Re: [-empyre-] complicit post
The network, as conceived of in ANT (Latour, Law, et al), is what I am referring to when talking about social contracts, creativity and mediation. Same idea, different language. Foucault was on to this, earlier, with a different terminology. The remediated self, as a node in a social network, is not the same as a cyborg, but has many similar characteristics. The remediated self is more a social and virtual construct that exists within a network. It is not an individual state although it may seem to manifest as one. That is the illusion of individuality. As Sean suggests, this might be conceived of in terms of corporate culture and globalisation. Certainly, ANT provides powerful tools for understanding how globalised corporate culture operates. However, I think it is putting the cart before the horse to suggest that the transnational corporation is the determining model here. I doubt there is a single determiner of current events. That is a probable limitation in conventional Marxist analysis. ANT would suggest a pluralistic approach to causality is likely to be more productive. No one cart can be put ahead of all the horses that are around at the moment. Seeking a more inclusive democratic model is fine in principle but I don¹t see it making much difference. I don¹t think democracy will be very attractive to a mountain either. Questions about how expanded networked agency can be coordinated are important and perhaps they do boil down to models of governance. But I cannot imagine how the forms of social organisation we have entertained to date will help. Best Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art s.bi...@eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments CIRCLE research group www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ si...@littlepig.org.uk www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: Sean Cubitt scub...@unimelb.edu.au Reply-To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:49:11 +1100 To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] complicit post Hey Cinzia Re the cyborg of the actor-network - sorry, that was a bit dense! Acyor-network theory as used in Latour, law and others is about the combination of human and technical into networks, like laboratories or cities. The Ocyborg¹ is a human-technological hybrid. The actually existing cyborg (I argued a decade ago) is the transnational corporation, a Omachine¹ which humans are plugged into as living bio-chips. At the time I thought this was an advance on the kind of subordination (subsumption) of humanity into techno-capital. Now I think of it as more than an advance on factory relations: the network (as in internet) isn¹t just a factory: it is a device for producing innovation. And as Marx argued ages ago, a characteristic of capitalist technology (means of production) is that it tends constantly to outrun the capacities of capital itself (mode of production), making capital innovate internally in terms of its organisation, all tending towards a point where it simply can¹t keep up with its own technical innovations without a profound mutation. This is what I think the new cyborg network is about: a profound change in social, political-economy and cutura organisaton. If this is indeed the historical trajectory we¹re on, then the duty of artists and writers, as the Oantennae of the species¹ is to imagine what happens next I¹m very taken with Rancière¹s idea that politics proceeds by being forced to address exclusions. The current challenge is to recognise that some people who are the objects of government - migrants demand to become subjects. This is the logic of globalisation. The upcoming exclusion (which we can address by getting Latour and rancière into dialogue) is technology; and we are well on the way to that with the emergence of a network politics and economicsthat people like Bauwens and rather differently Tiziana Terranova talk about. We can almost imagine what such an expanded democracy might be like, one where processed memory has an active role in economic and political life. But beyond that lies the unthinkable issue of a democracy which includes the non-human world for which Lovelock gives us the handy shorthand Gaia. What could it possibly mean to give a mountain a vote? (not to be represented: that¹s how we deal with migrants today: they do not require representing, they want a voice, agency). The unthinkable: that slaves might be part of society, or women, or the propertyless. Politics proceeds by changing radically as it incorporates these unthinkable others. The coming network politics only speaks to dialogue with technology the unthiunkable is to afford agency to the planet, with little or no idea what kind of politics that might mean Environmentalism isn¹t just a metaphor (as in Omedia ecologies¹, though that¹s a start): it is a political demand for agency that implies a transition from individual
Re: [-empyre-] complicit post
Sean, reading your comments is always so interesting. You write: Reversing their polarities, what if connectivity comes first and the elements it connects are secondary? Isn't that what the aesthetic experience infers? You have always been very sensitive to the ethics and politics of relating. I find it impossible to separate personal from social relations - the individual from the social - exactly because I see myself as (in)formed by the sticky set of connected relations I am and have been part of. I am interested in the way the networks of connected technologies spill out into familial, professional and intimate relationships and vice versa. I am also interested in my own 'objecthood' as a performer in my own video work - what do I become a mediator for? Where do I slot myself in? What ripples of relations and associations do I send forward? For me, the present dominance of technological networks does not offer an alternative (how long will access be this wide for?), but brings to the fore associating, relating, connecting where 'identity' was the dominant trope. ... the complex partnerships that predate the people or things that fill those roles ... is a fabulous paradox, as the partnerships exist only as long as there are Seans, Cinzias and Johannas to enact them and perform them - therefore evolving them, betraying them, and so on. One more thing: why the cyborg of the actor-network? Best, Cinzia openvisions.org 2010/1/4 Sean Cubitt scub...