Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Brilliant thought provoking dis-cussion again, Empyrycysts.I think about different points on the law, the law as something that must beinterpreted, how the law rubs sapiens the wrong way and provokes art. The lawis art. Human activity in general is art according to Shelley and some others. Judges,politicians, are artists, newscasters, carpenters…….. I question what the Law(capitalizing just once) does if it (they?) runs out of money. What if thebankruptcy in such a hypothetical case were feigned? My thoughts turn to Kleeand other artists working on cardboard when other supports are unavailable. AndI think of the fact of people forced to create in prisons—Jafar Panahi,mentioned by Murat, perhaps not exactly creating inside a prison, but workingin the face of strict repressive regimes. What is to be done? In a sense stillalready the question/answer daily. In some poem would I ever bring K beforeHamlet? Before Ophelia? Perhaps these are only tiresome pipe dreams but at themoment they offer a way of keeping myself from what I think is a mistake, whichis to think that nothing works anymore. Which would be dis-respectful to Kleeto say the very least. Salud, William ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear Ana ah, maybe I misunderstood you, as you argued that societies are fundamentally unhealthy: [Ana schreibt] we talk a lot about healing, but suppose we don't need to be healed? I mean the idea of a healthy society is ludicrous, there is not a healthy society in the world. and if that were the case, you'd be confirming the bleak outlook or nihilistic overview that Alan enumerated insistingly earlier this morning, and your hope, which you do express, against the odds, perhaps in sync with the artistic work and cultural production critical education foregrounded by Monika Weiss and Christina Spiesel, namely to live in a real polyphonic society - what of this hope? Alan, I hear your despair and it weighs heavily, and yet you spoke out, at that lecture or presentation you gave on Wednesday, and so did Andreas when he addressed the law on either side of a wall in Jerusalem, and this speaking out is what Christina meant I think. I can''t manage to ponder the angels now (William must have Klee's/Benjamin Angel of History in mind who flies high, backwards, looking at the horror piled up, and yes, Alan, that horror grows and historically, how do you compare what cannot be forgotten or must be forgotten and ought not be forgotten? Johannes Birringer ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I ment that maybe societies are normally unhealthy and our try to normalize things, the frame violence and despair and happiness are risen from our beliefs, born with the Modernity, on a shiny good world where health and happiness were norms. If we compare in strict terms the number of beheadings carried on by ISIS and the number of people killed in drunk accidents on the motorways or in random killings in the US schools, what ISIS does is a grain of sand. But the frame makes the difference :) Ana On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear Ana ah, maybe I misunderstood you, as you argued that societies are fundamentally unhealthy: [Ana schreibt] we talk a lot about healing, but suppose we don't need to be healed? I mean the idea of a healthy society is ludicrous, there is not a healthy society in the world. and if that were the case, you'd be confirming the bleak outlook or nihilistic overview that Alan enumerated insistingly earlier this morning, and your hope, which you do express, against the odds, perhaps in sync with the artistic work and cultural production critical education foregrounded by Monika Weiss and Christina Spiesel, namely to live in a real polyphonic society - what of this hope? Alan, I hear your despair and it weighs heavily, and yet you spoke out, at that lecture or presentation you gave on Wednesday, and so did Andreas when he addressed the law on either side of a wall in Jerusalem, and this speaking out is what Christina meant I think. I can''t manage to ponder the angels now (William must have Klee's/Benjamin Angel of History in mind who flies high, backwards, looking at the horror piled up, and yes, Alan, that horror grows and historically, how do you compare what cannot be forgotten or must be forgotten and ought not be forgotten? Johannes Birringer ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] introducing week 3
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Greetings to all! And many thanx to Johannes for introducing me to the list and inviting me to participate in this necessary and wonderfully deep, yet deeply disturbing discussions. As a newcomer to empire I have been following the development of conversations from the beginning of the month with great interest and attention often in awe at how many diverse yet coherently connected topics have opened up so far. Johannes kindly invited me to this 'roundtable' with regard to a book project, a collection of essays, that I am currently working as one of the editors http://www.theaterwetenschappen.ugent.be/bodydanger and which at least on some levels resonate with this months discussion (at least I think so!). Below I provide the main points we aim to research and hope to open for debate. However, for me the shift from biopolitics to necropolitics will be particularly important to consider when I try to think about the ISIS, the impact of the specific type of their production of violence and the effect and affect it creates trough the spectacularisation of monstrosity, the performativity of videotaped beheadings and the unrepresentable and the unwatchable that suddenly became both presented and watched. And also the question that haunts me eternally and that has already been asked in different forms several times on the list, how can art respond to this if at all, how to face the powerlessness and where to seek the empowerment? I would like to elaborate more on this in the mails over the weekend