[-empyre-] Fwd: para empyre

[Ana Valdés]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello, I am Alicia Migdal, Uruguayan writer and film critic.
Yesterday night I attended the worldwide premiere of the Italian film by
Ermanno Olmi Torneranno i prati (The grass will be back). It was showed at
the Italian Cultural Institute in Montevideo. It was showed to remember the
hundred years of the First World War. A poetic elegy from the trenches of
that war wich was supposed to be unique and not repeatable.

I want point out an index of topics I aim later to develop further,
thinking about this actual universe of annihilated erotization by death and
violence:

1: the bare life, the biopolitic and the permanent state of exception, as
adressed by Giorgio Agamben.
2: the femicide in Mexico and Argentina
3: the childkillngs (infanticidio) as consequence
4: My life efter: the work with the biographical data of the children and
grandchildren of the Argetinian dictatorship set up by the Argentinian
playwriter and director Lola Arias. She worked with clothes, objects,
images and materials from the concrete past of parents and grandparents.
www.lolarias.com.ar/010_bio_ing.swf
Ana Valdés contributed with the experience of former political female
political prisoners in the representation of Antigona Oriental directed by
Marianella Morena in Montevideo.
5: The "life is worthless" from the suicidal students killing their
comrades in the American universities.
6: the war against the drugs in Mexico, to live is an accident (or hazard,
or a coincidence, sorry the word casualidad is very tough to translate, too
many aceptions :(
Primo Levi already said that in his works about the concentrationary
universe.




Hola, soy Alicia Migdal, escritora y crítica de cine uruguaya.

Anoche, en el Instituto Italiano de Cultura de Montevideo pude ver en
estreno mundial la película de Ermanno Olmi *Torneranno i prati (Volverán
los prados)*. La ocasión era por el centenario dela primera guerra
mundial.  Una elegía poética desde las trincheras de aquella guerra que se
supuso única e irrepetible.

A manera de índice para ir desarrollando precisiones sobre este actual
universo de erotización aniquiladora por muerte y  violencia,  quiero
recordar:

 1) la nuda vida, la biopolítica y el estado de excepción permanente sobre
 los que ha pensado Giorgio Agamben

 2) el feminicidio en México y Argentina

3) el infanticidio como consecuencia

 4)* Mi vida después*: el trabajo con los cuerpos biográficos reales que la
dramaturga y directora argentina Lola Arias,  ha puesto en escena con los
hijos y nietos de desaparecidos de la dictadura:  ropas, objetos, fotos y
materiales del pasado concreto de padres y abuelos.  http:/
www.lolarias.com.ar/010_bio_ing.swf. Ana Valdés aportaba la experiencia de
ex-presas políticas en la representación de * Antígona Oriental* dirigida
por Marianella Morena en Montevideo.

5) El "la vida no vale nada" de los estudiantes suicidas que arrasan con la
vida de sus pares en las universidades estadounidenses

6)La guerra del narco en México: vivir es una casualidad. Ya Primo Levi lo
decía en sus obras sobre el universo concentracionario.










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"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with
your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always
long to return.
— Leonardo da Vinci
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Re: [-empyre-] language/discourse on terror, reporting the virtually true

[John Hopkins]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
On 05/Nov/14 15:17, Johannes Birringer wrote:



regards
Johannes Birringer



--
++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
grounded on a granite batholith
twitter: @neoscenes
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
++
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[-empyre-] rejected message, trying again :(

[Ana Valdés]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Johannes you are raised in Germany I assume you are familiar with Heinrich
Böll s writing. For me his best book is 8.30 biljard, a very powerful novel
about an elderly architect who builds a church (maybe a cathedral, I don't
exactly remember it), his son, an architect and engineer who destroys the
church because it's strategical value and the youngest of them, an
architect who is rebuilding it.
Shrines and churches and mosques and synagogues are built and rebuilt and
they live in the memory, as in Calvino's "Invisible Cities". I was several
times in Damascus and visited the Omeya mosque it was a Christian church
before a Roman temple and in the beginning a Babylonian sacred place.
The gods chose always the same spot to be worshipped :)
Ana


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— Leonardo da Vinci
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Re: [-empyre-] language/discourse on terror, reporting the virtually true

[Ana Valdés]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Johannes, only a short remark, when I am writing about my pain and my
memories I am also using literary tools, the body remembers but the
language or the brain don't. I read Butler's Frames of War, Agamben's Homo
Sacer and The remnants of Auschwitz to trace the mechanisms and the forms
to perform the pain. You all maybe remember we had a good exchange in
-empyre with Monica Weiss about public lamenting and how to show the
collective mourning as exorcism and catharsis.
I am now translating a short text written by my friend the Uruguayan writer
Alicia Migdal. She was one of -empyre guests when I was moderating the list
2012. She is quoting Agamben as well. I will be back with her translated
text, she writes in Spanish and I am just now translating it.
Ana

