[-empyre-] Onomasticities
Hi, Johanna et al! First off, I must say that I enjoyed David’s re-branding post immensely. In particular, the trope of re-branding is absolutely loaded—especially within the context of Business Art and the fraught relationship between art and advertising. I know that Johanna is quite interested in the history of the graphic arts, and, from my firsthand experience as a writer for various NYC ad agencies, can testify to the critical connection between (re)branding and Creative Departments, where graphic artists, writers and creative directors oversee the presentation and perfection of concepts to the public. Here, the wild, varied orthographies of Dada and Surrealism become so many Banners, newsletters and billboards, Breton and company achieving a complicity with a future throwaway culture in which Kiki of Montparnasse sells violins, and where Rrose Sélavy’s perfume bottles are the hit of Bloomingdales. Within this context, the word ‘concept’ looms large, calling to mind first and foremost the Hegelian identification of the idea as realized concept. For me, this notion recalls the realized concepts of Conceptual art, the one art form which has filtered through this dialogue as the place where theory and praxis meet, however dissonantly (although, here, the idea is not so much an ideal, in the Hegelian sense, but is more of what results when concept confronts world/reality through irruptive event). Everything from Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al to those fab Jenny Holzer diodes quietly assaulting slot machine junkies and high-hair mafia princesses at Las Vegas’ McCarran airport in the 80s as they retrieve pink suitcases from the baggage claim. And then, of course, there is the perennial and pervasive use of the word in ad agencies, which are largely concept-driven, even when we see them via Darren Stevens on Bewitched. Here, ‘concept’ is both noun and verb, something one develops and the very act of development or conception itself. “How are you concepting that?” is a question that still makes me laugh when I hear it, the same response I emit to the use of ‘party’ as an action verb by Eddie Murphy or others (“My girl wants to party all the time, party all the time, party all the time…”). But the concept is very much at stake for all of us on this forum, whether we are Sally Jane’s Over-identification Squad, or a Donald Judd box humming purple notes in the corner. Of all aesthetic movements, it is conceptual art which works the hardest to expose complicities—Chris Burden’s excavation of La La Land’s MOCA is a paradigmatic instance. And yet it is also the zone of the conceptual where important complicities flower in their own right, so many of them social, sexual —the marriage of Jeff Koons to La Cicciolina, or the relationship between Björk and Mathew Barney. The work these connections have created truly amazes me, all those racy photos of La Cicciolina with her glass dildoes, and the potential work that Matthew and Björk will perform with fauns, satyrs, and Cremasters if, unlike the Koons, they make it. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:36:05 -0800 From: david.chi...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13 I don't really think of what i am questioning as being part of a moral conscience per se--i think of it as a looking into the functions and functioning of language, which might include also a language which is in itself a form of silence. An area which i have been writing about in the last couple of years more and more is that of the Literature of the No. This involves several writers and several examples of methods and appearances of the No. These are unwritten works which in themselves refuse to be written, while creating a space which nonetheless exists as a an area in which the writings while unwritten have effects in their own of writing--this is just one aspect-- In a sense, i am concerned, interested in a way with the call to the spaces of art which claim with some degree actually, paradoxically, to a morality, of a moral nature--to not be concerned with being the moral conscience of a culture-- The political analogy is not necessarily silence at all, but on the contrary, a continuing functioning of writing which claims to a certain form of moral high ground as/for art in that it is in a sense above such questions-- What interests me are the questions which Pierre Vidal-Naquet raises re language and other issues within a culture's existence which are effected by the practice of torture (in his case)--when it is practised by a society as it is now by the American society. How has this affected the language itself?--What do the contradictions between what a culture purports to be for itself and what it actually does open up as spaces
[-empyre-] Delightenment as Mass Perception
Hi, Johanna! Your remarks about aesthetic practice and it roots in brute sensation take me to Dewey’s anti-elitist somatism in Art as Experience and Alexander Baumgarten’s original sense of what aesthetics could mean back in the 18th century, when this discipline was first systematized in the West as discrete branch of philosophy, something different from metaphysics or ethics. I also am drawn very much to the poetics of the quantum, and look to physics and its unfolding symmetries as another place where material complicities are being re-imagined and re-described in ways that transcend mere re-naming of re-branding, and which throw into chaos that simple Cartesian separation between thinking, un-extended and extended, un-thinking matter(s). What do we make of the famous TOE, or Theory of Everything, something that string and membrane theories, with their inherent elegance, to use Brian Green’s highly aesthetic word, have attempted to grasp in recent years in their promulgation of a resonating, symphonic universe? And what of this spooky action at a distance, gravity, which involves us all in the complicities of matter and energy alike, which suffuses scientific fact and myth (that famous apple konking Newton on the head), and which appears to me as the ultimate metaphor for metaphor, this joining of the disparate over time and space within a structure capable of uniting them via only spookiness? I can deal with imbrications being stricken from the list of potential re-brands for the term ‘complicity,’ but still open the question to everyone, as it seems important for me that we find a way to name complicity in a way which invokes the non-agency agencies of systems theory and postmodernism, everything from le schizo to the CSO to the cyborg to that minimally committed Luhmannian para-subject traversing its grooved and groovy (geodesic?) networks. To be honest, I liked the word mostly because it sounded onomatopoetic to me: imbrications can’t be anything but imbricated, the tentacles of those three successive consonants flanked by identical vowels leaving me with the sense that I am being pulled beneath the waters of a lake by a mystery creature part human, part vegetable. In this vein, I look to Lynn Margulis’ recent work on bacterial symbiosis and its relevance for evolutionary biology and autopoiesis (for example, in hers and Dorion Sagan’s Dazzle Gradually, an odd fusion of poetry and biology, much of it verging on syphiology). For Margulis, evolution evolved because the simplest creatures learned to coexist in such a way that each benefited the other, a primal form of complicity for sure, one in which the most was at stake, so much more than tenureship or wealth or fame, whatever we gain by becoming accomplices in the human world. In her estimation, sexual reproduction, for example, began as an act of bacterial phagocytosis; when nucleic materials were proven indigestible, they divided along with bacterium, becoming transmitted to new cells (reproduction minus the sex, which, when it was introduced, could only spell death-by-meiosis). This picture is only a rudimentary sketch, but I like very much how she sees collusion at the heart of complexity and biodiversity, how the exchanges we undertake in our banks and classrooms and performance venues can be traced back to the primordial quid pro quo of predatorial unicellular beauties benefiting from cooperation and cooptation, albeit accidentally and contingently, and with no concept of altruism. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ From: druc...@gseis.ucla.edu To: emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:37:50 -0800 Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Les Liaisons Dangereuses Just picking up on all this rich exposition below -- what about Clint Eastwood as an interesting example with regard to what MAT has suggested here. Can I just say I really find all of what is written by Michael most useful -- but can I also say I don't care for the word imbrication -- it is one of the plague symptoms in my grad seminars I know when it appears a host of critical diseases will soon follow (paraphrasitis with risk of metacitation and logotoxicity). Picky picky, I know... Johanna On Jan 9, 2010, at 9:12 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote: Hi, Johanna! You’ve really piqued my curiosity with those comments about Parc de la Villette and that little chat you attended back at Columbia. There’s a lot to think about here: your own uneasiness, displeasure, even outrage as these intensities surface and are encouraged to be denied expression by a fellow colleague (gender?), the irony of a big-wig suggesting revolutionary design for potential parkgoers and neighborhood locals, who might otherwise be lulled to sleep by an ergonomic opiate rendering the ugly beautiful, even
[-empyre-] Secular Sacrilege
Hi, Davin! Thanks for the super-fantastic Richard Serra link--you are consummately the best when it comes to selecting just the right encapsulating instant. What an amazing controversy! What agitated publics, what disrupted privates, what interrupted and intercepted and bisected and misdirected flows, what a wonderful-horrible breakwater of sines and cosines and missed traffic signs. I almost hear Andre Breton caution: Ralentir Travaux... Dwight Ink's name just kills me: talk about inscription and the infelicities of the performative utterance! Richard's refusal of portability is also a goldmine of object possibilities and refusals: this ain't no Duchampian valise, no birdcage filled with sugarcubes and the bleached bones of cuttlefish! Hearing Holly Solomon speak is also a pleasure--especially her SOHO business ethos. Who wants good art to become bad business through the long process of a fatal relocation? That would just be poor form. The work remains in storage. It's the final word. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:59:08 -0500 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au CC: emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13 You are right, Gerry, in a sense. Artists, like anyone else, should not simply carry water for causes or movements that are defined by others with no room for reflection, inspiration, interpretation, criticism, etc. I think most people would agree, that say, a whole of of commercial art and propaganda art carry this in common. The artist is more or less a hired gun, paid to make ideas that cannot easily be adopted on their own merits appear sexy and fun. (Has anyone played America's Army?). Maybe there are artists who make ads for Shell who really do believe that Ken Saro-Wiwa got what he deserved... but my guess is that most people making ads for Shell don't know who he is, don't care to know, and if they do care, figure out some way to disconnect their job from Shell's actions in the Niger River Delta... because at the end of the day, they want to get paid, quite possibly need to get paid. (It's not really for me to say whether or not they are good or bad... but if they haven't thought it through, they probably ought to.) On the other hand, I don't see why it is necessarily destructive for an artist to say, I want to make something that reflects my values and my values circulate around concepts like 'justice' and 'truth' and might find their purest expression in representing the ways that injustice or dishonesty is expressed in our world... Or, maybe the internal dialogue isn't even like that maybe they think, Critics are assholes I am going to make something for them. (Which is also a political stance). I think what a lot of people refer to as politics is really another way of talking about how a preferred form of social connection with others is expressed in the public sphere. If it hurts an artist to think this way then the artist should do something else. BUT you cannot expect everyone else to stop caring about how what you do effects them. I wouldn't say that people should censor artists... but I do think that people have a right to criticize works of art, especially if that art is made in ignorance of how it might impact their lives. A good example of this public obligation is in the Tilted Arc case: http://www.cfa.arizona.edu/are476/files/tilted_arc.htm In particular, I direct you to the words of Danny Katz: I didn't expect to hear the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It's not a great plaza by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in sealed rooms, and breathe re-circulated air all day. Is the purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy and hope? I can't believe that this was the artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has been the dominant effect of the work, and it's all the fault of its position and location. I can accept anything in art, but I can't accept physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human activity. And, here, I think is where the question of art, theory, and politics collide. In the case of Serra's work, Art and Theory exclude politics. But, to what end? To make a point, which is itself political. I'm not going to say whether or not the Tilted Arc should have been destroyed I only want to highlight what happens when you remove the burden of politics from the mix. It just becomes another species of politics. Davin On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 11:25 AM, Gerry Coulter gcoul...@ubishops.ca wrote: When we attempt to task art
