[-empyre-] another kind of violence
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- My friend and colleague Cecilia Parsberg, Swedish visual artist, who went with me to Palestine and took the pictures in Jenin and made the films I linked yesterday too, is working with an unique project, How to be a succesful beggar in Sweden. A text written by her was published in the interesting magazine Eurozine, a collaboration between small magazines in Europe, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-08-06-parsberg-en.html The text and her work add another dimension to the violence we were talking about. All these beggars rights as human beings are being violated every day, they travel by buss or by cheap flights to sit on the streets of the wealthy cities of Europe to be able to support themselves and their families in Rumania or Bulgary. They are seen as not beings, as parias as the Homo Sacer from Agamben Alicia quoted. A link to Cecilias interviews with them, http://vimeo.com/66966202 The choir with their voices, a mighty performance, http://beggingasaprofession.eu/ Ana -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 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 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Introducing week 2
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- good morning, to you all and week 2 starting up, and it's great to return to our roundtable and find Ana so very active and involved – thanks to all the responses between speakers here, and welcome to others, who just came, like Maria Damon and Scott Rettberg. Maria your concern about racial and gender violence, ethnic and home exproprition, needs to be addressed, for sure; thus at some point issues of ethics and the law, or a discussion about what we mean by human rights, and nationhood/citizenship (and patriotism) under the sign of terror will be necessary. May I join Alan in welcoming more guests to our round, please all continue, and thank you Jon McKenzie, Reinhold Görling, Yoko Ishiguro, Mine Kaylan, and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos for joining up. I will compose a small mix tape soon, reflecting on the weekend discussion; guest bios below: _ _ *Jon McKenzie, 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. *Reinhold Görling, Reinhold Görling is professor of media and cultural studies at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf and works at the intersection between media philosophy, psychoanalysis, film and performative studies. He recently (2014) published “Szenen der Gewalt. Folter und Film von Rossellini bis Bigelow” (Scenes of Violence. Torture and film from Rossellini to Bigelow.). Besides image and violence, another research subject currently focusses Reinhold’s interest on time, play, and abstraction. *Yoko Ishiguro, Yoko Ishiguro is a performance maker, performer and actress. She studied Psycholinguistics in University of Tsukuba (Japan) and got her MA in Contemporary Performance Making at Brunel University London in 2012. Her background is contemporary theatre and dance. After her acting and dancing career, she started to make her solo works and has performed internationally since then. Mostly, her works are simple and playful site-specific performances (or performative installations) to problematise the urban social/communicational conditions which determine the relationships of people within, considering the accompanying cultural and ontological issues. Currently, Ishiguro works interdisciplinarily in Live Art, performance art, theatre and academic fields across Japan and the UK. Website: http://ishiguroyoko.info/iroiro/ *Mine Kaylan, Mine Kaylan works as performance, visual theatre artist and writer. She teaches on the Performance and Visual Art programme at the University of Brighton. She is interested in ‘the cultural politics of live exchange’ and more recently has been exploring this subject through the 'lecture/performance' form and by making short films. She has been developing a ‘poetic documentary’ based on a series experiments with film poems and the Turkish destan form, as documentation of a 'poetics of liveness'. She continues to investigate the conundrum: how to combine a document of the live moment and the epic historic simultaneously, through a combination of word and moving image. * Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is Professor of Law Theory at the University of Westminster, and founder and Director of The Westminster Law Theory Centre, a centre that brings together radical interdisciplinary research. His research interests include environmental law, human rights, EU law, law and literature, law and space, continental philosophy, gender studies, law and art, and so on, all areas in which he has published. He lectures around the world and holds permanent professorial affiliations with the Centre for Politics, Management and Philosophy, Business School, Copenhagen since 2006, and the University Institute of Architecture, Venice since 2009. Andreas is also a practicing artist, working on photography, text and performance under the name of picpoet. His recent art publication is called “A fjord eating its way into my arm”, published by AND publishers, London. His academic books include the edited volumes Law and the City (2007), Law and Ecology (2011) Radical Encounters (2013), and the monographs Absent Environments (2007), Niklas Luhmann: Law, Justice, Society (2009) and the recent (2014) Spatial
[-empyre-] sample from today
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I want to thank Johannes for all the work he's done here, and all the guests current and future; it's an amazing and intense month. and from my current Google newsfeed (space and time displacements) - Suicide bombing at Nigerian school kills 47Sydney Morning Herald Military Plans 'Operation No Mercy' Against Boko HaramAllAfrica.com Palestinian stabbed Israel soldier in attack near Tel Aviv train station, police say :Palestinians break through West Bank barrier to mark Berlin Wall anniversary RT Egypt jihadists vow loyalty to ISIS In this Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2014 photo, smoke rises from explosions demolishing houses on the Egyptian side of the border town of Rafah as seen from the Palestinian side of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Cyberespionage group targets traveling execs through hotel networks Russia Says Sanctions Hurting as Bank Moves to Defend Ruble Russian Military Encounters With West at Cold War Levels: Report Suicide bomber kills 47 boys in Nigeria school massacre Daily Mail - 1 hour ago Suicide bomber kills 48 at school assembly in Nigeria IBNLive - 1 hour ago UPDATE 3-Suicide bomber kills dozens at school assembly in Nigeria Reuters - 45 minutes ago ... * Suicide bomber dressed as student kills 48, injures 79. * Detonates device during school's morning assembly. * Angry locals block access to school buildings, hospital. Leaders of China and Japan hold first face-to-face talks amid tensions CNN Trending on Google+:Palestinians break through West Bank barrier to mark Berlin Wall anniversaryRT Opinion:Terror attack in Tel Aviv: Palestinian stabs, critically wounds IDF soldierJerusalem Post From Nigeria:Scores Of Insurgents Killed In Mubi By SoldiersNAIJ.COM Clashes with Israel Police settle down in Arab locales ISIS gaining followers but losing leaders? CBS News - 52 minutes ago CAIRO -- Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, a jihadi organization based in the Sinai Peninsula that has carried out several attacks targeting Egyptian security forces, has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). African nations counter Ebola's tourism damageTimes of Malta Mali due to declare 108 Ebola-free after quarantineeNCA China's president praises Hong Kong chief's handling of democracy protests Los Angeles Times- 1 hour ago In a high-profile meeting, Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed his support for the Hong Kong government's handling of the ongoing pro-democracy demonstrations even as student protest leaders seek to schedule direct talks with central government ... Opinion:Russian Forces Provoked West 40 TimesDaily Beast In Depth:Russia's 'close military encounters' with Europe documentedBBC News ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Mother Courage, Antigone's bones
