Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
I like this from Tim This is for me about aesthetics as causality. And that this also is a philosophical move in the times of digital seems great to me--not too theoretical--but poetical as I take the attempts of some to think through dark mysticism is. If we are too change our view on science and technology via causality and poetics-- as I am hoping we do--it will take some rough times in all areas of creativity.But then my poetic moves in my writing as Lauren noted are full of concern about moving in that way. I feel affectively torn in my thought. Patricia In the absence of a metaphysics of cause and effect (from Hume and Kant on), what we have are statistical correlations. The movie plunges us into the void of reason that Kant detects in the Humean destruction of causality (a destruction that just is the condition of modern science). That void of reason is the gap between my (human) mind and another thing. But there are other gaps: between a pile of scrambled eggs and a bowl; between a foot and the bathroom floor; between a trolley and the doorway; between an eye and another eye, one looking through a crack in a doorway, the other not. Only metaphor bridges these gaps, which is to say, metaphor just is how causality functions in a universe of entities that don't sum to one another. That is, if we're not living in a total blend-o-rama where the eggs are the fork and so on. The tension in the movie is precisely the tension between a myriad cracks in and between things. From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Timothy Morton [timothymorton...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2012 6:35 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture Hello Everyone, My first reaction to Hotel is that the first few seconds are as it were without people, like that chapter Time Passes in To the Lighthouse. The wet skin is also without a person, in particular, just the light of the bathroom reflected in the droplets of water. A conversation between a foot and a tap, some ripples. One could of course read the whole thing as metaphorical for or otherwise figurative for the human-human interactions going on. But the paradox is that the movie relies on allowing the nonhumans to float free of specific ties to human significance at every opportunity. The slightly threatening sense of sheer existence is there--we have no idea what is happening, along with a too-mundane all-too-familiar quality, coupled with a certain uncomfortable voyeurism. The idea perhaps that there should be something to see, giving rise to anxiety. The whole thing is like a massively exploded version of the plughole moment in Psycho, from the camerawork point of view. Many many interstitial shots--a doorway, some pillows, the back of the room service girl. These sorts of shots are usually to prepare for something such as an encounter between humans, but they seem delinked from that, as if the camera itself wanted to talk to the moving trolley, the curtain and the shadows. My Tibetan Buddhist teacher talks about mandala principle this way: you should be in life as in a hotel, because you enjoy it better that way. It's not yours, yeah it's a non-place, but not (even) necessarily in that scary Romantic way Augé talks about. We have no idea what happened in that room. Each shot becomes a metaphor for each other shot, so that finally it's undecidable whether this is really a story about a room service girl, or a girl eating scrambled eggs, or a story about scrambled eggs talking to a fork, or skin talking to a faucet. In the absence of a metaphysics of cause and effect (from Hume and Kant on), what we have are statistical correlations. The movie plunges us into the void of reason that Kant detects in the Humean destruction of causality (a destruction that just is the condition of modern science). That void of reason is the gap between my (human) mind and another thing. But there are other gaps: between a pile of scrambled eggs and a bowl; between a foot and the bathroom floor; between a trolley and the doorway; between an eye and another eye, one looking through a crack in a doorway, the other not. Only metaphor bridges these gaps, which is to say, metaphor just is how causality functions in a universe of entities that don't sum to one another. That is, if we're not living in a total blend-o-rama where the eggs are the fork and so on. The tension in the movie is precisely the tension between a myriad cracks in and between things. Btw: My OOO use of withdrawal means open secret, not hiding or shrinking, or excess. Something unspeakable and irreducibly untranslatable. Yours, Tim On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 1:50 PM, Clough, Patricia pclo...@gc.cuny.edumailto:pclo...@gc.cuny.edu wrote: Yes I do think that this is a great question: are we
Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
Hi there - In hopes of being able to cogently contribute to this week's discussion, some of you may find a clip from one of my earlier video pieces to be of interest - Leave little to be Desired. It was my MFA thesis piece ( 1989 ! ) that functioned as both a single channel and installation piece. The piece posted on Vimeo is a short compilation of clips from the lengthier video. And, yes, technically speaking it was digitally created - way back then- in the days of behemoth machines with very long rendering timelines https://vimeo.com/44560594 Chris On Jun 21, 2012, at 7:42 AM, Lauren Berlant wrote: I don't disagree with that--the Auge is great--but maybe we could push a bit harder on the relation of the transitional to the transformational here, and on the relation of class to sexuality. In the hotel, the customer is getting to suspend who she was when not on vacation from herself in the way Auge suggests (the non-place inducing the habitation of self-misalignment) but the servant's relation to her is exactly what a servant's relation is, professional voyeurism as care that, when it has sexual or subjective consequences, has to be kept to oneself. It isn't a non place for the servant. LB Sent from my iPad On Jun 21, 2012, at 9:24 AM, Ana Valdes agora...@gmail.com wrote: But a hotel is also a way for the nomadic to rest for a while to interact with others to listen to gossip to drink to eat to sleep in a bed made by some other than oneself. The hotel is always transitional a non-place as an airport or a motorway if we follow the anthropologist Marc Auge's theory Non-Places. Ana Skickat från min iPhone 21 jun 2012 kl. 11:13 skrev Lauren Berlant lberl...@aol.com: Hi all! I just thought I'd float a few thoughts. 1. The juxtaposition of Jordan's Hotel to Montgomery's Transitional Objects does raise lots of questions about what kinds of refusal to produce a narrow-veined kinship cluster of likenesses and samenesses do to the general queer project of expanding the plane on which relationality appears as a scene in the psychoanalytic and criminal senses, a moving object and a moving target. In Jennifer's piece the mutilated recombined dolls produce no anchor but an anxiety about how to stay in relation; while in Jordan's piece the erotics of stuckness, of a binding to the signifiers of desire, can become both fetishistic of what appetite stands for and, because dedramatized by the music and slow, inarticulate mise en scene, drained of fetishism's drama to demythify or intensify the sign. Hotel in a way is about not a desire for expansive perverse queered transition but a queer stuckness that doesn't expand into the world but expands time into the enigma of relation itself, on the verge of shattering without the fetish's drama and pseudo-finality. 