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 8:17 PM, Johannes Birringer <
johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk> wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>
>
> dear all,
> one can only thank those who have joined so far, and welcome Olga and Pia,
> and those who like Ana write through their memory pain and evoke the death
> of hope for human civilization;
> the destructive character seems to favor the slow or continual, steady
> collapse of all infrastructures – but John, you don't subscribe to
> annihilation, do you?
>
> >
> the contemporary  focus on, literally, digging up the past and preserving
> it has limits. (We probably only do so because we have such a glut of
> energy flowing around our 'developed' world, because re-organizing the past
> in any form (from library to archive to buildings) definitely takes
> energy!).
> >
>
> this interested me (the limit, and the changes too, in contexts of
> preservation), also in relation to Erik's and Jon's ferociously provocative
> texts on the clichés (trailers all, of moves/choreographies and movies
> predictabled)
> and the spectacle of the scaffold.
>
> >>[Jon schreibt]
> Human rights are fraying, while democratic torture practices are being
> bootlegged and remixed in the global theater of cruelty. Infrastructurally,
> alongside the democratization of media technologies unfolds the
> democratization of reservoirs of violence, violence stored and reanimated
> from bodily repertoires, historical archives, and digital databases.
> >>
>
> Pia, human rights violation observer in Gaza and West Bank, tell us what
> human rights, then?  what rights for the normalistas, people on the ground,
> to one side of the wall or border, and for those who cling to survival, or
> fear the imagined coming-to -be-experienced (tales of) tortures?
>
> Pia the last line of your doubled post left me speechless; and so I wish
> not to continue here, also needing to reflect on Olga's findings and
> strategies to speak to combatants and those for whom killing is just a job,
> not even a banality (of evil), but mere professonalism (not to be talked
> about, not worth mentioning?).  Olga you had mentioned to me a trailer of
> your "Soldiers of the Last Empire"  -- do you wish us to see it, after what
> Erik wrote?  Your performance techniques of self interest me a great deal,
> in your context (and I want to read Judith Butler's "Frames of War: When Is
> Life Grievable"  [Verso 2010] to see whether "performance" of precarious
> being is a workable theory).
>
> [Pia schreibt]
> >
> But you can never say that you are close enough.
> All the journalists and observers are left behind, arrive late at the
> scene.
> To be close enough to know you have to be the killer or the victim.
> >
>
>
>
> regards
> Johannes Birringer
>
> ___
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> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>



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your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always
long to return.
— Leonardo da Vinci
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Re: [-empyre-] language/discourse on terror, reporting the virtually true

[Johannes Birringer]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--


dear all,
one can only thank those who have joined so far, and welcome Olga and Pia, and 
those who like Ana write through their memory pain and evoke the death of hope 
for human civilization;
the destructive character seems to favor the slow or continual, steady collapse 
of all infrastructures – but John, you don't subscribe to annihilation, do you?

>
the contemporary  focus on, literally, digging up the past and preserving it 
has limits. (We probably only do so because we have such a glut of energy 
flowing around our 'developed' world, because re-organizing the past in any 
form (from library to archive to buildings) definitely takes energy!).
>

this interested me (the limit, and the changes too, in contexts of 
preservation), also in relation to Erik's and Jon's ferociously provocative 
texts on the clichés (trailers all, of moves/choreographies and movies 
predictabled)
and the spectacle of the scaffold.

>>[Jon schreibt]
Human rights are fraying, while democratic torture practices are being 
bootlegged and remixed in the global theater of cruelty. Infrastructurally, 
alongside the democratization of media technologies unfolds the democratization 
of reservoirs of violence, violence stored and reanimated from bodily 
repertoires, historical archives, and digital databases. 
>>

Pia, human rights violation observer in Gaza and West Bank, tell us what human 
rights, then?  what rights for the normalistas, people on the ground, to one 
side of the wall or border, and for those who cling to survival, or fear the 
imagined coming-to -be-experienced (tales of) tortures?

Pia the last line of your doubled post left me speechless; and so I wish not to 
continue here, also needing to reflect on Olga's findings and strategies to 
speak to combatants and those for whom killing is just a job, not even a 
banality (of evil), but mere professonalism (not to be talked about, not worth 
mentioning?).  Olga you had mentioned to me a trailer of your "Soldiers of the 
Last Empire"  -- do you wish us to see it, after what Erik wrote?  Your 
performance techniques of self interest me a great deal, in your context (and I 
want to read Judith Butler's "Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable"  [Verso 
2010] to see whether "performance" of precarious being is a workable theory).

[Pia schreibt]
>
But you can never say that you are close enough. 
All the journalists and observers are left behind, arrive late at the scene. 
To be close enough to know you have to be the killer or the victim.
>



regards
Johannes Birringer

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Re: [-empyre-] first intervention from my part

[Alan Sondheim]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--


On Wed, 5 Nov 2014, Pia Holenstein wrote:


--empyre- soft-skinned space--

*/again text  unquotable, apologies/*

Perhaps there is only the wall of death, up against the
border of Lyotard's differend? To return is to be ignorant
of annihilation? Anguish then seethes at the wall?

Decades ago, many decades ago, I was in Israel and we were
shot at; I felt nothing. The bullets were exhausted, dropped
before they reached us. I can only claim the status of a
witness, of what? An image, nothing of the body, nothing of
interiority.

Perhaps everyone who is alive, arrives late at the scene?
Then perhaps there is no scene at all, scorched earth
dissolving every vestige of anything but dust.

Did you dream of these things? I have nightmares (for no
reason at all).

Thank you, Alan
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Re: [-empyre-] first intervention from my part

[Pia Holenstein]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--My entry was too short and went off prematurely.


There is also the sense of being (too) far away to be able to comment on
the information we get. It's an intriguing question whether I was "on the
ground" and therefore closer, while I was watching one kind of people
mistreating another, a slow and never ending process of oppression and
annihilation.