@unimelb.edu.au Thanks for the kind words Johanna Aesthetic - in the old Greek sense of aesthesis, of sensory, sensual - isn't that about a mode of appreciating? Some days even the things you prize most, poem, song, food, seem tired and jejune. Seizing on something beautiful remedies that soul-sickness, and isn't essentially about a class of things (art) but a way of overcoming the objectness of objects, the isolation of the psyche. A branch of bougainvillea, a Stephen Gerrard goal, the scent of roasting garlic wafting over a wall, watching your grad students argue about Agamben and games engines: these things are aesthetic, without the preciosity of art. The elegance of an algorithm - as Gelernter argued - has this quality, if a more mental one, also profoundly sociable, and on scales (vide Linux, P2P) far beyond the amiable but in this case unambitious Nicholas Bourriaud. A friend sends his review of Baudrillard's last book, with this passage on existential subjectivity, whose ³great disappearance² is, in his belief, not just that of the virtual metamorphosis of objective reality, but that of the ceaseless annihilation of subjectivity For JB this is a matter for distress: but isn't it the cost we have to pay for the renewal of a polity which has advanced by exclusion? If the subject par excellence of globalisation is the migrant, and the subject of the coming network society the cyborg of the actor-network, cultural identity and human identity are in question, and with them the idea of subjectivity that has dominated modernity (even in schizophrenic forms). So perhaps we have a few more twists and turns before we can shed even the 19th century dialectic of individual vs social. I guess this is a way of saying: we will almost certainly go 'beyond art' before we go beyond the dialectic. Co-dependence and autopoesis are too invested in the primacy of individuals to resolve the question of the social (as witness for example the truly unreadable paroxysms of Luhmann as he tries to make the autopoetic model fit human lives). Luckily for the empyre community, tho, both also include a far more important and as yet un-worked-out idea of mediation, flow, flux, connectivity. Reversing their polarities, what if connectivity comes first and the elements it connects are secondary? Isn't that what the aesthetic experience infers? So yes indeed, negotiations and complexities that do not offer themselves for resolution, but the dialectic is about the difficulty of contradiction, together with its necessity Now this is getting too 'academic' - sorry! But one last effort at relevance: complicity derives from the Latin 'complex' which, to add confusion, means 'accomplice' or 'partner'. (There's a false etymology which suggests it's from the French 'pli', fold, for all the Deleuzeans out there). I like the idea that the complexity of accomplices is implicit in 'complicit' - the complex partnerships that predate the people or things that fill those roles (the system chair-table-computer-modem . . .) which I slot myself into to write this . . . Best sean On 4/01/10 1:21 AM, Johanna Drucker druc...@gseis.ucla.edu wrote: Nice post, Sean. I agree, it's the pessimism that we have to get over -- we can't afford it, personally or culturally. What I want to salvage from Adorno is his insight into the workings of aesthetic objects--the qualities that make them distinct from other objects-- which of course
Re: [-empyre-] complicit post
gh comments below: On Jan 2, 2010, at 9:59 AM, Johanna Drucker wrote: But the legacy of Adorno’s aesthetics is problematic for us because it has become academic, and because it is premised on a description of the world and of art that have become formulaic. gh comments: I think I learned about Adorno from reading Artforum in the 1960's. He was referred to by art writers in support of the conceptual art of the time. I wonder whether anyone outside of Academia and the art world knows or cares about Adorno or Agamben for that matter. It occurs to me how bizarre a marriage the art world is taking academic theory and philosophy and melding it with the aesthetics of marketing and desire. In New York we often look to Europe for the theoretical underpinnings of art. It's an odd idea but it gives some veracity or credence to art works. The other verification is of course the market. If art sells than it must be good enough for someone to buy it. As I've often quoted Rimbaud here it is again sort of paraphrased, all an artists needs is a poet and a patron. Of course poets were the first art theorists entrusted with the task of explaining an art work. The patron obviously gives monetary support to the artist. In the 21st century art world there is an art industry that includes Academia, galleries,museums, alternative space, artists collectives, art fairs, arts festivals etc.. all of these function as patronage to a greater or lesser degree. The word complicit has a negative connotation as if being involved in these mechanisms has a taint to it. That's a strange notion. I've aways thought an artists is part of a culture and times even as they stand apart from it and try to present their own work. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] complicit post
