Re: [-empyre-] Book Piracy and Alienated Labour
Greetings all, Interesting topic. I think that it all comes down to what a locale shall decide is 'free' - (e.g. police or the fire department) - and then what shall not be free, like an ipod, no? In the end, we decide, through our actions, and willingness to demand certain actions from governing bodies, academic and otherwise, that certain objects and services shall be free. Most social systems, function as hybrid systems, that we tweak one way or another for different objects and services - rather than function as zero sum systems... Most people don't seem to care about the pimp and ho nature of mass media publishing...most writers and researchers assent, I imagine, as they want to write the 'hit' - and benefit from the strategy of corporate withholding and distribution, which creates and manages user demand and celebrity that is being criticized here...academics are probably the most collusively complicit writers in the world, in this respect... If academics, and other writers, truly wanted to take a more active role in the distribution of their work, they would withhold it from excessively corporatized outlets...and manage and distribute it themselves. NRIII Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D NRIII for Congress 2010 http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: Michael Dieter mdie...@unimelb.edu.au To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Thu, June 3, 2010 10:47:28 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Book Piracy and Alienated Labour Hi Sean, Emmett and the empyre list, I'm one of the curators of the topic for this month, along with Morgan Currie and John Haltiwanger. Thought it’s a good time to introduce myself through some reflections on this topic of distribution. To pick up a number of issues flagged by Emmett around sustainability, I’m interested in asking Sean whether he can speak more about if there are plans to perpetuate the ethos of the RG.org experiment now that the site appears to be stalled? And on this point, I’m wondering more specifically whether RG.org has a politics, and how might that be defined. I understand that providing access to resources and extra-institutional education are aims, but what underpins this desire, is it an idea of radical democracy? A liberalism? An anti-capitalism? Of course, I’ve noticed that the way you speak about the project during interviews does imply a certain kind of politics of networking. Partly something out of your hands, not exactly based on critique, but about connective or reticular alternatives (“Rather than thinking of it like a new building ... imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.”). The relation between filesharing and intellectual property is itself a complex situation, however. I’m wondering about the point of indistinction with this logic of networking at the center of RG.org as an exchange economy. I'm thinking of Matteo Pasquinelli's recent work here, who has suggestively drawn attention to the parasitic dimensions of contemporary informational economies – utilizing the philosophy of Michel Serres – partly as a critique of free culture ideologies. A difficult point for radical thinking to grasp, he claims, “is that all the immaterial (and gift) economy has a material, parallel and dirty counterpart where the big money is exchanged. See MP3 and iPod, P2P and ADSL, free music and live concerts, Barcelona lifestyle and real estate speculation, art world and gentrification, global brands and sweatshops” (http://matteopasquinelli.com/docs/immaterialcivilwar.pdf). From this perspective, even liberated knowledge exchange-based sites like RG.org (or blogs like Monoskop, not to mention massive e-book trading forums like Gigapedia) are not only targeted as threats to the rise of e-Reader markets, but also paradoxically prepare the way for devices like the iPad or Kindle in the first place. Liberated resources here return to commodification, not directly, but on the side. Thinking about Emmett's post, I agree we need to seriously re-think the general impulse towards free, but also question the economics of this situation politically. We should definitely support, celebrate and fight for open access to resources, but it seems like there's no point being theoretically free, if there's no possibility of sustaining that autonomy. I'm wondering Sean if you have any thoughts on this paradoxical situation? -- Michael Dieter School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/research-students/michael-dieter.html ___ 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
[-empyre-] on eli broad
greetings alla fine and 'animated' month at hand - I am following it with intrigue...please forgive the unrelated interjection mentioning eli broad - but I thought it was of interest to those following that aspect of complicity, regarding last month's -empyre - exchange, as his name did come up in an interesting entanglement: http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/mpls/messages/post/6Ym6HJigCggcJ7KSo6ifit pax et lux Nick Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D NRIII for Congress 2010 http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] art and ethics
...as I see it, without getting too heady about a common labor dispute, if art is an accomplice of life, it's difficult to see how the theater artists could ignore the circumstances interfering in their art lives...unless, 'injustice' was a welcomed function of that art life...I think you do well to bring up the Law, because it is more than a trope we can dismiss, in the sense that, for most of life, it is inescapable in its major forms of action and side-effects of governance; the Law may only be edited, or even for some, avoided, but never escaped. I think I can appreciate the Law, then, as what you mean by the shared ground upon which complicity, of all kinds, eventuates... nick From: simon s...@clear.net.nz To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Sun, January 24, 2010 8:44:32 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] art and ethics Dear Empyreans, Having just picked up a copy of Philosophy in the Present (Polity, 2009), from its pages Alain Badiou announces incommensurability as constitutive of the philosophical situation, the situation in which philosophy can create problems (or concepts). This would seem to be pertinent to the turn this discussion has taken, to the potentials for complicity between the corporation and art - perhaps I am reading it wrongly. But then again perhaps this turn can in turn be characterised in terms of its Kantian inflection, specifically an inspiration to consider ethics as a shared ground upon which complicity eventuates: on the Law. So, then, just asking for it, for a critique that goes to unground this implicit and unhappy co-incidence of art and ethics by this simple and easily repeatable formula: the time of art is not that of power; the ethics - on which, the Law or from which, the Law - the rules - of the power are incompossible with those of art - with those little laws of difference, that immanent Rule, which in making art is the only one worth listening to - and may just as soon make us outlaws; in short, what we are dealing with here are incommensurables. So, Badiou, invoking Mizoguchi's /Crucified Lovers, /particularly the lovers' withdrawal into the smile as they are led to the punishment which the law against adultery has conferred upon them - crucifixion - says: Well, in these magnificent shots, Mizoguchi's art not only resists death but leads us to think that love too resists death. This creates a complicity between love and art - one which in a sense we've always known about. [trans. P. Thomas A. Toscano] He is led here himself by Deleuze quoting Malraux to the effect that art is what resists death and in this situation will not give that the lovers are happy to meet their fate but that in a sense they have already overcome it. So in a similarly philosophical situation - one in which disinterest can possibly prevail - Badiou relates the story of Archimedes's summons to the Emperor Marcellus's court; wherein the soldier sent to collect the great scientist on behalf of the great power of the victor is ignored and eventually takes his sword and ends the former's life: Archimedes has asked for time to complete his 'demonstration,' a drawing in the sand of geometrical figures. Badiou glosses this confluence of incommensurables in terms of time: the impatience of the Emperor's emissary and the artist's time's otherness, an internal time, created with the problem in the act of describing the problem, or in the act of the problem's expression. However, I have followed this discussion with interest, because of an experience of a complicity which I haven't yet found here, and which I've ever since thought of as the complicity of the artist... with the destruction of the institutions on which the artist depends. In the early eighties in New Zealand theatre workers went out on strike, nationally. All seven professional theatres closed. Actors had voted to back technical and backstage workers, against the management, at that time a loaded word. And words, it must be said, were at the cutting edge, not of the dispute, but of the problem: the co-option of the language of the artform by the language of industrial relations. Productivity replaced productions. Industry displaced theatre or art. Artists redesignated themselves workers, workers all. The unforeseen outcome was that the formerly egalitarian theatres were stratified: where pay parity had existed between backstage and acting company, where in fact unity of the company had been the unofficial prejudice as it included back- and front- of the house, on-stage as well, demarcation made it thereafter almost impossible that an actor might, say, hang a light, and the theatres slipped back into star-systems, into British rep style hierarchizations, into, therefore, older formations. One step forward, two back. Could actors have envisaged that by their industrial action, by their complicity with, well, their