[-empyre-] Indiscernibles
If you haven't alrready, check out Arthur Danto's theory of indiscernibilia in his Philosophical Disenfranchisment of Art--it's kind of a neat way of approaching this ontological quagmire, and really speaks to the emergence of the concept as aesthetic buoy. MAT *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ From: gcoul...@ubishops.ca To: emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:56:20 -0500 Subject: Re: [-empyre-] self and others re What is art? For some time anything and everything can be art -- as such, nothing per se, is art. Each person will have to arrive at his/her own definition of what art is -- for me illusion is central to art -- otherwise it simply mirrors the real -- which we have little contact with in any case as it hides behind appearances. best g From: empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Christiane Robbins [...@mindspring.com] Sent: January 13, 2010 2:15 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] self and others Indeed, its been an energetic few weeks on empire. As such, it hasn’t been easy to keep track of all of the issues on the table. However, it seems that we always keep landing on this flea ridden canard – “what is art ?” Most specifically to this list - how do we think of it and what forms does it – can it take”? The domain of art practice seems to be broadly accepted as a given. There are references upon references to “great works of art” and that we should be concerned with these significant works ( primarily masterworks of the 19th/20thc). A pivotal question is left begging- what guarantees these works of art their centrality – as an ontological constant - within this discussion? Without question, it is simultaneously dynamic, provocative, insightful and, at times, frustrating when what art is … and isn’t … are bandied about, professed and sanctioned by experts from disciplines from sociology, law, computer science, literature, etc. Within these posts there often seems to be an offer of a bifurcated, inherently contradictory notion of contemporary art practice(s). Art has been positioned ( and beautifully articulated ) as an endeavor which seems ensconced in this utopian, self-referential, romantic, nostalgic, mournful exercise of self-expression. I think it was Lyotard who said sometime ago that there was an element of “sorrow in the Zeitgeist.” In the positioning of such a sense of loss, I see a jettison of the framework and substantiation of the late-20thc capitalist directive of the “professionalism of the field” – of an art practice that streams itself as a “career path” within capitalistic economies and systems – such as the academy. I, too, find making art pure pleasure - incredibly so at times! Much to my chagrin, I also realize that pleasure can sustain one only so much . So please forgive, and humor, my own naiveté to ask you all this question, how then does one negotiate and then reconcile these seemingly disparate tracks - pleasure and professionalism ? This may ring particularly relevant in revisiting notions of complicity – as its been parried about during the past few weeks. On Jan 13, 2010, at 6:36 AM, Johanna Drucker wrote: Nice turn to these exchanges. I also really appreciated Gabriela's point and the follow-up by others. If we think of art as the act of form giving, we recognize that forms partake of symbolic systems. As social creatures we 'interpellate' (hideous theory word) shared symbolic systems (signs, stories, genres, dance moves, rules of the game etc.). But of course collectively and individually, we shift those symbol systems (for better and worse--think of personal choice and fashion trends). I've fallen from my pure structuralist beliefs. I no longer think we are only 'subjects.' Individualism may be a founding mythology of western culture, absorbed in the most opportunistic ways into contemporary consumer culture, but I think it has grounding. You are not me, even though, to recap all the polit-theo-talk in Pogo's terms, We have met the enemy and he is us. A great deal of cult studs analysis comes to that. Life is short. One of the pressing questions is what does one want to spend time on? The term therapy seems to carry a dismissive tone. I find making art pure pleasure, but it is the pleasure of bringing something into being, an act of making-as-knowing, that intensifies awareness. I'm an awareness junky. Johanna ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Nothingness
Thanks for the link--can't wait to give it a whirl. As for our friend Kant, are you familiar with the Adrian Piper piece in which she goes on a starvation diet while reading the Critiques? Basically, she starves and starves while devouring more and more Kant (Kan't?), and makes a photo-log of her body's changes as it dematerializes (Food for the Spirit, 1970). Totally hot! *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ From: a.muns...@unsw.edu.au To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:00:52 +1000 Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Nothingness Hi Michael, Sometimes when I sit on a beach and stare at turquoise water I am almost tempted to fall into a Kantian sublime! But then I notice the ripples, the harmonics of waves get heard and...luckily I do not fall into the sublime abyss but get washed up on the shores of the baroque :-) ;-) For me, the sublime would be fine without the Kant. In Kant the sublime becomes total such that one fails to notice the micro-sensations (the nonrepresentatble) out of which feelings draw their force. Additionally, and as you indicate by placing Kant alongside Sartre, these sublimes tend toward negation (again totalising)... Nonrepresentable effects of practices have, I think, more to do with immanence than either dialectics or ontology (although Adorno's negative dialectics poses an interesting departure). But there's some interesting work being done on Kant at the moment that connects him to a genealogy of immanent thought (see Steve Schaviro's new book Without Criteria, http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2tid=11761 cheers Anna On 30/04/2009, at 9:15 AM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote: Anna-- My only other question for you would be the Kantian sublime, which involves the failure of presentification and the correspondent sacrifice of the imagination in the face of what can neither be mathematically nor dynamically represented: this to me seems close to your non-ontology. Sartres negatites also come to mind, those mini zero ontologies perforating existence and reminding l'etrte that technically, it is neant. Each idea carries signifcant impact for aesthetic production, non-production and contemplation, and seems to spesk for and to the kinds of praxis you are advocating. Best, MA *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:58:19 +0100 From: s...@krokodile.co.uk To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Tacticality: 4 Anna or possibly merely thinking she knows what is scary and stupid.. Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote: Or maybe what Anna is calling for is not strategy, which is primarily totalizaing and singular, but tactics, which are fragmented, dspersed, plural and framed in the absence of the God's-eye-view perspective without which there are no totals, only partial sums? I am thinking again of Michel de Certeau. *** *Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA* *http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/* http://www.michaelangelotata.com/ Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:09:05 -0700 From: edi...@intertheory.org To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called crisis dear anna...interesting comments, though I wonder if your representation of the non-representable is not a bit too theological for my taste? And transformation is such a magical enterprise... alchemically speaking, I do not suspect that attribution of a quality such as 'non-representabililty' adds or subtracts to the strategic authenticity or legitimacy of politics, responses or art, for that matter. Strategies, in other words, are always fatal...to their object, or to themselves. We all try to catch the falling the knife with each attempt at becoming, no? Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org http://intertheory.org/ *From:* Anna Munster a.muns...@unsw.edu.au *To:* soft_skinned_space emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au *Sent:* Saturday, April 25, 2009 3:48:56 AM *Subject:* Re: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called crisis Sorry Nikos but as to your rhetorical 'no' below, I resoundingly reply NO WAY!!. There is a world of difference between responding (rather than reacting which is really what Joseph is talking about) to a social, economic and political crisis using aesthetic strategies and techniques vs. the 'arts' of finance, government or whatever other institution you want to aestheticise. (a la Benjamin et al). The examples that Nik and Marc are talking
[-empyre-] Nothingness
Anna-- My only other question for you would be the Kantian sublime, which involves the failure of presentification and the correspondent sacrifice of the imagination in the face of what can neither be mathematically nor dynamically represented: this to me seems close to your non-ontology. Sartres negatites also come to mind, those mini zero ontologies perforating existence and reminding l'etrte that technically, it is neant. Each idea carries signifcant impact for aesthetic production, non-production and contemplation, and seems to spesk for and to the kinds of praxis you are advocating. Best, MA *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:58:19 +0100 From: s...@krokodile.co.uk To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Tacticality: 4 Anna or possibly merely thinking she knows what is scary and stupid.. Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote: Or maybe what Anna is calling for is not strategy, which is primarily totalizaing and singular, but tactics, which are fragmented, dspersed, plural and framed in the absence of the God's-eye-view perspective without which there are no totals, only partial sums? I am thinking again of Michel de Certeau. *** *Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA* *http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/* http://www.michaelangelotata.com/ Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:09:05 -0700 From: edi...@intertheory.org To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called crisis dear anna...interesting comments, though I wonder if your representation of the non-representable is not a bit too theological for my taste? And transformation is such a magical enterprise... alchemically speaking, I do not suspect that attribution of a quality such as 'non-representabililty' adds or subtracts to the strategic authenticity or legitimacy of politics, responses or art, for that matter. Strategies, in other words, are always fatal...to their object, or to themselves. We all try to catch the falling the knife with each attempt at becoming, no? Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org http://intertheory.org/ *From:* Anna Munster a.muns...@unsw.edu.au *To:* soft_skinned_space emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au *Sent:* Saturday, April 25, 2009 3:48:56 AM *Subject:* Re: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called crisis Sorry Nikos but as to your rhetorical 'no' below, I resoundingly reply NO WAY!!. There is a world of difference between responding (rather than reacting which is really what Joseph is talking about) to a social, economic and political crisis using aesthetic strategies and techniques vs. the 'arts' of finance, government or whatever other institution you want to aestheticise. (a la Benjamin et al). The examples that Nik and Marc are talking about (and also what Brian Holmes has been involved with) are emphatically not abut knee jerk response or reaction but are about using nonrepresentational aesthetic strategies - among a multitude of strategies which also include activist, semiotic, political, social and affective ones – to /transform/ subjective and collective situations. These are immanent, critical, positive and productive relationships with crisis ie they do not respond /to / crisis but rather work amid, through and via crisis to work with what might be transformative about crises. And these aesthetic strategies are absolutely everywhere both in and out of the 'art world' eg Critical Art Ensemble, Harwood and Mongrel,16Beaver, rebublicart project, The Senselab, eipcp, Make World, edu factory, The Thing, Serial Space (sydney -based for all you North Americans who need to get out more ;-) etc etc etc. And these are just the artists/collectives/projects - there's also a wealth of brilliant art theory around this - try Hito Steyerl, Gerald Raunig, Brian Holmes, Matthew Fuller, Florian Schneider, Brian Massumi all the FLOSS+art etc etc etc There is NO relation between these kind of politics, responses and aesthetics and the 'art' of finance - except a relation of revulsion. On the other hand, if you want to find out about a really fantastic installation that engaged directly with the stock market and in fact used a gambling syndicate's money to trade stocks as part of the actual art work - have a look at Micheal Goldberg's documentation of his 2002 work 'Catch a Falling Knife' (http://www.michael-goldberg.com/main.html - go into Projects and select the title of the piece). Just another point I'd like to make