Of course I could sense the building up of hatred and a strange, unknown
feeling to me (which I only gather or imagine) was this wild and secret
will to live at any cost, maybe the cost of all truths and morals you had
before. I was closer to the notions of a life before the war in Gaza - and
therefore familiar to a precarious situation that you thought could never
be topped, but it did, when the bombs were banging the heart out of a -
even in calm times - dying system. It may be that you are less shocked
because you have experienced the suffering and abuse before and expected
something to happen. That the open demonstrative terror is less terrifying
after long periods of undercover fear and despair.


But you can never say that you are close enough. All the journalists and
observers are left behind, arrive late at the scene. To be close enough to
know you have to be the killer or the victim.


For now, all the best, Pia
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[-empyre-] first intervention from my part

[Pia Holenstein]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear all

First I am to apologize for not filing into your flow of an engaged and fervent 
discussion until now. It's not easy because of the fast pace and because I 
missed some of the contributions, I am afraid - seems I can't find Erik's 
texts, on which others comment. There's another problem, more deeply bothering 
me and preventing me from chiming in.

I am still bewildered by the mere thought that two (or thousand) public signs 
of terror can look the same and be based on completely different realities.

They are not the same, not even from the outside, though, but are made to look 
and be judged as atrocities.

A young man hops on a bus with explosives, killing dozens of innocent 
travelers. Another runs over people with his car, today, in Jerusalem. A small 
boy throwing stones at an APC of the oppressing power parked deliberately in 
his village. All these are called terrorists, even the boy can get up to 20 
years in prison (the bill passed last week in the Knesset). - And then on the 
other hand young men and women from a free western country joining a horde of 
retro-religious-killer-activists (and it's preposterous to call anything in 
that religious) to be terrorists, too. There is nothing in common.

This is why I cannot see outbreaks of violence without enquiring about the 
political background. It is not a matter of esthetics. Or, if it is: 
Decapitations in front of cameras to announce war on the western or decadent 
society is just so pathetic, the most blatant recourse to plainest symbols - 
you see I am enraged and looking for an expression: It's Kitsch.

Not that it did not terrify me, it worked on me and I was not able to watch 
what was meant to give an exclusive thrill the specators. A real beheading in 
our time, archaic and terrifying and unknown nourishment to your imagination. 
But I refuse to respond to it in the expected way.



+++

Pia Holenstein Weidmann, Dr. phil.
Bergrain 11
CH - 8910 Affoltern a. A.
0041 - 44 - 761 40 38

pia.holenstein.ch

sospeacewithoutwalls.wordpress.com



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Re: [-empyre-] language/discourse on terror, reporting the virtually true

[Johannes Birringer]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
 
thank you Jon, for already joining in and for your comments!   allow me thus to 
welcome Jon McKenzie to the table, he is amongst the guests we had invited for 
this month. 

*
[bio]

Jon McKenzie is Director of DesignLab, a digital composition center, and 
Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, where he 
teaches courses in performance theory and new media. He is the author of 
"Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance" (Routledge 2001) and such 
articles as “Global Feeling: (Almost) All You Need is Love,” “Performance and 
Globalization,” and “Towards a Sociopoetics of Interface Design.” He is also 
co-editor of "Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research" (Palgrave 
2011). Jon has also produced a number of experimental video essays, including 
"The Revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r" (2012) and "This Vile Display" (2006), and 
gives workshops on performative scholarship and smart media. His work has been 
translated into a half-dozen languages.

+ + +  
As was pointed out so eloquently in the book by Rustom Bharucha I cited 
yesterday, researching the theme of terror and performance made Rustom realize 
that the discourse on terror had hugely proliferated
(especially after the Iraq wars and the 9/11/2001 attack on the World Trade 
Center in NY), but the discourse on performance had also spread greatly "As 
the category of 'performance' expands into new areas of investigation like 
Performance Management and Techno Performance, whose interdependent genealogies 
have been brilliantly mapped by Jon McKenzie, the older associations of 
'performance' in performance studies drawn from the practices of theatre and 
ritual anthropology have come under considerable stress" (p. xv). Thanks Rustom 
for introducing Jon in this way.

And thank Alan for moving forward questions to our participants and stimulating 
the dialogue.  Once again, we invite everyone to the table. 

warm regards
Johannes Birringer
+ + +

[Alan schreibt]

(Erik..  A question in regard to the plays - What is the effect on the actors
themselves, what do they take away? Is activism an issue? Can there even
be activism 'around' terror? What would that be?
But with the plays and actors, what happens internally? I remember at
times students reduced to immobility at times...

And Olga, I have two questions:

Is there any way you can relate your work to ISIS and annihilation; does
it relate? I'm thinking that the form of ISIS and many other groups is
close to formless; on one hand, a caliphate, and on the other, a kind of
formless and violent vandalism. The second question: Did the soldiers ever
question, speak of resistance? During the Vietnam War, US military
personnel became increasingly demoralized, and there was such. (Apologies
for my naivete here.)




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Re: [-empyre-] language, reporting the virtually true and Olda Danylyuk's post

[Alan Sondheim]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

On Wed, 5 Nov 2014, Erik Ehn wrote:


--empyre- soft-skinned space--


(I try to quote you, but your text comes across as an html attachment for 
some reason and I can't, at least not in a text-based editor. However. -)


A question in regard to the plays - What is the effect on the actors 
themselves, what do they take away? Is activism an issue? Can there even 
be activism 'around' terror? What would that be?