[-empyre-] art and ethics
on the curious intersection of the philosophical arts and ethics... http://vodpod.com/watch/2907756-bbc-news-world-news-america-cornel-wests-note-to-obama nick___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] art and ethics
...but how to de-link these states seems impenetrable - like the recent Supreme Court ruling that will certainly unleash a whole new genre of freely circulating corporatist art, no? nick From: Johanna Drucker druc...@gseis.ucla.edu To: jha...@haberarts.com; soft_skinned_space emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Mon, January 11, 2010 8:12:46 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13 John, Much different. I agree. I do want to make a space for art that is not tasked with being the moral conscience of the culture too. Johanna On Jan 11, 2010, at 4:09 PM, John Haber wrote: The analogy to rebranding is very interesting indeed, in an excellent post. Let me ask more about it, though. Now, to me it's only an analogy, and of course whatever venting we may wish to have about torture and Israeli policy aren't instantly illuminating regarding art except as a kind of red flag. (Hey, there's injustice in the world, so don't let it happen in this realm.) Indeed, it could actually disguise the problem, by suggesting distinct realms after all, which the whole problematic of complicity in art is supposed to question. Thus, my question would be this: if the political analogy is silence, then does that open possibilities for art, in which making visible is part of the game? Now, I realize that acknowledging something, as argued well, doesn't make it go away. But it's still different from silence. John ___ 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 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Lascaux to Asylum Art
I have the same feeling when contemplating caves in Lascaux and Altamira...that there is something - original - about this activity...but, it is true that purity is a romantic limit, not that romance is all bad news...still, how might this consideration limn from Lascaux to unrecognized Asylum Art? nick From: Gerry Coulter gcoul...@ubishops.ca To: soft_skinned_space emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Tue, January 12, 2010 5:14:06 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13 Art is not responsible to anyone or anything. Neither should academics feel the need to speak for others. It is nice when are makes the world more enigmatic -- artists who disentangle themselkves from theory do the world a favour. Art is amoral, irresponsible, it ceases to be art when we make it otherwise. Political art and political theory share the same overwrought character. Art is stronger than politics and morality -- it comes from a time before politics, from elsewhere. best g From: empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of davin heckman [davinheck...@gmail.com] Sent: January 12, 2010 12:19 PM To: soft_skinned_space Cc: jha...@haberarts.com; soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13 This is shaping up to be an interesting week on Empyre. Thank you, everyone. Sometimes, I think it is good to think about art, politics, criticism, theory, morality, etc. from a naive perspective, a sort of psychic backtracking, so that we follow the paths that we have avoided in the past, and imagine what would be if we were not where we are today. The knot of art, theory, politics, and commerce that we live in right now is singular, and so it is treacherous to extrapolate this into a general theory of how artists or critics or anyone should operate (in fact, all speculation is fraught with peril, because other people do and want other things). If art is not meant to communicate, what is it for? Is it for the artist to express him or herself? If so, then for what end? I don't want to burden art with too much of a redemptive mission... but at the very least, I think art ought to be communicable in some way. That the event can be reproduced (as a concept, as a record, a trace, an object, a text, whatever)... that it is has to go from one person to another person in some way that intervenes against the flow of time and space. Art has to refer to an idea that at least one other person (even a hypothetical one) could agree upon. To offer the most meager definition of art, at the very least, it could be like the words in your head that give shape to your ideas. Undoubtedly, our brains do things. Animals' brains do things. But when we put these neural actions into representation, whether we share this representation or not, we enter into that socially constructed space outside of the whatever-would-have-happened-had-we-not-intervened (nature? the animal? physics?). Now, this is a naive explanation of art. It ignores many of the specifics that determine what we think about when we talk about art today. It even lends art a certain innocence that might be a good conceit to work under, but which itself is just an artifice erected against doubt. But I think it also ties the notion of art to politics in the sense that art always has something to do with the other (the other who it aims to represent, the other who is its intended audience, the other who it is supposed to be hidden from, etc.) Art, as long as it is made and has any meaning, would seem to be concerned with communication of some sort. And thus it seems that it cannot easily be untangled from the moral, the ethical, the political. Furthermore, anything that expresses human will could conceivably be formed in the awareness of how this will effect others (friends, enemies, nations, environments, species... even, perhaps, yourselfthe other that you will become). What limits we want to draw around introspection and moral accountability are things that we might be able to hammer out some kind of agreement on. We might even be able to establish some system like the one sketched out by Matthew Arnold, where artists do the primary work (and make the messes) while critics do the lesser work (present the work as socially valuable). Maybe we can hammer out some other system of art with no critics, but just robots which count diggs and direct individuals to works that were sufficiently dugg by people like you (with a little bit of extra recommending going to sponsored content --yuck). In any case, figuring out just what the relationship between art, criticism, and audience carries with it moral implications. But to just say that art and politics or art and theory do not belong together, while it might solve some historically specific problems we have today with art
Re: [-empyre-] Delightenment as Mass Perception
the arts of complicity, with regard to predatorial unicellular beauties benefiting from cooperation and cooptation, albeit accidentally and contingently, and with no concept of altruism... harold ford implodes... http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-14/harold-ford-implodes/?cid=hp:exc Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D NRIII for Congress 2010 http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org From: Michael Angelo Tata, PhD mt...@ipublishingllc.com To: Soft Skinned Space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wed, January 13, 2010 7:09:29 PM Subject: [-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
Re: [-empyre-] self and others
it seems there has always been an unnameable economy, Bataille referred to as the 'general' economy...we, quite powerfully, modulate such an economy; socially, technically - for better and worse. An interesting biological aspect of this economy,Tata referenced via Margulis' work on symbiosis. The ontological complicity of us all - I think of it as - for living things, that this unnameable economy substantiates our first metaphysical principle...that of capital. Bataille connected it to the Sun - and in a sense, he was right, because of the Sun's primary connection to life. The further theoretical connection is our human consciousness of capital, and its particular currencies we identify and trade - artistic, political, and otherwise. The negotiation and reconciliation you invoke between pleasure and work, Christiane, seems beholden to a first principle complicity - that of the unnameable economy, which gives rise to a metaphysics of capital, to which we all subscribe, by virtue of our membership in life. Another, perhaps second principle complicity, revolves around what Dienstag identified as the 'first' thought - that things could be otherwise. I would say that the extent to which we are willing to activate the first thought - that things could otherwise - directly denies or affirms our ontological relation to our first principle complicity. As you can see then, one can approach the escape velocity of complicity as a limit, but never completely achieve it, in life. Perhaps that is the perfection of martyrdom, death and God. One's perfect fidelity to an idea or complicity can never again be challenged by the facts of one's material existence. Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D NRIII for Congress 2010 http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: Christiane Robbins c...@mindspring.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wed, January 13, 2010 2:15:57 PM 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
[-empyre-] a genealogy of disappearance?