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- small mix tape, with collected impressions, organized as a sounding board (inspired by Plastic Art Foundation). - Trashman Ana - just watched the first part of your friend Cecelia's documentary interviews with Maria begging on the streets of Gothenburg, thinking that Sweden is rich and blessed, and God looks after Sweden, and people there smile at beggars and are friendly. The Roma, she says, can make a living there and then return to Rumania for a while, support family there. Maria seems most pleased that her young children can learn how to read and write. Olga writes that the current events in my home country Ukraine are a good case study of patriotism and evoke the possibility that you are out of frame if you are not a patriot in Ukraine nowadays, and then responds to my question about the re-appearance of the Cossacks, the mythic figure coming alive and real again in the 21st century. My reference to the Samurai and Mishima may be forgiven. Olga also mentions the images (spectacle of the scaffold): I came across the issue of beheading when I investigated representations of Chechen war. There were videos uploaded by Chechen fighters of beheading young Russian conscripts with knives that were circulating on the net. It caused an ethical outrage of the internet community, especially when Belorussian female blogger posted video on her website under the title: Chechen kill Russian soldies as pigs. She obviously supported Chechen fight for independence as the rest of democratic world ( but at what price?). To mock the morbid curiosity of internet users the false links were created that linked to porn sites instead of videos. John cautions and asks: What is terror that is not seen except by perpetrator and victim? that is not discovered and written, talked about. Is it still terror? The media 'observer' changes things profoundly, but how? And in a sense I see this powerful question gain traction after Pia's response to Ana, about whether the observer was close (enough) to actual killings, or whether the violations of human rights as ongoing intimidation, humiliation and degradation are not the terror we speak about, the real violence dealt out to all? Sonja interjected: News desk is where Mother Courage is busy nowadays, trading, eating her children alive. - Glutmut The odour of the burning flesh, evoked by Sonja's reference to concentration camps, resonates with several accounts we heard last week, also regarding the complex sublime threat manifested in the September 11 attacks. I walked to Ground Zero about 3 weeks later, and the stench was ghastly, and it sticks in one's body and clothes and mind for some time. Carolee Schneemann, the well known body/performance artist, later exhibited her Terminal Velocity, photographs as a kind of (she says) 'In Memorium' -- an attempt to get closer and closer and closer to the representative figures who were either jumping or thrown out of the windows by the extensive heat and falling to their deaths [on September 11]. I wanted to study them and try to understand aspects of falling and what the absolute dynamic of gravity was going to do. I was not commenting on the social construction of information. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/11/carolee-schneemann_n_4415261.html] Then what courage, mother. Agreeing with Fereshteh, I would also ask about identification with victims - nosotros somos x - , how to put myself in their place, to imagine their situation, but it is not so easy. The psychological pressure is so immense that no one can bear it? Pia speaks of design, and the not-newsdesk patterns, of some aspects you might not have realized, even if you heard about the bombing and blockade of Gaza, the “targeted” assassinations and demolitions of the houses of suspects and their families. The victimization (more secret, indirect, not public horror show). You answered my question of what you mean by kitsch Threads of resistance are also mentioned by both Pia and Ana. - Alaska Then the homeland, where do you go back to? Olga's views on patriotism seem diametrically opposed to Ana's (Ana, why would patriotism or nostalgia seem foreign to you, what made you return to Uruguay? and how do you experience the militant fanatic believer, the one that, as Fereshteh mentioned, may stand quietly on the street corner to pass out reading material)? Can we talk about knowledge or performance other than knowing, and Pia you raised a comparison, that we may want to address: kitsch -- working in the most trite way on basic emotions. (And what is the difference to art aiming at evoking emotions? The difference might lie in the kind of emotions: Expected ones by a public execution are false, art means to generate genuine feeling. At least it is to be hoped that there is a difference.) Erik and several others spoke of clichés of
Re: [-empyre-] sample from today
--empyre- soft-skinned space--It's stunning to me that there's nothing about Mexico and the current political crisis. 100,000 people dead, some 40,000 missing in the last 7 years, 43 students massacred on Sept 26, protests all over the country, and protestors burned the doors to the National Palace the night before last. Do we hear a word about it? Why, I wonder Any thought? Diana On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 10:08 AM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I want to thank Johannes for all the work he's done here, and all the guests current and future; it's an amazing and intense month. and from my current Google newsfeed (space and time displacements) - Suicide bombing at Nigerian school kills 47Sydney Morning Herald Military Plans 'Operation No Mercy' Against Boko HaramAllAfrica.com Palestinian stabbed Israel soldier in attack near Tel Aviv train station, police say :Palestinians break through West Bank barrier to mark Berlin Wall anniversary RT Egypt jihadists vow loyalty to ISIS In this Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2014 photo, smoke rises from explosions demolishing houses on the Egyptian side of the border town of Rafah as seen from the Palestinian side of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Cyberespionage group targets traveling execs through hotel networks Russia Says Sanctions Hurting as Bank Moves to Defend Ruble Russian Military Encounters With West at Cold War Levels: Report Suicide bomber kills 47 boys in Nigeria school massacre Daily Mail - 1 hour ago Suicide bomber kills 48 at school assembly in Nigeria IBNLive - 1 hour ago UPDATE 3-Suicide bomber kills dozens at school assembly in Nigeria Reuters - 45 minutes ago ... * Suicide bomber dressed as student kills 48, injures 79. * Detonates device during school's morning assembly. * Angry locals block access to school buildings, hospital. Leaders of China and Japan hold first face-to-face talks amid tensions CNN Trending on Google+:Palestinians break through West Bank barrier to mark Berlin Wall anniversaryRT Opinion:Terror attack in Tel Aviv: Palestinian stabs, critically wounds IDF soldierJerusalem Post From Nigeria:Scores Of Insurgents Killed In Mubi By SoldiersNAIJ.COM Clashes with Israel Police settle down in Arab locales ISIS gaining followers but losing leaders? CBS News - 52 minutes ago CAIRO -- Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, a jihadi organization based in the Sinai Peninsula that has carried out several attacks targeting Egyptian security forces, has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). African nations counter Ebola's tourism damageTimes of Malta Mali due to declare 108 Ebola-free after quarantineeNCA China's president praises Hong Kong chief's handling of democracy protests Los Angeles Times- 1 hour ago In a high-profile meeting, Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed his support for the Hong Kong government's handling of the ongoing pro-democracy demonstrations even as student protest leaders seek to schedule direct talks with central government ... Opinion:Russian Forces Provoked West 40 TimesDaily Beast In Depth:Russia's 'close military encounters' with Europe documentedBBC News ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu -- Diana Taylor University Professor Professor, Performance Studies and Spanish Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Tisch School of the Arts NYU 721 Broadway,6th fl. New York, NY 10003 tel 212 998 1620 fax 212 995 4571 http://hemi.nyu.edu ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] sample from today
--empyre- soft-skinned space--I’m enjoying the engagement here, troubling as the topics have been. The posts by Alan, Johannes, Ana, Reinhold, John, Eric and others have been very provocative, and the different speeds and tenors of post-communication is breath-taking. I’ve tried to respond in a slow way, for I think/believe/feel that absolute terror is both unprecedented and yet everyday, as it connects to the slow terror of economic, environmental, and cultural progress-gone-awry. In You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk distinguishes vita performativa from both vita contemplativa and vita activa. His figure for Western theoretical man, the neutral observer of vita activa, is one of suspended animation, all head (capital) and no body (Diogenes). In the Art of Life, he traces modernism’s attempts to kill the Man of Logos. The most surprising thing I’ve discovered through our conversations is the uncanny resonance between videoed beheadings and Bataille’s Acephale. The significance of this reverb is as legible as a tarot card. Are pictographics permitted on this list? Like graphe, the term “performance” is polymorphic enough to stretch from acts of violence (those we call real, actual, unmediated, etc) to violence enacted within theatrical and artistic contexts (those we call artificial, representational, mediated etc.), while also opening up unsettling practices in-between. In Prison Theatricality in the Romanian Gulag,” Ruxandra Cesereanu