But with the plays and actors, what happens internally? I remember at 
times students reduced to immobility at times...



And Olga, I have two questions:


Is there any way you can relate your work to ISIS and annihilation; does 
it relate? I'm thinking that the form of ISIS and many other groups is 
close to formless; on one hand, a caliphate, and on the other, a kind of 
formless and violent vandalism. The second question: Did the soldiers ever 
question, speak of resistance? During the Vietnam War, US military 
personnel became increasingly demoralized, and there was such. (Apologies 
for my naivete here.)


Thank you both greatly, Alan
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Re: [-empyre-] language, reporting the virtually true

[Erik Ehn]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--scarry's book on beauty (as justice) also alluring.



On Wednesday, November 5, 2014 11:31 AM, Alan Sondheim  
wrote:
 


--empyre- soft-skinned space--


There are times this 'slow terror' speeds up, times it slows down; it 
seems to me it might be problematic to inflate it with ISIS and the like; 
there are two - and more - destructive orders of the world and worlding. I 
began reading Assyrian texts again (in translation/transliteration/etc.) 
and it's uncanny how the same techniques pop up again and again, all the 
way back roughly four-thousand years. Violence is everywhere; think of the 
heads used in the Mayan ball-games, the Shang Burials, Ferguson. How do we 
psychologically survive this (in some ways we don't re: Amery - I have to 
thank Pier Marton for recommending him), how can we refuse the catatonia 
of anguish?

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Re: [-empyre-] language, reporting the virtually true

[Alan Sondheim]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--


There are times this 'slow terror' speeds up, times it slows down; it 
seems to me it might be problematic to inflate it with ISIS and the like; 
there are two - and more - destructive orders of the world and worlding. I 
began reading Assyrian texts again (in translation/transliteration/etc.) 
and it's uncanny how the same techniques pop up again and again, all the 
way back roughly four-thousand years. Violence is everywhere; think of the 
heads used in the Mayan ball-games, the Shang Burials, Ferguson. How do we 
psychologically survive this (in some ways we don't re: Amery - I have to 
thank Pier Marton for recommending him), how can we refuse the catatonia 
of anguish?

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Re: [-empyre-] language, reporting the virtually true

[Alan Sondheim]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

Slaughter and annihilation extend outward, and where social orders exist 
within the TAZ (temporary autonomous zones) epicenters, annihilation can 
be complete; if there are no survivors, no memorials, nothing, then 
nothing is remembered, as if nothing occurred.


On another note, related, I recommended Jean Amery's At the Mind's Limits, 
which deals with torture among other things, he was tortured as well, and 
the account is unnerving and pertinent here. There is also the Violence 
and Civilization anthology, Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, the more 
recent Joanna Bourke's The Story of Pain, and Byron Good's Medicine, 
Rationality, and Experience. I only mention these because there is much 
about silence and the pain-event in them.


- Alan

On Wed, 5 Nov 2014, Johannes Birringer wrote:


--empyre- soft-skinned space--


[Alan schreibt]



"Nearly a thousand years old the first of its kind in Iraq, according to
Archnet, and one of the last six standing, according to Iraq Heritage the
distinctive muqarnas-domed mausoleum is now a statistic. The tomb of Shia
Uqaylid amir Sharaf ad-Dawla Muslim is one of a number of sites that have
been destroyed recently. Preceded by the Shrine of Arbaeen Wali (for 40
martyrs in the Islamic conquest of Tikrit) and the Syrian Orthodox Green
Church of Mar Ahudama in late September, followed by the Yezidi Shrine of
Mem Rean (Meme Reshan) in late October, the Mausoleum of Imam al-Daur was
destroyed by the Islamic State on October 23."

And then what is there? anthropologists? archeologists? dust?





precisely, what my hopes (for/of remembrance and the necessity thereof) that I 
was asked to grow up with
in Germany after WW I and the Holocaust were imagining, that forgetting is not 
easy or impossible, and
aided ? in the repressions and its counters ?  in many ways, by yes, 
anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, story tellers,
detectives, teachers, performance artists, photographers, doctors, workers, 
collectors, mothers of the disappeared
and of the rubble dust (Tr?mmerfrauen).


Johannes


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==
email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285
music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
current text http://www.alansondheim.org/sw.txt
==
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Re: [-empyre-] language, reporting the virtually true

[Erik Ehn]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--approx: "the greatest calamity that the human race can experience is the 
destruction of a city" (simone weil on the iliad). city as a cloud of ideas or 
better a coherence and intensity of meaning-making - an instanciation of the 
human at aspriational ratio to the scale of the human idea.




On Wednesday, November 5, 2014 10:36 AM, Jon McKenzie  
wrote:
 


Thanks for an engaging discussion.
I feel that we’re not only witnessing a vast image of terror but also sensing 
shock waves from a tortuous infrastructure that runs right through us. The 
cultural accession—and culture as cultivation, settling, development of people, 
places, and things—has indeed entailed legacies of appropriation and violence 
connected to what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence,” environmental and economic 
violence whose toll over generations dwarfs that of contemporary terror and 
wars on terror. With the best of intentions, governments, museums, and 
universities have contributed to this slow terror, which provides the backdrop 
for the fast and furious terror of ISIS, Boko Karam, Abu Ghraib, Taliban, and 
Latin American death squads. 