2. This leads me back to Zach's insistence on negativity as that which seems negative: withdrawal, subtraction, immeasurability, escape from capture. I said this to Zach last spring when we were talking about the common and sex, so this is where we are stuck, but: I think it's a mistake to take the state's biopolitical aesthetics of the subject's and a population's forced appearance and translation into data as the defining taxonomy of the moment, because by copying the dominant fetishizing idiom, repeating its own profound stupidity about the relation of information and knowledge, even in resistance to it, you reproduce its idiom as the idiom of the world. Any representation of relational processes (or of object/scenes, as I call them) makes a new closet and a new disturbance. Practices of exposure and literalization are false comforts. (I feel this as well about the romance of the nomad--being a nomad is a lot scarier and incoherently scavenging than Braidotti suggests! That's one way to read Patricia's poem...) I think it's a sign of the crisis of the reproduction of life that the world's we are in that literalization, the sheer immeasurable description of the materiality of affect in action and relation, is everywhere seen as necessary for a new realism. XxoL Sent from my iPad On Jun 20, 2012, at 6:56 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I saw in the city of Umeå in the North of Sweden a very interesting exhibition, Lost and Found Queerying the Archive. The curators Jane Rowley and Louise Wolthers built the show around some central and pivotal questions: identity, love and sexuality. Many of the voices presented are anonymous, people questioning themselves, searching for some belonging, for some identity, asking themselves about normality and normativity. The norms are made of conventions and consensus, agreements, historical memes written on people's experiences and stories. For me personally it was a great aha moment to read Rosi Braidottis Nomadic Subjects, a book where she writes about
Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
Hi all! I just thought I'd float a few thoughts. 1. The juxtaposition of Jordan's Hotel to Montgomery's Transitional Objects does raise lots of questions about what kinds of refusal to produce a narrow-veined kinship cluster of likenesses and samenesses do to the general queer project of expanding the plane on which relationality appears as a scene in the psychoanalytic and criminal senses, a moving object and a moving target. In Jennifer's piece the mutilated recombined dolls produce no anchor but an anxiety about how to stay in relation; while in Jordan's piece the erotics of stuckness, of a binding to the signifiers of desire, can become both fetishistic of what appetite stands for and, because dedramatized by the music and slow, inarticulate mise en scene, drained of fetishism's drama to demythify or intensify the sign. Hotel in a way is about not a desire for expansive perverse queered transition but a queer stuckness that doesn't expand into the world but expands time into the enigma of relation itself, on the verge of shattering without the fetish's drama and pseudo-finality. 2. This leads me back to Zach's insistence on negativity as that which seems negative: withdrawal, subtraction, immeasurability, escape from capture. I said this to Zach last spring when we were talking about the common and sex, so this is where we are stuck, but: I think it's a mistake to take the state's biopolitical aesthetics of the subject's and a population's forced appearance and translation into data as the defining taxonomy of the moment, because by copying the dominant fetishizing idiom, repeating its own profound stupidity about the relation of information and knowledge, even in resistance to it, you reproduce its idiom as the idiom of the world. Any representation of relational processes (or of object/scenes, as I call them) makes a new closet and a new disturbance. Practices of exposure and literalization are false comforts. (I feel this as well about the romance of the nomad--being a nomad is a lot scarier and incoherently scavenging than Braidotti suggests! That's one way to read Patricia's poem...) I think it's a sign of the crisis of the reproduction of life that the world's we are in that literalization, the sheer immeasurable description of the materiality of affect in action and relation, is everywhere seen as necessary for a new realism. XxoL Sent from my iPad On Jun 20, 2012, at 6:56 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I saw in the city of Umeå in the North of Sweden a very interesting exhibition, Lost and Found Queerying the Archive. The curators Jane Rowley and Louise Wolthers built the show around some central and pivotal questions: identity, love and sexuality. Many of the voices presented are anonymous, people questioning themselves, searching for some belonging, for some identity, asking themselves about normality and normativity. The norms are made of conventions and consensus, agreements, historical memes written on people's experiences and stories. For me personally it was a great aha moment to read Rosi Braidottis Nomadic Subjects, a book where she writes about our fragmented identities, our ability to wander between different identities and belongings but not staying in one. Ana On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 2:44 AM, Zach Blas zachb...@gmail.com wrote: hi all-- i’m finally jumping in here again after some great posts from patricia, lauren, jordan, and jack again! i’d really like to pull in some empyre subscribers to this discussion, so i wonder if we can try to tackle some more general questions about the stakes and stances around affect and its relations to queerness, digital technology/media, and political art. patricia and lauren, you have already somewhat laid this out, but i think it would be great to hear more about how you parse affect and feelings and what those frameworks / structures of thinking permit, enhance, delimit, enclose. in my experience, discussions around affect always run up against conflicting approaches to defining it as well as how it relates to feelings or emotions. patricia, it seems that many theorists and writers who focus on technology, the nonhuman, and the new materialisms you have already mentioned engage affect through a deleuzian / spinozan approach. and they do so because it affords them a particular way to think technical / nonhuman materials. it seems like one of the critiques we could think about here is the one that jack has already brought up, which is on the use of high theory and a politics of citations. do you think its possible to explore this strand of affect through low theory? do you know of anyone who is doing this? in this area of deleuze, affect, queerness, and feminism, luciana parisi has talked about a fundamental queerness through her notion of abstract sex and claire colebrook has also considered how doing theory could be fundamentally queer. i’m
Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
