Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear All, Taking up Johannes' extensions of the questions (below), let me do a wee bit of back and fill. Antonio Damasio in /Descartes' Error/ (1994) tells the story of a judge who gave up judging after suffering neurological impairment because he could no longer access emotion which is a guide in the complex equation of factors that go into judging. There are people in the legal system now who just think of it as the fair application of rules, [punishments being just desserts, and there are people devoting themselves to creating judging machines and software to predict how one or another judge will decide a case. There is a lot of thinking about justice at stake in our legal system right now. All the time humans make judgments but our options are being foreclosed by the mentality of the systems in which we now live. This is, of course, a first world issue except that our inability to come to terms with the third world as being real and complex in its own right means that we do not have good matches between our efforts and our results. Democracy cannot be exported as we've fantasized and neither can our health care system -- look at all the cultural factors that have made medical interventions so difficult in the Ebola epidemic begun in Liberia for instance. We are in the grips of a historical moment when emotions are being excluded for many reasons. So the education of our subjectivities through history, humanities, the arts is being cut out in favor of instrumental and concrete thinking. People don't stop feeling, cannot turn off their emotions, but with these big holes in their education, they have fewer tools to understand what to do with them, to understand their own humanity. Yesterday the New York Times ran an op ed by two doctors talking about how medicine is being done in by large intermediaries -- insurers and drug companies and medical organizations focused on externals -- and how doctors are under pressure to treat by the book. As they wrote, patients are NOT populations (the stuff of statistics) but individuals and the cookbooks might advocate treatments that are inappropriate for that individual. Doctors are now caught in between because their institutional self-interest is now at odds with their role as healers. This is a long introduction to a simple thought: we need the arts to come to the rescue. I keep thinking of the art teacher in (Teresin?) who taught the interned young very advanced modernist aesthetic tools to express themselves even as they waited for transfer to extermination camps. Their wonderful works are on now display in Prague. Was it foolish to keep them spiritually alive in the face of atrocity or the best protest possible under the circumstances? What comfort did the teaching give the teacher when all other sources of power were eliminated? And for the children? Didn't it give them an experience of freedom and possibilty? We need arts both in the universities and out there in public spaces. And we need artists to keep themselves alive, somehow, both as beings and as creators. I believe that this is the counter story to the awfulness of our perceptions of the world these days. And there is always an inter-generational conversation between arts makers and their forebears, and hopefully, inventively, we'll find ways to play it forward. CS On 11/19/2014 10:04 AM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- ps (to last night) I just wanted to acknowledge, in addition, some of the contributions to our discussions over the past days, from John Hopkins, Erik Ehn, and Christina Spiesel; and I found it interesting, in the contexts of human rights, the law and legal philosophy raised yesterday, that Christina chose to focus on the educational system and various aspects of teaching, cognition (machine) learning, assessment, etc., presumably in the evolving corporatized and privatized neoliberal higher education sectors. Christina also very persuasively points out that teaching that produces critical thinking is labor intensive -- it actually requires teachers who have real knowledge/preparation before they get to students and then students who can be responsive to inter-generational conversations. This notion of the inter-generational conversation, and the various modes and possibilities of cultural performance and knowledge transmission is an important one that deserves further attention, I believe, also especially because it seems to me that 'justice,' but also existing laws (and any form of dialogue and exchange based on situated codes and conventions and discourses of specific historical and cultural contexts) and rules of propriety, debt, compensation, or distribution, are intimately connected to teaching and learning. And of course, Christina, I agree with what you argue, namely that feeling
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Thu, 20 Nov 2014, Christina Spiesel wrote: This is a long introduction to a simple thought: we need the arts to come to the rescue. I keep thinking of the art teacher in (Teresin?) who taught the interned young very advanced modernist aesthetic tools to express themselves even as they waited for transfer to extermination camps. Their wonderful works are on now display in Prague. Was it foolish to keep them spiritually alive in the face of atrocity or the best protest possible under the circumstances? What comfort did the teaching give the teacher when all other sources of power were eliminated? And for the children? Didn't it give them an experience of freedom and possibilty? We need arts both in the universities and out there in public spaces. And we need artists to keep themselves alive, somehow, both as beings and as creators. I believe that this is the counter story to the awfulness of our perceptions of the world these days. And there is always an inter-generational conversation between arts makers and their forebears, and hopefully, inventively, we'll find ways to play it forward. CS Of course I agree with you, but what is happening is the reverse - budgets are being drastically cut back, arts in the schools are being eliminated, and even art colleges are suffering or turning into vocational schools for digital technicians who dream of the next big game but end up doing commercials. There are so many disconnects. I feel that the right wants less education - 1. It interferes with religious dogma; 2. It's an imposition from cabals with liberal agenda; 3. Those cabals are elsewhere and are dangerous; 4. It forces things like a belief in global warming upon us; 5. It teaches that slavery was all bad and overlooks the good slave-owners; 6. It interferes with producing well-behaved workers; and 7. It's going to break up _my_ family. So the result is a war on education and teachers, and the further result is an inability of a large number of people do understand the complexity of the world geopolitical system and its miserable consequences. ISIS becomes and produces spectacle and gains thereby, and education in so many areas of the world (not just the U.S., but Nigeria for a horrific example) is seen as dangerous, and decadent. If we can't even support decent K-12 in our own country, if we can't support the arts (which are notoriously underfunded here) or critical dialog, how can we act in the world at all? Who even knows where Syria, Iran, Iraq, are on the map? The difference between Sunni and Shiite? This might as well apply to the United States, change the religion: In 1928, four years after the abolishment of the caliphate, the Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna founded the first Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Sunni world, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). Al-Banna was appalled bythe wave of atheism and lewdness [that] engulfed Egypt following World War I. The victorious Europeans hadimported their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theatres, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices. Suddenly the very heart of the Islamic world was penetrated by Europeanschools and scientific and cultural institutes that cast doubt and heresy into the souls of its sons and taught them how to demean themselves, disparage their religion and their fatherland, divest themselves of their traditions and beliefs, and to regard as sacred anything Western. ( http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/934 ) So the usual question: What is to be done? - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear All -- I have been writing about education in the arts/humanities as critical in resisting technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity. So I see cultural production. and not just education about it, as a form of resistance. Yes, it is mind-boggling the extent to which performance is being used as adjunct to bad acts -- or maybe essentially a warped picture is the envelope in which some actors feel they need to operate. So while it is hard to match advanced weaponry, it is easy for people who feel powerless to address it through violent performance. And so we watch it all unfolding. So what can mere mortals do? For starters, name what is going on which I have experienced this conversation as doing. Be makers. Protect what we can. Small acts make ripples. CS On 11/20/2014 4:57 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all So much to ponder, in your postings, that one doesn't know where to go, following Simon's dark pronouncement of our dilemma, and the fear projected onto us all? Is it possible to talk about a political intention in accelerating violent imagery, collapsing historical precedence, dividing societies by reversing meanings, that debt will be credit, that risk and danger will be security, that wars are humanitarian, that is eradicating rights because they threaten democracy, privatising and marketising weapons manufacture, including nuclear arms, while directing their deployment in a controlled market of the senseless consumption of living flesh, enslaving governments to corporations, while violently overthrowing states who fail to surrender sovereignty or economic self-determination? [Simon] The reversing of meanings, or the crossing over (inside/outside, before/after) the Law, also haunts me after reading Andreas' letter. And yet, last night, I felt encouraged to think of poetry, yes, and the power of accents in the very ambiguity, unassimilated to power, towards law and power, also the power of joke - thank you Murat for the text you linked us to [http://ziyalan.com/marmara/murat_nemet_nejat3.html] - I laughed loud, and cried as well as you recount your wild dissimulations and self-immolations , migrating to an Am-erika without poetic continuities (and thus no anxiety of influence..of rights or rites); and I had to think of Rustom Bharucha's last chapter as well, where he struggles to explain Ghandi's training to die, training the body to become the proper source of sacrifice (Terror and Performance, p. 156), training non-violence in Ghandi's Hindu understanding of 'ahimsa' (non-violence) and 'satya' (truth) but thus also training to be sacrificed, to be beaten and to my horror Rustom then engages a longer discussion of the performatives of suicide bombers who record their video testimonials, auto-erotically preparing the destruction of self, before the act of killing, or 'martyrdom.' The Jihadists of ISIS, in interviews, are not sick in the sense in which the US secretary of state thinks they are. They knew their camera work too, in the videos, and two of them, believed to have been recruited from France and Britain, spoke yesterday of their 'spectacular' mission, perfectly ready, as Maxime Hauchard is quoted, for martyrdom, obviously. After reading Monika's powerful plea for healing, lamenting as pollution and indictment of public space-against-forgetting-and-in-need-of-communal enunciation-rituals, and Ana's resigned response that there is too much un-health -- it occurred to me that quite a few here amongst our participants, including Christina and Mine, who insist on the arts as educational