We've spent some time discussing an assumed complicity with the world and its events, art, politics and thought. We acknowledge our position as an assumption, however well evinced and founded. Might we take another tack? Perhaps it is too late for complicity. What if, by now, when complicity rises to the level of consciousness - complicity is already over. What then? And what is our status? Baudrillard: Reality exists through language; then, within the shadow of language, it quietly ceases to exist. Doubtless its the same with the very recent concept of globalization, which has itself gone global. Mightn't this sudden spread of the concept mean that globalization is, to all intents and purposes, over and that we're moving on to something else now? (Noailles and Baudrillard, 108) Virality, has gone viral - it is over? Descartes acknowledged the cogito - it is over? Christ acknowledges the power of love - and it is over? Our complicity is acknowledged - so what is its fate? Or are there further steps required in the processes of resolution, or dialecticism? Nick Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D NRIII for Congress 2010 http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] put your theory where your praxis is
Greetings all! Happy Independence Day weekend! In the name of putting my theory where my praxis is - I am running for Congress in 2010, FL District 24...tell your friends and neighbors! http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html ...and an Independence Day gift: Bjork - Declare Independence http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igOWR_-BXJU pax et lux, NRIII Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] On Currencies, Capitalism, and the Fed
absolutely julian...like fergie might say, 'we need to stop those chickens from jacking our swagger' and further, 'we need to stop being so 2000 and late, and start being so 3008!' :-) NRIII Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: Julian Oliver jul...@julianoliver.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 3:40:56 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] On Currencies, Capitalism, and the Fed ..on Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 12:03:13PM -0700, Nicholas Ruiz III wrote: bh...let us be fair ...i'm sure you spend and earn capital, so the idealization and/or criminalization of a legal and legitimate livelihood seems petty and trite...and an organization like Goldman Sachs employs tens of thousands of people, so why pick on all of them, when your issue probably applies to a handful of aristocracy across a number of institutions, financial and otherwise...and the phenomenon of greed applies to everyone in every discipline...that is what rules and laws are for, no? It sounds like you would outlaw financial trading...would you outlaw trade in art as well? A more realistic approach, I believe is to acknowledge one's complicity in exchange, and to argue for appropriate rules and regulations regarding the trade of whatever objects we have agreed could and should trade...in fact, this is how it works, and it is what we have done over the millenia, since Mesopotamia, at the very least. The true questions revolve around the Law, wherein, unfortunately, an Aristocracy stacks the odds in their favor, in every industry, and in every fashion...better law-making and not, 'egg-throwing' will serve all better in the long run, no? While you are writing to BH here and not me I thought I'd drop a couple of words on this. I agree with you Nick. I fear however we, as complicit yet critical subjects of the capital state, are forever detectives that turn up after the crime. The formation of new law, the re-definition and affirmation of existing laws, are inextricably dependent upon those that will act outside of them, a 'legal ecology' of sorts. Corporations have historically proven to operate at the threshold of what is legal, taking advantage of their disproportionate capital buffer in the event of retribution and/or state intervention. State regulation and rigorous critique - as building blocks for pre-emptive legal intervention and citizen safe-guarding - are always late. In this sense, state enforced transparency and fair-play are seeds of criminal innovation in the corporate sector. Nonetheless, this is a good thing: let's at least make it harder for them! I think it's necessary to underscore however that a capital state is /necessarily/ configured for the abuse of its subjects, it is just a question of what is bearable. Any 'economy' implies scarcity, the maldistribution of wealth and, as such, laws that operate within such a frame are innately disempowered at the citizen layer. Greetings from Lima, Peru, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Madrid, Spain currently: Lima, Peru about: http://julianoliver.com - Original Message From: Brian Holmes brian.hol...@wanadoo.fr To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wednesday, April 8, 2009 6:40:52 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] On Currencies, Capitalism, and the Fed On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 10:26 PM, jeff pierce zentra...@live.ca wrote: I'm so tired of hearing about centralized this and globalization that as every time I hear it in the media I get the feeling that they're just warming us up to what will eventually be. Governments are too big to begin with, as they are a big part of this problem. They can't handle their affairs on a national level, what makes anybody think they can handle the affairs at a world level. The thought alone makes me shiver. Where would you hide if you didn't like the system that is in place? Nowhere as far as I can tell. At this point (and for about the last ten years) the same consensus rules the entire Western world. Asia and Latin America are of course different, so try your luck. Maybe you will find a place where entrepreneurs are allowed to commit climate change and foster horrendous social inequality without any oversight. You might be happy there, if you are rich and willing to have armed guards of course. At one point between October-December it was so hard to trade and carry any positions over the weekend because we (traders) feared some type of government intervention over the weekend which would cause the markets to move in totally random ways. This is still very much a concern, but it hasn't been as bad as of late. This is really neoliberal bullshit. You think the markets are free for your petty day-trading greed? That's foolish. The big government you abhor (with the very terms that Reagan, Thatcher Co. taught
Re: [-empyre-] Contretemps
well, the whole concept of networking as a gift capitalism, where everyone is engaged in a large back-scratching partyseems to me as contretemps as it gets...! :-) 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: Thursday, April 23, 2009 6:40:31 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Contretemps Contretemps as network or network-ing? Do tell! *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:47:49 -0700 From: edi...@intertheory.org To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Contretemps Kantian distinctions notwithstanding, has this all not simply dissolved (evolved?) into what jt referred to (albeit in a different manner than the 80s and post-80s Silicon Valley sense) as 'networking'? NRIII Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org/ From: Cinzia Cremona cinziacrem...@googlemail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 7:50:50 PM 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 and effulgence we seek to manage and mask through economics and ethics. PS?Love your vid! Are you trapped inside the gift? Perhaps you are the gift. Thanks MA for such piercing questions. Of course I am the gift! In the 'The Politics of Friendship', Derrida suggests contretemps as a radical and indispensable dissymetry between the offer and the return I can expect. And it is always I, as the relationship can only be mentioned from the point of view of the offerer. I shall call you friend in the hope that you will become, by my interpellation, my friend. My gift creates an obligation, but it does not ask for a direct return. Not sure how a letting loose of the phallic function applies here, although desire plays a big part. Contretemps is based on difference (differance?) - not at the same time, not in the same place, not with the same person, etc. Personally, I feel called to invest in a larger loop of exchange. It makes more sense to offer gifts to those who cannot return them. Similarly, I hope that I will be offered gifts that I cannot return by those who have resources I have no access to. I am not sure how to think about potlatch in the 21st century ... As a process, it seems to me to stem from a sense of kinship, of US and THEM, which does not apply anymore. What are the marks of my friends and of my enemies? How would I know which 'other' is worth my investment? I'd rather make the pot fuller with what I have in abundance. At some point, someone else will do the same with different gifts. Of course, this is naive, steeped in neo-liberalism and captive of capitalism! But perhaps it is not that far from an Open Source approach to production and self organization. And being kind to those who are not of the same kind seems to me a good investment. -- Cinzia Visions in the Nunnery 22 to 31 May 2009 openvisions.org Windows Live™ SkyDrive™: Get 25 GB of free online storage. Check it out.___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Beyonce/Burger King