[-empyre-] Off
Hello, All! In The Gift of Death, Derrida enumerates three flavors of the “adieu”: “It seems like the adieu can mean at least three things: The salutation or benediction given (before all constative language “adieu” can just as well signify “hello”…) The salutation or benediction given at the moment of separation, of departure, sometimes forever… The a-dieu, for God or before God and before any relation to the other, in every other adieu… But I am not saying adieu: I am merely offering a cheery au revoir to people I know I will once again encounter on or off the screen. Specifically, I would like to thank Nikos for giving me the extraordinary opportunity to “guest-star” on this e-Forum among such brilliantly diverse and diversely brilliant minds. His poetic presence throughout has encouraged me to view terms like “Code” or capital in terms generally reserved for Romantic poetry or theology: in other words, to perceive them viscerally. I also appreciated the gentle tug of Davin, who was always there to nudge my thought in new directions, and to question my assumptions and values. His emphasis on the everyday instantiation and re-inscription of the global through his own lived and embodied “petits histories” spoke volumes about where we stand in relation to the meta-N (“grandies,” as Joe called them) and its nostalgias. Finally, thanks to Joseph for placing the aesthetic and the poetic beneath the glittering skyline of systems theory, a place where Code and capital alike are challenged by commitment and by the ways in which we define, construct and, ultimately, use an environment, extracting it from its locus within another system to incorporate it as raw material for détourned ends and personal metabolisms. I am also grateful for the thought-provoking input of other thinkers, lurkers and commentators, especially when exchanges became thermodynamically interesting. David Chirot, your work, like the “Ojo” piece, is very important—make more of it! Au revoir, mes autres! Michael Angelo Tata *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:04:38 -0700 From: edi...@intertheory.org To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: [-empyre-] coda bonjour mon amies! we soon depart for our respective locales as easily as we began this month...we still have another day, as the new critical coterie for May 2009 on -empyre- should have their announcement up shortly...the forum may begin to wane as we make our exits, but all are encouraged to enter a final plea on this month's topic up until the close of this intellectual market on April 30! pax et lux nicolas Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre _ Windows Live™ Hotmail®:…more than just e-mail. http://windowslive.com/online/hotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_more_042009___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] All Systems Go
Joseph— Thanks for introducing the possibility of “little stories” (petits histories) and their relation to the system/s of systems theory (Luhmann—also Maturana and Varela). “We assume there are systems” is a far cry from “The world is all that is the case” (Wittgenstein/Tractatus) and even carries Heidegger to a new level. Rather than “There is Being” or Time or Da-sein, it becomes, “We assume that there is Being,” or Time, or Da-sein: but maybe our assumptions are wrong, or in need of modification, or based on trompe l’oeil. Furthermore, a system is organized in such a fashion that the foundation/Grund is not quite what we think it might be: how we ground a network or even autopoietic entity like an archaebacterium sucking Hydrogen Sulfide from an ocean vent is not the way we ground philosophy proper, or the way be lay a foundation to Mar-a-Lago. When a system is a network, for example, there is a webbiness transcending the simple grounding of the algorithm. We are absorbed by this network in novel ways (think: Videodrome), and may even choose to enter it at points of our own selection (something beyond the “flexibility” of flexible accumulation—more than designing our own Capital One card, as the TV spot urges me to do ever so sweetly and gently, with the suppressed urgency of the advertised commodity). Whether or not we believe Lyotard, there is an effusion of little stories that is even more “effuse” with the advent of phenomena like ’zines, blogs, vlogs, and other little parcels of the personal, the everyday, that which we memorialize, however trivial it might be. Whether we link these fragments together into some kind of larger tale about their fragmentedness or leave them to float and waft on trajectories of their own design is up for grabs, and an epochal question. Many of our fellow panelists care abut the chance of change or revolution, leading me to wonder about the political import of fragmentation-as-fragmentation. Marking our entry, as you phrase it, is a productive place to start—and given that we star in a society encouraging us to tell our little stories at every turn and in every medium (if we are fortunate enough, they enter into the Reality TV mechanism and make us that new type of celebrity most lucidly described by Omarosa in her TV interviews, and to some degree in her book The Bitch Switch), it seems that there is no end to this obscene profusion, an arabesque proliferation of non-banal banalities and grotesque sportive of the exotic and the bizarre. As Foucault says, the hero of a disciplinary society is not the epic stud, but Judge Schreber, whose Memoirs of My Mental Illness is the little story that sets the standard for modern subjectivity and what we expect of it. On a note that will carry us in a different direction, there is Barthes’ Systeme de la Mode, which is rigorous in its own way, and which describes our own narratives and marking via the event of fashion (the garment I wear versus the garment I see in a magazine: event ruptures structure). I am not sure how to place Barthes’ systematicity with regard to Luhmann’s, but what I am suggesting is an examination of systems of consumption as these define subjectivity in their own right (here, the sumptuary). *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:02:52 -0500 From: jta...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meta- The transcendence of Meta-Narrative as itself a Meta-Narrative? Logically, Michael, that makes sense. I suppose it's a question of where one situates oneself. Lyotard, after all, made the absence of meta-narratives into a narrative of a new, emergent period, a 'post-modern' era defined by the loss of faith in the grand narratives of modernity. Freud, Marx, and Durkeim, once so powerful and capable of explaining so much, with the passing of time could be seen as expressive of the hopes, aspirations, oppressions and (consequent?) repressions of a certain /period/. The fact that the old explanations failed to convince, or failed to convince in ways that could inspire widespread dedication to a cause, was an indication that society had reached a different moment. The transformation in sensibiity occurred, palpably, whether or not the post-modernists were paradoxical or contradictory in how they described the occurrence. It does seem to be the case that, by Lyotard's time (1970s, '80s), the only narratives to attain an (admittedly restricted) power, were those that admitted their own contingency, their dependence on a particular subject position, their construction of a situated identity. If there were not so many actual 'petit histoires' on offer, in the cultural domain, the meta-narrative of postmodernity would not have been persuasive (at least, not for as long
[-empyre-] Axiomatics 2
Oh-and wonderful way to bring Eve S and the gift into closer proximity. Shantih Squared, MA *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:04:26 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Rock Theory I suppose it is good to remind ourselves in these situations that we can take nothing for granted, except for those things which we ourselves grant. I can't help but think about Sedgwick's Axiomatic... RIP. Davin On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Nicholas Ruiz III edi...@intertheory.org wrote: ...and to complicate matters further..there is the physiological 'transduction' of sensory phenomena into neurotransmissions understood by the central nervous system...! Abstraction par excellence! Narrative side effects occur in this process as well, limiting what we perceive to be the real...many physicists revel in the work of elucidation of such a 'cognitive' dissonance... :-) Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 9:34:03 AM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Rock Theory This is an intersting thought How does a person abstract themselves? The process of cognition itself is a process of abstraction...a move from the perception of primary phenomena to a restructuring of the present through narrative representation. This is where, I think, the identity of the individual is felt most concretely. On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 10:23 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD mt...@ipublishingllc.com wrote: Yes--it seems that dematerialization and thoughtlessness go together. Whether we are talking about money, capital, or arms. Perhaps to be thoughtful, we need to de-distance ourselves from concrete entities become abstractions: the thing may need to re-appear after all in order for there to be an ethics. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:04:58 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] headline: human interaction reaches junk status! I think you are right to suggest that I am downgrading human interaction to junk status. And I cannot say that it was necessarily ever different. But I still want to the kind of person who does not always act like an idiot and who is willing to make changes to build a world that is different. I don't know that junk status is absolute. If somebody wants to make an argument in favor of one way of doing something over another, then, my judgment is wrong precisely because I have claimed that everything is so thoughtless. If someone says, No, Davin. You are wrong. I am not as thoughtless as you think. And if they can articulate this thought, it would be hard for me to insist otherwise. But, if people don't care to explore the space of their consciousness (and better yet, share it), instead preferring to ride on cruise control, then in that particular case, they have been thoughtless. And, of course, nobody should have to prove they are thoughtful to me but they should try to prove it to themselves from time to time, the more the better. While I am sure that people have always been pretty thoughtless, it strikes me as particularly true in our age of relentless busyness. I am particularly taken by Virilio's arguments about speed and cybernetics, particularly the notion that acceleration leads to decreased capacity to respond responsibly, so judgment is increasingly embodied in formulas and cybernetic systems. When we killed each other with rocks, you had to look at the person you were going to crush before you crushed them. Today, when you kill someone at supersonic speed, you just plug in some coordinates, and the machine does the rest. Or, you can just kill through default by destroying infrastructure and imposing embargoes. This is thoughtlessness on an ultimate scale. I'm plenty thoughtless myself. And I feel like I should be more thoughtful. And when I try to be thoughtful, it is usually fairly exhausting and often frustrating. But, on the other hand, it's also very rewarding in its own way. It's usually accompanied by some feeling of guilt, possibly some immediate changes in my behavior, and eventually a sense that I tried to do something other than what I would have done had I not been mindful. It's a modest reward, and maybe it is an impossible way to change anything in all but the most minute ways, but I would like to believe that if enough people even devoted a modest slice of each day (5 minutes
[-empyre-] Metabolisms