Dear Johanna, Many thanks for your post which astutely articulates and reflects a number of conversations with friends and colleagues that I’ve had during the past few months. Specifically, I so appreciate your candor and courage and do hope that your post will open up a space for this productive conversation for Sweet Dreams are made of these ( apologies for the pun which seems somehow appropriate gesture of nostalgia within the haze of New Years'!) Kevin Hamilton initiated an earlier attempt in mid-late November. The resonance of the last sentence in his post stayed with me – “Any thoughts? Maybe a public listserv isn't the safest place to have this conversation? Kevin Hamilton. I felt a chill as I read his sentence as it fully evidenced the dynamics to which your email alludes. So … now ... thanks to the continuum of Empyre and Nicholas we have the introduction of this topic for January – one which is wholly welcome and necessary. I will respond more fully in the days to come – Chris On Jan 2, 2010, at 6:59 AM, Johanna Drucker wrote: All, This is meant as an independent start, not a response to John's post, which I shall take a look at later today. I just wanted to make an initial statement here before engaging in discussion. JD Complicity I believe in art and I believe that aesthetic objects and expressions do something that other things do not. What is the work that aesthetic objects do and what are the grounds for critical apprehension of that activity? My answers to these basic questions does not fall far from the formulations of earlier aestheticians— refinement of discriminatory sensibility, appreciation of purposive purposelessness, shock effect that wakes us to experience, and the opening of the space for experience itself. Works of art and the work of art objects are remarkable, unique, and provocative because they give form to thought in material expressions that make it available to a shared perception. From that, all kinds of cultural effects follow. When I titled Sweet Dreams, I was well aware that the term “complicity” was provocative, suggesting as it does that the critical stance of moral superiority to “common” or “mass” culture taken by many critics and artists was being called into question. But at the same time, I was not suggesting that the acknowledgment that we are – all of us – part of systems of consumption, careerism, professionalism, promotion etc. that are the inevitable apparatus of our conditions of work and existence–meant that we are necessarily aligned with values of oppression and exploitation. But I was trying to point out what feels like blindness (even bad faith at its extreme) in two worlds I know well – that of radical, innovative art practice and that of academic work focused on cultural production across the arts and media. I simply wanted to point out that we are all operating inside the same system that becomes reified as the object of critical study. None of us are outside its machinations, nor, if we are honest, outside the drives and desires it instills in us or to which we subscribe. I was originally motivated to write Sweet Dreams because of the enthusiasm I had for contemporary artists whose work had a playful relation to mass culture that did not begin with the assumption of negativity that was characteristic of some early 20th century avant-garde practices. If we revisit Italian Futurism, we find Marinetti, for instance, fully engaged in mass media as a thematic inspiration (‘wireless imagination’) and as instrument and means of realization (the language of publicity, typography of advertising, use of radio, pamphlets, newspapers as sites and instruments of the work). Dada and Cubist collage work is not antithetical to mass culture, but toying with its materials and their potential as elements of aesthetic expression. Surrealism has a long career of absorption into fashion, film, popular culture. While the useful critical tenets of Russian Formalism, particularly those of Viktor Shklovsky, stress defamiliarization as a way to recover aesthetic experience from the numbing mechanical effects of daily life, they are not more focused on mass culture as the enemy than on other routines and habits. Mass media becomes an object of critical disdain and denigration with the fearful recognition of the power of propaganda to create a “mass” whose hysterias are both destructive and self-destructive. Media studies arises from the terrors wrought by the first world war, and takes the form we know best through the writings of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno, in response to the rise of fascism and the contemporary free-market demon, the culture industries. But the legacy of Adorno’s aesthetics is problematic for us because it has become academic, and
Re: [-empyre-] complicit post
Welcome to the New Year, everyone. I wonder if others in the -empyre- community share my curiosity as I enter into the new year finding posts coming across my screen that could be understood to be dismissive of intellectual history (the legacy of Adorno's aesthetics is problematic for us because it has become academic) and/or of the benefits that might be derived from philosophical or cultural thought, whether inside or outside of the academy (I wonder whether anyone outside of Academia and the art world knows or cares about Adorno or Agamben for that matter). I certainly agree with Johanna that part of our responsibility as artists and thinkers is to question and challenge notions of the world and art that have become formulaic. But I wonder if you, Johanna, could clarify what you mean by academic in this context, especially since I value your academic study of alphabetic historiography and digital aesthetics, just as I appreciate the academic contexts that have brought us into productive conversation in the past. Best wishes, Tim gh comments below: On Jan 2, 2010, at 9:59 AM, Johanna Drucker wrote: But the legacy of Adorno's aesthetics is problematic for us because it has become academic, and