Good morning...Finding her way indeed...Haraway's When Species Meet intersects right here: What, however, if human labor turns out to be only part of the story of lively capital? Lively Capital? Not very profound once we've made the leap to understanding that Capital is but a currency of the Code...but she biocapitalizes this for us in an interesting way...please read on: Of all philosophers, Marx understood relational sensuousness, and he thought deeply about the metabolism between human beings and the rest of the world enacted in living labor. As I read him, however, he was finally unable to escape from the humanist teleology of that labor--the making of man himself. In the end, no companion species, reciprocal inductions, or multispecies epigenetics are his story. But what if the commodities of interest to those who live within the regime of Lively Capital cannot be understood within the categories of the natural and the social that Marx came so close to reworking but was finally unable to do under the goad of human exceptionalism? So after use and exchange value, Haraway allows for 'encounter value, wherein the encounters of lively beings (dogs especially) materialize a problematics of suspension for human exceptionalism, and theoretical treatment of the commerce and consciousness, evolution and bioengineering, ethics and utilities that are all in play. For us, this month, it seems we are also passengers on such a journey, wherein we are delineating biocapital's artistic impulses along the nerve fibers of our humanly, if tragicomic, artfully financial, networks of time and money. Might we, too, on -empyre-, need to escape from a distinctively 'humanist' teleology of art and creativity, as it relates to our discussion of human financial networks this month? 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 10:52:36 PM Subject: [-empyre-] Beyonce/Burger King Joseph and/or Cynthia and/or tout le monde: What is at stake in the separation or de-conflation (de-flation?) of consciousness, perception, reading and viewing? Is there an edifice to be built, a ground, a foundation to be laid? Or are we being rhizomic, these diverse strands and filaments creeping across a horizontal plane without impacting one another’s biotic meanderings? Is it the time for Husserlian epoché, a bracketing and subtracting that leads to a basic yet transcendent structure that can make sense of the mind’s organization? Perhaps Donna Haraway’s glance at canine consciousness in her The Companion Species Manifesto might find a way into our discussion, especially as, manifesto-wise, it supplements her remarks on cyborg consciousness (non-Oedipal, and not so much based on viewing or reading as on conceiving: sort of a perverse eidetics whose holism is the product of radical hybridity and bio-technical disjunction). What happens when we perceive, rather than read, a letter of the alphabet, as in the famous Erté images so important to Barthes? When a language we cannot speak registers only as gobbledygook (an audio-perceiving that is not even a “listening” proper, like when I’m at the nail salon and the Uzbek ladies carry on)? I think of a friend who was kind enough to translate some of my poetry into Arabic for publication in an Algiers journal, and how I could not read it, yet perceived and loved what to me were squiggles and wiggles—everything except for the expression “Burger King,” which was not translatable, either linguistically or culturally, and transcended the squiggle on multiple levels. Now we must add Cazwell’s “I Seen Beyonce at Burger King” to the soundtrack we’ve been developing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWZm9SfGgSU To read is first and foremost to perceive, as the physicality or material of language enters the mind’s eye and the eye’s eye, where it will be processed, mined for meaning, exchanged for semantic currency. Perception so often slides beneath reading, those forgotten moments of ingestion and consumption whose very substance is a pre-condition for semantics, poetics, prosody, the performative utterance, the constative description, even the iffy decision to step onto the first rung of Wittgenstein’s ladder. And if these layers—perception, reading, cognition—are to remain separate, and not rhizomically separate, but some other kind of “adverbially” separate, then which metaphors are most relevant to the description of the arrangement of these strata? Pousse-café? Terrine? Some kind of textual tectonics? I think of specific gravity, sediment, even Husserl’s “sinking down” (Phenom of ITC): but would these strata or layers interact in such a fashion? What I am attempting to characterize is the relation of these zones, how they come
[-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
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 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
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 53, Issue 15
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. Still, I believe our relationship with the ruse of capital is far less theological, then it is biomolecular... Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org From: Cinzia Cremona cinziacrem...@googlemail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2009 6:44:29 AM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 53, Issue 15 Oh I do admire the qualities of certain systems ... absorbing, reappropriating, exploiting happen on all sides of an argument. I would like to question some assumptions ... 1. We are so used to thinking about 'capital' as 'money'. There are other capitals, values, systems of exchange. I do like the way you highlight the thread of friendship in the Madoff affair. Were his social skills, his capacity to befriend, his first resource? Now that this narrative has come to a dramatic denouement, it is harder to think how else those resources could have been invested, and what returns they could have matured. Friendship produces other values, which sometimes translate into money and sometimes translate into less quantifiable values. Some of the resources that can be accessed because of friendship need not be bought! And this goes on all around us, but it is not part of the big capitalist narrative - it does not translate into money - which makes it harder to include it into the equation. I wonder if the critique of capitalism is not always struggling to catch up when it is too late. In commenting on the commercialisation of everything 'green', we should also comment on those who invested in the environment when there was no hope of monetary return. Some will have generated money on top of other things. Does this mean that capitalism has appropriated environmentalim completely? 2. If capitalism was not so over encompassing, would we want to find alternatives? Personally, I think one is never 'outside' anything. I also think that 'pre-' (add to your taste: -capitalist, -linguistic, -subjective, etc) ways of being are lovely philosophical fables. Let's ask ourselves the ultimate naive question: WHY do we want to be free from capitalism? What do we mean? What do we think we would be like if we were? 3. Questions of value ... Good point, what if my gift is refused? I might get it wrong ... I might be offering you something that is of great value to me, but means nothing to you. Isn't this the foundation of the wastefulness of Potlach generosity? Reciprocity (competition too?) can be based on quantity or on shared values. That's where capitalism's quantifiable and interchangeable currencies make things easier. Investing in difference might mean taking the trouble to evaluate what is of value to you specifically. And taking responsibility for offering the wrong gift ... Do we really all value the same things? Are you really exploiting me if I want your friendship instead of your money in exchange for a service or a commodity? 4. I wonder how you would translate the phallic function into female terms: an orgasm that doesn't even produce seed? Isn't shedding an egg a month a life of dissemination without harvest? (dis-egg-ation ...) Investment in sheer desire for living? 5. Your very beautiful point about credit says a lot about interwoven systems of value, singularity and multiplicity. Without friendships, Madoff would have not accumulated money. Does this mean his friendship was not true? Or was it also counterfeit? Does necessarily one exclude the other? Deleuze and Guattari open 'A Thousand Plateaus' with ... since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. I also wonder if betrayal is not part of friendship from the very beginning, at least in Derrida. He seems to depict a set of obligations that will inevitably be disappointed. He also delves in Nietzsche's parallel invocation: 'oh my enemy ...'. By the way I am living, do I create more debt or credit? In what proportion? What is do be done? I'll have to leave the conversation here, as I'll be away from computers for a week
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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Re: [-empyre-] On higher ed...