describes Cold War prison performances in which guards forced prisoners to reenact the torture of saints and other scenes of blasphemy in grotesque living tableaus. More mundane and profound is the realization that all techniques, performances, experiences are generated via practice, repetition, alternation, fine-tuning, etc. that is, are emergent via graphe. So by performances I mean actual and enacted acts and the blur from which this distinction emerges, for each act of terror, torture, rape is at once unique, singular, immediate and at same time multiple, citational, mediated by the material environments and symbolic contexts through which it unfolds, those of victim, perpetrator, witness, etc. This holds long before cameras, poets, and speculators arrive (assuming they’re not always on the scene: where I’m coming from techne operates in physis along the lines Deleuze and Guattari staked out as machinic phylum, graphe meets autopoesis). And once media technologies do arrive, they can’t be assumed as external to the performance of violence, merely exploiting the situation, repeating the event, etc. Images and cameras, audio and sound systems themselves carry force, both physical and performative force, to do things not only to witnesses but also to victims and perpetrators. At US prisons at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib, cameras and images were part of the psychophysical interrogation regime, used to humiliate, intimidate, and psychologically torture detainees, as well as to document and produce “actionable” intelligence. Videos posted online by ISIS and its precursor organizations serve as warnings to other groups and populations, as provocations to the international community, and also as recruitment tools for seasoned and new jihadists. Electronic terror is built atop public electric utilities. To miss the tele-pathy (pathos, suffering, passion at a distance) of anachronistic (wars on) terror is to miss the most proximate of events and all the affective networks in-between, here, for instance, on this listserv. Triads of victim, perpetrators, and witnesses multiply, morph, recombine, and rotate over time and at different scales. Whether one misses the tele-pathy or not, it’s bound to reverb, if not return. “Homo sacre data body” is a term coined a decade ago to tune in the reverb by mashing up Giorgio Agamben and Critical Art Ensemble. If Agamben’s camp signals the democratization and generalization of homo sacre, CAE’s data body doubles the physical body with a virtual double composed of information stored in networked databases. Ideally, homo sacre data body is ubiquitous yet intimately customizable. Facebook meets Acephale. The intersection of homo sacre and data body can be a drone strike, a care package, or getting hauled away by border officials. Its thumbprints are your passport, ID cards, passwords, and cookies. Homo sacre data body emerges as a microcosm of hypergraphe, the metasisizing of graphic violence and graphic media, producing the vast intermittent images of contemporary terror. The society of spectacle of scaffold is as much temporal as spatial, as much rhythm and break as stage and spectacle. Theater and spectacle hook up with visualizations, algorithms, and 24/7 dataveillance. Coming and going, mobile biometrics are the happy form of tiny terror. To think and act on links between absolute terror and the globality of economic, cultural
Re: [-empyre-] sample from today
--empyre- soft-skinned space--typographic t/error: the neutral observer of vita contemplativa On Nov 10, 2014, at 9:59 AM, Jon McKenzie jvmcken...@wisc.edu wrote: I’m enjoying the engagement here, troubling as the topics have been. The posts by Alan, Johannes, Ana, Reinhold, John, Eric and others have been very provocative, and the different speeds and tenors of post-communication is breath-taking. I’ve tried to respond in a slow way, for I think/believe/feel that absolute terror is both unprecedented and yet everyday, as it connects to the slow terror of economic, environmental, and cultural progress-gone-awry. In You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk distinguishes vita performativa from both vita contemplativa and vita activa. His figure for Western theoretical man, the neutral observer of vita activa, is one of suspended animation, all head (capital) and no body (Diogenes). In the Art of Life, he traces modernism’s attempts to kill the Man of Logos. The most surprising thing I’ve discovered through our conversations is the uncanny resonance between videoed beheadings and Bataille’s Acephale. The significance of this reverb is as legible as a tarot card. Are pictographics permitted on this list? Like graphe, the term “performance” is polymorphic enough to stretch from acts of violence (those we call real, actual, unmediated, etc) to violence enacted within theatrical and artistic contexts (those we call artificial, representational, mediated etc.), while also opening up unsettling practices in-between. In Prison Theatricality in the Romanian Gulag,” Ruxandra Cesereanu describes Cold War prison performances in which guards forced prisoners to reenact the torture of saints and other scenes of blasphemy in grotesque living tableaus. More mundane and profound is the realization that all techniques, performances, experiences are generated via practice, repetition, alternation, fine-tuning, etc. that is, are emergent via graphe. So by performances I mean actual and enacted acts and the blur from which this distinction emerges, for each act of terror, torture, rape is at once unique, singular, immediate and at same time multiple, citational, mediated by the material environments and symbolic contexts through which it unfolds, those of victim, perpetrator, witness, etc. This holds long before cameras, poets, and speculators arrive (assuming they’re not always on the scene: where I’m coming from techne operates in physis along the lines Deleuze and Guattari staked out as machinic phylum, graphe meets autopoesis). And once media technologies do arrive, they can’t be assumed as external to the performance of violence, merely exploiting the situation, repeating the event, etc. Images and cameras, audio and sound systems themselves carry force, both physical and performative force, to do things not only to witnesses but also to victims and perpetrators. At US prisons at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib, cameras and images were part of the psychophysical interrogation regime, used to humiliate, intimidate, and psychologically torture detainees, as well as to document and produce “actionable” intelligence. Videos posted online by ISIS and its precursor organizations serve as warnings to other groups and populations, as provocations to the international community, and also as recruitment tools for seasoned and new jihadists. Electronic terror is built atop public electric utilities. To miss the tele-pathy (pathos, suffering, passion at a distance) of anachronistic (wars on) terror is to miss the most proximate of events and all the affective networks in-between, here, for instance, on this listserv. Triads of victim, perpetrators, and witnesses multiply, morph, recombine, and rotate over time and at different scales. Whether one misses the tele-pathy or not, it’s bound to reverb, if not return. “Homo sacre data body” is a term coined a decade ago to tune in the reverb by mashing up Giorgio Agamben and Critical Art Ensemble. If Agamben’s camp signals the democratization and generalization of homo sacre, CAE’s data body doubles the physical body with a virtual double composed of information stored in networked databases. Ideally, homo sacre data body is ubiquitous yet intimately customizable. Facebook meets Acephale. The intersection of homo sacre and data body can be a drone strike, a care package, or getting hauled away by border officials. Its thumbprints are your passport, ID cards, passwords, and cookies. Homo sacre data body emerges as a microcosm of hypergraphe, the metasisizing of graphic violence and graphic media, producing the vast intermittent images of contemporary terror. The society of spectacle of scaffold is as much temporal as spatial, as much rhythm and break as stage and spectacle. Theater and spectacle hook up with
Re: [-empyre-] Mother Courage, Antigone's bones