because it is premised on a description of the world and of art that have become formulaic. gh comments: I think I learned about Adorno from reading Artforum in the 1960's. He was referred to by art writers in support of the conceptual art of the time. I wonder whether anyone outside of Academia and the art world knows or cares about Adorno or Agamben for that matter. It occurs to me how bizarre a marriage the art world is taking academic theory and philosophy and melding it with the aesthetics of marketing and desire. In New York we often look to Europe for the theoretical underpinnings of art. It's an odd idea but it gives some veracity or credence to art works. The other verification is of course the market. If art sells than it must be good enough for someone to buy it. As I've often quoted Rimbaud here it is again sort of paraphrased, all an artists needs is a poet and a patron. Of course poets were the first art theorists entrusted with the task of explaining an art work. The patron obviously gives monetary support to the artist. In the 21st century art world there is an art industry that includes Academia, galleries,museums, alternative space, artists collectives, art fairs, arts festivals etc.. all of these function as patronage to a greater or lesser degree. The word complicit has a negative connotation as if being involved in these mechanisms has a taint to it. That's a strange notion. I've aways thought an artists is part of a culture and times even as they stand apart from it and try to present their own work. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Timothy Murray Director, Society for the Humanities http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/ Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu Professor of Comparative Literature and English A. D. White House Cornell University Ithaca, New York 14853 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] complicit post
My favourite among the bizarre marriages is the defusing and capitalisation of the situationists over recent years. There is a letter from Adorno to Benjamin which sets up the problem neatly: he refers to high and low culture as 'the two torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up'(this is such an important quote for me, I looked up the date of it -- 18 March 1936 - it's in the correspondence, and in the old NLB collection Aesthetics and Politics) I'm reading up on Lavater; in a collection of essays the editor, who takes the physiognomist to task for populism *and* a claim to high aesthetic values, asks whether it is not an absolute contradiction to be in favour of popularising the nobility of aesthetics. I think I have to answer, yes, in the dialectical sense. The contradiction - between cheap commercial culture and (pick your favourite exemplars: mine would almost all be media artists) the best in art - is what drives forward the idea of democratising the best, not just the good-enough. I have been trying to climb out form under the long shadow of Adorno for a decade now. Johanna is right: the formula is a problem, Even more so is the historical oddity, that TWA wrote from his experience of gazing into the maw of the end of european enlightenment in the horror of fascism. His pessimism is what has become academic, and sentimental, in the sense that 'we're all doomed' is a position occupied without taking responsibility for the consequences - an excuse for quiescence If I follow right, the argument is that we are all complicit, and have to get used to the idea that we have to work within the beast. There are other ways than negativity (in Adorno's sense of refusal): open source, peer-to-peer, gift economies and the line stretching back to at least the counterculture of the 60s of building alternatives, for example. Today the market seems like the almighty engine of history, as perhaps a hundred years ago (almost to the day) nations seemed the only source of pride and power. Going into the teens, networks are just beginning to look like they might be the alternative (and just as Marx emerged in the period of nation-state hegemony to critique the market, so the first critics of the networks are beginning to appear). Avant-gardes were always based on the principle that whatever they invented would be commercialised in time - often very swiftly nowadays. No technique is intrinsically safe from the process. Perpetual innovation is art's job, an innovation which constantly fuels capital, which is now so regimented it is incapale of generating its own novelty. But that is another contradiction, and if there is one thing worth keeping from Teddy Wiesengrund it is the dialectic! So happy new decade to one and all - a year isn't long enough! sean On 3/01/10 4:48 AM, G.H. Hovagimyan g...@thing.net wrote: gh comments below: On Jan 2, 2010, at 9:59 AM, Johanna Drucker wrote: But the legacy of Adorno¹s aesthetics is problematic for us because it has become academic, and because it is premised on a description of the world and of art that have become formulaic. gh comments: It occurs to me how bizarre a marriage the art world is taking academic theory and philosophy and melding it with the aesthetics of marketing and desire. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre Prof Sean Cubitt scub...@unimelb.edu.au Director Media and Communications Program Faculty of Arts Room 127 John Medley East The University of Melbourne Parkville VIC 3010 Australia Tel: + 61 3 8344 3667 Fax:+ 61 3 8344 5494 M: 0448 304 004 Skype: seancubitt http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/ http://www.digital-light.net.au/ http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/ http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/ http://del.icio.us/seancubitt Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Book Series http://leonardo.info ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