Steve-- I appreciate your engagement of Nick's ideas, and your distrust of the universality of capital, which, following the workings of contingency as defined by Leibniz, could be other without logical contradiction. I think Nick's move in and out of Metaphysics is to connect capital to Code, as in his argument that there is already currency buried deep within our own chemical structure, making of capital a sort of external application of constitutive biological predisposition. I agree with you in that what we need is to expose the contingencies of capital in order to loosen its hegemonic hold (here I am thinking of the way Laclau and Mouffe define the term in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy), and also to provide a genealogy to capital which does not bury its origins in a biological metaphor occluding capital's fundamental contingency (making capital's thereness into an ahistorical quiddity which we cannot critique, but only accept and, to some extent, appreciate). What is universal is exchange; what is not universal is the particular form of exchange constituting capitalism. How the universal of exchange particularizes itself in this specific constellation of means, bodies and activities (labor) making capitalism capitalism is the subject of a history in urgent need of continued historical exposition: I think this is what you are suggesting, rather cogently, and even what Nick hints at, in his recent attention to the liveliness of capital. Perhaps a fruitful direction for Nick would be to differentiate exchanges with a sharper razor, such that the thereness of Code is examained in terms of its multifarious resultant individualities, or to reflect upon what Code will evolve into next, as capital is presumably only one of its stopping points, there being no end to the Code's vitality (Bergson), or liveliness (Marx/Haraway). My only questions would be how you connect capital with Locke's theories of the genesis of private property, and secondly to inquire as to ho you would suggest folding Rousseau into the mix, as far as his thesis of the social contract is concerned. Is there a contractualiy to capitalism, or does capital suspend contractuality through a naturalization of its thereness (your critique of Nick)? It's back to that department store en Geneve for me. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:26:33 +0100 From: s...@krokodile.co.uk To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Biomes Michael, It's not finally a matter of exchange but rather whether capital and capitalism should be defined as a universal in the way that Nick suggests. It's clear that even in the use of the biochemical example of 'breathing as a capitalist action' Nick is applying his local social norms to define capital as a universal. It would be a small movement for a communist to make precisely the same case and define communism as a universal 'breathing as a communist action', as a consequence exchange and capital should not be considered as equivalent. As a universal capital remains more deeply social and ungiving than the more normal alternatives of purely economic definitions of (M-C-M). The question becomes does a position which defines capital's thereness as material and biochemical enable social change or even social evolution and whether the deep pessimism that seems unavoidable with the conceptualisation of capital as a universal (breathing as a capitalist action) give us any grounds for hope. steve Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote: Nick + Steve: I think the question is whether or not there can be a history of exchange, or whether exchange transcends historical analysis because, like Being and Time in Heidegger's system, it has always been there as a primary given or noumenon, and we have no analytical access to its fundamental thereness. Personally, I think that even if we trace exchange back to metabolism, there is the possibility of constructing a genealogy, albeit a biochemical one. Currently, I'm reading Lynn Margulis' /Dazzle Gradually/, and paying a lot of attention to her idea that life began as symbiosis (a motile spirochete invading a stationary archaebacterium, and the two forming a stable and transmissible system). But even in her thought, there is pre-exchange, a time preceding even the push and pull of metabolism or symbiosis, making it possible to rephrase the question of a history of exchange as a problematics of bacteriology. For her, even the exchanges of capital refer back to the exchanges of metabolism, which ultimately begin with the interactions of bacteria with environment and one another, which hearken back to the autopoiesis that made individual existence and its interactions possible in the first place
[-empyre-] Axiomatics
Thank you for that. I also think of DG's discussion of axiomatics in light of that famed creature, the body without organs. How can we connect the axiomatic to Luhmann's systems, or to the self-regulating entities of autopoiesis, especially as regards (non)-grounding, points of entry, and the selfhood that somehow results from the web, network, tissue or other organizational schema of the system proper? For Eve, it was always a question of Silvan Tomkins and his take on what we are to do with emotions like, her favorite, Shame, within AI or the cybernetic. For Tomkins, interest is the key--a word reverberating with our discussions about capital and its construction (or, pace Nick, thereness), at least metaphorically--as it is impossible to generate a truly independent thought system/mentality/cogito without first getting this thinking computer to care (a sort of application of Sorge to the servo-mechanistic). *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:04:26 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Rock Theory I suppose it is good to remind ourselves in these situations that we can take nothing for granted, except for those things which we ourselves grant. I can't help but think about Sedgwick's Axiomatic... RIP. Davin On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Nicholas Ruiz III edi...@intertheory.org wrote: ...and to complicate matters further..there is the physiological 'transduction' of sensory phenomena into neurotransmissions understood by the central nervous system...! Abstraction par excellence! Narrative side effects occur in this process as well, limiting what we perceive to be the real...many physicists revel in the work of elucidation of such a 'cognitive' dissonance... :-) Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 9:34:03 AM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Rock Theory This is an intersting thought How does a person abstract themselves? The process of cognition itself is a process of abstraction...a move from the perception of primary phenomena to a restructuring of the present through narrative representation. This is where, I think, the identity of the individual is felt most concretely. On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 10:23 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD mt...@ipublishingllc.com wrote: Yes--it seems that dematerialization and thoughtlessness go together. Whether we are talking about money, capital, or arms. Perhaps to be thoughtful, we need to de-distance ourselves from concrete entities become abstractions: the thing may need to re-appear after all in order for there to be an ethics. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:04:58 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] headline: human interaction reaches junk status! I think you are right to suggest that I am downgrading human interaction to junk status. And I cannot say that it was necessarily ever different. But I still want to the kind of person who does not always act like an idiot and who is willing to make changes to build a world that is different. I don't know that junk status is absolute. If somebody wants to make an argument in favor of one way of doing something over another, then, my judgment is wrong precisely because I have claimed that everything is so thoughtless. If someone says, No, Davin. You are wrong. I am not as thoughtless as you think. And if they can articulate this thought, it would be hard for me to insist otherwise. But, if people don't care to explore the space of their consciousness (and better yet, share it), instead preferring to ride on cruise control, then in that particular case, they have been thoughtless. And, of course, nobody should have to prove they are thoughtful to me but they should try to prove it to themselves from time to time, the more the better. While I am sure that people have always been pretty thoughtless, it strikes me as particularly true in our age of relentless busyness. I am particularly taken by Virilio's arguments about speed and cybernetics, particularly the notion that acceleration leads to decreased capacity to respond responsibly, so judgment is increasingly embodied in formulas and cybernetic systems. When we killed each other with rocks, you had to look at the person you were going to crush before you crushed them. Today, when you kill someone at supersonic speed, you just plug in some
[-empyre-] The Place of Skulls
Hi, Nick! I love the quote--it encapsulates everything you, myself and Davin have been discussing regarding the dematerialization of money, which has ramifications for economics/chrematistics, as well as aesthetics and poetics (Derrida’s discussion of counterfeit money in Given Time). Interestingly enough, Warhol hates plastic, and only loves cold, hard cash—something he can hold in his hand, store in a jar (see his Philosophy). The materiality of material is refreshing, and you are right to wink at what it might mean to re-relate to matter. For even though a plastic card representing money (and in essence, representing representation) does possess physical qualities which allow me to access it as matter (it is firm, hard, smooth), the object of its reference lies beyond my tactile capacity, and so it possesses a compromised or limited materiality. To touch, smell, or taste the represented/signified is particularly meaningful in an epoch marked by increasing distance from Das Ding. The movie Traffic dealt with this notion rather brilliantly (the message being that, in LA, we get in car accidents because it is the only way we meet people, or gain any insight into their lives as concrete individuals inhabiting expanding space-time in a particular fashion). I also wonder what Object Relations Theory has to say about the loss of matter integral to dematerialization: what happens to partial or transitional objects or full-fledged object-objects when they lose their objective dimension (something empirically “there,” in front of us, waiting for our embrace)? Matter matters: and engaging it at the level of its materiality within a society of spectacles, phantoms and distanced-distancing representations may very well be a heroic act. Even sex, with the popularity of i-porn and “live” blow-up dolls and genitals (for example, Jeff Stryker’s plastic penis, available at any Pleasure Chest), as well as its own battery of chemicals (“Viva Viagra!”) has lost some of its materiality: a copulation ummediated by plastic or pills might actually be revolutionary, at the moment! Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:47:37 -0700 From: edi...@intertheory.org To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Rock Theory (and Jesse Livermore) The infamous turn of the 20th century trader, Jesse Livermore, once wrote: ...most speculators rarely see the money. To them the money is nothing real, nothing tangible. For years, after a successful deal was closed, I made a habit to draw out cash. I used to draw it out at the rate of $200,000 or $300,000 a clip. It is a good policy. It has a psychological value. Make it a policy to do that. Count the money over. I did. I knew I had something in my hand. I felt it. It was real. Money in a broker's account or bank account is not the same as if you feel it in your own fingers once in a while. Then it means something. There is a sense of possession that makes you just a little bit less inclined to take headstrong chances of losing your gains. So have a look at your real money...there is too much looseness in these matters on the part of the average speculator. mt...perhaps there is a looseness in these matters with regard to the average person as well, regarding creation, expansion, becoming and so on, that of wealth, and other material objects? Perhaps most are too headstrong with the previous generation(s)'s gains? What would it mean to re-relate to objects, even peoplehow to embody it: Yes, we can! --but is that enough?! :-) Perhaps anthropos is forever metaphysically abstracted from such a positivistic integral reality by vulgar virtue of subjective self-occupation and the predilection for one's specific pet position in the parallax of views...? We all know that 'objects are closer than they appear' and that the distance is an illusion, but our spreading anthropic emotional distances (e.g. within foreign policy and international relations, religious dogmas, artistic dogmas, etc.) only prove that we like it that way, no? Thought is already manifest in the fullness of the human fold...whose thought prevails seems to be the likely issue for the Senators of the world, no? What is the thing that may re-appear, or even must first appear? After Golgotha, that place of skulls, might the Christos die for some again? Realign the metaphysical order of things? Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org From: Michael Angelo Tata, PhD mt...@ipublishingllc.com To: Soft Skinned Space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 10:23:34 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Rock Theory Yes--it seems that dematerialization and thoughtlessness go together. Whether we are talking about money, capital, or arms. Perhaps to be thoughtful, we need to de-distance ourselves from concrete entities
[-empyre-] Back to Bartending?