Higher ed produces docile bodies, within the ranks of faculty and admin, and
within the student docile bodyand we have enabled it, as a 'public' that
allows the sheer collusion of the aristocratic bureaucracies to act in the name
of 'the people'...the educational system is so far gone, and yet we continue to
allow the gutting of our K-20 schools in every conceivable fashion. One may
conclude from this that the public simply couldn't care less, and/or lacks the
will, vision and resolve to do something concrete about it.
If the humanities is to survive the instrumental perfect storm engulfing it, it
will have to be saved from outside of higher ed...for within the institutional
settings of American academia...it is already a dead man walking...
nick
Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D
Editor, Kritikos
http://intertheory.org
- Original Message
From: joseph tabbi jta...@gmail.com
To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Sent: Tuesday, April 7, 2009 12:02:24 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] On Currencies, Capitalism, and the Fed
This is a very helpful overview and (as a matter of personal politics)
I agree with everything Jeff says.
Especially the bit about 'poor legislature,' weak oversight, and (in
an earlier post) the systematic weakening of the dollar. I would just
add that these policies seem to me a part of a trend that Harvey
describes under the term, 'accumulation by dispossession.' An early
model, was when the Thatcher administration encouraged the sale of
tenement homes in an economically troubled district close to downtown
London, at what seemed favorable prices allowing distressed owners to
walk away (from the city) with what seemed like a nice chunk of cash
while others came in themselves to do the work of renovating the old
houses, bringing them up to standard and in the process often pricing
the homes out of the range of any who were not working in the city's
soon to be booming financial and service industries. Those who 'sold
out' might never buy back in, and that nice bit of cash, as it turned
out, didn't go very far in the brave new economy. That cottage in the
Isle of Wight turned out to be 'too dear' after all. The former
Londoners were dispossessed while prices increased and capital
accumulated (somewhere).
That's of course just one example (Harvey's example - and I hope I
don't get too many details wrong, I'm writing from memory here). I
expect we all have seen the same patterns in cities everywhere. Some
certainly benefited from having the dollar value of their house
appreciate over the years, although what this did was to make one's
home itself the site of speculation. The recent downturn indicates
that doing so may not have been such a good idea, for either national
economies or a large number of household economies.
Apart from the economics, though, there is the phenomenon described by
Davin, of the creeping commodification of everything, even weddings.
And certainly higher education - which of all the options Davin lists
does seem to me to be moving in the direction of a skills-based
legitimation for the better endowed universities, and a glorified
high-school setting for undergrads at not so well funded institutions.
At the graduate level, graduating Ph.D's without marketable skills are
clearly in no way guaranteed to work in the research tracks they've
trained for.
In an earlier post I set out a proposal for e-literature that I hope
might be a model for de-commodification of higher education generally
- at least in the Digital Humanities. (Ah, Bartleby! Ah, Digital
Humanities!) But at the same time, I notice that the grants being won
by people and institutions in this field are generally grounded in the
development of specific skills and tools. Given the highly
commercialized nature of the environment in which we work - computers,
offices, communications networks - I do think some modus vivendi has
to be reached between a skills-based economy and a protected ('soft')
space for research and unimpeded scholarly conversation.
Including a 'soundtrack' might not be a bad idea actually, since
that's something concrete you can ask for in a grant or proposal. A
Global Positioning System, a Second Life meeting space, lots of
software and meeting rooms and repeated conference travel and
computers that need upgrading yearly: these are all ways that
commodities can be worked into proposals and you can ask for something
seemingly concrete. These things ARE being worked in and often this is
done creatively and conscientiously. My only hope is that a space will
be reserved for what is perhaps measurable but not strictly
commodifiable: for example, the reading of works of literature, the
viewing of works of art, and the act of listening to composiitions -
this is a kind of literary/aesthetic 'work' that should not be
clocked, but can and perhaps should be registered more often in the
place where such things increasingly are performed: online. The
commentaries
[-empyre-] children of the damned
Perhaps it is to say we are the 'children of the damned'...we can be creative in GHH's village-oriented utopian loft scene, but even in that 'extra-marketable' milieu, trade occurs...even the most wet socialist dream involves copius amounts of red-blooded exchange of materials, ideas, data, feelings and other forms of capital...in the end we are all capitalists, even as we creatively negotiate how we participate in the protocols of 'sharing,' no? Dreams of social optimization do not preclude exchange, such dreams serve as experimental data to be used in the augmentation of our integral reality. It does very little good to attempt to criminalize one segment of the exchange matrix relative to another...if a market exists, it exists! However, this does not mean that all forms of trade should be sanctioned...human trafficking, for example, as postmodern slavery should be eradicated...but what's wrong with day-trading? It's the rules that get put in place by the aristocracy that we should be most concerned with...the rules that stack the game of trade in their favor...and all of us have had to deal with such aristocratic manipulation on one level or another... NRIII 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: Monday, April 6, 2009 3:54:28 AM Subject: [-empyre-] Perversities I think the point might be that Christianity can only be defended perversely. Even if we stick with Kierkegaard's analysis of the Abraham/Isaac story, and with what Derrida does with it in his ethical investigation into the “economic” meaning of the gift, I can only fulfill my obligations as Christian by defying the ethical code to which I am beholden. If I only follow the equivalent of Kant's categorical imperative, I fail in executing my duty, since my truest duty of all is to risk being ejected from a social and even religious order by giving in to the absolute responsibility I owe the Other. I am irreplaceable, and my acts do not have to be replicable by all or any: my responsibility is not general or generic. Zizek's perversity is not necessarily Derrida's, or Kierkegaard's, as his involves my phantasmic relation to the Absolute, whose very fragility gives birth to its sublimity. In essence the Absolute needs me, in my singularity and finitude, and hence displays a surprising fragility. If anything, Zizek calls to the fore the profoundly Judeo-Christian character of psychoanalytic discourse in general, and I appreciate the risk he takes at formulating his own ethical position on the matter. That Courbet’s L’origine du Monde has a central role in Zizek’s defense of the Christian legacy is as perverse as perversity can get. I am not sure how to bring these reflections back around to the Market, free trade, or the housing crisis, but I'm sure there's a way. Any ideas? *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 11:08:53 -0500 From: jta...