techniques, and Murat, Rustom and Monika, and also Fereshteh with her new play, and of course Alan when he makes music and writes apocalyptic poetry -- are probing performance and theatre along a potential line -- maybe also considered spatial/physical practice - that can rupture emotionally (as briefly evoked last night in my reading of Hamed Taheri's lost home) and aurally the terrible legal spectacle , the thick liquid undecidablity, as Andreas ponders. Fereshteh, what were you (not) able to take from there to there, what accent do you speak in now? what garden do you tend now? And as a small but not irrespectful question to Monika, which was on my tongue last night when I ran into Olga Danylyuk, the question of speaking for others or of voice. [Monika schreibt] Leila Sadat, a scholar of international crime and law ... would travel around the globe, she would see and meet the communities, the individuals, the whole generations and nations affected, mourning, in suspension of trauma, but not fully mourning. What voice do they have, she asked me. Where does it live, the voice This is why subjectivity appears as witness; this is why it can speak for those who cannot speak’ When
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Johannes my answer was not resigned at all (I am not the kind of resigned people :) but wondered if our dilemma was not a typical dilemma risen from Modernity, to make Humanity happier and more enlightened with the help of education, health and good housing...The rethoric trap of progress, linear developing and shiny ny motorways but with the cost of diversity and ancient forests being cut down and ancient peoples losing their cultures and their habitat. I saw tonight a great documentary movie made by two Swedish directors about the politician and prime minister of Sweden, murdered by unknown in February 1986. I lived in Sweden at that time and we were all in schocked, should this crime be the end of the open society, wherer the prime minister and his wife could attend a film in a central movietheater without body guards? It was not, in shock but the Swedes coped with the loss of the inocence. Some years later their Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh, was murdered by a Serb in a store where she went with a friend to buy some clothes. The violence didn't succed in transforming the society, still today in Sweden the ministers travel in the subway and live in unguarded apartaments. It's quite similar here in Uruguay where our own president drives his old battered Wolkswagen to work and live in a shackle outside Montevideo. Ana On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 9:03 PM, Christina Spiesel christina.spie...@yale.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear All -- I have been writing about education in the arts/humanities as critical in resisting technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity. So I see cultural production. and not just education about it, as a form of resistance. Yes, it is mind-boggling the extent to which performance is being used as adjunct to bad acts -- or maybe essentially a warped picture is the envelope in which some actors feel they need to operate. So while it is hard to match advanced weaponry, it is easy for people who feel powerless to address it through violent performance. And so we watch it all unfolding. So what can mere mortals do? For starters, name what is going on which I have experienced this conversation as doing. Be makers. Protect what we can. Small acts make ripples. CS On 11/20/2014 4:57 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all So much to ponder, in your postings, that one doesn't know where to go, following Simon's dark pronouncement of our dilemma, and the fear projected onto us all? Is it possible to talk about a political intention in accelerating violent imagery, collapsing historical precedence, dividing societies by reversing meanings, that debt will be credit, that risk and danger will be security, that wars are humanitarian, that is eradicating rights because they threaten democracy, privatising and marketising weapons manufacture, including nuclear arms, while directing their deployment in a controlled market of the senseless consumption of living flesh, enslaving governments to corporations, while violently overthrowing states who fail to surrender sovereignty or economic self-determination? [Simon] The reversing of meanings, or the crossing over (inside/outside, before/after) the Law, also haunts me after reading Andreas' letter. And yet, last night, I felt encouraged to think of poetry, yes, and the power of accents in the very ambiguity, unassimilated to power, towards law and power, also the power of joke - thank you Murat for the text you linked us to [http://ziyalan.com/marmara/murat_nemet_nejat3.html] - I laughed loud, and cried as well as you recount your wild dissimulations and self-immolations , migrating to an Am-erika without poetic continuities (and thus no anxiety of influence..of rights or rites); and I had to think of Rustom Bharucha's last chapter as well, where he struggles to explain Ghandi's training to die, training the body to become the proper source of sacrifice (Terror and Performance, p. 156), training non-violence in Ghandi's Hindu understanding of 'ahimsa' (non-violence) and 'satya' (truth) but thus also training to be sacrificed, to be beaten and to my horror Rustom then engages a longer discussion of the performatives of suicide bombers who record their video testimonials, auto-erotically preparing the destruction of self, before the act of killing, or 'martyrdom.' The Jihadists of ISIS, in interviews, are not sick in the sense in which the US secretary of state thinks they are. They knew their camera work too, in the videos, and two of them, believed to have been recruited from France and Britain, spoke yesterday of their 'spectacular' mission, perfectly ready, as Maxime Hauchard is quoted, for martyrdom, obviously. After reading Monika's powerful plea for healing, lamenting as pollution and