Thanks for supplementing the Kantian trustee idea we've been toying with for the past couple of days with a deeper look at how his ideal institution would be structured. Philosophy as an umbrella has me singing Rihanna, but it is a great use of inquiry to apply it to managing higher discourses which will presumably supply the worker bees--and queens--who take on decision-making and policy-creating positions after they exit the University with a firm grounding in ethics and epistemology. Sun Tzu is an excellent reference, and brings me to St. Augustine and his theories of just wars (for example, my daily battle with Satan and his minions). And then there's Machiavelli and his marvelous expediencies, seductive in their own right. Truth be told, we may be living among the de' Medicis! Pragmatism is also a helpful angle, as it more than any other philosophical school deals closest with the notion of community vis-a-vis knowledge/epistemology; furthermore, a notion like fallibilism (Peirce, James) opens up a Pandora's box of post-objective versions on the truth of truth which impacts ethics in profound ways (as James says, many times we have to act before the truth comes in). *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:37:41 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] On higher ed... I'm in the middle of grading lots of long papers (fortunately, they seem to be really good so far). But I think there are many paths: Withdrawing from bad situations, limiting complicity, and trying to dry up the consent that is implied by even the most oppositional participation (the mystical path) Or, trying to work within a situation to mitigate its evils (the pragmatic path)... Or waging war against it (the warrior's path). These are three approaches, and the each play their part in the ethical life. At some level, I think it is good to view ideological struggles through the lens of warfare, and to apply Just War theory to the situation. I copied a passage from Wikipedia's Just War entry: * the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; * all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; * there must be serious prospects of success; * the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition. I would never opt for armed conflict to solve my problems. But, if you abstract it away from discussions of nation vs. nation conflict, and think about the possibility that it can have for states of being (say, between those who have full rights and those who live in a state of exception) you can ask yourself if the damage that this institution is inflicting on a particular community as lasting, grave, and certain. You can ask if you have explored other means of ending the conflict. You can ask yourself if you have serious prospects for success. And, you can ask yourself if your response, whatever it is, could foreseeably produce evils or disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. There have to be some standards by which we can judge whether or not an action is good and we need to find some way to agree upon whether or not we will do one thing over another, because at this point, it is no longer an individual choice. I think this is precisely where community is critical being able to define a community to which you belong in, preferably the most abstract and comprehensive way possible. And, in practical terms, having an intimate community that can challenge you to act not simply in your self-interest, but in the common interest as well. As far as teaching goes, I feel that the classroom opens up a lot of possibilities for correcting the very injustices that higher education is complicit with--I believe, anyways, that I can provide at least a small number of students with the support that they need to generate their own good ideas and put them into action--I believe, following Kant by way of Bill Readings, that the lower faculty of philosophy can serve as a moral or ethical guard against what were once the higher faculties (medicine, theology, and law), but which might correlate in a disappointing way with the various jobs that are taught in the contemporary University. Readings writes, “Philosophy, on the other hand, replaces the practical savoir-faire of these magicians with reason, which refuses all shortcuts. Hence, philosophy questions the prescriptions of the legislative power and asks fundamental questions on the basis of reason along, interfering with the higher faculties in order to critique their grounds. The life
[-empyre-] Trust
Interesting use of the word trustee--and tracing back to Kant, nonetheless! What would it mean to be a trustee of knowledge? Would it be anything similar to a Bankruptcy Court trustee? A conservator you appoint when your aunt develops Alzheimers and can no longer manager her finances? On this forum, are we trustees of knowledge/science? And then there's the regression to trust--trust as treasure, but also trust as blind confidence, as that ultimate atom, faith. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 06:49:03 -0700 From: edi...@intertheory.org To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: [-empyre-] op-ed piece (markets and graduate studies) ...an interesting op-ed piece on markets, higher ed and obsolescence, which intersects with our discussion this month... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?_r=1 Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre _ Windows Live™ Hotmail®:…more than just e-mail. http://windowslive.com/online/hotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_more_042009___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Willowy
Davin— Wow! I guess even Eagle Rock is going beige. We have a good friend from the ’hood who, before the bubble burst, unloaded her house there to yupsters for a huge profit (she got it for a song, back when she answered phones at NBC, long before she became VP of, ironically, censorship). Gentrification is a mystical process indeed. In NYC, when they kicked the trannie hookers out of Chelsea, then the Meat Packing District (Stella McCartney wouldn’t have it), then they, too, like your ruddy crew, vaporized, this time in the interest of safer schools, cleaner streets, and more au courant boutiques. There was always one who stood by the Pier in the West Village singing Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman” as a commentary on irony, since she, too, was homeless, but then the Hudson River Conservancy prettied up the waterfront, and even she, too, got the boot. I wish I could commission Jack Kerouac to write “Heaven: The Sequel” for them, and for your Dad’s tip-top amigos. Like it or not, we have to admit that capital takes casualties, as the Juggernaut of development rolls over each of us in one way or another. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:09:31 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Manhattans, Rusty Nails The bar was called Topper's Tavern on Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock. It is now called the Chalet. Unlike Topper's, the Chalet has a Myspace page and a twentysomething clientele. The last time I tried to track down any of my old friends from Topper's, they were hanging out at the Eagles Club. The ones that I ran into there all looked smaller and willowy, spectral, even... when I was a kid, these men had hard hands--carpenters, pipefitters, hustlers-- they were big, ruddy, occasionally scary. The conversation wandering between stifled sobs consisted of: You look just like your old man, Carl can't be dead, and Topper's is filled with yuppies, why would anybody go there! It went downhill after your dad left. Davin On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD mt...@ipublishingllc.com wrote: Wow--that was incredible. I truly appreciate your candor and open-ness as regards your own connection to currency, geography, family, urban history, commerce, and friendship. Where in La La was your Dad's bar? What was it called? Your worldliness throughout this discussion makes a lot more sense to me now: even from a couch in San Diego, one can rule the world. So opposite from any species of evil or banality. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:00:11 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] N-gons + Green Miles I wish I had more time. I am going to have to read Descartes on this, but probably won't get a chance to until I grade my papers. The interesting things about my life with my dad. He started out his adult life as a journeyman electrician. Then, in the late 50s/early 60s, he got into art, poetry, music, and psychedelia. Eventually, he managed a blues nightclub in the LA area. And, by the time I was born, he managed a bar in a white working class neighborhood in LA. Through the 80s, various socioeconomic phenomena ripped through LA. The crack epidemic and the gang wars, both flooded the airwaves and began to migrate into our neighborhood. And, because he worked at a bar, when the socioeconomic fabric experienced disruptions, there would be an increase in violence, robbery, and general mayhem (although this was always present). We kept a lot of guns in the house and watched a lot of Charles Bronson movies. In only saw him on weekends, and when I did see him, it was nothing but splendor. But he still made time to teach me where the various guns were hidden, how to shoot them, how to place the unregistered gun in the hand of the dead man, and, finally, how to call the cops and report the incident. So, there was a fair amount of Reagan-era paranoia, and since I was born in 1975, this all made a strong impression on my little mind, but I thought it was cool. Lest you think my time with my father was every scary or unpleasant, he also taught me everything he knew about life's hedonistic pleasures. I learned to eat fine foods and junk, to drink everything from Pernod to Pabst. I learned to smoke Benson and Hedges menthols and how to hustle drunks out for comic book money over games of Pac Man. He taught me to read and draw. He taught me about Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. He taught me a lot of things. But, eventually, as is often the case with people working in service industries, he lost his job and was unable
Re: [-empyre-] Sonic Boom
Brad:
Any commentary on your music and how it responds to or impacts any of the
issues we've been rolling around for the past few weeks? To me, it is
fabulously creepy, the soundtrack for an execution (I am listening to fill the
mirror). MA
***
Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA
http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:00:50 -0700
From: bbr...@eskimo.com
To: edi...@intertheory.org
CC: emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Geflecht
the trite answer would be China
but more exactly, it's the irrational belief in
capitalist
casino culture
that prevails
(you see someone winning great scads of cash/fame
and think, that's the political system I want...
but it's still house-rules for 99.99% of us)
art-institutions follow the same ponzi schemes
and artworld-acolytes blow their last dimes
fill_the_mirror
field-recordings from brad brace
http://www.archive.org/details/fill_the_mirror
an island (project) interlude -- rhythmic edits all around
the horizon (race track with film and shopping scores)
http://www.archive.org/details/fill_the_mirror
{ brad brace } bbr...@eskimo.com ~finger for pgp
--- bbs: brad brace sound ---
--- http://69.64.229.114:8000 ---
On Wed, 22 Apr 2009, Nicholas Ruiz III wrote:
I'm sure someone has thought (or said this) by now, but it
has to be the US military industrial complex that backs
our currency, more than anything else, no?
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[-empyre-] Biomes
Nick + Steve:
I think the question is whether or not there can be a history of exchange, or
whether exchange transcends historical analysis because, like Being and Time
in Heidegger's system, it has always been there as a primary given or noumenon,
and we have no analytical access to its fundamental thereness. Personally, I
think that even if we trace exchange back to metabolism, there is the
possibility of constructing a genealogy, albeit a biochemical one. Currently,
I'm reading Lynn Margulis' Dazzle Gradually, and paying a lot of attention to
her idea that life began as symbiosis (a motile spirochete invading a
stationary archaebacterium, and the two forming a stable and transmissible
system). But even in her thought, there is pre-exchange, a time preceding even
the push and pull of metabolism or symbiosis, making it possible to rephrase
the question of a history of exchange as a problematics of bacteriology. For
her, even the exchanges of capital refer back to the exchanges of metabolism,
which ultimately begin with the interactions of bacteria with environment and
one another, which hearken back to the autopoiesis that made individual
existence and its interactions possible in the first place.
***
Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA
http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:27:47 -0700
From: edi...@intertheory.org
To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] local currencies
sd...it all depends upon how you read/perceive a market...and exchange...my
view is quasi-empirical: in such a view, 'breathing' is a capitalist action,
wherein a being, call it 'A' --capitalizes upon the extant oxygen in a given
gas containing milieu, further utilizing that oxygen to drive cellular
processes that enable energy production in the form of cellular ATP. The
Romantics will call such activity, as it drives a certain familiar mammal
around the planet, human 'life'. There is even a built-in regulator of
ecological balance, in the sense that one person can only breathe so much at
a time...on the other hand, other activities of anthro-capital utilization
(e.g. financial speculation, local currency creation,etc.) are checked by
more anthropic laws...
Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D
Editor, Kritikos
http://intertheory.org
- Original Message
From: s...@krokodile.co.uk s...@krokodile.co.uk
To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 2:25:39 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] local currencies
Nick
Given that earlier you claimed that 'we are all capitalists' and in the
same note proceeded to mention the 'market' in terms which effectively
continue the fetishization of the concept which we've been living with
throughout the last three decades, to then revert back to a currency
localized in geographic terms seems a little inconsistent...
Still there have always been methods of exchange which are external to
capitalist markets, for markets existed before capital and will exist
long after capital has been superceded.
steve
Nicholas Ruiz III wrote:
these people may really be on to something with this practice...why
wouldn't or shouldn't every locale have their own currency?
NRIII
Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D
Editor, Kritikos
http://intertheory.org
- Original Message
From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com
To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Sent: Monday, April 6, 2009 2:35:14 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Eddies, Whirlwinds, Trade Winds
I just read an article in the Detroit News on their new local currency:
http://www.detnews.com/article/20090323/BIZ/903230389/Detroit+cash+keeps+hometown+humming
It's not extra-marketable... but I do like that it tries to keep money
local.