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] entanglement A belated word, regarding 'worth.' As Jeff notes, it's a Holy Grail and likely to remain one because if the 'real worth' of commodities were ever determined, that would be the end of markets as we know them today. Imagine that the dollar value of commodities could be known precisely, and suppose this knowledge could be circulated immediately and accurately, and suppose also that the kind of analytical instruments used by disciplined traders were available to everyone. Further, suppose that political conditions were stable, and not only stable but more or less hands off so that trading could carry on relatively freely, without protections or government interventions that skew the market. (Jeff you're right, I am fond of utopian scenarios: they're good for thought-experiments.) I imagine, fairly soon, the temptations to gamble would decrease, and the field would be left to disciplined professionals free to participate in a self-regulating market. Capital would flow toward industries grounded in real productive capacity. Inequalities would be greatly lessened but in this ideal case, wouldn't the low level of profits make the capitalist game entirely uninteresting to producers and traders? Wouldn't a totally free and totally transparent market, and the removal of barriers to trade, also remove the basic social underpinnings of the market system? Unlike that town in Germany (where the bank really was robbed after a TV documentary), Global free trade is not just my own or the media's utopian fiction. Globalization is a narrative that has gained worldwide traction (in admittedly less than ideal circumstances but when are economic conditions ever ideal?). One
[-empyre-] local currencies
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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Re: [-empyre-] A strange bit of luck
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 that constitute our own professional practice to seriously consider the problems of the global everyday. In this exercise, the many existing forms of Marxist critique are a valuable starting point, but they too must be willing to suspend their inner certainty about understanding world histories in advance. In all these instances, academics from the privileged institutions of the West (and the North) must be prepared to reconsider, in the manner I have pointed to, their conventions about world knowledge and about the protocols of inquiry (research) that they too often take for granted. (Appadurai 19)\ Peace! Davin ___ 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-] On Currencies, Capitalism, and the Fed
...it does seem, lately, that every time the market takes a dive, the media then announces a surprise speech of no consequence by a government official...in some attempt to prop it up, no? NRIII Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org From: jeff pierce zentra...@live.ca To: -empyre- empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Monday, April 6, 2009 10:26:13 PM Subject: [-empyre-] On Currencies, Capitalism, and the Fed 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 appreciate at 10%/year, every year. And all of this led to the ensuing subprime debacle and credit crises. 2. The SEC failed to do it's job allowing major corruption with the financial system like Madoff. 3. The Government's reaction to all of this proves time and time again that they have no real idea on how to handle this. They are throwing everything at this hoping something will stick, literally gambling the future of American on a hunch that massive money printing and quantitative easing will solve everything. Why can't they realise that you can't solve a problem with the very same cause of the problem in the first place. So why is a one world currency bad? In theory it's not, but in the practical application and the greed that lives within the financial industry would ruin it. It's puts to much power in the hands of too few. I'm so tired of hearing about centralized this and globalization that as every time I hear it in the media I get the feeling that they're just warming us up to what will eventually be. Governments are too big to begin with, as they are a big part of this problem. They can't handle their affairs on a national level, what makes anybody think they can handle the affairs at a world level. The thought alone makes me shiver. Where would you hide if you didn't like the system that is in place? At least now if you don't like the the United States, you can move (like me--to Canada). The world needs diversity as much in the cultural sense as in the financial sense. Checks and balances if you will. The currency should be the health barometer of a country. I can't even fathom how a one would currency would effect the business cycles between countries with different types of governments. I feel that people throw around the term capitalism too much. The United States does not operate under a capitalistic state at this point in time. It's some hybrid cross of socialism, capitalism, and possibly totalitarianism. At one point between October-December it was so hard to trade and carry any positions over the weekend because we (traders) feared some type of government intervention over the weekend which would cause the markets to move in totally random ways. This is still very much a concern, but it hasn't been as bad as of late. This is not a free market system. Who are the government to decide which companies are bailed out and which ones aren't. Last time I checked the survival of the fittest in the business world was the model of choice. If a company wasn't profitable, then they should fail. End of discussion. Don't use taxpayers money, print unlawful amounts of money, and destroy the currency in the process. The final piece of the problem is the Fed. It doesn't even make sense to me for the government to borrow money from a private institution to conduct business. Our federal taxes go to pay the interest only on the debt to the Fed, making those bankers filthy rich. This house of cards will collapse sooner rather than later as the money printing goes to exponential heights. It's so bad now that the Fed doesn't even report it's money growth anymore. No fiat currency lasts and this one will be no different. But instituting a one world currency will result in more of our privacies being taken away, more surveillance, and more control. It makes more sense for the government to print it's own money, thus relieving itself from hefty interest repayment. My solution is dissolve the Fed, cut
[-empyre-] April 2009 on –empyre-
April 2009 on –empyre- “Creativity and Postmodern Finance, or the Artifice of the 21st Century Global Financial Implosion” Plan on escaping the travails of finance and capital? Sure you do. We are all creative in our orientation toward the artifice of capital. The decision to survive requires employment of the arts of finance and capitalization, regardless of one's subjectivity or preoccupation. 'Creativity,' from the Latin, 'crescere,' means 'I come to be,' 'I increase,' 'I grow and expand,' etc. To be sure, some are endowed in one way or another with more or less of something, creativity notwithstanding. And for certain, some are more creative than others. Out of all this, what ‘comes to be’ as humanity employs the arts of capital in the 21st century? What does our creation obtain? As of late, the human world is preoccupied with artisans of capital and finance, and with good reason. Humanity is fearful that its future, we might say, is being foreclosed upon by the uncontrollable forces of their trade. Many cultural theorists feel that capital is an artifice. Capital is but our creation, they say. So perhaps we need only recreate capital, and its terms, to adjust for its errors, to render an ever better society. Others say capital is the problem in itself. What have we caused to be, to be increased, or expanded upon, that has led us to this spirited place? How does our art, our artifice, from the Latin ‘armus’…art being that which comes from our arm or shoulder…contribute to the problems or solutions of the global meltdown? Who are the artisans? And who is the audience that goads them onward? Our guests: Michael Angelo Tata is the author of Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality (forthcoming in 2009). Laurence Rickels is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include The Devil Notebooks (2008), Nazi Psychoanalysis (2002) and The Vampire Lectures (1999). Joseph Tabbi is professor of contemporary literature and technology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Cognitive Fictions (2002) and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (1995). He also edits the Electronic Book Review. Jeff Pierce is an independent equity trader based in Canada. He is also the editor of Zentrader.ca Davin Heckman is Assistant Professor of English at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. He is the author of A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day (2008). Nicholas Ruiz III is a moderator of –empyre-. He is the author of America in Absentia (2008) and The Metaphysics of Capital (2006). He is also the editor of Kritikos. Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] April 2009 on –empyre-