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Johannes a quick answer to your direct question. I left Sweden when one million people voted for Sverigedemokraterna now the third party in Sweden. A xenophob party wanting forbid the begging and stop the immigration. I came back to Uruguay not because I am born here, where my Spaniard and Italian grandfathers found a good place to raise their families but because the Uruguayan melting pot felt now energetic and vital. In jail we woke up six in the morning to see the flag being up and six in the afternoon the flag were down. We were tortured with the Uruguayan anthem sounding in the loudspeakers. No fosterland or country for me, thanks. Ana Enviado desde Samsung Mobile Mensaje original De: Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk Fecha:10/11/2014 14:50 (GMT-03:00) A: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Asunto: Re: [-empyre-] Mother Courage, Antigone's bones --empyre- soft-skinned space-- small mix tape, with collected impressions, organized as a sounding board (inspired by Plastic Art Foundation). - Trashman Ana - just watched the first part of your friend Cecelia's documentary interviews with Maria begging on the streets of Gothenburg, thinking that Sweden is rich and blessed, and God looks after Sweden, and people there smile at beggars and are friendly. The Roma, she says, can make a living there and then return to Rumania for a while, support family there. Maria seems most pleased that her young children can learn how to read and write. Olga writes that the current events in my home country Ukraine are a good case study of patriotism and evoke the possibility that you are out of frame if you are not a patriot in Ukraine nowadays, and then responds to my question about the re-appearance of the Cossacks, the mythic figure coming alive and real again in the 21st century. My reference to the Samurai and Mishima may be forgiven. Olga also mentions the images (spectacle of the scaffold): I came across the issue of beheading when I investigated representations of Chechen war. There were videos uploaded by Chechen fighters of beheading young Russian conscripts with knives that were circulating on the net. It caused an ethical outrage of the internet community, especially when Belorussian female blogger posted video on her website under the title: Chechen kill Russian soldies as pigs. She obviously supported Chechen fight for independence as the rest of democratic world ( but at what price?). To mock the morbid curiosity of internet users the false links were created that linked to porn sites instead of videos. John cautions and asks: What is terror that is not seen except by perpetrator and victim? that is not discovered and written, talked about. Is it still terror? The media 'observer' changes things profoundly, but how? And in a sense I see this powerful question gain traction after Pia's response to Ana, about whether the observer was close (enough) to actual killings, or whether the violations of human rights as ongoing intimidation, humiliation and degradation are not the terror we speak about, the real violence dealt out to all? Sonja interjected: News desk is where Mother Courage is busy nowadays, trading, eating her children alive. - Glutmut The odour of the burning flesh, evoked by Sonja's reference to concentration camps, resonates with several accounts we heard last week, also regarding the complex sublime threat manifested in the September 11 attacks. I walked to Ground Zero about 3 weeks later, and the stench was ghastly, and it sticks in one's body and clothes and mind for some time. Carolee Schneemann, the well known body/performance artist, later exhibited her Terminal Velocity, photographs as a kind of (she says) 'In Memorium' -- an attempt to get closer and closer and closer to the representative figures who were either jumping or thrown out of the windows by the extensive heat and falling to their deaths [on September 11]. I wanted to study them and try to understand aspects of falling and what the absolute dynamic of gravity was going to do. I was not commenting on the social construction of information. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/11/carolee-schneemann_n_4415261.html] Then what courage, mother. Agreeing with Fereshteh, I would also ask about identification with victims - nosotros somos x - , how to put myself in their place, to imagine their situation, but it is not so easy. The psychological pressure is so immense that no one can bear it? Pia speaks of design, and the not-newsdesk patterns, of some aspects you might not have realized, even if you heard about the bombing and blockade of Gaza, the “targeted” assassinations and demolitions of the houses of suspects and their families. The victimization (more secret, indirect, not public horror show). You
Re: [-empyre-] sample from today
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Some quick answers: Jon, check the archives of -empyre and you can read Alicia Migdal's quotations of Agamben and its Homo Sacer. And Diana, two days ago I posted to the list the links with live strem to the protests in Mexico when the news of the killed 43 students reached us. And Alicia and me discussed it in the list. Ana On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 2:04 PM, Jon McKenzie jvmcken...@wisc.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- typographic t/error: the neutral observer of vita contemplativa On Nov 10, 2014, at 9:59 AM, Jon McKenzie jvmcken...@wisc.edu wrote: I’m enjoying the engagement here, troubling as the topics have been. The posts by Alan, Johannes, Ana, Reinhold, John, Eric and others have been very provocative, and the different speeds and tenors of post-communication is breath-taking. I’ve tried to respond in a slow way, for I think/believe/feel that absolute terror is both unprecedented and yet everyday, as it connects to the slow terror of economic, environmental, and cultural progress-gone-awry. In You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk distinguishes vita performativa from both vita contemplativa and vita activa. His figure for Western theoretical man, the neutral observer of vita activa, is one of suspended animation, all head (capital) and no body (Diogenes). In the Art of Life, he traces modernism’s attempts to kill the Man of Logos. The most surprising thing I’ve discovered through our conversations is the uncanny resonance between videoed beheadings and Bataille’s Acephale. The significance of this reverb is as legible as a tarot card. Are pictographics permitted on this list? Like graphe, the term “performance” is polymorphic enough to stretch from acts of violence (those we call real, actual, unmediated, etc) to violence enacted within theatrical and artistic contexts (those we call artificial, representational, mediated etc.), while also opening up unsettling practices in-between. In Prison Theatricality in the Romanian Gulag,” Ruxandra Cesereanu describes Cold War prison performances in which guards forced prisoners to reenact the torture of saints and other scenes of blasphemy in grotesque living tableaus. More mundane and profound is the realization that all techniques, performances, experiences are generated via practice, repetition, alternation, fine-tuning, etc. that is, are emergent via graphe. So by performances I mean actual and enacted acts and the blur from which this distinction emerges, for each act of terror, torture, rape is at once unique, singular, immediate and at same time multiple, citational, mediated by the material environments and symbolic contexts through which it unfolds, those of victim, perpetrator, witness, etc. This holds long before cameras, poets, and speculators arrive (assuming they’re not always on the scene: where I’m coming from techne operates in physis along the lines Deleuze and Guattari staked out as machinic phylum, graphe meets autopoesis). And once media technologies do arrive, they can’t be assumed as external to the performance of violence, merely exploiting the situation, repeating the event, etc. Images and cameras, audio and sound systems themselves carry force, both physical and performative force, to do things not only to witnesses but also to victims and perpetrators. At US prisons at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib, cameras and images were part of the psychophysical interrogation regime, used to humiliate, intimidate, and psychologically torture detainees, as well as to document and produce “actionable” intelligence. Videos posted online by ISIS and its precursor organizations serve as warnings to other groups and populations, as provocations to the international community, and also as recruitment tools for seasoned and new jihadists. Electronic terror is built atop public electric utilities. To miss the tele-pathy (pathos, suffering, passion at a distance) of anachronistic (wars on) terror is to miss the most proximate of events and all the affective networks in-between, here, for instance, on this listserv. Triads of victim, perpetrators, and witnesses multiply, morph, recombine, and rotate over time and at different scales. Whether one misses the tele-pathy or not, it’s bound to reverb, if not return. “Homo sacre data body” is a term coined a decade ago to tune in the reverb by mashing up Giorgio Agamben and Critical Art Ensemble. If Agamben’s camp signals the democratization and generalization of homo sacre, CAE’s data body doubles the physical body with a virtual double composed of information stored in networked databases. Ideally, homo sacre data body is ubiquitous yet intimately customizable. Facebook meets Acephale. The intersection of homo sacre and data body can be a drone strike, a care package, or getting hauled away by border officials. Its thumbprints
Re: [-empyre-] para empyre / Mother Courage, Antigone's bones