and in the following week. Meanwhile I send the not so short :-) description of the topics we're thinking about. Titled This body is in Danger! Shift-shaping CorpoRealities in Contemporary Performing Arts the book will aim to look at they changing corporealities in the light of: Shifts from Biopolitics to Necropolitics - from Foucault through Agamben to Mbembe For contemporary subjects of biopolitics and necropolitics, the body becomes the locus and symptom of an (embodied) social trauma. In the last decade, life, its modes and the social and political space of global capitalism have been managed and organized by the logic of death. In Necropolitics (2003), Achille Mbembe discusses this new logic of the capital and its processes of geopolitical demarcation of world zones based on the mobilization of the war machine. Mbembe claims that the concept of biopolitics - one of the major logics of contemporary societies, due to the war machine and the state of exception - should be replaced with necropolitics. Biopolitics is for that matter the horizon for articulating contemporary capitalist societies from the so-called politics of life, where life (which does not matter anymore, following Giorgio Agamben, if it’s bare/naked life or life-with-forms) is seen as the zero degree of intervention of each and every politics into contemporary societies; but today, capital’s surplus value is based on the capitalization of death (in Latin: necro) worlds. Technologies - Pop-up bodies in the desert of the real The notion of the body is going through a major transformation, moving from an anthropocentric to a anthropomorphist one. Digital technologies brought the crucial shifts and changes in contemporary understanding of the body from the natural over the cultural to the technological body. These shifts produced and keep on producing unstable changes in the architecture of reality, indicating the influence of the real over reality. This also had a grip on gender studies. As Beatrice Preciado (2013) writes, “gender” assumes that the configuration of a subject’s sex can be influenced by means of various interventions such as surgery, hormonal and psychological therapy. She introduced the word “technogender” to replace the concepts of sex and gender because bodies can no longer be isolated from the social forces of sexual difference. In relation to above mentioned concepts we shall address the particular bodies that are ‘in danger’ or ‘endangered’ and the diverse ways they pop up in performance contexts, including specific performativity of pop-up bodies (Stalpaert) in digital constellations, where both the space-time paradigm (Grzinic) and one subject - one body paradigm (Žižek, 1997) are broken. We particularly welcome contributions on how these bodies might pop up and create dissensus in a police corporeal constellation, i.e. appear as political bodies and embodied different realities. Activism - from performing protest to cultivating a diplomacy of dissensus In the twenty-first century, a new ethical aesthetic is developed with regard to performing protest and activism. Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) proclaims the end of corporeal agency as targeted action, for our capacity to act is embedded in a network consisting of human and nonhuman agents and actants. This posthuman thought creates
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- thank you Christina for offering a clear and sober approach to the conflagrations and to absolute violence which have been discussed, and you counsel making, naming, small acts, conversation, small acts. I agree with you, and that is direct, for me, and not, perhaps, paraphrasable. [Christina schreibt] I have been writing about education in the arts/humanities as critical in resisting technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity. So I see cultural production. and not just education about it, as a form of resistance. So while it is hard to match advanced weaponry, it is easy for people who feel powerless to address it through violent performance. And so we watch it all unfolding. So what can mere mortals do? For starters, name what is going on which I have experienced this conversation as doing. Be makers. Protect what we can. Small acts make ripples. What does happen, and of course i am included in this when i reference the readings i have done or the listening to fellow artists/cultural workers and their plays or performances, is that sometimes the analysis or the philosophy of just war or unjust war, and the naming of all the horros, the speaking about trauma, the speaking of technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity, take on a different dress. Our extended theorizing shrouds too. I am glad Aneta has arrived and just posted her long and intricate prose, which of course was partly a sketching of the critical landscape for this new book on endangered bodies.. And now that I reflect, as I did when Monika first mentioned the metaphor of the garden, I am trying to understand what you mentioned, this necropolitics, this war machine, this pop-up body [?} [and Ana just thought we needed to see this photo [!],] this gendered constellation, this new ethical aesthetic .. developed with regard to performing protest and activism. Never mind the diplomat idea. Or, well, okay, has someone here felt they acted as a diplomat and dissensus-maker? You may well have. ( they desire, as a performer-diplomat, to leave “the question of the number of the collective open, a question that, without him, everyone would have a tendency to simplify somewhat”) Hmm, I don't understand this paraphrase from Latour/Rancière.. Well, Aneta, now you have thrown out a number of ideas! We have to grapple. And I had also invited your co-editor Marina Gržinić to the table, as I had heard about her writings (Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism -- Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life), but unfortunately Marina declined. In fact a number of people declined. The other day