But a hotel is also a way for the nomadic to rest for a while to interact with others to listen to gossip to drink to eat to sleep in a bed made by some other than oneself. The hotel is always transitional a non-place as an airport or a motorway if we follow the anthropologist Marc Auge's theory Non-Places. Ana Skickat från min iPhone 21 jun 2012 kl. 11:13 skrev Lauren Berlant lberl...@aol.com: Hi all! I just thought I'd float a few thoughts. 1. The juxtaposition of Jordan's Hotel to Montgomery's Transitional Objects does raise lots of questions about what kinds of refusal to produce a narrow-veined kinship cluster of likenesses and samenesses do to the general queer project of expanding the plane on which relationality appears as a scene in the psychoanalytic and criminal senses, a moving object and a moving target. In Jennifer's piece the mutilated recombined dolls produce no anchor but an anxiety about how to stay in relation; while in Jordan's piece the erotics of stuckness, of a binding to the signifiers of desire, can become both fetishistic of what appetite stands for and, because dedramatized by the music and slow, inarticulate mise en scene, drained of fetishism's drama to demythify or intensify the sign. Hotel in a way is about not a desire for expansive perverse queered transition but a queer stuckness that doesn't expand into the world but expands time into the enigma of relation itself, on the verge of shattering without the fetish's drama and pseudo-finality. 2. This leads me back to Zach's insistence on negativity as that which seems negative: withdrawal, subtraction, immeasurability, escape from capture. I said this to Zach last spring when we were talking about the common and sex, so this is where we are stuck, but: I think it's a mistake to take the state's biopolitical aesthetics of the subject's and a population's forced appearance and translation into data as the defining taxonomy of the moment, because by copying the dominant fetishizing idiom, repeating its own profound stupidity about the relation of information and knowledge, even in resistance to it, you reproduce its idiom as the idiom of the world. Any representation of relational processes (or of object/scenes, as I call them) makes a new closet and a new disturbance. Practices of exposure and literalization are false comforts. (I feel this as well about the romance of the nomad--being a nomad is a lot scarier and incoherently scavenging than Braidotti suggests! That's one way to read Patricia's poem...) I think it's a sign of the crisis of the reproduction of life that the world's we are in that literalization, the sheer immeasurable description of the materiality of affect in action and relation, is everywhere seen as necessary for a new realism. XxoL Sent from my iPad On Jun 20, 2012, at 6:56 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I saw in the city of Umeå in the North of Sweden a very interesting exhibition, Lost and Found Queerying the Archive. The curators Jane Rowley and Louise Wolthers built the show around some central and pivotal questions: identity, love and sexuality. Many of the voices presented are anonymous, people questioning themselves, searching for some belonging, for some identity, asking themselves about normality and normativity. The norms are made of conventions and consensus, agreements, historical memes written on people's experiences and stories. For me personally it was a great aha moment to read Rosi Braidottis Nomadic Subjects, a book where she writes about our fragmented identities, our ability to wander between different identities and belongings but not staying in one. Ana On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 2:44 AM, Zach Blas zachb...@gmail.com wrote: hi all-- i’m finally jumping in here again after some great posts from patricia, lauren, jordan, and jack again! i’d really like to pull in some empyre subscribers to this discussion, so i wonder if we can try to tackle some more general questions about the stakes and stances around affect and its relations to queerness, digital technology/media, and political art. patricia and lauren, you have already somewhat laid this out, but i think it would be great to hear more about how you parse affect and feelings and what those frameworks / structures of thinking permit, enhance, delimit, enclose. in my experience, discussions around affect always run up against conflicting approaches to defining it as well as how it relates to feelings or emotions. patricia, it seems that many theorists and writers who focus on technology, the nonhuman, and the new materialisms you have already mentioned engage affect through a deleuzian / spinozan approach. and they do so because it affords them a particular way to think technical / nonhuman materials. it seems like one of the critiques we could think about here is the one that jack has
Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
I don't disagree with that--the Auge is great--but maybe we could push a bit harder on the relation of the transitional to the transformational here, and on the relation of class to sexuality. In the hotel, the customer is getting to suspend who she was when not on vacation from herself in the way Auge suggests (the non-place inducing the habitation of self-misalignment) but the servant's relation to her is exactly what a servant's relation is, professional voyeurism as care that, when it has sexual or subjective consequences, has to be kept to oneself. It isn't a non place for the servant. LB Sent from my iPad On Jun 21, 2012, at 9:24 AM, Ana Valdes agora...@gmail.com wrote: But a hotel is also a way for the nomadic to rest for a while to interact with others to listen to gossip to drink to eat to sleep in a bed made by some other than oneself. The hotel is always transitional a non-place as an airport or a motorway if we follow the anthropologist Marc Auge's theory Non-Places. Ana Skickat från min iPhone 21 jun 2012 kl. 11:13 skrev Lauren Berlant lberl...@aol.com: Hi all! I just thought I'd float a few thoughts. 1. The juxtaposition of Jordan's Hotel to Montgomery's Transitional Objects does raise lots of questions about what kinds of refusal to produce a narrow-veined kinship cluster of likenesses and samenesses do to the general queer project of expanding the plane on which relationality appears as a scene in the psychoanalytic and criminal senses, a moving object and a moving target. In Jennifer's piece the mutilated recombined dolls produce no anchor but an anxiety about how to stay in relation; while in Jordan's piece the erotics of stuckness, of a binding to the signifiers of desire, can become both fetishistic of what appetite stands for and, because dedramatized by the music and slow, inarticulate mise en scene, drained of fetishism's drama to demythify or intensify the sign. Hotel in a way is about not a desire for expansive perverse queered transition but a queer stuckness that doesn't expand into the world but expands time into the enigma of relation itself, on the verge of shattering without the fetish's drama and pseudo-finality. 