Davin
On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 8:58 PM, { brad brace } bbr...@eskimo.com wrote:
On Sun, 5 Apr 2009, G.H. Hovagimyan wrote:
ghh...what might an 'extra-marketable' utopia look like...?
... In New York there are hundreds of artists collectives that
are now functioning outside of the market. They share loft spaces,
produce work online and offline and function despite the
market...
you'd know better than me G.H. (I haven't set foot in NYC
since the 70-80's), so I'm genuinely interested to know
about all these many suddenly successful artists' co-ops...
care to name a few? (or is this wistful posturing...)
/:b
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[-empyre-] Pomo Guilt: Vestige? Remainder?
Julian-- Thanks for providing the Baudrillard quote--it resonates beautifully with our ongoing discussion about credit, debt, and a gift that must exude generosity transcendentally (a metaphysical ruse in its own way). Perhaps what needs further examination is a theory of postmodern guilt, since Baudrillard's tones are not so different from Lacan's when he overstates the case for a split subject defined in an originary way by lack, Derrida's, when he advocates an ontological disparity between the human and the divine which necessitates a suspension of the ethical, or even Heidegger's, when he describes the Call of Being (something not everyone can hear). How and why does guilt survive in a secular fashion, even when its apparent need has been obviated? And how does it not appear in the places we might expect it to: the Octo-Mom's uterus, Bernie Madoff's office? *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:15:08 -0500 From: jul...@julianoliver.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 53, Issue 15 ..on Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 09:56:42AM -0700, Nicholas Ruiz III wrote: With regard to the debt or credit we cannot be rid of, there is a wonderful thought from Baudrillard: All current strategies boil down to this: passing around the debt, the credit, the unreal, unnameable thing you cannot get rid of. Nietzsche analyzed the strategem of God in these terms: in redeeming man’s debt by the sacrifice of His son, God, the great Creditor, created a situation where the debt could never be redeemed by the debtor, since it has already been redeemed by the creditor. In this way, He created the possibility of an endless circulation of that debt, which man will bear as his perpetual sin. This is the ruse of God. But it is also the ruse of capital, which, at the same time as it plunges the world into ever greater debt, works simultaneously to redeem that debt, thus creating a situation in which it will never be able to be cancelled or exchanged for anything. This is certainly a great quote. Looking at the cultures of superstition surrounding gambling you clearly see this bridge between god and capital - a metaphysics of debt and salvation - described. Chairs, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Madrid, Spain currently: Lima, Peru about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre _ Rediscover Hotmail®: Get quick friend updates right in your inbox. http://windowslive.com/RediscoverHotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Rediscover_Updates2_042009___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Synod(e)
Ethical Investment policy = oil, telecommunications, banking? Well, at least they skirted the Gaza crisis elegantly enough, and got on swimmingly with the House of Lords. How funny, to think of the ecnomy of worldly riches versus the economy of spiritual riches, those two competing strata so central to gift theory. Thanks for the info! It sure makes the French Revolution seem a lot more logical (seizure of church properties, invention of an impersonal Etre Supreme, a snappy new calendar making even time something to be revolutionized, the works). *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:40:03 -0700 From: edi...@intertheory.org To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] On Currencies, Capitalism, and the Fed The Church manages assets in a godly fashion: The church commissioners' annual report reveals how it has emerged as one of the most successful money managers in Britain. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2006/apr/27/religion.news NRIII Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Tuesday, April 7, 2009 11:53:13 AM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] On Currencies, Capitalism, and the Fed Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I don't doubt that plenty could go wrong with a monetary monopoly--Look at what folks have done with the monetary oligopoly. I just wanted to some more out there from someone who knows more about it than I do, especially since I have so little experience with money. My wife, our three three children, and I try to get by with as little as possible. The only sort of financial dealings I have, beyond cashing my paycheck and paying my bills is our contribution to my University's retirement account. And I would consider even going without that, if we could just have the promise of a small home, three meals, and a doctor when we are sick. I know it will sound strange to say this, because I just said that I would be happy with the promise of a home. etc. But money opens up for me a feeling of dependence that tends to flow in one direction. So much of what my wages are worth and how I am permitted to live, if at all, depends not on what I can do well... but upon what some other people in some other place do with money. Money itself is so abstracted from actual production that people who trade it tend to become detached from anyone but the value of their own portfolios, yet their actions effect me. Yet, working people take time daily to build the foundations upon which the financial system is abstracted from. I'm not saying all investors operate in this mode (for example, I know some nuns who invest so they can attend board meetings and agitate for women's rights), but I think that the abstract quality of money and the speed at which it moves tends to gloss over the human foundations that it is derived from. How often does a day trader travel to China or Honduras to examine the labor that they have just purchased? And since I cannot demand that any individual take this measure of responsibility and a nation-state has a hard time regulation what its currency does beyond its borders, I was wondering if a global system of economic and trade regulation might do any better. But, like you said, we don't have such a hot record with more limited currencies so it is entirely likely that I am out of my tree. As with previous threads about the good and trying to funnel these things through a single nexus probably does more to undermine the vibrant character of ethics than it would to share them. I guess I still have a bit of thinking to do. Thank you. Davin On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 10:26 PM, jeff pierce zentra...@live.ca wrote: Davin, My jaw literally dropped when I read your question about what would be wrong with a one world currency. Now let me preface this by saying that I don't have all the answers, but I think based on some of the events that have transpired over the last 6 months we can come to a few conclusions and go from there. 1. Government policies created this problem through easy credit, poor legislature, and low interest rates. If you let people borrow money at an historically cheap rate for an extended length of time, bad things will happen. I'm sure Greenspan was telling himself that this time it's different and we can leave interest rates low, but believe me it's never different. Every time a trader tells himself those 4 words they're setting themselves up for a fall. Greenspan took the interest rate down from 6% to 1% and kept it there far too long. Easy credit encourages leveraged speculation. This fuelled the housing bubble as everybody thought their house would
Re: [-empyre-] Meta-
I am reminded of Rorty: contingency and irony as a basis for solidarity. Despite pomo-ism, have we transcended the meta-N, or is a meta-N of no meta-N a meta-N after all? *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:32:24 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] A strange bit of luck I agree, it does tend to be a bit vaguely optimistic, but I don't know that there is necessarily anything wrong with broad metanarratives, particularly at a time when people on the bottom of the pile tend be isolated, and often opposed to each other. A broad narrative about justice or working class solidarity provides a pretext for talking about groups of people who share common interests. At some level, the idea that I could not coordinate a narrative with disparate populations, itself, becomes a metanarrative. And, a debilitating one. I do think that the capacity for people to bridge these pockets of humanity is powerful and explosive. NGOs are perfectly positioned to provide accounts provided academics, legislators, artists, and everyday people are willing to listen and help. (I know a lot of farmers and union workers who are very careful about buying fair trade goods. On the other hand, I know a lot of farmers and union workers who think fair trade is a bunch of liberal, socialist nonsense. So I think we really need narratives that can compete with the paranoid, even jingoistic, attitudes towards trade). A perfect example of success can be found in the recent successes that student activists have had in working with NGOs in Honduras against the anti-union practices of Russell Athletics. http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4367/pstudents_wont_sweat_it_p It can't solve everything. But on a practical level, I believe that this type of solidarity is possible, and becomes more and more effective the more it is engaged in. If I can get together with somebody in Detroit and agree to use a particular currency in a particular business network, it is possible for me to work with someone in another country to have a positive impact on a particular transnational network... the only real difference is how the network is organized geographically. Peace! Davin On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Nicholas Ruiz III edi...@intertheory.org wrote: Can't say I'm particularly moved by this.'yes, we can'...was ascliché then as it is now, no? The real question no one cares to answer in this regard is: yes, we can do what exactly?! For example, the local currency movement offers a specific answer to a particular problem...but the broad sweeping metanarratives of global emancipation read more like political speeches than anything else, it seems to me... nick Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Monday, April 6, 2009 6:33:50 PM Subject: [-empyre-] A strange bit of luck I was reading a book today and stumbled across a reference to Arjun Appadurai's Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination. I found a copy from Appadurai's Globalization (Duke UP, 2001) and started reading. First, I was kind of bummed and embarrassed that I hadn't read it before. But after getting over that, I was taken aback by the relevance of this article to the discussions we are having here. Everything from our crises of meaning, to the use of academic language, challenges to neoliberalism, the academic research marketplace, the problems with runaway financial institutions but most importantly, Appadurai offers some constructive suggestions to academics on how to facilitate globalization from below. I won't break down Appadurai's argument here. It is widely available (I found a copy of the article online). I expect that most here have already read it. It's much more readable than anything I could write. It is worth the time if this is something you are interested in. But I will plunk down a giant quote, just to give you a sense of the scope of his article: Such an account [of globalization from above and below] would belong to a broader effort to understand the variety of projects that fall under the rubric of globalization, and it would also recognize that the word globalization, and words like freedom, choice, and justice, are not inevitably the property of the state-capital nexus. To take up this sort of study involves, for the social sciences, a serious commitment to the study of globalization from below, its institutions, its horizons, and its vocabularies. For those more concerned with the work of culture, it means stepping back from those obsessions and abstractions
Re: [-empyre-] Rock Theory