To paraphrase Benjamin: There is no institution of civilization which is not at 
the same time an institution of barbarism. What to make of this?

If the closure of humanist, disciplinary societies opens slowly and suddenly on 
to modes of global performativity, then the political assassinations and 
protests of the 1960s can be read as rehearsing the society of the spectacle of 
the scaffold, the contemporary mash-up of media technologies and graphic social 
violence whose brutality channels practices ancient and modern. Opposed in 
life, Foucault and Debord are now both right: the spectacle is dead, long live 
the spectacle, with beheadings and mutilations and “torture lite” techniques of 
psychological degradation and electrical shock all on display. 

As Alfred McCoy, Darius Rejali, and others help show, 20th-c Western 
democracies resolved the double bind of simultaneously promoting national 
security and human rights by developing brutal “no touch” interrogation 
techniques. Abu Ghraib helped expose this cruel knot, which remains uncut 
today. Human rights are fraying, while democratic torture practices are being 
bootlegged and remixed in the global theater of cruelty. Infrastructurally, 
alongside the democratization of media technologies unfolds the democratization 
of reservoirs of violence, violence stored and reanimated from bodily 
repertoires, historical archives, and digital databases. The vast image comes 
from a vast infrastructure, and it would be a mistake to assume that we don't 
pass through the projection booth.

Blanchot wrote, “Learn to think with pain.” Perhaps we also face thinking 
(with) the graphic violence of being human(e).

Jon


Jon McKenzie 
Director • DesignLab • designlab.wisc.edu
Professor • Department of English • english.wisc.edu
Affiliate • Digital Studies • digitalstudies.wisc.edu
6143 Helen C. White Hall • 600 N. Park St. • Madison, WI 53706 USA
University of Wisconsin-Madison • jvmcken...@wisc.edu • labster8.net

See smart media at the Digital Salon: go.wisc.edu/digitalsalon


On Nov 4, 2014, at 5:34 PM, John Hopkins  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>On 04/Nov/14 15:47, Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
>
>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>>You know, I've been wondering about this: since the Taliban blew up the 
>>Buddhas
>>and then with the destruction of the domed mosques and manuscripts in Mali and
>>environs, and now this.
>>
>It was painful to watch the video of the Buddha sculptures, especially knowing 
>why it happened. It's always painful to see what we might consider unchanging 
>reality suddenly lose its persistent form and ... change. It acts as a bitter 
>reminder of mortality.
>
>But isn't it such that cultural accession over time is doing essentially 
>similar things all the time, over the vast reaches of history. And our 
>contemporary focus on, literally, digging up the past and preserving it has 
>limits. (We probably only do so because we have such a glut of energy flowing 
>around our 'developed' world, because re-organizing the past in any form (from 
>library to archive to buildings) definitely takes energy!).
>
>While the Buddhas were obliterated rapidly, using modern weapons (explosives), 
>time via entropy continually devolves the detritus of the yesterday, and it is 
>only the socio-cultural context (or even 'fashion') that dictates what is 
>saved and what is allowed to slip away into chaos. Contexts change, and what 
>was important in one context becomes passé in another.
>
>
>I wonder if there shouldn't be an emergency scanning fund that would help pay
>>for capture of threatened built heritage. Maybe some kind of Unesco thing.
>>
>This is where the question of choice of what to preserve and what to let go 
>surfaces. We

Re: [-empyre-] language, reporting the virtually true

[Jon McKenzie]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks for an engaging discussion.

I feel that we’re not only witnessing a vast image of terror but also sensing 
shock waves from a tortuous infrastructure that runs right through us. The 
cultural accession—and culture as cultivation, settling, development of people, 
places, and things—has indeed entailed legacies of appropriation and violence 
connected to what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence,” environmental and economic 
violence whose toll over generations dwarfs that of contemporary terror and 
wars on terror. With the best of intentions, governments, museums, and 
universities have contributed to this slow terror, which provides the backdrop 
for the fast and furious terror of ISIS, Boko Karam, Abu Ghraib, Taliban, and 
Latin American death squads. 

To paraphrase Benjamin: There is no institution of civilization which is not at 
the same time an institution of barbarism. What to make of this?

If the closure of humanist, disciplinary societies opens slowly and suddenly on 
to modes of global performativity, then the political assassinations and 
protests of the 1960s can be read as rehearsing the society of the spectacle of 
the scaffold, the contemporary mash-up of media technologies and graphic social 
violence whose brutality channels practices ancient and modern. Opposed in 
life, Foucault and Debord are now both right: the spectacle is dead, long live 
the spectacle, with beheadings and mutilations and “torture lite” techniques of 
psychological degradation and electrical shock all on display. 

As Alfred McCoy, Darius Rejali, and others help show, 20th-c Western 
democracies resolved the double bind of simultaneously promoting national 
security and human rights by developing brutal “no touch” interrogation 
techniques. Abu Ghraib helped expose this cruel knot, which remains uncut 
today. Human rights are fraying, while democratic torture practices are being 
bootlegged and remixed in the global theater of cruelty. Infrastructurally, 
alongside the democratization of media technologies unfolds the democratization 
of reservoirs of violence, violence stored and reanimated from bodily 
repertoires, historical archives, and digital databases. The vast image comes 
from a vast infrastructure, and it would be a mistake to assume that we don't 
pass through the projection booth.