2. This leads me back to Zach's insistence on negativity as that which seems negative: withdrawal, subtraction, immeasurability, escape from capture. I said this to Zach last spring when we were talking about the common and sex, so this is where we are stuck, but: I think it's a mistake to take the state's biopolitical aesthetics of the subject's and a population's forced appearance and translation into data as the defining taxonomy of the moment, because by copying the dominant fetishizing idiom, repeating its own profound stupidity about the relation of information and knowledge, even in resistance to it, you reproduce its idiom as the idiom of the world. Any representation of relational processes (or of object/scenes, as I call them) makes a new closet and a new disturbance. Practices of exposure and literalization are false comforts. (I feel this as well about the romance of the nomad--being a nomad is a lot scarier and incoherently scavenging than Braidotti suggests! That's one way to read Patricia's poem...) I think it's a sign of the crisis of the reproduction of life that the world's we are in that literalization, the sheer immeasurable description of the materiality of affect in action and relation, is everywhere seen as necessary for a new realism. XxoL Sent from my iPad On Jun 20, 2012, at 6:56 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I saw in the city of Umeå in the North of Sweden a very interesting exhibition, Lost and Found Queerying the Archive. The curators Jane Rowley and Louise Wolthers built the show around some central and pivotal questions: identity, love and sexuality. Many of the voices presented are anonymous, people questioning themselves, searching for some belonging, for some identity, asking themselves about normality and normativity. The norms are made of conventions and consensus, agreements, historical memes written on people's experiences and stories. For me personally it was a great aha moment to read Rosi Braidottis Nomadic Subjects, a book where she writes about our fragmented identities, our ability to wander between different identities and belongings but not staying in one. Ana On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 2:44 AM, Zach Blas zachb...@gmail.com wrote: hi all-- i’m finally jumping in here again after some great posts from patricia, lauren, jordan, and jack again! i’d really like to pull in some empyre subscribers to this discussion, so i wonder if we can try to tackle some more general questions about the stakes and stances around affect and its relations to queerness, digital technology/media, and political art. patricia and lauren, you have already somewhat laid this out, but i
Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
I am not sure about that I saw the Servants by Genet when I was very young and I saw it again recently. It struck me how eternal and wise the play was, how the negotiation with power, sexuality and identity was so well done with all those small protocols dealing with small details of great importance. I think again that place is today as powerful as belonging as class. I am myself a nomadic, living between two continents two or three languages and several sexualities from the polyamory to the non sexuality. Ana Skickat från min iPhone 21 jun 2012 kl. 11:42 skrev Lauren Berlant lberl...@aol.com: I don't disagree with that--the Auge is great--but maybe we could push a bit harder on the relation of the transitional to the transformational here, and on the relation of class to sexuality. In the hotel, the customer is getting to suspend who she was when not on vacation from herself in the way Auge suggests (the non-place inducing the habitation of self-misalignment) but the servant's relation to her is exactly what a servant's relation is, professional voyeurism as care that, when it has sexual or subjective consequences, has to be kept to oneself. It isn't a non place for the servant. LB Sent from my iPad On Jun 21, 2012, at 9:24 AM, Ana Valdes agora...@gmail.com wrote: But a hotel is also a way for the nomadic to rest for a while to interact with others to listen to gossip to drink to eat to sleep in a bed made by some other than oneself. The hotel is always transitional a non-place as an airport or a motorway if we follow the anthropologist Marc Auge's theory Non-Places. Ana Skickat från min iPhone 21 jun 2012 kl. 11:13 skrev Lauren Berlant lberl...@aol.com: Hi all! I just thought I'd float a few thoughts. 1. The juxtaposition of Jordan's Hotel to Montgomery's Transitional Objects does raise lots of questions about what kinds of refusal to produce a narrow-veined kinship cluster of likenesses and samenesses do to the general queer project of expanding the plane on which relationality appears as a scene in the psychoanalytic and criminal senses, a moving object and a moving target. In Jennifer's piece the mutilated recombined dolls produce no anchor but an anxiety about how to stay in relation; while in Jordan's piece the erotics of stuckness, of a binding to the signifiers of desire, can become both fetishistic of what appetite stands for and, because dedramatized by the music and slow, inarticulate mise en scene, drained of fetishism's drama to demythify or intensify the sign. Hotel in a way is about not a desire for expansive perverse queered transition but a queer stuckness that doesn't expand into the world but expands time into the enigma of relation itself, on the verge of shattering without the fetish's drama and pseudo-finality. 2. This leads me back to Zach's insistence on negativity as that which seems negative: withdrawal, subtraction, immeasurability, escape from capture. I said this to Zach last spring when we were talking about the common and sex, so this is where we are stuck, but: I think it's a mistake to take the state's biopolitical aesthetics of the subject's and a population's forced appearance and translation into data as the defining taxonomy of the moment, because by copying the dominant fetishizing idiom, repeating its own profound stupidity about the relation of information and knowledge, even in resistance to it, you reproduce its idiom as the idiom of the world. Any representation of relational processes (or of object/scenes, as I call them) makes a new closet and a new disturbance. Practices of exposure and literalization are false comforts. (I feel this as well about the romance of the nomad--being a nomad is a lot scarier and incoherently scavenging than Braidotti suggests! That's one way to read Patricia's poem...) I think it's a sign of the crisis of the reproduction of life that the world's we are in that literalization, the sheer immeasurable description of the materiality of affect in action and relation, is everywhere seen as necessary for a new realism. XxoL Sent from my iPad On Jun 20, 2012, at 6:56 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I saw in the city of Umeå in the North of Sweden a very interesting exhibition, Lost and Found Queerying the Archive. The curators Jane Rowley and Louise Wolthers built the show around some central and pivotal questions: identity, love and sexuality. Many of the voices presented are anonymous, people questioning themselves, searching for some belonging, for some identity, asking themselves about normality and normativity. The norms are made of conventions and consensus, agreements, historical memes written on people's experiences and stories. For me personally it was a great aha moment to read Rosi Braidottis Nomadic Subjects, a book where she writes about our fragmented
Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
