embodied speech act? A
via-negativa speaks, from a space of non-relation, non-photography— from the
somewhat disingenuously described ‘too-innocent’ site that is outside of
perceivable substance? No transubstantiation, because the Son of Man, for
Laruelle, arrives without a body, without the body of the human, without the
body of community, and is self-born, self-generating, “like” (oops) God…. ?
Does Laruelle’s extravagance around angels as theorists and theorists as angels
deserve special notice as an auto-epipanic event- LaRuelle recreates himself ?
Can we do the same? At the ‘event-horizon’ of the human…
What do you think, Alex, does your argument of withdrawal exclude all “poetics
of relation” (Glissante) with a sublimity (angel-theorist-Son of Man) in its
place? So seems to be the logic of commentators around LaRuelle. like Grelet
(trans. Brassier) here
http://www.onphi.net/texte-son-of-man--brother-of-the-people--behold-the-theorist-29.html
But perhaps you imply something more nuanced. I began my comment with a mention
of the ‘via negativa’. Would you instead be proposing, via Turrell a negative
theology?
"n negative theology, it is accepted that experience of the Divine is
ineffable, an experience of the holy that can only be recognized or remembered
abstractly. That is, human beings cannot describe in words the essence of the
perfect good that is unique to the individual, nor can they define the Divine,
in its immense complexity, related to the entire field of reality. As a result,
all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization
should be avoided. In effect, divine experience eludes definition by
definition:” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology
So, to put it in tragicomic mode, and yet I am serious, is this new
meta-narrative about a revelation from “God”?
Christina
http://christinamcphee.net
Incredible Machines/ Alexander Galloway March 6 2014
http://incrediblemachines.info/keynote-speakers/galloway/
On May 11, 2014, at 7:25 AM, Alexander R. Galloway <gallo...@nyu.edu> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear Soraya & Co..
>
> I guess part of the impetus is that I'm surprised--if not unnerved--by the
> way in which networks have captured and eclipsed other ways of thinking. A
> new pantheon of dot-com philosophers reigns supreme today, ready to proclaim
> at every turn that “everything is a network.” Mark Zuckerberg: people are
> networks. Donald Rumsfeld: the battlefield is a network. Bruno Latour:
> ontology is a network. Franco Moretti: Hamlet is a network. David Joselit:
> Art is a network. Guy Debord: the post-capitalist city is a network. John Von
> Neumann: computation is a network. Konrad Wachsmann: architecture is a
> network.
>
> Ladies and gentlemen, postmodernism is definitively over! We have a new
> meta-narrative to guide us.
>
> We might label this a kind of “reticular pessimism.” And here I'm taking a
> cue from the notion of “Afro-pessimism” in critical race theory. Just as
> Afro-pessimism refers to the trap in which African-American identity is only
> ever defined via the fetters of its own historical evolution, reticular
> pessimism claims, in essence, that there is no escape from the fetters of the
> network. There is no way to think in, through, or beyond networks except in
> terms of networks themselves. According to reticular pessimism, responses to
> networked power are only able to be conceived in terms of other network
> forms. (And thus to fight Google and the NSA we need ecologies, assemblages,
> or multiplicities.)
>
> By offering no alternative to the network form, reticular pessimism is deeply
> cynical because it forecloses any kind of utopian thinking that might entail
> an alternative to our many pervasive and invasive networks.
>
> This is part of the mandate of this book, as I see it: to articulate a logic
> of being that is not reducible to a metaphysics of exchange, to a metaphysics
> of the network. This to me is the promise of excommunication: the message
> that says “there will be no more messages”; a logic of relation, without the
> tired, old model of exchange.
>
> So, yes, strategic withdrawal is at the heart of what interests me most. Some
> are a bit skeptical about this notion of withdrawal -- often because they see
> in a negative light as alternatively a surrender monkey position (i give up!
> i'm outta here!), or a position of privilege (the political equivalent of
> opening a bank account in the Cayman Islands). But I see it very differently.
> I see it more as a withdrawal from representation. A structural withdrawal. I
> see it as a way to conceive of a kind of practical utopia in the here and
> now. "You don't represent us." "No one is illegal." "I would prefer not to."
> "We have no demands." Yes I realize utopian thinking is very unfashionable
> today; that's precisely why we need so much more of it. So perhaps less a
> bunker mentality and more about the reclaiming of a new experience of life
> and activity.
>
> Re: obsolescence of theory -- perhaps it hinges on *which* kind of theory? I
> don't agree with Latour and the notion that "theory has run out of steam."
> Marxism, feminism, psycho-analysis -- they all still work great if you ask
> me. But I do think that a kind of "vulgar 1968" style of theory has run its
> course. Nancy Fraser has it exactly right: capitalism co-opted many of the
> demands of '68-style theory. So now we have to reassess and recompile a new
> kind of theoretical method. Because of this I'm much more interested in a
> slightly different spin on the theoretical tradition.
>
> -ag
>
http://christinamcphee.net
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