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- [traducción rápida de mi ‘mix tape’/compilación] ..una compilación pequeña, con las impresiones recogidas, organizada como una caja de resonancia (inspirado por la Fundación de Artes Plásticas). - -Hombre de la basura Ana - acaba de ver la primera parte de su amigo – estas entrevistas documentales de Cecelia con María la mendicidad en las calles de Gotemburgo, Suecia pensando que es rico y bendecido, y Dios se ocupa de Suecia, y la gente no sonreír a los mendigos y es amable. La Roma, dice, puede ganarse la vida allí y luego regresar a Rumania por un tiempo, apoyar a la familia allí. María parece más contentos de que sus niños pequeños pueden aprender a leer y escribir. Olga escribe que los acontecimientos actuales en mi país de origen Ucrania son un buen caso de estudio de patriotismo y evocan la posibilidad de que esté fuera de cuadro, si usted no es un patriota en Ucrania hoy en día, y luego responde a mi pregunta sobre la reaparición de los cosacos, la figura mítica volviendo a la vida y los bienes de nuevo en el siglo 21. Mi referencia a los Samurai y Mishima puede ser perdonado. Olga también menciona las imágenes (espectáculo del cadalso): yo nos encontramos con el problema de la decapitación cuando investigué representaciones de la guerra de Chechenia. Había videos subidos por los combatientes chechenos de decapitar jóvenes reclutas rusos con cuchillos que circulaban en la red. Causó un escándalo ético de la comunidad de Internet, especialmente cuando blogger bielorruso publicó el vídeo en su página web bajo el título: Chechenia mata soldies rusos como cerdos. Ella, obviamente, apoya Chechenia lucha por la independencia como el resto del mundo democrático (pero ¿a qué precio?). Para burlarse de la curiosidad morbosa de los usuarios de Internet los falsos vínculos que se crearon vinculadas a sitios porno en vez de vídeos. Juan advierte y le pregunta: ¿Cuál es el terror que no se ve, excepto por autor y la víctima que no se descubre y escrito, hablado de ¿Sigue siendo el terror Los medios de comunicación 'observador' cambia las cosas profundamente, sino cómo.?? Y en cierto sentido, veo esta poderosa pregunta ganar tracción después de la respuesta de Pia a Ana, acerca de si el observador estaba cerca (suficiente) para asesinatos reales, o si las violaciónes de los derechos humanos como continua intimidación, la humillación y la degradación no son el terror que hablar, la violencia real trató a todos? Sonja intervino: Noticias escritorio es donde Madre Coraje está ocupado hoy en día, el comercio, comer a sus hijos con vida. -- Coraje Resplandeciente El olor de la carne quemada, evocado por la referencia de Sonja a campos de concentración, resuena con varias cuentas que escuchamos la semana pasada, también en relación con la compleja amenaza sublime se manifiesta en los ataques del 11 de septiembre. Me acerqué a la Zona Cero de aproximadamente 3 semanas más tarde, y el hedor era espantoso, y se pega en el cuerpo y la ropa de uno y la mente por algún tiempo. Carolee Schneemann, el artista corporal / rendimiento muy conocido, más tarde exhibió su Terminal Velocity, fotografías como una especie de (dice ella) 'En Memorium' - un intento de obtener más y más cerca y más cerca de las figuras representativas que eran ya sea saltando o arrojados por las ventanas por el calor y la extensa caer a su muerte [el 11 de septiembre]. yo quería estudiar y tratar de entender los aspectos de la caída y lo que la dinámica absoluta de la gravedad iba a hacer. yo no estaba comentando sobre la construcción social de la información . [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/11/carolee-schneemann_n_4415261.html] Entonces, ¿qué valor, madre? Coincidiendo con Fereshteh, también me pregunte acerca de la identificación con las víctimas - Nosotros Somos x - , la forma de ponerme en su lugar, imaginar su situación, pero no es tan fácil La presión psicológica es tan inmensa que nadie puede soportar Pia habla de diseño, y los patrones no-Noticiario de algunos aspectos que tal vez no se han dado cuenta, incluso si usted oído hablar de los bombardeos y el bloqueo de Gaza, el objetivo asesinatos y demoliciones de las casas de los sospechosos y sus familias. La victimización (más secreto, indirectos, no espectáculo de horror público). Ha respondido a mi pregunta de qué quiere decir con lo kitsch. Hilos de resistencia también son mencionados por tanto Pia y Ana. -- Alaska A continuación, la patria, ¿dónde ir de nuevo a? Visitas de Olga en el patriotismo parecen diametralmente opuesto al de Ana (Ana, ¿por qué el patriotismo o la nostalgia parece ajeno a ti, ¿qué te hizo regresar a Uruguay? Y ¿cómo se experimenta el creyente fanático militante, el que, como Fereshteh mencionado, puede estar en silencio en la esquina de la calle para repartir material de lectura)? ¿Podemos hablar de conocimientos
Re: [-empyre-] sample from today
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Yes of course you did-- I was referring to the Google news feed reported by Alan. I thought THAT was interesting in its omission. Apologies if you thought I was referring to your posts Ana! Diana Diana Taylor University Professor Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish, NYU Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics On Nov 10, 2014, at 3:51 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Some quick answers: Jon, check the archives of -empyre and you can read Alicia Migdal's quotations of Agamben and its Homo Sacer. And Diana, two days ago I posted to the list the links with live strem to the protests in Mexico when the news of the killed 43 students reached us. And Alicia and me discussed it in the list. Ana On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 2:04 PM, Jon McKenzie jvmcken...@wisc.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- typographic t/error: the neutral observer of vita contemplativa On Nov 10, 2014, at 9:59 AM, Jon McKenzie jvmcken...@wisc.edu wrote: I’m enjoying the engagement here, troubling as the topics have been. The posts by Alan, Johannes, Ana, Reinhold, John, Eric and others have been very provocative, and the different speeds and tenors of post-communication is breath-taking. I’ve tried to respond in a slow way, for I think/believe/feel that absolute terror is both unprecedented and yet everyday, as it connects to the slow terror of economic, environmental, and cultural progress-gone-awry. In You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk distinguishes vita performativa from both vita contemplativa and vita activa. His figure for Western theoretical man, the neutral observer of vita activa, is one of suspended animation, all head (capital) and no body (Diogenes). In the Art of Life, he traces modernism’s attempts to kill the Man of Logos. The most surprising thing I’ve discovered through our conversations is the uncanny resonance between videoed beheadings and Bataille’s Acephale. The significance of this reverb is as legible as a tarot card. Are pictographics permitted on this list? Like graphe, the term “performance” is polymorphic enough to stretch from acts of violence (those we call real, actual, unmediated, etc) to violence enacted within theatrical and artistic contexts (those we call artificial, representational, mediated etc.), while also opening up unsettling practices in-between. In Prison Theatricality in the Romanian Gulag,” Ruxandra Cesereanu describes Cold War prison performances in which guards forced prisoners to reenact the torture of saints and other scenes of blasphemy in grotesque living tableaus. More mundane and profound is the realization that all techniques, performances, experiences are generated via practice, repetition, alternation, fine-tuning, etc. that is, are emergent via graphe. So by performances I mean actual and enacted acts and the blur from which this distinction emerges, for each act of terror, torture, rape is at once unique, singular, immediate and at same time multiple, citational, mediated by the material environments and symbolic contexts through which it unfolds, those of victim, perpetrator, witness, etc. This holds long before cameras, poets, and speculators arrive (assuming they’re not always on the scene: where I’m coming from techne operates in physis along the lines Deleuze and Guattari staked out as machinic phylum, graphe meets autopoesis). And once media technologies do arrive, they can’t be assumed as external to the performance of violence, merely exploiting the situation, repeating the event, etc. Images and cameras, audio and sound systems themselves carry force, both physical and performative force, to do things not only to witnesses but also to victims and perpetrators. At US prisons at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib, cameras and images were part of the psychophysical interrogation regime, used to humiliate, intimidate, and psychologically torture detainees, as well as to document and produce “actionable” intelligence. Videos posted online by ISIS and its precursor organizations serve as warnings to other groups and populations, as provocations to the international community, and also as recruitment tools for seasoned and new jihadists. Electronic terror is built atop public electric utilities. To miss the tele-pathy (pathos, suffering, passion at a distance) of anachronistic (wars on) terror is to miss the most proximate of events and all the affective networks in-between, here, for instance, on this listserv. Triads of victim, perpetrators, and witnesses multiply, morph, recombine, and rotate over time and at different scales. Whether one misses the tele-pathy or not, it’s bound to reverb, if not return. “Homo sacre data body” is a