Yes--it seems that dematerialization and thoughtlessness go together. Whether we are talking about money, capital, or arms. Perhaps to be thoughtful, we need to de-distance ourselves from concrete entities become abstractions: the thing may need to re-appear after all in order for there to be an ethics. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:04:58 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] headline: human interaction reaches junk status! I think you are right to suggest that I am downgrading human interaction to junk status. And I cannot say that it was necessarily ever different. But I still want to the kind of person who does not always act like an idiot and who is willing to make changes to build a world that is different. I don't know that junk status is absolute. If somebody wants to make an argument in favor of one way of doing something over another, then, my judgment is wrong precisely because I have claimed that everything is so thoughtless. If someone says, No, Davin. You are wrong. I am not as thoughtless as you think. And if they can articulate this thought, it would be hard for me to insist otherwise. But, if people don't care to explore the space of their consciousness (and better yet, share it), instead preferring to ride on cruise control, then in that particular case, they have been thoughtless. And, of course, nobody should have to prove they are thoughtful to me but they should try to prove it to themselves from time to time, the more the better. While I am sure that people have always been pretty thoughtless, it strikes me as particularly true in our age of relentless busyness. I am particularly taken by Virilio's arguments about speed and cybernetics, particularly the notion that acceleration leads to decreased capacity to respond responsibly, so judgment is increasingly embodied in formulas and cybernetic systems. When we killed each other with rocks, you had to look at the person you were going to crush before you crushed them. Today, when you kill someone at supersonic speed, you just plug in some coordinates, and the machine does the rest. Or, you can just kill through default by destroying infrastructure and imposing embargoes. This is thoughtlessness on an ultimate scale. I'm plenty thoughtless myself. And I feel like I should be more thoughtful. And when I try to be thoughtful, it is usually fairly exhausting and often frustrating. But, on the other hand, it's also very rewarding in its own way. It's usually accompanied by some feeling of guilt, possibly some immediate changes in my behavior, and eventually a sense that I tried to do something other than what I would have done had I not been mindful. It's a modest reward, and maybe it is an impossible way to change anything in all but the most minute ways, but I would like to believe that if enough people even devoted a modest slice of each day (5 minutes) to something as simple as studying and reflecting upon some injustice that they themselves have inflicted upon another, either through action or omission, directly or indirectly, that the world we would create would be much more ethical. (Jeez! I guess I am becoming a whacko.) Peace! Davin On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Nicholas Ruiz III edi...@intertheory.org wrote: Indeed, the consumer society has been rotten forever...but at least we can switch the channel from the wedding planners to the forensic pathologists...sounds like you're downgrading human interaction to junk status...but we might ask...when was it different? When was the way we were...'here'...I'm just curious to know... :-) NRIII Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Monday, April 6, 2009 10:32:43 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 53, Issue 6 I think this might be why gift giving can be so subversive, because if we were to resign ourselves, say, to viewing the cash nexus as the only medium for exchange... gift giving implies that the cash nexus is incomplete or insufficient. If you give a gift (say, you give someone a copy of your favorite book) and it returns to you with an expected equivalent compensation from the recipient ($27.95), then this is a business transaction. If the gift returns to you in all of the various ways that gifts can... you strengthen a bond of friendship, you feel a little bit better, maybe even you hope that someday someone will give you a gift (maybe a mix tape or their favorite music or a copy of THEIR favorite book), or whatever... it cheapens the whole idea of economics by suggesting that something
[-empyre-] Beyonce/Burger King
of scarification and the repetition of trauma for reasons exceeding those of mere pleasure to the tripartite hydraulics of an id, ego and super-ego always trying to elude each other through the lexical moves of constructing rebuses, consolidating images, transposing objects, and turning repressed content into sublimated masterpieces? In a way, the id is the first bank, that little vault where we store what we cannot bear to cognize or re-cognize and wait for it to accrue all the interest we’ve already managed to forget about, unsure of how we will spend it since, technically, we do not know it’s there, much like the “open secret” theorized so vividly by Eve Sedgwick. Speaking of whom, her recent passing is a loss to all of us, and I dedicate the remainder of this dialogue to her loving memory. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2009 18:59:58 -0500 From: jta...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] The E-ject Yes, Michael, there are viewings that are also readings (metaphorically speaking?) and vice versa. And yes, Cynthia, there is thinking in images. But my impression is that these operations are all too readily conflated in current discourse - when what is needed rather are stern distinctions, kindof - lest the literary itself is lost in the faster, more powerful circulation (and also the 'push-pull') of visual/perceptual experience. And in discourse on the same. People flock to museums. We go there to see a collection of visual objects. A few of these objects, we hold in our minds, but not in the way a museum's holdings are possessed. Those curatorial possessions are commodities precisely because they cannot be memorized (and hence held in our thought). The objects in a museum also need to be perceived, sensed bodily, not only thought about. When we think in words, we hear, in our head - words. At least they sound to us something like the words we hear, or hear ourselves say. This happens also when reading. That is an important continuity I think, that brings the act of reading into the realm of thought, in a material way that is just not possible with images. This is the medial specificity of print: it stimulates thought by reducing perception, during the time of reading, to a minimum. (Concrete poems and examples of book art and the whole rematerialized context of e-writing are interesting precisely because they bring the forgotten material support for reading BACK into consciousness, but then we're again perceiving, not reading, not thinking with words.) Why insist on the distinction? Because the 'layering of meaning and perception' (Cynthia) is more interesting, more rich cognitively, when the layers are kept distinct and their different cognitive operations can be observed. It is the ideas that stir, not the object itself (Cynthia again). Right. And I agree totally about the impossibility of commodifying the meanings that attach to an art object. (The neolibs haven't figured out yet how to do that, or have they? have we?) But the path from stimulation to idea is very different, when reading or when viewing/sensing. The ideas in books are formed by words, and the ideas about objects are formulated, not in objects, but in words. At least, we need a verbal formulation if we want to communicate our ideas - to any person who speaks our language, or whose language we speak/read. Sure, you can communicate by an exchange of objects that can be as richly interpretable (in its own way) as a poem or a literary narrative, but again the meaning of the object will need to be cognized verbally, in ways that can only be 'about' the object (to use Davin's term, around and about but never within, as we are when reading.) That makes a kind of continuity possible, that again accounts for the medial specificity of books: when we read old books, in languages that have changed over time, we can make comparisons between the language we think in habitually and the language of, say, Chaucer or the Beowulf poet or Melville or Virginia Woolf. We can register the changes in style in the lifework of a contemporary writer. The words going through their heads, and getting somehow preserved on a screen or a page, have a different composition or pacing from our words, but there's still a basis of comparison. And a way, then, to feel the effects of history longer in duration than our own memory or the memory of our grandparents. (Again, we can observe different period styles or deviations therefrom in objects recovered or preserved from the past, but we would have to communicate these differences, and their meanings, in words. When reading, we don't have to switch levels in order to know something about what the work's creator was thinking.) The other reason to hold onto the distinction
[-empyre-] Fakes
Nick-- Quick question: at the start of our debate, one particularly astute discussant brought up the work of J.S.G. Boggs. You can see some examples here: http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles1999/Articles0999/JBoggsA.html I was particularly struck by the Pittsburgh $0 bill he forges. His conterfeit bills spoke both to the Wall Street crisis, as well as to the issue of counterfeit money and meaning in Derrida's Given Time, a text that surfaced as one many of us found relevant to issues of exchange, interrupted economy, prodigality, generosity and friendship. Whenever you have a moment, I'd love you to have you share your take on Boggs' bills, since after the topic was introduced, interest faded al too quickly. If you could help resuscitate this thrread, I'd be in your debt. I will also look closely at the sites you have provided in your most recent post later tonight so I can get back to you in a day or so with some reflections. As I write to you, I stare at the Yorkshires on the back cover of my Jeff Koons coffee table book, and wonder where art will head within these new developments within capital. What will become of these Yorkies and their progeny? I hear them bark long into the night, but cannot translate the message. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:12:41 -0400 From: na...@cornell.edu To: emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] More Art Michael, Thank you for your very kind comments on the project :-) As for galleries, I've been in a few shows, but am fundamentally ambivalent about them; while I wouldn't say that I abhor the gallery space entirely (as I see the possibility of doing interventions within them), I am also quite interested in different modes of exhibition and engagement with artworks. As is evidenced by MAICgregator, I see there to be an interesting potential space with new types of net.art based projects, especially when we can consider ways of modifying webpages in-place. With regards to what other artistic interventions are going on in response to---and developing creative alternatives as a result of---the financial crisis, I'm hoping that others will be able to share projects that I don't know of. One the one hand there's works such as Stock Overflow that I mentioned in my statement (http://www.imal.org/StockOverflow/) that are a direct reaction and reframing of what's going on. On the other hand there are initiatives that are on-going that take on new urgency now. I'm thinking especially of the workshops and meetings put on by Medialab-Prado in Madrid (http://medialab-prado.es/) that are about bringing people together to collaborate on projects of their own choosing, as well as organizing seminars to teach techniques and theory about everything from installing Drupal to netlabel management. These sorts of alternatives to traditional gallery spaces---as well as the mainstream neoliberal system---can be conceptualized as well as a means of producing an new form of individual/collective subjectivity that cannot be---at the moment---easily re-inscribed within the system that produced the collapse in the first place. nick Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote: Nick: Wow! I love your Webby intrusions and incursions: have you exhibited any in a gallery or exhibition space? Your adjusted pages make me think of Hans Haacke and his marvelous infiltration of the real estate industry with works like /Shapolsky et al, /or even his /Manet '74/ and its exposure of the provenance of a Manet masterpiece and its connection to activities of the Third Reich. Please say some more about direct aesthetic responses to current corporate greed, the bursting of housing bubbles, or the ineluctable smirk of Bernie Madoff. I know some fab visual artist is making fiery canvases depicting the faces of the guilty, but I cannot think of his name. Do you know who I mean? For example, he paints Madoff, or that creepy Angelo from Countrywide, then goes to the street and encourages strangers to mark up the canvas with words, expressions and graffiti expressing their anger, grief and dissatisfaction. A bientot! *** *Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA* *http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/* http://www.michaelangelotata.com/ Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:07:11 -0400 From: na...@cornell.edu To: emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called crisis Dear empyre, It's strange that it's the 16th of the month (at least where I am), yet there has been little sustained discussion of present-day artistic responses to this so-called financial crisis--one that exists in a mythical realm of numbers-that-we-cannot-perceive, but that sadly
[-empyre-] TAZ-mania