Blanchot wrote, “Learn to think with pain.” Perhaps we also face thinking 
(with) the graphic violence of being human(e).

Jon

Jon McKenzie 
Director • DesignLab • designlab.wisc.edu
Professor • Department of English • english.wisc.edu
Affiliate • Digital Studies • digitalstudies.wisc.edu
6143 Helen C. White Hall • 600 N. Park St. • Madison, WI 53706 USA
University of Wisconsin-Madison • jvmcken...@wisc.edu • labster8.net

See smart media at the Digital Salon: go.wisc.edu/digitalsalon

On Nov 4, 2014, at 5:34 PM, John Hopkins  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> On 04/Nov/14 15:47, Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> You know, I've been wondering about this: since the Taliban blew up the 
>> Buddhas
>> and then with the destruction of the domed mosques and manuscripts in Mali 
>> and
>> environs, and now this.
> 
> It was painful to watch the video of the Buddha sculptures, especially 
> knowing why it happened. It's always painful to see what we might consider 
> unchanging reality suddenly lose its persistent form and ... change. It acts 
> as a bitter reminder of mortality.
> 
> But isn't it such that cultural accession over time is doing essentially 
> similar things all the time, over the vast reaches of history. And our 
> contemporary focus on, literally, digging up the past and preserving it has 
> limits. (We probably only do so because we have such a glut of energy flowing 
> around our 'developed' world, because re-organizing the past in any form 
> (from library to archive to buildings) definitely takes energy!).
> 
> While the Buddhas were obliterated rapidly, using modern weapons 
> (explosives), time via entropy continually devolves the detritus of the 
> yesterday, and it is only the socio-cultural context (or even 'fashion') that 
> dictates what is saved and what is allowed to slip away into chaos. Contexts 
> change, and what was important in one context becomes passé in another.
> 
>> I wonder if there shouldn't be an emergency scanning fund that would help pay
>> for capture of threatened built heritage. Maybe some kind of Unesco thing.
> 
> This is where the question of choice of what to preserve and what to let go 
> surfaces. We are witnessing the procession of history and it seems we are in 
> the moment as powerless as others in the past, watching accepted heritage be 
> ground to dust. It's a strange process to witness. (and interesting that 
> Johannes suggests that "archaeologists and anthropologists will surely 
> confirm that the past cannot be lo

Re: [-empyre-] language, reporting the virtually true

[Johannes Birringer]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--


[Alan schreibt]
>
"Nearly a thousand years old the first of its kind in Iraq, according to
Archnet, and one of the last six standing, according to Iraq Heritage the
distinctive muqarnas-domed mausoleum is now a statistic. The tomb of Shia
Uqaylid amir Sharaf ad-Dawla Muslim is one of a number of sites that have
been destroyed recently. Preceded by the Shrine of Arbaeen Wali (for 40
martyrs in the Islamic conquest of Tikrit) and the Syrian Orthodox Green
Church of Mar Ahudama in late September, followed by the Yezidi Shrine of
Mem Rean (Meme Reshan) in late October, the Mausoleum of Imam al-Daur was
destroyed by the Islamic State on October 23."

And then what is there? anthropologists? archeologists? dust?
>


precisely, what my hopes (for/of remembrance and the necessity thereof) that I 
was asked to grow up with
in Germany after WW I and the Holocaust were imagining, that forgetting is not 
easy or impossible, and
aided – in the repressions and its counters –  in many ways, by yes, 
anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, story tellers,
detectives, teachers, performance artists, photographers, doctors, workers, 
collectors, mothers of the disappeared
and of the rubble dust (Trümmerfrauen). 


Johannes 


___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] language, reporting the virtually true

[Ana Valdés]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--The theater director and theorist Brenda Laurel was early engaged in
videogames. She worked at the legendary Atari Lab and was envolved in many
games with a pristine narrative. Her work with videogames for girls took
her to Interval Research, founded by Paul Allen, the cofounder of
Microsoft. I attended several conferences she participated and interviewed
her in Palo Alto for my book "Internet and Women".
She argued the videogames were so addictive and had the capacity to become
viral because they played with archetypes, the same kind of archetypes the
Greek tragedy used. She said the early staged tragedies were a work of
clear propaganda, paid by the state of Athenes, sponsored by the state and
many times commissioned by the state to implant a meme in the population.
Terror and it's choreography aim to the same effect: create a situation
where the inflicted pain becames a collective fear, the pain of others is
seen as our own possible pain.
When I was tortured the worst was not the own pain but the feeling it
should come other more painful things, the tale of the torture and it's
variations became as powerful as the pain in itself.
Ana Valdés

