----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Hello Alan, I am looking foward to your month of curation at empyre.
I chime in early as an uninvited contributor. The reaction to ISIS, with such speculation, as you put it, on "How does one live within the knowledge of annihilation?" seems to me to say more about the magnifying powers of modern mass networked media that the strategic capabilities of the barbaric Islamic State. The possibility of us in the Western World being annihalated by the despotic and brutal IS is questionable at best. However, the actions of this group should provoke far more legitimate and pressing questions over the 10+ years of Western investment in the state of Iraq, along with the geo-political future of the region and the fate of the millions of people in the region who have already suffered under this horrible war and occupation. My point is, your statement that "the anguish of political situations that seem out of control" should be interogated for why these situaitons seem this way, not for the nature of control and how it can be restored to a prefered status quo. I believe it is the representation of the political situations that is out of control, to the point where the most bloody act now gains the most attention, as if rhetoric was now violence and words the flash of a sharpened blade. All maginfied in the echo chanber of an increasingly hierarchical World Wide Web (as in clusters of information centered on powerful producers and organizers) The IS has been described repeatedly as a "Death cult" by the current Australian Prime Minister, who unwitingly identifies the source of the image for this terror group as online media: “This mob, by contrast, as soon as they’ve done something gruesome and ghastly and unspeakable, they’re advertising it on the internet for all to see which makes them, in my mind, nothing but a death cult and that’s why I think it’s quite proper to respond with extreme force against people like this.” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/02/tony-abbott-says-extreme-force-needed-to-counter-isis-death-cult The horrific executions of nationals on film has become the calling card for the cruel and merciless group known as IS. But actual technologies of annihalation that can kill very large numbers of people have taken vast steps since Walter Heerdt and Bruno Tesch developed and delivered vacum sealed cannisters of Zyklon B to their fascist customers in Nazi Germany. Presently, no such technologies or infrastructures seem to be in the hands of the ISIS thugs and murderers (Thankfully). Instead, today for the majority of us in the world we have a lot of terror by virtue of a social media campaign that is extremely effective. So how does one fight this vast image of terror? That is a question I would like to see dealt with, among others, in the month ahead on empyre. How does one comprehend such pitiless acts of barbarism as public decapitation when they are combined with the amatuer YouTube asethetic and a resounding chorus of theocratic manipulation as audio and editing and are available online 24/7 from pole to pole? Finally, as an after-thought; citizens and non-citizens alike are regularly beheaded and even crucified (crucifixion in this context means the body and head would then be put on public display) in Saudi Arabia. It has been going on for decades- http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/saudi-arabia-five-beheaded-and-crucified-amid-disturbing-rise-executions-2013-05-21 where has been the global outcry over this barbarity? Best James James Barrett PhD Candidate/Adjunct Department of Language Studies/HUMlab Umeå University Sweden http://about.me/James.G.Barrett ________________________________________ From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Alan Sondheim [sondh...@panix.com] Sent: 03 November 2014 06:19 To: soft_skinned_space Subject: [-empyre-] Introductory post (Alan Sondheim) ----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- (The beginning guests will be announced shortly) The topic for this month: ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance Our initial precis: The world seems to be descending into chaos of a qualitatively different dis/order, one characterized by terror, massacre, absolutism. Things are increasingly out of control, and this chaos is a kind of ground-work itself - nothing beyond a scorched earth policy, but more of the same. What might be a cultural or artistic response to this? How does one deal with this psychologically, when every day brings new horrors? Even traditional analyses seem to dissolve in the absolute terror that seems to be daily increasing. We are moderating a month-long investigation on Empyre into the dilemma this dis/order poses. We will ask a variety of people to be discussants in what, hopefully, will be a very open conversation. The debate will invite the empyre community to a deep and uncomfortable analysis of abject violence, pain, performance, and ideology [taking further the October 2012 debate on Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual], looking at the ambivalences of terror, incomprehensible emotions, and our own complicity in the production of 'common sense' around terror. The format this month will be slightly different; participants will be announced on an organic basis, and we hope that many of the subscribers will chime in. We are all facing the anguish of political situations that seem out of control. We are interested in topics such as, How does one deal with anguish personally? How can anguish be expressed culturally? Can such expressions make a difference at all? We have all read political analyses of the causes of this descent; here, we're interested in the cultural and personal responses to it. ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance Lyric poetry begins, not end, with Auschwitz; the very violence and terror produced by slaughter places the statement under erasure. But lyric, poetics, poesis, are among other things subversions of language, the recognition of a linguistic weight that bypasses the syntactic, caresses the abject. So that one might drive poetics through the force of terrified flesh, one might find language springing there, just as unutterable pain may be surrounded by the cacophony of elegy and mourning. Lyric poetry begins with nothing; poetics scrapes away at lateral fluency, undercuts the corporate, only to die in the advertising slogan. But Auschwitz is a borderland of time, where end and annihilation are imminent, imminant, and I keep think of this in relation to absolute terror, wailing postulations against the wall that also disappear. Absolute terror, the performative of beheadings, genocides, and crucifixions, signs the performative of the end-time itself. It is not a question of the inerrancy of the text leading the torturers on; it's the errancy of any text in the face of decapitation; every world is ultimately unutterable. It's the unutterability of the world that founds anguish, that tears momentarily at the soul and body under erasure. It this which I've been wrestling with for years, only momentarily handed off to ISIS and this and other geopolitics. How does one live within the knowledge of annihilation? How does one produce within such, in response to such? What is the conceivable meaning of such production? Is meaning itself obliterated to such an extent that even suicide becomes a useless act? [/] We have guests for this round, several each week for four weeks. But we need your input, as many people as possible. I'm on a number of email lists concerned with cultural workers, cultural production, cultural politics, geo-politics; ISIS and terror rarely come up for discussion or as a subject for production, and when they do, things often tend towards the usual leftist analysis (for which there is also BBC and Al Jazeera, which I recommend). But here, we want less political analysis or politics for that matter, and more, a form of personal/cultural testimony that is rarely written. What of anguish? What of inconceivable torture? What of a planet tending wildly towards overpopulation, extinctions, local wars, starvations, all producing despair, breakdown, anomie? In other words - how does one sleep at night? So in a sense, this is about the dark night of the soul without god, without recourse. And the very absence of discussion in general, about the interiority of absolute violence, opens the subject up here, on Empyre (given the subject, an ironic title!) - please contribute! Thanks to Renate and everyone - - Alan Sondheim _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