Hi, again! Please see my Warhol comments to Joseph (to be posted soonish)—these are also written with you in mind, and I would be quite happy to have your take. As for the pages you so generously sent to the forum, here are some fleeting thoughts: “Stock Overflow” Such strange financial cartographies, arrows and vectors sending me on- and offshore on international junkets of junk bonds and cash accounts and investments in an infrastructure that will always transcend me. Algorithm and cluster fuck, the sudden appearance of obscured and obfuscated networks of “stoppages” miraculously turned into data flows revealing how the circulation of commodities and capital is set in motion, overdetermined in velocity, direction, telos. I spy paths, ways, routes, places I may have been without any memory of the journey, economies in which I’ve participated without my knowledge, planets and isthmuses where buried treasure is guarded by emoticons sporting eye patches. My computer screen becomes panoptical, showing me my desire to be shown the world, recealing my position in a watch tower outside all seeing: my eye fills and spills; the hagiography of Michel Foucault requires me to be burned at the stake as well, and I comply (it wasn’t my decision, after all: discipline is discipline). “MedialabPrado” Wow—thaumaturgy and prestidigitation. Was Adam Smith a wizard, or The Wiz? Can machines be funny? Can they chortle? I channel Silvan Tomkins, and he says to wait for the Mex DF workshop to find out, but also that until we can fabricate interest, there is neither poiesis nor autopoiesis nor I nor AI. Such lovely synergies, parts overtaking wholes and infusing them with enthusiasm and élan. Smash the cogito—or at minimum, string it together like Christmas lights, toss it into a system of simultaneous equations, de-oligarchize the production and dissemination of knowledges (noematic, somatic, aesthetic). Wiki-Wiki: we come together at the center of an atoll made of licorice. Thanks for sharing these marvelous possibilities and realities. I can only have responded poetically, since any other type of response would have cheapened this important, critical and above all inspiring work. And as for your call to revolution, to “arms,” as Nick might call it, given his initial interest in creativity and armature, I think of de Certeau’s notion of La Perruque in The Practice of Everyday Life: all those tiny, little breaks in the system we effect each day, everything from oppositional shopping (label-switching, kleptomania) to the simple act of writing a love letter “on the boss’ time.” No giant Arendtian break, but sweet and individual tears in the social tapestry that give meaning to the banal, the programmatic, the codified, the staid, the static. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:12:41 -0400 From: na...@cornell.edu To: emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] More Art Michael, Thank you for your very kind comments on the project :-) As for galleries, I've been in a few shows, but am fundamentally ambivalent about them; while I wouldn't say that I abhor the gallery space entirely (as I see the possibility of doing interventions within them), I am also quite interested in different modes of exhibition and engagement with artworks. As is evidenced by MAICgregator, I see there to be an interesting potential space with new types of net.art based projects, especially when we can consider ways of modifying webpages in-place. With regards to what other artistic interventions are going on in response to---and developing creative alternatives as a result of---the financial crisis, I'm hoping that others will be able to share projects that I don't know of. One the one hand there's works such as Stock Overflow that I mentioned in my statement (http://www.imal.org/StockOverflow/) that are a direct reaction and reframing of what's going on. On the other hand there are initiatives that are on-going that take on new urgency now. I'm thinking especially of the workshops and meetings put on by Medialab-Prado in Madrid (http://medialab-prado.es/) that are about bringing people together to collaborate on projects of their own choosing, as well as organizing seminars to teach techniques and theory about everything from installing Drupal to netlabel management. These sorts of alternatives to traditional gallery spaces---as well as the mainstream neoliberal system---can be conceptualized as well as a means of producing an new form of individual/collective subjectivity that cannot be---at the moment---easily re-inscribed within the system that produced the collapse in the first place. nick Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote: Nick: Wow! I love your Webby intrusions and incursions: have you exhibited any
[-empyre-] The Temporality of Friendship
literature is credit-based, in terms of our faith in the veracity of the narrator, the fidelity of the narrator’s narration with respect to the particular memory which both substantiates and supports it, and in terms of our own credence with respect to the ability of a porous and aporetic language to grab hold of the world and its multifarious objects with some degree of accuracy, one clear enough to ensure a praxis of living. As for the credit without which there would be no friendship or acquaintanceship, and especially not a literature, a contemporary mutation within the sphere of human relations arises: how are we to invest in that new tabloid creature, the Frenemy (for example, Paris Hilton/Nicole Ritchie)? In Baudelaire’s prose poem Counterfeit Money from the collection Paris Spleen, friendship borders many things: dissimulation, philanthropic display, social obligation and, most critically, the truthfulness of truth, which at all moments in time might slip into the masquerade of the counterfeit. Here, the n+2, or, as Derrida terms it, the l’être-deux-à-parler, experiences the crisis of the simulacrum: in a sense, the two comprising the friendship pair in Baudelaire’s poem are frenemies from the get-go, their amity cemented by competition and conflict revealed through the politeness of sublimated pleasantries and the luxurious expenditure of tobacco (for anthropologists, a highly symbolic and meaningful gift not so much exchanged as exhausted through immolation). Generally speaking, aren’t we all “Captives of Capitalism?” The problem of capital is that it expertly absorbs the critique of capital: in some sense, it even orchestrates that critique, setting up a false dichotomy so that we might feel some pleasure at resolving the pseudo-antinomy. Unlike totalitarianism, which persecutes its opponents, capitalism invites antagonism, if only because the general agonistics at its core generates more capital; even in the wake of the current housing calamity, there is money to be made with the “Loan Mod” racket, for example. For me, the vital question is: is there an exterior to capital? True, there are parasitic responses to capital, like Freeganism, Voluntary Simplicitism, or squatting, but none of these achieve freedom from capital, their motivating force, express cause and raison d’être. It seems like the only way to break through capital is via terror, but even this insidious tactic gives capital new terrain to dominate after the dead are counted, collected and interred: for example, the rebuilding of Baghdad after the US bombs it as a response to 9/11, or the capital invested in the new World Trade Center monument. Investing in difference, as you so elegantly phrase it, is a key strategy to the operation of capital, which astutely realizes that even similarity must be marketed as dissimilarity. Truth be told, neither “difference” nor “différance” are inimical to capital: they are essential to its functioning, which is based almost entirely on variation, variegation and novelty. To resurrect Debord: the essence of contemporary capital is diffusion, as opposed to that of totalitarianism, which is concentration (think: Warhol’s Mao series, versus the “official” images of Mao decorating Communist China). Life may very well be a Benetton commercial. I mean, look at us: a fab British New Media artist conversing with an equally fab American poet about the nature of difference and its role in sustaining and accumulating capital. I think of the ad campaign for design house Moschino: “Consenting member of the fashion system.” Becoming aware of our complicities and capitalizing upon them may be the highest form of rebellion: I say this without irony, sarcasm, or regret. Ciao for now! *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:50:50 +0100 From: cinziacrem...@googlemail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Contretemps Cinzia, your invocation of the Derridean concept of a Contretemps is intriguing, and I would love to hear more. At the outset, it causes my consciousness to turn to Derrida?s idea about dissemination as the giving of that which can never come back to me: a squandering of the nom-de-p?re, a letting loose of the phallic function even more radical than occurs with respect to Judge Schreber?s psychosis. How do you connect contretemps with potlatch, all those Trobriand Islanders smashing plates and burning whale oil candles in a spectacle of unreciprocatable generosity? Also, since Derrida claims that, eccentrically, the gift sets the economic circle in motion (while it somehow also effractively breaks it apart), I wonder how you connect this account of an economic engine with contretemps, dissemination, waste and excess: the obscene underside of the gift, the squalor
[-empyre-] The Wiz
Thanks for the Detroit article--what a neat concept. Of course the best part
is that Stephanie Mills is involved with the project (it's a pomo dream come
true, unless the article refers to another Stephanie Mills, in which case it's
doppleganger time). Now I can't get The Medicine Song out of my head.
***
Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA
http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 14:35:14 -0400
From: davinheck...@gmail.com
To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Eddies, Whirlwinds, Trade Winds
I just read an article in the Detroit News on their new local currency:
http://www.detnews.com/article/20090323/BIZ/903230389/Detroit+cash+keeps+hometown+humming
It's not extra-marketable... but I do like that it tries to keep money
local.
Davin
On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 8:58 PM, { brad brace } bbr...@eskimo.com wrote:
On Sun, 5 Apr 2009, G.H. Hovagimyan wrote:
ghh...what might an 'extra-marketable' utopia look like...?
... In New York there are hundreds of artists collectives that
are now functioning outside of the market. They share loft spaces,
produce work online and offline and function despite the
market...
you'd know better than me G.H. (I haven't set foot in NYC
since the 70-80's), so I'm genuinely interested to know
about all these many suddenly successful artists' co-ops...
care to name a few? (or is this wistful posturing...)
/:b
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[-empyre-] Eddies, Whirlwinds, Trade Winds
Greetings, all! I’m quite excited to share this panel with such an eminent bunch, and look forward to undertaking some important reflection upon what the cultural ramifications of the current Wall Street debacle might be, both domestically and globally. Basically, I’ve written a book about Warhol which is currently forthcoming from Intertheory, so hopefully Warhol’s own relation to commerce, as well as the role he has been slated within pomo-ism proper by people like Jameson, will become a part of the discussion. Aside from Warhol, the place toward which my mind immediately turns as I think about what Nicholas refers to as the Immaculate Deception is Camille Paglia’s identification of Jacques Derrida as a junk-bond salesman in her “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders” (part of Sex, Art, and American Culture). I think my mind races to this piece of writing because it does raise the important question of the potential bankruptcy of theory in general (a risk that does not seem to plague philosophy quite the same way). Glancing anew at Derrida’s The Gift of Death, I take immense pleasure in the text’s flow, the beautiful post-structural play of surfaces that carry me away on currents of semantic glissement: perhaps she’s right, but without comprehending that the problematic she formulates is wrong because theory is nor philosophy, what it can give transcends the gross objectivity of a fact or datum. Still, there is Derrida’s love of counterfeit money in Gift and Given Time. How does this tropism speak to Madoff’s antics? To the culture that will flourish in the wake of collapse and that has flowered all along during these golden years of HELOC madness and Home Depot grand openings? To the “cultural logic” of late capitalism in general, and the late, late gerontic capitalism of today’s world? Places my mind travels to next: The marvelous bankruptcy of American culture in general—especially in its postmodern instantiation. Something for nothing, nothing for nothing. The Dotcom crash of the early millennium as prefigurement to the present real estate crash: the no-there-there of the virtual reasserts itself in the financial sector. 9/11 and the return of a historically meaningful present, pace Baudrillard’s post-history: what is post-postmodernism? Are we experiencing it now? Specifically, what comes next, after irony? The Pecker paradigm. “Yes We Can” becomes “Yes You Can”; the Obama slogan becomes a Pepsi mantra (or is it the Obama mantra becomes the Pepsi slogan?). Where do we go with this mutation? On a recent trip to Geneva, I stumbled across a department store (Manor-La Placette) built on the original site of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s boyhood home: a little placard, tender yet bearing the weight of history, read something to the effect of “Ice est né le petit Rousseau….’ How do we read this repurposing of Rousseau in light of his “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences”? How do we connect the cultural bankruptcy Rousseau outlines with recent Wall Street hijinks? Commerce and culture alike straddle an abyss of currency and meaning: what does each realm have to say to the other regarding risk and venture? Alright: this little poetic scatter catalogues my various points of inception. I am looking forward to reading everyone else’s. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ _ Quick access to your favorite MSN content and Windows Live with Internet Explorer 8. http://ie8.msn.com/microsoft/internet-explorer-8/en-us/ie8.aspx?ocid=B037MSN55C0701A___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