Oh this (2) below is one that grabs me. I often ask students especially when I get tired of asking myself how close to the crisis do we need to get to figure a way around, through away from---change it. How do we theorize or approach that which is blinding us called the present (although it might just be some collapse of time we call the present) How do we describe well the defining taxonomy of the moment without reinforcing it. Turning to the difference between Deleuze and OOO/SR for me has been another way to ask these kinds of questions. I say this because I notice how much our conversation about objects is human oriented not object oriented. Not sure what to make of that here. But composing a writing, a film a digital thingy also may be a way of describing without becoming the taxonomy or reenforcing it. I think digitalqueerreal might be what to call this kind of composing. What this composing allows is leaving much (energies) on the composing plane that the taxonomy of the moment might not allow if we describe only it. So what is the defining taxonomy of the moment? and what does it have to do with digital and affect? 2. This leads me back to Zach's insistence on negativity as that which seems negative: withdrawal, subtraction, immeasurability, escape from capture. I said this to Zach last spring when we were talking about the common and sex, so this is where we are stuck, but: I think it's a mistake to take the state's biopolitical aesthetics of the subject's and a population's forced appearance and translation into data as the defining taxonomy of the moment, because by copying the dominant fetishizing idiom, repeating its own profound stupidity about the relation of information and knowledge, even in resistance to it, you reproduce its idiom as the idiom of the world. Any representation of relational processes (or of object/scenes, as I call them) makes a new closet and a new disturbance. Practices of exposure and literalization are false comforts. (I feel this as well about the romance of the nomad--being a nomad is a lot scarier and incoherently scavenging than Braidotti suggests! That's one way to read Patricia's poem...) I think it's a sign of the crisis of the reproduction of life that the world's we are in that literalization, the sheer immeasurable description of the materiality of affect in action and relation, is everywhere seen as necessary for a new realism. XxoL Sent from my iPad On Jun 20, 2012, at 6:56 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I saw in the city of Umeå in the North of Sweden a very interesting exhibition, Lost and Found Queerying the Archive. The curators Jane Rowley and Louise Wolthers built the show around some central and pivotal questions: identity, love and sexuality. Many of the voices presented are anonymous, people questioning themselves, searching for some belonging, for some identity, asking themselves about normality and normativity. The norms are made of conventions and consensus, agreements, historical memes written on people's experiences and stories. For me personally it was a great aha moment to read Rosi Braidottis Nomadic Subjects, a book where she writes about our fragmented identities, our ability to wander between different identities and belongings but not staying in one. Ana On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 2:44 AM, Zach Blas zachb...@gmail.com wrote: hi all-- i’m finally jumping in here again after some great posts from patricia, lauren, jordan, and jack again! i’d really like to pull in some empyre subscribers to this discussion, so i wonder if we can try to tackle some more general questions about the stakes and stances around affect and its relations to queerness, digital technology/media, and political art. patricia and lauren, you have already somewhat laid this out, but i think it would be great to hear more about how you parse affect and feelings and what those frameworks / structures of thinking permit, enhance, delimit, enclose. in my experience, discussions around affect always run up against conflicting approaches to defining it as well as how it relates to feelings or emotions. patricia, it seems that many theorists and writers who focus on technology, the nonhuman, and the new materialisms you have already mentioned engage affect through a deleuzian / spinozan approach. and they do so because it affords them a particular way to think technical / nonhuman materials. it seems like one of the critiques we could think about here is the one that jack has already brought up, which is on the use of high theory and a politics of citations. do you think its possible to explore this strand of affect through low theory? do you know of anyone who is doing this? in this area of deleuze, affect, queerness, and feminism, luciana parisi has talked about a fundamental queerness through her notion of abstract sex and
Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
I meant here to cite Fatima El-Tayeb's concept of the translocal, from her book European Others, which she describes through international hip-hop communities and muslim feminists, which I found hugely relevant to my own experience as a second generation immigrant in a world of global media commodities. On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 11:25 AM, micha cárdenas mmcar...@usc.edu wrote: Are we perhaps in an anti-taxonomical time? A time of hyperlocalities that are hyper-connected but always losing something and gaining something in the translation and the static on the line to conjure Ronell again? It seems that Deleuze is a useful referent here, as -- micha cárdenas PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California Provost Fellow, University of Southern California New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, http://amzn.to/x8iJcY blog: http://transreal.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
I absolutely agree that place persists as a major determinant of life possibilities, as much or more than class, despite the ongoing pounding of the rhetoric of digital globality and neoliberal plentitude. I find it hard to support any claim that there is a zeitgeist or taxonomy of the moment, unless we're talking about the moment in the US or in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California. When I used to go to UCSD and spend my time crossing the US/Mexico border regularly I was often reminded that even in Tijuana, with it's proximity to the US, most people don't speak english and there is almost no usage of the word queer, an untranslatable word. Also, throughout Latin America, as Diana Taylor describes, the word Performance is largely untranslatable and has a handful of poor substitutions, or substitutions with difference, perhaps a best one being lo performatico. Being someone who does queer performance with technology means that conversations about my work in Latin America have a very, very different valence. I was invited to speak a couple of years ago at the Universidad de Baja California in Tijuana at what the organizers described to me as the first gender studies / queer theory event they had ever seen at the school, and I spoke about my transreal work in virus.circus and technesexual, mostly. When I was interested in doing my PhD at Concordia in Montreal, Viviane Namaste, the head of the women's studies department there responded to me saying I was interested in queer theory by saying that queer theory is a US centric invention that is merely trying to capitalism on french poststructuralism, perhaps revealing her own french nationalism while offering a certain view of queerness and place. Are we perhaps in an anti-taxonomical time? A time of hyperlocalities that are hyper-connected but always losing something and gaining something in the translation and the static on the line to conjure Ronell again? It seems that Deleuze is a useful referent here, as striving towards non-teleology still seems to be a radical act in many circles. I wonder if a taxonomy like that of Borges, quoted by Foucault in