April 2009 on –empyre- “Creativity and Postmodern Finance, or the Artifice of the 21st Century Global Financial Implosion” Plan on escaping the travails of finance and capital? Sure you do. We are all creative in our orientation toward the artifice of capital. The decision to survive requires employment of the arts of finance and capitalization, regardless of one's subjectivity or preoccupation. 'Creativity,' from the Latin, 'crescere,' means 'I come to be,' 'I increase,' 'I grow and expand,' etc. To be sure, some are endowed in one way or another with more or less of something, creativity notwithstanding. And for certain, some are more creative than others. Out of all this, what ‘comes to be’ as humanity employs the arts of capital in the 21st century? What does our creation obtain? As of late, the human world is preoccupied with artisans of capital and finance, and with good reason. Humanity is fearful that its future, we might say, is being foreclosed upon by the uncontrollable forces of their trade. Many cultural theorists feel that capital is an artifice. Capital is but our creation, they say. So perhaps we need only recreate capital, and its terms, to adjust for its errors, to render an ever better society. Others say capital is the problem in itself. What have we caused to be, to be increased, or expanded upon, that has led us to this spirited place? How does our art, our artifice, from the Latin ‘armus’…art being that which comes from our arm or shoulder…contribute to the problems or solutions of the global meltdown? Who are the artisans? And who is the audience that goads them onward? Our guests: Michael Angelo Tata is the author of Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality (forthcoming in 2009). Laurence Rickels is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include The Devil Notebooks (2008), Nazi Psychoanalysis (2002) and The Vampire Lectures (1999). Joseph Tabbi is professor of contemporary literature and technology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Cognitive Fictions (2002) and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (1995). He also edits the Electronic Book Review. Jeff Pierce is an independent equity trader based in Canada. He is also the editor of Zentrader.ca Davin Heckman is Assistant Professor of English at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. He is the author of A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day (2008). Nicholas Ruiz III is a moderator of –empyre-. He is the author of America in Absentia (2008) and The Metaphysics of Capital (2006). He is also the editor of Kritikos. Subscribe to the–empyre- listserv forum here: http://www.subtle.net/empyre/ Many thanks, Nicholas Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Mez Breeze [_Netwurker_]: Resolution for Digital Futures
But where, oh where, are the 'Exchangers,' on this neo-megalithic complexicon of a wishlist... NRIII Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org From: Timothy Murray t...@cornell.edu To: soft_skinned_space emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Friday, January 30, 2009 11:48:53 AM Subject: [-empyre-] Mez Breeze [_Netwurker_]: Resolution for Digital Futures _Tu[r]ning Up The [Ch]A[racter]vatar Heat_ A prognosticfuturoidal New Years Res[Sing.the.Gameic.Body] [wish]list: * Wish 1: Purveyors of cultural production [including contemporary expressorz + corresponding theorizerscritiquers] up[date]grade [pre]set creativity conc[r]e[te]pts _away from_ standardisedregulartraditional notions of art +/or culture + _[re]wire these_ via [reflectingembracing] platforms designed 2 emulate+promote playcuriosity thru aggregationalnetwurkedaugmented states. * Wish 2: Gatekeepers [ie academic promulgators + Xinsert-label-of-ur-choice-hereX-media experts] of culture|entertainment [de]signabsorbencourage the creation of [gameic]wurks that seek 2 engage + connect via multiple triggerings of subjective|active meaning frameworks involving less _manifest creator intention_ + more lattice-like involvementcontent composition. * Wish 3: Hoping_4banking_on sensations experienced by absorbersreadersconstructorsviewers of 1) + 2) 2 include a loverly shud[|t]d[|t]ering/jumping disruption of regular comprehension processes + sensory trickling via com[/]bin[/]ations of nestled meaning + heavy duty _snippetry_ [definition insert: _snippetry_ = terminology 4 collapsing info-categories that hi-light connector states + value currents + encompass[es] the drench of the social(ly wired) with trad_channel jigsawing . Snippetry may deny monoprimarydirectionalauthorialownership concepts completely]. * Wish 4: Purrsonally [hide +]seeking 2 absorbcreatepromote wurkstates that process|update change + morph constantly in line with the enorm[delici]ous amount of in[de]formation being pro[ac]cessed everyday; from s[oc_net.d]ens[e.st]ory [overload/sha]rings 2 the t[actile]ouch of the delicate - co-opting/rema[sh]king/regurgitating it all via [sc]avengingcobblingextending systemicstechniquesinfo-basesknowledgee[mpathy]xperiences. Bio: Mez Breeze [aka _Netwurker_] (Australia) is a Reality Engineer who has had a sustained presence in synthetic realities for over two decades. She is also an established net artist and game theorist who practices _Poetic Game Interventions_ [the creative manipulation of MMO parameters in order to disrupt or comment on various aspects of augmented states]. -- Renate Ferro and Tim Murray Co-Moderators, -empyre- a soft-skinned-space Department of Art/ Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art Cornell University ___ 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-] Geert Lovink: Resolution for Digital Futures
word. NRIII Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org From: Timothy Murray t...@cornell.edu To: soft_skinned_space emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2009 8:50:47 AM Subject: [-empyre-] Geert Lovink: Resolution for Digital Futures Geert Lovink Seven Resolutions for 2009 1. Radical makeover of Indymedia into an irresistible network of networks, aimed to link local initiatives, worldwide, that aim to bring down corporate capitalism. In order to do this Indymedia needs to go beyond the (alternative) news paradigm. This is the time to do it. If not now, when? The debate should be about the possible adaptation, or perhaps transcendence (think negative dialectics) of the social networking approach. Is it enough if we all start to twitter? Perhaps not. A lot of the online conversations at the moment circle around these topics. There is a real momentum building up here, and that's exciting. 2. Renaissance of theory, radical texts that appeal to young people and help them to dream again, aimed to develop critical concepts, cool memes and audio-visual whispers that can feed the collective imagination with new, powerful ideas that are capable to move people into action. Theory, in this context, means speculative philosophies, not academic writing or hermetic bible texts, aimed to exclude outsiders and those with the wrong belief system. Overcoming political correctness in the way that beats populism would be the way to go. 3. Dismantling the academic exclusion machine. With this I mean the hilarious peer review dramas that we see around us everywhere, aimed to reproduce the old boys networks, excluding different voices, discourses and networked research practices. We need to have the civil courage to say no to these suppressive and utterly wrong bureaucratic procedures that, in the end, result in the elimination of quality, creativity and criticism (and, ironically, of innovation, too). In the same way we need to unleash a social movement of those who dare to say no to all these silly copyright contracts that we're forced to sign. We should stop signing away our 'intellectual property' and begin to radicalize and help democratize and popularize the creative commons and floss movements. 