I cited from Hamed's play (Home is in Our Past) and when I remember it, the no actually was the most reverberant single word I heard next to the unbelievable vocal performance by the woman singer which cut to the bone and was untranslatable. The man/soldier/immgrant in the mud, the one submerged in the dirt and the grey mass of vile liquid, he probably could not hear her. Johannes Birringer ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Fri, 21 Nov 2014, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- out is what high, backwards, looking at the horror piled up, and yes, Alan, that horror grows and historically, how do you compare what cannot be forgotten or must be forgotten and ought not be forgotten? Johannes Birringer It will always be forgotten, it's disappearing at an increasing rate of course. Unfortunately, I think, the 'ought' (cannot be/must be/out not) is words, a turned phrase, a sound. I keep wondering how I am with the topic here in general, I have, deeply, absolutely no hope, and that is hardly a message that bears repeating (although it is one that bares repetition). - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz, was geschehen ist
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- a note: Kafka asks what if the Law, in its timely (l)iteration, were Justice, in its untimely (ethico-aesthetic - or ethological) imagination? the playwright, Howard Barker, follows, with an oeuvre imagining first freedom as a political telos and topos and then finding in the image of justice an adequacy freedom lacks. I think about the untimely of poetics and timely politics, wherewith theatre has equal wager. what to do is a question of politics and the action will be a timely answer, adequate or not; what to do it /for/ is one to which the untimely answer often comes last. (I meant it as a question, but Johannes - thank you - drew attention to it as if it described a dilemma: do you not think that the (fantasy) world we are traversing in this discussion has some intention in posing itself as this particular (multiplicitous) dilemma? that this intention works for, in aid of, political ends? is it not being demanded of us by this world - in shriller and shriller performatives - that we feel and think in a certain way about that which happens, /das Geschehen/? that we indeed feel, think and act /with/ a politics we would, if we gave ourselves the choice, disavow?) Best, Simon ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thank you, Johannes! And now asking a favor: 1) I do not want to sidetrack the empyre discussion although my query is in part engendered by the conversation, so if any of you knows something, you might just want to email me directly. Or if it is relevant to the on-going conversation, by all means respond to the list. 2) This is an academic research question. 3) The answer(s) lie in local knowledge of South Asian legal culture. Here goes: We have been discussing acts of horrible violence in part as a form of political performance. When we have discussed the State, is has mostly been about the exercise of war powers. The question that I want to raise is specifically about legal culture in the far east. One of the films I referenced when I joined in this month is called /The Act Of Killing./ During the course of the film, real perpetrators of horrible mass murder are asked about their acts and re-enact some of them without the blood, real bodies, etc. I remembered my law teaching colleague telling me about a trial in Japan that he witnessed -- or I should say he was there for part of a day -- during which a still photo of a jailhouse reenactment of the crime with a police officer acting the part of victim was presented as evidence. Meanwhile, this same colleague interviewed a South Korean colleague of his at another institution. Apparently in South Korea re-enactments often occur with cases and they are performed out in the open, fully public, after a confession but before a jury is chosen, etc. With today's communications, there is no structural reason why all potential jurors would not have seen this before they are called for service on the court case. So I am wondering about whether South Asian countries have related practices. The site of the film is Indonesia and I am wondering whether its re-enactments arise in part from a specific cultural context local to the story and that they would in some sense have a legal dimension that is not apparent to us viewing the film in America. Anyone know anything about this? With thanks, Christina Spiesel On 11/21/2014 2:29 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- thank you Christina for offering a clear and sober approach to the conflagrations and to absolute violence which have been discussed, and you counsel making, naming, small acts, conversation, small acts. I agree with you, and that is direct, for me, and not, perhaps, paraphrasable. [Christina schreibt] I have been writing about education in the arts/humanities as critical in resisting technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity. So I see cultural production. and not just education about it, as a form of resistance. So while it is hard to match advanced weaponry, it is easy for people who feel powerless to address it through violent performance. And so we watch it all unfolding. So what can mere mortals do? For starters, name what is going on which I have experienced this conversation as doing. Be makers. Protect what we can. Small acts make ripples. What does happen, and of course i am included in this when i reference the readings i have done or the listening to fellow artists/cultural workers and their plays or performances, is that sometimes the analysis or the philosophy of just war or unjust war, and the naming of all the horros, the speaking about trauma, the speaking of technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity, take on a different dress. Our extended theorizing shrouds too. I am glad Aneta has arrived and just posted her long and intricate prose, which of course was partly a sketching of the critical landscape for this new book on endangered bodies.. And now that I reflect, as I did when Monika first mentioned the metaphor of the garden, I am trying to understand what you mentioned, this necropolitics, this war machine, this pop-up body [?