Re: [-empyre-] sample from today
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Maybe Mexico is too near the US to be worth some alert in Google? :( Ana On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 7:51 PM, Diana Taylor diana.taylo...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Yes of course you did-- I was referring to the Google news feed reported by Alan. I thought THAT was interesting in its omission. Apologies if you thought I was referring to your posts Ana! Diana Diana Taylor University Professor Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish, NYU Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics On Nov 10, 2014, at 3:51 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Some quick answers: Jon, check the archives of -empyre and you can read Alicia Migdal's quotations of Agamben and its Homo Sacer. And Diana, two days ago I posted to the list the links with live strem to the protests in Mexico when the news of the killed 43 students reached us. And Alicia and me discussed it in the list. Ana On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 2:04 PM, Jon McKenzie jvmcken...@wisc.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- typographic t/error: the neutral observer of vita contemplativa On Nov 10, 2014, at 9:59 AM, Jon McKenzie jvmcken...@wisc.edu wrote: I’m enjoying the engagement here, troubling as the topics have been. The posts by Alan, Johannes, Ana, Reinhold, John, Eric and others have been very provocative, and the different speeds and tenors of post-communication is breath-taking. I’ve tried to respond in a slow way, for I think/believe/feel that absolute terror is both unprecedented and yet everyday, as it connects to the slow terror of economic, environmental, and cultural progress-gone-awry. In You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk distinguishes vita performativa from both vita contemplativa and vita activa. His figure for Western theoretical man, the neutral observer of vita activa, is one of suspended animation, all head (capital) and no body (Diogenes). In the Art of Life, he traces modernism’s attempts to kill the Man of Logos. The most surprising thing I’ve discovered through our conversations is the uncanny resonance between videoed beheadings and Bataille’s Acephale. The significance of this reverb is as legible as a tarot card. Are pictographics permitted on this list? Like graphe, the term “performance” is polymorphic enough to stretch from acts of violence (those we call real, actual, unmediated, etc) to violence enacted within theatrical and artistic contexts (those we call artificial, representational, mediated etc.), while also opening up unsettling practices in-between. In Prison Theatricality in the Romanian Gulag,” Ruxandra Cesereanu describes Cold War prison performances in which guards forced prisoners to reenact the torture of saints and other scenes of blasphemy in grotesque living tableaus. More mundane and profound is the realization that all techniques, performances, experiences are generated via practice, repetition, alternation, fine-tuning, etc. that is, are emergent via graphe. So by performances I mean actual and enacted acts and the blur from which this distinction emerges, for each act of terror, torture, rape is at once unique, singular, immediate and at same time multiple, citational, mediated by the material environments and symbolic contexts through which it unfolds, those of victim, perpetrator, witness, etc. This holds long before cameras, poets, and speculators arrive (assuming they’re not always on the scene: where I’m coming from techne operates in physis along the lines Deleuze and Guattari staked out as machinic phylum, graphe meets autopoesis). And once media technologies do arrive, they can’t be assumed as external to the performance of violence, merely exploiting the situation, repeating the event, etc. Images and cameras, audio and sound systems themselves carry force, both physical and performative force, to do things not only to witnesses but also to victims and perpetrators. At US prisons at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib, cameras and images were part of the psychophysical interrogation regime, used to humiliate, intimidate, and psychologically torture detainees, as well as to document and produce “actionable” intelligence. Videos posted online by ISIS and its precursor organizations serve as warnings to other groups and populations, as provocations to the international community, and also as recruitment tools for seasoned and new jihadists. Electronic terror is built atop public electric utilities. To miss the tele-pathy (pathos, suffering, passion at a distance) of anachronistic (wars on) terror is to miss the most proximate of events and all the affective networks in-between, here, for instance, on this listserv. Triads of victim, perpetrators, and witnesses multiply, morph, recombine, and
Re: [-empyre-] Pier Marton's 1st Appearance on -empyre- Part 1
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- [relay to all those who did not receive this per e-mail] Thank you to Alan for inviting me to this month’s empyre discussion. As the new kid on the bloc, I hope to learn quickly the lay of the land to be shorter in the future! As a form of introduction and because I am still working on a newer text - don’t we always say the same thing though? - I am posting this twenty year old text: A 1994 text for a video installation called “JEW” featuring my videotape “Say I’m a Jew. _ AFTER ALL (50 years later) “. . . only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation be safely built.” - Bertrand Russell, 1923 Me too, I would rather not look. Too much familiarity, my grandmother was murdered. In my body. Zyklon gas was an improved form of killing. Do I, like a drunk pleading to forget, engage with the digital modernity? TV brain lures with stories and theories, sensation when there is none. The body is missing. I work on TV, taming it before it lulls me. Each cut, a wake to awake. It takes repetition, the killing was repeated. Is repeated. Over. - Pier Marton, 5754/1994 _ Continued in Part 2. PM_uoʇɹɐɯ_ɹǝıd — http://piermarton.info School Of No Media — http://schoolofnomedia.com/ About — http://about.me/piermarton BrainBleed— http://brainbleed.wordpress.com/ One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them. Virginia Woolf The essence of normalcy is the refusal of reality. Ernst Becker When something seems the most obvious thing in the world, it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up. Bertolt Brecht An idea becomes false the moment one becomes satisfied by it. Alain There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. Hannah Arendt When around you, you hear the word Jew pronounced, be on guard, they are speaking about you. Frantz Fanon If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet renounce controversy are people who want crops without ploughing the ground. Frederick Douglass Silence is the authentic mode of speaking. Claude Lanzmann ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Pier Marton's 1st Appearance on -empyre- Part 2
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Continued from Part 1 __ In many ways things have not changed much since that 1994 text, except that now video is part of new media, the screens are everywhere, Skype and Facebook consolidate our mass-solitary-confinement in the ways predicted by Günther Anders (before Guy Debord). Most of my art activities, often around video-art, dealt with “heavy topics”: audience passivity, the Shoah, male violence, television indoctrination - and as Jon McKenzie brought up the term this morning, I directed the short performance piece “Telepathos, broadcast live on the Learning Channel with the artists Nancy Buchanan and Shalom Gorewitz. For more than thirty years I have taught media production, often emphasizing self-reflexivity - that was the term back then - and Brecht’s distancing effect. Now, six years after a form of brain reboot (a brain hemorrhage), I see the busyness of many of our concerns to be just “stuff.” There are important exceptions but they are rare: Joshua Oppenheimer’s recent film The Act of Killing is one such example. Growing up with a father who was a well-known artist-photographer, I was surrounded by photographs and images; now, I am suspicious of them, even while I capture images of abstraction. I still feel compelled to keep track of the news, as hard and violent as it is. Good news barely exists; subtlety and non-violent media take too much time, and they don’t sell. For me the question that remains is whether there is something that can be done about the violence that surrounds us beyond being concerned, signing petitions, writing doing artwork. I have no idea at this point but I am willing to try. Pier Marton P.S.: Si puedo hacerlo voy a escribir en español et j’essayerai autant que possible d’écrire en français aussi. Ha van valaki aki akarja holy magyarul irjak is, akkor meg probálom ugy is ini. Pier Marton P.S.: Si puedo hacerlo voy a escribir en español, et j’essayerai autant que possible d’écrire en français aussi. Ha van valaki aki akarja holy magyarul is irjak, akkor meg probálom ugy is ini. PM_uoʇɹɐɯ_ɹǝıd — http://piermarton.info School Of No Media — http://schoolofnomedia.com/ About — http://about.me/piermarton BrainBleed— http://brainbleed.wordpress.com/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] I feel today a bit patriotic :)