4. Overcoming media genres and expertise prisons in order to productively connect our knowledge and experience. With this I do not mean diplomatic gestures to open up token channels for interdisciplinary dialogue. Any formal attempt to bring together people from different backgrounds is bound to fail. What might be a solution is to go for hybrid-pervert situations in order to investigate the absurd edges of the knowledge universe. Again, any model that somehow wants to move towards a synthesis (or convergence) is doomed to be irrelevant and will only be instrumentalized in institutional restructurings in which the creative-subversive elements are the ones that will be excluded. 5. Squatting the overlooked ruins of the 2009 crisis. There is an enormous economic infrastructure that is being abandoned at the moment, ripe to be socialized. The problem, however, is that we do not really 'see' it, in the same way as in the 1970s and 80s many did not see the subversive potential of squatting warehouses, factories and old housing stock. Luckily this is merely a matter of start wearing the right pair of glasses. Put them on and you discover an abundance of abandoned resources, ready to be re-used. 6. Global crackdown of the corporate consultancy class. We have to get a better understanding of the dubious role that the Ernst Young/PricewaterhouseCooper etc. consultants are playing, from downsizing firms, coaching NGOs and global civil society professionals, privatizing public infrastructure, to running entire education sectors. Not only are they experts in cooking the books (see the dotcom crash). Their role as (invisible) advisers, speech writers and PR managers needs some serious investigative journalism a la Naomi Klein. 7. Opening channels for collective imagination. It's not enough to say that another world is possible (we know that). Radical reform plans are available-and are being implemented as we speak-by the bankrupt neo-liberal elites, in a desperate attempt to somehow make it to 2010 or 2011, when the recession will be over and old policies can be continued again. It's not enough to be satisfied with the promise of a green GM car, made in the USA. We can think, and build, so much more. For this to happen, the corporate elites need to be dispossessed of their power. Calling for 'change' comes with consequences: dethronement. Sorry, you fu*ked up badly. It's time to step down and move on. Exit. -- Geert Lovink (Netherlands) is a Dutch-Australian media theorist, author of Zero Comments, and director of the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, where he also teaches
[-empyre-] love on -empyre-, forwarded by Owen Ware
forwarded by our guest contributor, Owen Ware: Once a discourse is thus driven by its own momentum into the backwater of the 'unreal', exiled from all gregarity, it has no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of an affirmation. - Roland Barthes, A Lover?s Discourse Thirty years after Barthes wrote these words, we must ask: Can theory carry out this task of affirmation today? What conceptual resources are now available to bring love and its discourse back from exile? The resources are multiple: we can speak of the experience of love (phenomenology), its performative forces (speech-act theory), its tensions in ethics and politics (feminism, Marxism, deconstruction). But how do these resources become a site of affirmation? That is the question - and perhaps the task - of thinking through the various meanings, practices, and performances of love. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] love on -empyre-, forwarded by Edgar Landgraf
forwarded by guest contributor Edgar Landgraf: In my German Quarterly essay Romantic Love and the Enlightenment: From Gallantry and Seduction to Authenticity and Self-Validation, I looked at changes in the semantics of love in the eighteenth century as recorded by epistolary novels, the bourgeois tragedy and finally by Goethes The Sufferings of Young Werther. These literary works demonize the notions of love typical for the aristocratic society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which conceived of love in highly formulized, playful, rhetorically defined terms, as the art of gallantry and seduction. This paradigm is replaced with a new emphasis on authenticity and self-validation which sees in love no longer a social game of sorts that is played and enjoyed as many other things in life, but rather links love to the semantics of individuality: rather than being merely a skill and an enjoyment, love now fundamentally comes to define who a person is and how he or she relates to him- or herself. This shift, in essence, takes place in two steps. The epistolary novels of the mid-eighteenth century and the bourgeois tragedy still frame the argument in terms of moral codes and familial constellations, supporting the transition from, as Friedrich Kittler put it, the family of generations to the family of procreation that links love to marriage. In this respect, love becomes important for the life especially of young bourgeois daughters whose existence is cast to depend on finding love, marriage, and a home away from the home of their fathers (interesting here, of course, how much more starkly gender differences are implemented and the possibilities, roles, and options for women are reduced in the Enlightenment as opposed to pre-modern aristocratic society). Sturm und Drang as well as Romantic literature (in my essay, I focus in particular on Goethes Werther where we can witness a new and truly modern notion of love emerge), link love even more closely to the identity of the (modern) individual. Love now becomes a medium for self-exploration and self-validation independent of particular economic, moral, or other social needs. My article drew on the works of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, especially his book Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy. Luhmann (and, more generally, contemporary systems theory) encourages one to read the changes in the semantics of love and individuality against the backdrop of a comprehensive theory of modernity, as responding to the change from stratification to functional differentiation. In my article, I point out that the semantic changes of love must also be linked more immediately to a change in communicational media. The dominant communicative medium of pre-modern aristocratic society was conversation. In the eighteenth century, however, as a late effect of the printing press and due to the increased alphabetization of Europe, writing becomes the preferred communicational medium. As Cornelia Bohn has argued, writing (esp. letter writing) fosters a very different semantics that conversation, puts a premium on communications of authenticity and individuality and invites more self-reflection. I would be happy to expand and further discuss any of these developments as well as the theoretical framework that supports the argument. In light of the medial changes mentioned, I would also like to discuss the present state of affairs, in particular the effect of the new, digital media (email, internet, cell phones, text messaging, Facebook, etc.) on the semantics of love. Cell phones reduce the distance and availability of addressees; Facebook comes to structure our individuality once again along types and ideals rather than profiling individuality in terms of difference; the constant flow of messaging reduces rather than increases the propensity for self-reflection, emails in particular present a strange cross between writing and conversation that affects how we present ourselves, address the recipient, how we profile and differentiate sensibilities, etc. (those of us who still remember writing personal letters will easily notice such difference). I hope we can discuss and theorize some of these changes. Do they lead to more rationality with matters of the heart? Does constant availability increase or decrease intimacy levels? Can we relate them to the increased decoupling of love and sex? How do they affect the eighteenth-century idea that binds love to marriage? How are gender roles affected? Etc. Edgar Landgraf ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
