thanks to Alan for responding in such intensified manner to Bishop's
commentaries
and earlier questions, and I am with Alan here, and feel down also now
when reflecting, these past days, on how "biological matter" has entered
the discourse in reference to human remains (they cannot find any whole bodies
after the suicided airplane crash of germanwings in the french alps, and a
friend
of mine flew from Geneva to London at the same time when it happened); the
issue of biological matter haunts me after the
disappearance of the 43 young Ayotzinapa students we discussed in our
conversations on terror, last November; they were never found, only
body dust located near some river (and not savage beauty)( I was inexcusably
punning
on Bishop's reference to fashion designer van Dongen; as I had just received
notice that Alexander McQueen's show at the V & A had opened; the fashion
designer
hanged himself, so the savage beauty of his designs are retrospectival). And
pushing through, Alan, I was thinking about what you said regarding your playing
instruments,
>>
Accompanied by comments on the physicality of playing
intruments; afterwards, I had split nails, blisters, blood.
For me, this was about pushing - not against, but through -
the aural landscapes
and yes, the body has to be insisted upon, and the more
one ponders its endless vulnerability and force, its energies
and the kind of perverse, magnificent metaphysical incantations or poetics
that Artaud evoked in his delirium, the more one could regret the
fashionable D/G "desiring machines" and how they infested the
theoretical discourses. Those are driven of course, as are
the policies of racialized states and corporate capitalism,
by economic power interests, and yes, the meat is being destroyed.
regards
Johannes
>>
[Alan Sondheim schreibt]
There's a difference between secrets and bodies, and people aren't
becoming disembodied at all; I think that's a troubling political position
- one might argue that people are having their bodies stolen from them
(organ mining in China for example, or prisons in the U.S.) and
transformed - but as Carolee Schneeman or Michael McClure would have
pointed out - it's the meat of the body, it's bushmeat as well of other
species and bodies - that's being destroyed. There's a difference between
our secrets - which, to the extent they exist in an arhivable/digital
form, no longer belong to us - and our situation within our own minds -
it's your personality, for example, your poetics (which are brilliant)
that comes through to me, even here in the midst of lower ASCII, all that
interconnectivity. I've often felt that if a machine writes a brilliant
poem, I wouldn't be interested in it - or interested in it only under the
aegis of New Crtiticism (I.A. Richards etc. back in the 40s), which
separates the text from the body, from the habitus. For me a poem is
intimately tied, inherently tied, to the writer in the way that song or
music is. Well, this is off the point, but there's increasingly Queer
politics in new media (judging by Interrupt), as well as a radical
politics of race, etc. etc. - and for me this flies in the face of
technophilia, the absent body - at Interrupt, the body was insisted upon,
over and over again; if anything, it was the contested body in the midst
of all those screens/projections. Downtown here in Providence we see the
fallout as well, with so many disenfranchised people on the streets.
It's this phrase - "desire machines, driven by autonomous
> social viruses like capitalism, wont drive humans, particularly those
> in crisis, to do 'what must be done'." - that worries me; capitalism is
not an "autonomous social virus" - look at mining in West Virginia and the
decisions made by people, by bodies, crippling the state, and the people
who are being driven are by and large the poor who produce machines in the
first places. But this is a contestation among people and bodies, as ISIS
and Yemen and Boko Haram and Ferguson and so many other places, show... So
the question for me isn't about "desiring machine" (so many phrases of D/G
are just _cool_), but whose desire? And by that I don't mean tchnology,
techne, capital, etc. - I'd mean (for myself, I mean, I'd mean), Who?
Thanks, Alan
On Thu, 26 Mar 2015, BishopZ wrote:
> You all bring up some great points. It has taken some time for me to
> think thru them. I really appreciate everyones responses, and I really
> like the perpendicular dimensions suggested by "savage shapeshifting"
> - the biological and virtual, performance and archive, mutilation and
> desecration.
>
> There is no research that shows that a mind would be such, without a
> body. Consciousness is highly defined by personality which depends on
> identity derived from our bodies: their movement, adornments,
> eccentricities.
>
> While I agree that to 'fire and forget' the body would be an
e desire machines, driven by autonomous
> social viruses like capitalism, wont drive humans, particularly those
> in crisis, to do 'what must be done'.>
extravagant move, discursive to
civil rights, a 'spit in the eye' to
> anyone with heliocentric or anthropomorphic sensibilities - Yet I do
> find it hard to believe that the desire machines, driven by autonomous
> social viruses like capitalism, wont drive humans, particularly those
> in crisis, to do 'what must be done'.
>
> I've come to find metaphors of people becoming asleep or as sheep, to
> be 'out of date' - rather people are becoming more like disembodied
> oxen - our physical world littered with 'drone bodies' the bodies left
> behind by the pilots of drones.
>
> To phrase it in another dimension, our ability to record our
> experiences, with or without our permission or intention, continues to
> out-paced our ability to search, isolate, curate, or understand the
> 'big data' we hold in our 'hands'. The internet archive and the
> eventual 'internet of things archive' are both far deeper than even
> quantum computers could reach. Not only will our secrets be buried
> there, so too all the secrets of all the recorded generations.
>
> Any thoughts appreciated,
> Bz
>
>
>
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