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Today started the Syrian kids their first day as pupils in a public school in Montevideo. They are among the 120 refugees taken as political refugees to Uruguay. Several of them are Palestinian living in Syria as refugees, the war expelled them from Syria and now they are refugees here, they are going to be trained in Spanish and be treated as any child. The Uruguayan school is a copy of the French, secural, free and obligatory. All wear the same white rock with a blue tie, to cover up the social differences. I was myself educated in a Catholic private school but the public school in Uruguay is really something to be proud of. And it feels right for us, who has been refugees in so many countries, to open this land to so many refugees as possible who want settle down here. A country bigger than Belgium and Holland together and with a population of 3 million people need new ideas and cultural input :) Ana https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6jp0757lUo -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 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 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] I feel today a bit patriotic :)
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi This evening I was watching TV at the doctor’s waiting room (everything was OK). The breaking news was about the beheading of a woman whose head was found rolling down a highway by a driver in the outskirts of a very well known Uruguayan seaside resort. Speculations about her identity ended up in the news of the disappearing, days before, of a 15 years old girl. I will not go into more details about this. But I started to think of a connection (in my head, in the audiences, in all of us) between beheadings no matter the reasons, political or not. So I started to wonder what allow ourselves *to watch* a beheading from ISIS. Is a beheading for political reasons singular and consequently watchable? It seems to me that we allow ourselves to watch sadistic actions on screen, on pictures, for reasons we have to ask ourselves very seriously. ¿What do allow ourselves (millions and millions of spectators) to watch the unwatchable? Are ISIS beheadings unwatchable? What do we mean by unwatchable? I have no answer. But I think these questions are necessary because ISIS takes a very good advantage of our “police blotter audience” or “melodramatic audience” condition --by means of an endless aesthetization of horror through fiction series, games, police blotter or whatever. I never watch ISIS beheadings for political, ethical and moral reasons since I think that the mere act of watching is a form of participation which makes us, like it or not, accomplices, like watching pedophile porn. I think this is critical since we are used to demand for the visibility of political crime actions that are usually hidden or out of the public view. But now we have to understand that these guys want us to watch the beheadings as part of their political strategy of (spectacular) horror, and we *are* watching. Best, Leandro On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 8:46 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Today started the Syrian kids their first day as pupils in a public school in Montevideo. They are among the 120 refugees taken as political refugees to Uruguay. Several of them are Palestinian living in Syria as refugees, the war expelled them from Syria and now they are refugees here, they are going to be trained in Spanish and be treated as any child. The Uruguayan school is a copy of the French, secural, free and obligatory. All wear the same white rock with a blue tie, to cover up the social differences. I was myself educated in a Catholic private school but the public school in Uruguay is really something to be proud of. And it feels right for us, who has been refugees in so many countries, to open this land to so many refugees as possible who want settle down here. A country bigger than Belgium and Holland together and with a population of 3 million people need new ideas and cultural input :) Ana https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6jp0757lUo -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 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 ___ 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
Re: [-empyre-] I feel today a bit patriotic :)
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi This evening I was watching TV at the doctor’s waiting room (everything was OK). The breaking news was about the beheading of a woman whose head was found rolling down a highway by a driver in the outskirts of a very well known Uruguayan seaside resort. Speculations about her identity ended up in the news of the disappearing, days before, of a 15 years old girl. I will not go into more details about this. But I started to think of a connection (in my head, in the audiences, in all of us) between beheadings no matter the reasons, political or not. So I started to wonder what allow ourselves to watch a beheading from ISIS. Is a beheading for political reasons singular and consequently watchable? It seems to me that we allow ourselves to watch sadistic actions on screen, on pictures, for reasons we have to ask ourselves very seriously. ¿What do allow ourselves (millions and millions of spectators) to watch the unwatchable? Are ISIS beheadings unwatchable? What do we mean by unwatchable? I have no answer. But I think these questions are necessary because ISIS takes very good advantage of our “police blotter audience” or “melodramatic audience” condition --by means of an endless aesthetization of horror through fiction series, games, police blotter or whatever. I never watch ISIS beheadings for political, ethical and moral reasons since I think that the mere act of watching is a form of participation which makes us, like it or not, accomplices, like watching pedophile porn. I think this is critical since we are used to demand for the visibility of political crime actions that are usually hidden or out of the public view. But now we have to understand that these guys want us to watch the beheadings as part of their political strategy of (spectacular) horror, and we are watching. Best, Leandro On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 11:22 PM, Leandro Delgado oxibi...@gmail.com wrote: Hi This evening I was watching TV at the doctor’s waiting room (everything was OK). The breaking news was about the beheading of a woman whose head was found rolling down a highway by a driver in the outskirts of a very well known Uruguayan seaside resort. Speculations about her identity ended up in the news of the disappearing, days before, of a 15 years old girl. I will not go into more details about this. But I started to think of a connection (in my head, in the audiences, in all of us) between beheadings no matter the reasons, political or not. So I started to wonder what allow ourselves *to watch* a beheading from ISIS. Is a beheading for political reasons singular and consequently watchable? It seems to me that we allow ourselves to watch sadistic actions on screen, on pictures, for reasons we have to ask ourselves very seriously. ¿What do allow ourselves (millions and millions of spectators) to watch the unwatchable? Are ISIS beheadings unwatchable? What do we mean by unwatchable? I have no answer. But I think these questions are necessary because ISIS takes a very good advantage of our “police blotter audience” or “melodramatic audience” condition --by means of an endless aesthetization of horror through fiction series, games, police blotter or whatever. I never watch ISIS beheadings for political, ethical and moral reasons since I think that the mere act of watching is a form of participation which makes us, like it or not, accomplices, like watching pedophile porn. I think this is critical since we are used to demand for the visibility of political crime actions that are usually hidden or out of the public view. But now we have to understand that these guys want us to watch the beheadings as part of their political strategy of (spectacular) horror, and we *are* watching. Best, Leandro On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 8:46 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Today started the Syrian kids their first day as pupils in a public school in Montevideo. They are among the 120 refugees taken as political refugees to Uruguay. Several of them are Palestinian living in Syria as refugees, the war expelled them from Syria and now they are refugees here, they are going to be trained in Spanish and be treated as any child. The Uruguayan school is a copy of the French, secural, free and obligatory. All wear the same white rock with a blue tie, to cover up the social differences. I was myself educated in a Catholic private school but the public school in Uruguay is really something to be proud of. And it feels right for us, who has been refugees in so many countries, to open this land to so many refugees as possible who want settle down here. A country bigger than Belgium and Holland together and with a population of 3 million people need new ideas and cultural input :) Ana https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6jp0757lUo -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060