The Order of Things, is best suited to our contemporary, US based (which I am) moment. Note that this taxonomy is still based in a fundamental Orientalism that uses the foreign other, the Chinese in Borges' case, as the basis for fantastical imaginings. Borges describes 'a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,' the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into: those that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained, suckling pigs, mermaids, fabulous ones, stray dogs, those included in the present classification, those that tremble as if they were mad, innumerable ones, those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, others, those that have just broken a flower vase, those that from a long way off look like flies. In my own work, rather, I try to use my own experience of oppression as the basis for fantastical imaginings of future dystopias, heterotopias and other possible futures. It seems that starting with the frameworks, or realities, we're given and building resistance to them is a common flaw in political organizing. I prefer to imagine other mythopoetic systems to inhabit and to use my relation to the world towards disturbance, a non-teleological form of resistance, inspired by my work with Ricardo Dominguez who will join us next week, which aims more to unsettle, annoy, unravel power and invite it to reveal itself, rather than trying to identify and destroy it. On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 10:20 AM, Clough, Patricia pclo...@gc.cuny.edu wrote: Oh this (2) below is one that grabs me. I often ask students especially when I get tired of asking myself how close to the crisis do we need to get to figure a way around, through away from---change it. How do we theorize or approach that which is blinding us called the present (although it might just be some collapse of time we call the present) How do we describe well the defining taxonomy of the moment without reinforcing it. Turning to the difference between Deleuze and OOO/SR for me has been another way to ask these kinds of questions. I say this because I notice how much our conversation about objects is human oriented not object oriented. Not sure what to make of that here. But composing a writing, a film a digital thingy also may be a way of describing without becoming the taxonomy or reenforcing it. I think digitalqueerreal might be what to call this kind of composing. What this composing allows is leaving much (energies) on the composing plane that the taxonomy of the moment might not allow if we describe only it. So what is the defining taxonomy of the moment? and what does it have to do with digital and affect? 2. This leads me back to Zach's insistence on negativity as that which seems negative: withdrawal, subtraction,
Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
Yes I do think that this is a great question: are we in anyone else's moment? Never mind one's own While I do appreciate your point about the untranslatablility it is funny, Micha that you end on Deleuze. And I know much more is going on below than just Deleuze.But actually there are challenges to Deleuze right now that have implications for politics and even what can be made out of the experiences you describe below. Lauren might have been asking the same question what can we say about the many experiences we are sharing and failing to share with each other? From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of micha cárdenas [mmcar...@usc.edu] Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2012 2:25 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture I absolutely agree that place persists as a major determinant of life possibilities, as much or more than class, despite the ongoing pounding of the rhetoric of digital globality and neoliberal plentitude. I find it hard to support any claim that there is a zeitgeist or taxonomy of the moment, unless we're talking about the moment in the US or in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California. When I used to go to UCSD and spend my time crossing the US/Mexico border regularly I was often reminded that even in Tijuana, with it's proximity to the US, most people don't speak english and there is almost no usage of the word queer, an untranslatable word. Also, throughout Latin America, as Diana Taylor describes, the word Performance is largely untranslatable and has a handful of poor substitutions, or substitutions with difference, perhaps a best one being lo performatico. Being someone who does queer performance with technology means that conversations about my work in Latin America have a very, very different valence. I was invited to speak a couple of years ago at the Universidad de Baja California in Tijuana at what the organizers described to me as the first gender studies / queer theory event they had ever seen at the school, and I spoke about my transreal work in virus.circus and technesexual, mostly. When I was interested in doing my PhD at Concordia in Montreal, Viviane Namaste, the head of the women's studies department there responded to me saying I was interested in queer theory by saying that queer theory is a US centric invention that is merely trying to capitalism on french poststructuralism, perhaps revealing her own french nationalism while offering a certain view of queerness and place. Are we perhaps in an anti-taxonomical time? A time of hyperlocalities that are hyper-connected but always losing something and gaining something in the translation and the static on the line to conjure Ronell again? It seems that Deleuze is a useful referent here, as striving towards non-teleology still seems to be a radical act in many circles. I wonder if a taxonomy like that of Borges, quoted by Foucault in The Order of Things, is best suited to our contemporary, US based (which I am) moment. Note that this taxonomy is still based in a fundamental Orientalism that uses the foreign other, the Chinese in Borges' case, as the basis for fantastical imaginings. Borges describes 'a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,' the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into: those that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained, suckling pigs, mermaids, fabulous ones, stray dogs, those included in the present classification, those that tremble as if they were mad, innumerable ones, those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, others, those that have just broken a flower vase, those that from a long way off look like flies. In my own work, rather, I try to use my own experience of oppression as the basis for fantastical imaginings of future dystopias, heterotopias and other possible futures. It seems that starting with the frameworks, or realities, we're given and building resistance to them is a common flaw in political organizing. I prefer to imagine other mythopoetic systems to inhabit and to use my relation to the world towards disturbance, a non-teleological form of resistance, inspired by my work with Ricardo Dominguez who will join us next week, which aims more to unsettle, annoy, unravel power and invite it to reveal itself, rather than trying to identify and destroy it. On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 10:20 AM, Clough, Patricia pclo...@gc.cuny.edu wrote: Oh this (2) below is one that grabs me. I often ask students especially when I get tired of asking myself how close to the crisis do we need to get to figure a way around, through away from---change it. How do we theorize or approach that which is blinding us called the present (although it might just be some collapse of time we call the present) How do we describe well the defining taxonomy of the moment without
Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
Hello Everyone, My first reaction to *Hotel* is that the first few seconds are as it were without people, like that chapter Time Passes in *To the Lighthouse*. The wet skin is also without a person, in particular, just the light of the bathroom reflected in the droplets of water. A conversation between a foot and a tap, some ripples. One could of course read the whole thing as metaphorical for or otherwise figurative for the human-human interactions going on. But the paradox is that the movie relies on allowing the nonhumans to float free of specific ties to human significance at every opportunity. The slightly threatening sense of sheer existence is there--we have no idea what is happening, along with a too-mundane all-too-familiar quality, coupled with a certain uncomfortable voyeurism. The idea perhaps that there should be something to see, giving rise to anxiety. The whole thing is like a massively exploded version of the plughole moment in *Psycho*, from the camerawork point of view. Many many interstitial shots--a doorway, some pillows, the back of the room service girl. These sorts of shots are usually to prepare for something such as an encounter between humans, but they seem delinked from that, as if the camera itself wanted to talk to the moving trolley, the curtain and the shadows. My Tibetan Buddhist teacher talks about mandala principle this way: you should be in life as in a hotel, because you enjoy it better that way. It's not yours, yeah it's a non-place, but not (even) necessarily in that scary Romantic way Augé talks about. We have no idea what happened in that room. Each shot becomes a metaphor for each other shot, so that finally it's undecidable whether this is really a story about a room service girl, or a girl eating scrambled eggs, or a story about scrambled eggs talking to a fork, or skin talking to a faucet. In the absence of a metaphysics of cause and effect (from Hume and Kant on), what we have are statistical correlations. The movie plunges us into the void of reason that Kant detects in the Humean destruction of causality (a destruction that just is the condition of modern science). That void of reason is the gap between my (human) mind and another thing. But there are other gaps: between a pile of scrambled eggs and a bowl; between a foot and the bathroom floor; between a trolley and the doorway; between an eye and another eye, one looking through a crack in a doorway, the other not. Only metaphor bridges these gaps, which is to say, metaphor just is how causality functions in a universe of entities that don't sum to one another. That is, if we're not living in a total blend-o-rama where the eggs are the fork and so on. The tension in the movie is precisely the tension between a myriad cracks in and between things. Btw: My OOO use of *withdrawal* means open secret, not hiding or shrinking, or excess. Something unspeakable and irreducibly untranslatable. Yours, Tim On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 1:50 PM, Clough, Patricia pclo...@gc.cuny.eduwrote: Yes I do think that this is a great question: are we in anyone else's moment? Never mind one's own While I do appreciate your point about the untranslatablility it is funny, Micha that you end on Deleuze. And I know much more is going on below than just Deleuze.But actually there are challenges to Deleuze right now that have implications for politics and even what can be made out of the experiences you describe below. Lauren might have been asking the same question what can we say about the many experiences we are sharing and failing to share with each other? From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [ empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of micha cárdenas [ mmcar...@usc.edu] Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2012 2:25 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture I absolutely agree that place persists as a major determinant of life possibilities, as much or more than class, despite the ongoing pounding of the rhetoric of digital globality and neoliberal plentitude. I find it hard to support any claim that there is a zeitgeist or taxonomy of the moment, unless we're talking about the moment in the US or in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California. When I used to go to UCSD and spend my time crossing the US/Mexico border regularly I was often reminded that even in Tijuana, with it's proximity to the US, most people don't speak english and there is almost no usage of the word queer, an untranslatable word. Also, throughout Latin America, as Diana Taylor describes, the word Performance is largely untranslatable and has a handful of poor substitutions, or substitutions with difference, perhaps a best one being lo performatico. Being someone who does queer performance with technology means that conversations about my work in Latin America have a very, very different valence. I was invited to speak
Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
I saw in the city of Umeå in the North of Sweden a very interesting exhibition, Lost and Found Queerying the Archive. The curators Jane Rowley and Louise Wolthers built the show around some central and pivotal questions: identity, love and sexuality. Many of the voices presented are anonymous, people questioning themselves, searching for some belonging, for some identity, asking themselves about normality and normativity. The norms are made of conventions and consensus, agreements, historical memes written on people's experiences and stories. For me personally it was a great aha moment to read Rosi Braidottis Nomadic Subjects, a book where she writes about our fragmented identities, our ability to wander between different identities and belongings but not staying in one. Ana On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 2:44 AM, Zach Blas zachb...@gmail.com wrote: hi all-- i’m finally jumping in here again after some great posts from patricia, lauren, jordan, and jack again! i’d really like to pull in some empyre subscribers to this discussion, so i wonder if we can try to tackle some more general questions about the stakes and stances around affect and its relations to queerness, digital technology/media, and political art. patricia and lauren, you have already somewhat laid this out, but i think it would be great to hear more about how you parse affect and feelings and what those frameworks / structures of thinking permit, enhance, delimit, enclose. in my experience, discussions around affect always run up against conflicting approaches to defining it as well as how it relates to feelings or emotions. patricia, it seems that many theorists and writers who focus on technology, the nonhuman, and the new materialisms you have already mentioned engage affect through a deleuzian / spinozan approach. and they do so because it affords them a particular way to think technical / nonhuman materials. it seems like one of the critiques we could think about here is the one that jack has already brought up, which is on the use of high theory and a politics of citations. do you think its possible to explore this strand of affect through low theory? do you know of anyone who is doing this? in this area