} [and Ana just thought we needed to see this photo [!],] this gendered constellation, this new ethical aesthetic .. developed with regard to performing protest and activism. Never mind the diplomat idea. Or, well, okay, has someone here felt they acted as a diplomat and dissensus-maker? You may well have. ( they desire, as a performer-diplomat, to leave “the question of the number of the collective open, a question that, without him, everyone would have a tendency to simplify somewhat”) Hmm, I don't understand this paraphrase from Latour/Rancière.. Well, Aneta, now you have thrown out a number of ideas! We have to grapple. And I had also invited your co-editor Marina Gržinić to the table, as I had heard about her writings (Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism -- Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life), but unfortunately Marina declined. In fact a number of people declined. The other day I
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear all, I have been on an airplane and now I see so much has happened in our writing in the meantime. I will read/address those newer posts later tonight but in this post I would like to share what I wrote on the subject of voice of (for) others in response to Johannes Birringer’s question: _ The voice must be given but only to those who express the desire or need, those who agree to have it projected into space, to have it exist as their voice but also as our voice, shared as an inscription into the public sphere. Those who are here now, our contemporaries, and who live in the shadows of their private or public trauma or who are socially removed from power, including power of voicing. How can we not offer [as we are positioned in the realm of visibility, we work with visibility as our language] to be the conduit, to be the transmitter, the ‘amplifier'? Those who are no longer here, the forty students in Mexico, those disappeared whose relatives I met while working on the project in Chile, whose fragile remains, particles, bone fragments, are still being searched for in the sands, in the dirt surrounding Santiago. How can we refuse to offer to be their microphone? Their amplifier? their resonance box? Their archivist? Their instrument? Their lover/loving listener? Those who are no longer here, the 1,000 young women seamstresses who perished in one of the death marches, on their way out of Gruenberg camp ( “Shrouds”), the abandoned, now forgotten (and sold to a private developer) by the city. The square as actively not remembered, not seen, by the citizens. The women who perished there are in oblivion; the site today looks like a damp, full of debris, which serves as a field for the enacted practice of forgetting, our active forgetting. How could I refuse to give them our/their voice, the voice of now living young women that worked with me on that site, lamenting, and who wanted to speak through their presence (the young women living in this town today), in order to give the voice to that absence and erasure. A ribbon came out of the young women raped by a group of citizens on a bus. One of them recalled during the trial a certain feeling of surprise at the site of that red ribbon, which was her intestines taken out by a rod inserted violently into her already devastated and destroyed bleeding body, inserted by the youngest of the rapists. Her heroic attempts to stay alive without internal organs left inside, just for a little while, some days following the destruction, where her body was literally turned inside out, her RIBBON (something I am working with right now), and her dramatic whispered call. She addressed us to us to not to forget . Her voice and her ribbon waving at us, still today. How can I not give her the voice, the amplification. How can we not give the voice to the raped and murdered daily victims of the horrific uses of war and sexual violence understood as means to destroy, as means to kill, to penetrate with rods, with bottles, with weapons, harsh objects, those taking ribbons out, in horrific acts of violence against human beings. We all ought to see the ribbon. It needs to glow before us, in our memory, in our wake and in our sleep. I dream of a monument to her internal ribbon that should occupy a public sphere. Perhaps within the canopy in front of the India Gate. A monument abolishing rape and abolishing gender based prosecution. We ought to stand by, identify with, those who’re tortured, silenced, disappeared, raped, killed, wounded, beaten, forgotten, invisible, impoverished, deprived, removed. We as artists have at least a chance, a potential, a chance at visibility, through the artifacts that we sometimes make, the conditions of enunciation. Art making as the realm of the visible, always within public domain Art as pollution and as an accusation and as a trial. Cultural production as political production, including poetry. Activating and transformational, even if only nearing this potential of transformation. The artifact, the poetic entity, the place, the site of the encounter, bordelinkings (Bracha Ettinger) . Artifact as the amplifier, as the conduit, as the transmitter, as a fluid membrane, as a form of resonance, as the act of waving our silents and often forcibly silenced arms towards the volume of violence. Potentiality of the realm of the symbolic, what Kristeva calls the “thing”. The shortcut, the residue, voice, voice over, voicing, speaking up, voice as presence. —— Monika Weiss On Nov 20, 2014, at 3:57 PM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all So much to ponder, in your postings, that one doesn't know where to go, following Simon's dark pronouncement of our dilemma, and the fear projected onto us all? Is it possible to talk about a