Re: [-empyre-] language/discourse on terror, reporting the virtually true
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- halló -- perhaps better late than never, the flow of late is a bit much for me to manage as I'm editing a book right now as well... too many words! 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? annihilation -- no -- I'm too much of a scientist and perhaps quasi-Taoist -- supplementing phenomenological observation with consultations of the I Ching. The dynamic between order and disorder fluctuates at all spatial and temporal scales across the cosmos. And there is neither 'pure' chaos or 'pure' order, only a movement cycling along the line that connects the two (abstract) extremes. so, if anything, annihilation becomes the kernel of coming-to-be. I think often we humans fixate on our own monumental culture rather than taking a long view (we've only been around a few million years, so far all species are more-or-less transitory according to the fossil record). Why in our puny-ness do we think that we are the pinnacle of being? etc... And, somewhere, outside of my spirit, I get suspicious that all the violence is simply what life does to make sure the 'best' survives, and the altruism is a blip on the radar of evolution. Sounds cynical, and it doesn't explain any spiritual sentiments, but if the spiritual is idiosyncratic conjecture unless it's happening internally to one's self, there's certainly no way to 'prove anything'. And so we are left with telling each other stories in order to build up a transitory clan here, by the hyper-mediated network constructed by the military-industrial complex... sigh... [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 enoughto know you have to be the killer or the victim. I think I would take the opposite stance -- to be alive is to be implicated, but more than that, it is to be as close as anyone to anything... the absolute 'beautiful terror' of incarnation... peace, jh -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] I feel today a bit patriotic :)
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi - I agree with you here, however I do not watch beheading or other torture videos; I know no one personally who does. They're not shown on the new here. At one point I did see the beheading of Daniel Pearl; I felt connected to the case and wanted to 'face' the violence, however mediated. This isn't to say that there's not an interest in tortured bodies in this country; anyone who has seen an episode of Bones knows has graphic these kinds of images can be. But there are many people, myself included, who have too many nightmares; I'd write more but we're in NY for a performance and the connection where we're staying is close to non-existent. Apologies, Alan On Mon, 10 Nov 2014, Leandro Delgado wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- == 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 == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] sample from today
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- What I cut and pasted from was the headline page only, which breaks things down in categories; there's a lot of news, but one massacre seems to supercede another. The headline page also depends on categories the user assigns; for example I have a heavy section on physics, because it's an interest of mine. - Alan On Mon, 10 Nov 2014, Diana Taylor wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- == 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 == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] sample from today
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear all, Thank you for this month's discussion and thank you for bringing in what is happening in Mexico to this very difficult but very needed conversation. Here in Mexico the news have been emotionally draining for most everyone, and now that our President has left to go to China for diplomatic talks, many Mexicans are asking for his resignation. The newspapers have been commenting here in Yucatan how people even from the wealthier strata of regional society are going to the marches and protests over the murder of the students. I guess we are all trying to perform out our grieving in some way, collectively, so as to feel safer and feel we do have control over our spaces and lives. A very important thing that is happening is that most everyone is chanting repeatedly no more violence and no to violence: Apparently the burning of the door of the National Palace was done by a soldier from the Mexican army in order to justify the intervention of the police against the crowd of protesters; at least that is what even the major newspapers say. I would like to suggest here that the performance of violence and violent performances are now giving way to the performance of non-violence, but this is arguably a different kind of performed violence. The installations using empy chairs, cards, mementos and photos of the students, public performances of those marching throwing themselves to the ground and remaining motionless for many minutes, the holding of signs on cardboard or cloth, and the chants hostile to the government are all part of so-called non-violent demostrations, but they are in fact violent, and they are meant to shake our government officials and public peace keepers to the bones. I am not sure these tacticts are working, since neither our politicians nor the rest of the world seem to pay any attention or be in the least disturbed, but they are bringing about a new, publically-constructed collective understanding of non-violent protest. And it is also a way to re-construct some feeling of being safe. I find it interesting that the collective performance of non-violence is meant as a violent act, and that it is expected to stop the physical violence of the killings and forced disappearances that sadly mark everyday life today in much of Mexico. To my mind, it is a reinvention of passive aggression, this time in collective forms. But all in all, perhaps it is a good step in a good direction. Thanks again for this discussion. Gabriela Vargas-Cetina Merida, Yucatan, Mexico -- http://antropuntodevista.blogspot.mx On 11/10/14, 4:19 PM, Ana Valdés wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Maybe Mexico is too near the US to be worth some alert in Google? :( Ana On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 7:51 PM, Diana Taylor diana.taylo...@gmail.com mailto:diana.taylo...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Yes of course you did-- I was referring to the Google news feed reported by Alan. I thought THAT was interesting in its omission. Apologies if you thought I was referring to your posts Ana! Diana Diana Taylor University Professor Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish, NYU Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics On Nov 10, 2014, at 3:51 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com mailto:agora...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Some quick answers: Jon, check the archives of -empyre and you can read Alicia Migdal's quotations of Agamben and its Homo Sacer. And Diana, two days ago I posted to the list the links with live strem to the protests in Mexico when the news of the killed 43 students reached us. And Alicia and me discussed it in the list. Ana On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 2:04 PM, Jon McKenzie jvmcken...@wisc.edu mailto:jvmcken...@wisc.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- typographic t/error: the neutral observer of vita contemplativa On Nov 10, 2014, at 9:59 AM, Jon McKenzie jvmcken...@wisc.edu mailto:jvmcken...@wisc.edu wrote: I'm enjoying the engagement here, troubling as the topics have been. The posts by Alan, Johannes, Ana, Reinhold, John, Eric and others have been very provocative, and the different speeds and tenors of post-communication is breath-taking. I've tried to respond in a slow way, for I think/believe/feel that absolute terror is both unprecedented and yet everyday, as it connects to the slow terror of economic, environmental, and cultural progress-gone-awry. In You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk distinguishes vita performativa from both vita contemplativa and vita activa. His figure for Western