of deleuze, affect, queerness, and feminism, luciana parisi has talked about a fundamental queerness through her notion of abstract sex and claire colebrook has also considered how doing theory could be fundamentally queer. i’m just really curious how the feminist new materialisms, which engage affect and queerness, could align/overlap with jack halberstam’s investments in a low theory and what that might look like--or what it already looks like if someone is doing thisand for this week, how low theory and high theory differently impact and shape our understandings and experiences of affect. lauren, thanks for bringing in the transitional objects video! i wonder if was can all take a look at a recent work by jordan crandall called “hotel.” http://vimeo.com/7091631 maybe we can think about the relations and (dis)alignments between these two videos and how they convey affect. notably, jordan’s piece does not use language, while the other piece has consistent speaking. maybe another way to think about affect, queerness, and technology is around capture, withdrawal, and escape. i’m pretty taken by recent theories of escape, invisibility, refusals of recognition, tactics of nonexistence, becoming imperceptible. personally, i’ve been really interested in how alex galloway and eugene thacker have framed this around what they identify as the coming era of “universal standards of identification,” which of course are already here with devices like biometrics. “henceforth,” they write, “the lived environment will be divided into identifiable zones and nonidentifiable zones, and nonidentifiables will be the shadowy new ‘criminal’ classes–those that do not identify.” this is something phil agre has also written about, what he calls the capture model and grammars of action. different from surveillance, capture is specific to our information age and grammars of action are what capture produces. arge writes that “the capture model describes the situation that results when grammars of action are imposed upon human activities and when the newly reorganized activities are represented by computers in real time.” i bring this all up because i’m generally interested in affect, capture, and measurability. since i recently read a lot of hardt negri for my prelim exams this spring, immeasurability and beyond measure surfaced a lot. this is a pretty open-ended question at this point, but i’m just wondering if anyone has thoughts on affect’s relation to (im)measurability and capture--and how that might weigh on queerness and feminism... thanks! -- zach blas artist phd candidate literature, information science + information studies, visual studies duke university www.zachblas.info
Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
Hi allI want first to say I have seen Jennifer Montgomery's video Its very affective. Thanks Lauren and Jack for the commentI want to move on to Zach's good questionsbut before I do I also had a thought about affect and digital and object oriented/SR. I do think that what was so great about the video besides making me feel sick as Lauren also noted-- or finding myself shuttering-- was that it made me think again that we are at this moment when the technology is changing throwing us back to the threatening space where the transitional object may not be transitioning us leaving us with confusion and hate and anger and loss. LB: We see that the making of a new medium is a gathering up of previous events of newness, all violent to the sensorium. And while I don't want to be too pushy with this analogy, I think that object oriented and SR whatever else they may be belong to this technological moment (not clearly stated yet) and so are producing a reaction that is alluded to in the video -- While objected oriented and SR haven't made links to queer, they are queer in this way. Just for starters with Zach's questions. I think digital has made us think much more or much more again about technology and the body (less about intelligence) and has made us think the body in terms of affect and emotion that are not cognitive or conscious and maybe not even unconscious so the body is not merely the organismOr the organism is no longer the best figure of life. We have been pushed beyond the cyborg -- two entities joined to each other-- to an ontology of matter and capacities of objects. Whatever we might want to make of subjectivity it no longer is simply human subjectivity or simply joined to the function of the organism---or autopoeisis. That is some kind of queer. Only some kind of queer. As for high and low theory. Well while I seem to be a high theorist (probably over correction for low level education), I am working more now in terms of writing and writing style which undoes every move with in it without losing any of the movesSo I am writing a piece right now on exorcisms and rosary beads and my crazy mother---mixed with some psychoanalysis and some philosophy , some art history and some very low level devotional writings. And the dark mysticisms that have been connected with SRThacker and others. I am trying to keep it from getting too high More soon. P From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Zach Blas [zachb...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 19, 2012 8:44 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture hi all-- i’m finally jumping in here again after some great posts from patricia, lauren, jordan, and jack again! i’d really like to pull in some empyre subscribers to this discussion, so i wonder if we can try to tackle some more general questions about the stakes and stances around affect and its relations to queerness, digital technology/media, and political art. patricia and lauren, you have already somewhat laid this out, but i think it would be great to hear more about how you parse affect and feelings and what those frameworks / structures of thinking permit, enhance, delimit, enclose. in my experience, discussions around affect always run up against conflicting approaches to defining it as well as how it relates to feelings or emotions. patricia, it seems that many theorists and writers who focus on technology, the nonhuman, and the new materialisms you have already mentioned engage affect through a deleuzian / spinozan approach. and they do so because it affords them a particular way to think technical / nonhuman materials. it seems like one of the critiques we could think about here is the one that jack has already brought up, which is on the use of high theory and a politics of citations. do you think its possible to explore this strand of affect through low theory? do you know of anyone who is doing this? in this area of deleuze, affect, queerness, and feminism, luciana parisi has talked about a fundamental queerness through her notion of abstract sex and claire colebrook has also considered how doing theory could be fundamentally queer. i’m just really curious how the feminist new materialisms, which engage affect and queerness, could align/overlap with jack halberstam’s investments in a low theory and what that might look like--or what it already looks like if someone is doing thisand for this week, how low theory and high theory differently impact and shape our understandings and experiences of affect. lauren, thanks for bringing in the transitional objects video! i wonder if was can all take a look at a recent work by jordan crandall called “hotel.” http://vimeo.com/7091631 maybe we can think about the relations and (dis)alignments between