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 10:25 AM, Erik Ehn 
wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> [about hesychios: see his written for theoduolos in v.1 of the philokalia:
> https://archive.org/stream/Philokalia-TheCompleteText/Philokalia-Complete-Text#page/n109/mode/2up/search/Hesychios
> ]
>
> [continuing from yesterday - performance and the lure of mere sense.
> moving on from: "In terms of scripts: we are writing into the ads for our
> writing. Our ironies and glibness suggest what kind of art we would make if
> we felt like it, but we don’t feel like it, because something hates me or
> has left me and my fear produces a serum of anger that serves a biological
> need to defend against feeling..."]
>
> When a paranoid production process drives us to clarify the event of our
> plays, we are often encouraged to settle specifically on event as aftermath
> – what one takes away from the play. A play you can take anything from has
> to exercise ownership – has to be premised on private property, on stabile
> units cleanly transported (portablilty). This is undramatic. A play is
> public property and doesn’t go anywhere; it is, like an angel or a star. An
> angel has useless wings – the wings suggest movement, but the angle doesn’t
> have to actually move – it’s mentality and physicality are perfect –
> nothing inhibits and angel so its choices are constant and ambient – the
> angel is the complete string-theory cosmos – is every possibility of
> itself, realized in active adoration – is perfectly reciprocal; is
> all-contemplation, all praise. Better than the post-hoc event is the
> precipitating event, the source of action, not it’s read-out. Passover is a
> gorgeous drama – “why is this night different from every other night?” –
> the precipitating event isn’t the answer – it is the asking of this
> question.
>
> A play in response to terror is barely there, is more question than
> answer, is an occasion for collaborative labor (the labor of not-knowing,
> not-having, not-expecting); it is without consolation. It is ceding
> language, losing its language as it spills it.
>
> A play’s action doesn’t matter, in the sense of the activities it
> sequences or ideas it builds, the action is the action in us – the event in
> the play is not what we comprehend, but what moves us to action, what
> starts up our discontent through irresolution. (Bert States: plays used to
> embed self summaries, tellingly called “arguments” a play is just enough
> itself to disagree with itself.)
>
> Event as description is marketing; plays of description sell specifically
> what has already passed away. Sell death. Sell us what we’ve already bought
> and has already been worn down, worn away (trailers for movies that in
> essence, we’ve already seen).
>
> 9/11, as an act of terror, was recognizable because it was a cliché – we
> had already seen it.
>
>
>   On Tuesday, November 4, 2014 6:34 PM, John Hopkins <
> jhopk...@neoscenes.net> wrote:
>
>
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> On 04/Nov/14 15:47, Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
> > --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> > You know, I've been wondering about this: since the Taliban blew up the
> Buddhas
> > and then with the destruction of the domed mosques and manuscripts in
> Mali and
> > environs, and now this.
>
> It was painful to watch the video of the Buddha sculptures, especially
> knowing
> why it happened. It's always painful to see what we might consider
> unchanging
> reality suddenly lose its persistent form and ... change. It acts as a
> bitter
> reminder of mortality.
>
> But isn't it such that cultural accession over time is doing essentially
> similar
> things all the time, over the vast reaches of history. 

[-empyre-] post from Olga Danylyuk

[O Danylyuk]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear friends,

I would like to share some ideas from my research project about the
cultural imagination of war that was part of my thesis *' Virtually* *True'.
Intermedial Strategies in Staging of War Conflict*. I was concerned that
our attachment to the actuality is largely lost in the mediatised world,
especially due to the proliferation and artful hyper intensification of the
violent imaginary. It seems that mainstream news reporting is in permanent
 'moral crises', paradoxically caught between saturation and sanitisation.
If our culture of spectatorship neutralises the moral force of indexical
records, I decided to avoid familiar templates. If our culture of
spectatorship neutralises the moral force of indexical records, I decided
to avoid familiar templates and considered neutral facticity of museum
setting to present the military side of the conflict, especially the
apparent 'normality' of being a combatant in a war zone. I created
intermedial installation *Soldiers of the Last Empire *that was based on
material collected from my encounters with Russian and Ukrainian military
and police officers, trained initially in Soviet military schools. Being
brought up in the similar tradition they took different pathways since the
split of the USSR. The title of the piece points out to the origin of the
military ethos, which largely informed the expressed worldview in
documentary film, which was part of the installation as well. In the course
of history the soldiers served in various hot spots, like Chechnya,
Afghanistan,
Nagorny Karabach, Yugoslavia, East Timor, Liberia.


 One Russian officer (military intelligence, two Chechen wars) playfully
responded  to my first email to him:

*… Ask a specific question and you get a concrete answer)) So what’s
required from me? To kill someone and then commit an outrage or vise versa?
Say what’s needed and I’ll do it for you, especially as I am on vacation.
But don’t concern yourself with war. After all, it’s a job.*


Another former Soviet officer ( Nagorny Karabach and other conflicts) wrote
back:


*Why war?...It’s of no interest, dear Olga, And practically not realistic.
Because no one will tell you anything that’s true and reliable. They’ll
either refuse or will laugh it off gently, turning the conversation to more
neutral topics. The ones who excitedly tell you about days they spent in
the war…are likely to be lying through their teeth. You know, the best
stories ever reported about war were written in smoking area next to
military headquarters. Next to staff soldiers always ready to talk a lot
about ‘front-line’ routine.[…] And no movies about war. Everything in them
is lie…*


First question: Is it possible to get to the actuality despite
mediatization?


I was curious to engage with the live world to continue my investigation
beyond mediatized representations, which often limit our perception of
events to what fits the screen. My investigation resulted in a multiple
data archive collected from the participants for the project. The presented
material consisted of personal photographs, objects and photographs of
objects that have been ‘there’, an autobiographical memoir, fragments from
correspondence and video interviews, including personal video archives.


Second question: How I am going to present my participants to the public?


Taking my cue from Foucauldian concept I observed the practice  of
self as performed
by combatants, yet the practices of self are not entirely invented by
individuals. They are models found in culture and are proposed – indeed,
perhaps, imposed - upon the individual ‘by his culture, his society, and
his social group’ (1997:291). My practical project demonstrates that
self-performance of a military group is always connected to the power
structure.  They act in the interest of their national states, which take
the moral responsibility of military actions.To understand the ethos of
this social group that is very remote form civilian life I decided to use
sympathetic imagination and to avoid pre-judgments if I could. It is
important to bear in mind that my interviewees shared the ethos of Soviet
military school, as mentioned above, that held the status of military
officer very high. It was one of the most prestigious professions at the
time, which attracted the brightest men with the ambitious to protect the
country. Even after USSR fall apart the tradition of military ‘noblesse
oblige’ survived almost to the present days.However, in the light of thg
current events in Ukraine it's impossible to unify this group any more. At
the time I conducted my research project,in  2012, Ukraine  was a strategic
partner of  Russia and there was no sigh that we  would  ever engaged in
military conflict with Russians.


   Third question: The ethic of  research and my role  in the
project?

For the sake of this project I became an ‘experiencer’ myself by engaging
into informal investigatio

Re: [-empyre-] language, reporting the virtually true

[Erik Ehn]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--[about hesychios: see his written for theoduolos in v.1 of the philokalia: 
https://archive.org/stream/Philokalia-TheCompleteText/Philokalia-Complete-Text#page/n109/mode/2up/search/Hesychios]

[continuing from yesterday - performance and the lure of mere sense. moving on 
from: "In terms of scripts: we are writing into the ads for our writing. Our 
ironies and glibness suggest what kind of art we would make if we felt like it, 
but we don’t feel like it, because something hates me or has left me and my 
fear produces a serum of anger that serves a biological need to defend against 
feeling..."]

When a paranoid production process drives us to clarify the event of our plays, 
we are often encouraged to settle specifically on event as aftermath – what one 
takes away from the play. A play you can take anything from has to exercise 
ownership – has to be premised on private property, on stabile units cleanly 
transported (portablilty). This is undramatic. A play is public property and 
doesn’t go anywhere; it is, like an angel or a star. An angel has useless wings 
– the wings suggest movement, but the angle doesn’t have to actually move – 
it’s mentality and physicality are perfect – nothing inhibits and angel so its 
choices are constant and ambient – the angel is the complete string-theory 
cosmos – is every possibility of itself, realized in active adoration – is 
perfectly reciprocal; is all-contemplation, all praise. Better than the 
post-hoc event is the precipitating event, the source of action, not it’s 
read-out. Passover is a
 gorgeous drama – “why is this night different from every other night?” – the 
precipitating event isn’t the answer – it is the asking of this question.

A play in response to terror is barely there, is more question than answer, is 
an occasion for collaborative labor (the labor of not-knowing, not-having, 
not-expecting); it is without consolation. It is ceding language, losing its 
language as it spills it.

A play’s action doesn’t matter, in the sense of the activities it sequences or 
ideas it builds, the action is the action in us – the event in the play is not 
what we comprehend, but what moves us to action, what starts up our discontent 
through irresolution. (Bert States: plays used to embed self summaries, 
tellingly called “arguments” a play is just enough itself to disagree with 
itself.)

Event as description is marketing; plays of description sell specifically what 
has already passed away. Sell death. Sell us what we’ve already bought and has 
already been worn down, worn away (trailers for movies that in essence, we’ve 
already seen).

9/11, as an act of terror, was recognizable because it was a cliché – we had 
already seen it. 


On Tuesday, November 4, 2014 6:34 PM, John Hopkins  
wrote:
 


--empyre- soft-skinned space--
On 04/Nov/14 15:47, Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> You know, I've been wondering about this: since the Taliban blew up the 
> Buddhas
> and then with the destruction of the domed mosques and manuscripts in Mali and
> environs, and now this.

It was painful to watch the video of the Buddha sculptures, especially knowing 
why it happened. It's always painful to see what we might consider unchanging 
reality suddenly lose its persistent form and ... change. It acts as a bitter 
reminder of mortality.

But isn't it such that cultural accession over time is doing essentially 
similar 
things all the time, over the vast reaches of history. And our contemporary 
focus on, literally, digging up the past and preserving it has limits. (We 
probably only do so because we have such a glut of energy flowing around our 
'developed' world, because re-organizing the past in any form (from library to 
archive to buildings) definitely takes energy!).

While the Buddhas were obliterated rapidly, using modern weapons (explosives), 
time via entropy continually devolves the detritus of the yesterday, and it is 
only the socio-cultural context (or even 'fashion') that dictates what is saved 
and what is allowed to slip away into chaos. Contexts change, and what was 
important in one context becomes passé in another.

> I wonder if there shouldn't be an emergency scanning fund that would help pay
> for capture of threatened built heritage. Maybe some kind of Unesco thing.

This is where the question of choice of what to preserve and what to let go 
surfaces. We are witnessing the procession of history and it seems we are in 
the 
moment as powerless as others in the past, watching accepted heritage be ground 
to dust. It's a strange process to witness. (and interesting that Johannes 
suggests that "archaeologists and anthropologists will surely confirm that the 
past cannot be lost" -- once humans have interjected their changes into the 
world, the change will persist (though it gradually dissipates, never quite to 
zero,