from:"Murat Nemet\-Nejat"

Re: [-empyre-] social media and scholarship

2014-12-12 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--David, along with John Cayley's, yours is the most ludic analysis of social
media, and its selling itself, I have heard. Thank you.
Murat

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 3:19 PM, David Golumbia dgolum...@gmail.com wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Tim kindly asked me yesterday to reflect briefly on my own scholarship and
the question of the relationship of social media and politics.

I'm deliberately not engaging with the recent discussion on the list,
although I've tried without success to dig into the discussion of ISIS Tim
mentioned in last month's list.

My interest, from the beginning, has been on the rhetoric that fuels this
form of inquiry, and the political effects of that rhetoric. The ideas that
the internet writ large, or social media writ somewhat smaller, is
fueling or provoking political change; that that political change is
welcome in some global sense; that if you want to liberate a government,
give them Facebook--the odd and inexact phrasing of that sentence itself
being worth reflection, as is the fact that it was uttered by a former
Google executive who now is part of a Google social change venture
capital subsidiary.

All of this rhetoric, multiplied thousands of times in the mass and social
media (a distinction I wouldn't want to grant, but let's leave it for now),
provides a hard sell for a single proposition: give people more computing
power, and welcome political change will result.

Not only is that proposition based on, as I mentioned before, extremely
contentious and implicit definitions of welcome and political, but it
is probably false. not only is it probably false: there is good evidence to
believe the opposite is true. This is the buried message behind the Snowden
revelations, which I believe are wildly misinterpreted by Snowden himself,
by encryption advocates, by the Left, and many others: the point is not
that NSA is misusing networked computer power. The point is that that power
itself is unwelcome and destructive. Networking and computerization the
world was recognized long before our time as a way to create a
fully-monitored, fully-surveilled, fully-controlled society. Now we find
people not only dismissing the claim out of hand, and misinterpreting the
claim as one about bad actors rather than inherent features of the system
itself, but actually advocating its direct converse: that computerization
equates with political liberation. As Daniel Trottier suggests in his great
recent book *Social Media as Surveillance*, you can't disentangle these
two functions: they are the same thing, viewed through different frames.

The fact that we have moved from a kind of clear-sighted intellectual
formation in the 1950s and 1960s and even 1970s that mass computerization
would clearly lead to politically destructive outcomes, to a world in which
even making those suggestions is dismissed out of hand by activists whose
understanding of politics proceeds almost entirely from the computer
itself, should make anyone with a long view very concerned.

Further, the world that encryption advocates appear to want--in which all
communication has been made entirely opaque to governments--is just as
disastrous. This is one interesting place to focus in Snowden's speeches
and those of his advocates, because they continually wave their hands about
completely proper law enforcement--claiming it is possible and that it is
FUD to claim otherwise, while at the same time claiming that their
systems somehow block all IMPROPER law enforcement, while having no
backdoors or other mechanisms to distinguish the two. It is logically and
factually nonsensical. One need not dig long on the Tor website to see its
fans actually crowing about the fact that corporate CEOs use Tor, while at
the same time belittling anyone who suggests that this would somehow make
prosecution of corporate malfeasance more difficult.

So, back to my general comment about scholarship and advertising. The
first glimmers we heard of Facebook revolutions and Twitter revolutions
came from Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky, both highly-paid corporate
consultants who by dint of the generosity of the university system also
have faculty appointments. Neither of them is a scholar in the usual sense:
they do not have advanced degrees and do not submit their work for peer
review.

When they celebrate Facebook revolutions *when no revolution has
happened*--the starkest case being the original one, Iran, nobody calls
them to account. People all over the academy take them seriously, despite
the nonseriousness of their claims.

In my own university, without getting too personal, there are several
classes and programs devoted to teaching about social media and its
usefulness for good. in those classes they read Shirky, and Jarvis, and
others like them, while exclusively admiring the power of social media

Re: [-empyre-] Social Media Use across Campaigns for Social Justice

2014-12-12 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--John, I am glad to read what you have written. I was feeling more and more
like a Luddite in my jaundiced view of social media, in my belief that the
power of this media is much more towards evil than good.
Ciao,
Murat

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 8:12 AM, John Cayley john_cay...@brown.edu wrote:

 --empyre- soft-skinned space--
 On December 10, 2014 at 11:37:36 AM, David Golumbia (dgolum...@gmail.com)
 wrote:

 power does not know social justice, however we construe that term. it is
 just power.

 On December 10, 2014 at 11:37:36 AM, David Golumbia (dgolum...@gmail.com)
 wrote:

 it is everywhere in the scholarship on social media in particular: I'm
 going to look exclusively at the thing I consider good and how social media
 contributes to it, and put aside any consideration of the things I consider
 bad. That's not scholarship: it's advertising.

 Power does not know social justice and neither does algorithm or robot.
 Rather, now, the power of Big Software - more or less explicitly
 overdetermined by venal human desire - constructs systems of
 algorithmically driven robots in its service. The robots are reactive and
 generative in the sense that they react to symbolically structured cultural
 forms and then generate (more from less) cultural forms which are fed back
 to human subjects and also to other robots and systems.

 Big Software now builds these networked computational systems chiefly and
 massively to render commerce (not art or politics or culture or anything
 else except perhaps the flourishes of 'entertainment media') as
 frictionless as possible: by facilitating real tractions (between capital
 and its (co-)subjects) and by advertising hyper-effectively on behalf of
 capital. Big Software - McKenzie Wark's vectoralists - must make their
 income by charging capital for 'services.' But they have also discovered
 (and I will only briefly touch on this real, historical injustice) that
 they are easily able to steal Big Data from people everywhere merely as an
 unregulated function of the self-stated 'terms' of 'use' for these
 'services'.

 Social Media is perhaps the most important manifestation of this pathology
 of sociopolitical economy.

 In so far as we may no longer be able to 'build our own' systems of social
 media, and in so far as the algorithms and robots of real existing social
 media are designed by and in the service of this pathology, I believe that
 there is an argument against Social Media as we know it. Social Media - in
 the form of robots and algorithms - will tend, inevitably, to generate more
 and more in the way of pathological cultural forms addressed to human
 subjects, regardless of those subjects intentions in terms of social
 justice or its opposite or anything else.

 And this is quite apart from the historical fact of Big Data theft and
 accumulation that is routinely and tacitly accepted as a function of the
 pathology - our contemporary pharmakon as Bernard Stiegler has it - with
 and within which we must try to live. The uses and values of all that
 'data' (and it's not really data anyway, its only everything that our
 devices can so far collect) are all but entirely beyond democratic control,
 let alone beyond our control as individuals or progressive
 institutions/collectives.





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Re: [-empyre-] Lobal Gestures

2014-12-10 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hola Ricardo,
One thing Putin did in response to the sanctions by the United States is to
force MacDonald places to shut down for health violations in Russia, or
ISIL wants to shut down all western institutions, or someone blowing
himself/herself up in the middle of a market in Iraq or Afghanistan. Aren't
all these (and the list goes on) attacks against local institutions for one
reason or another? My assumption is they do not necessarily share your
ideology or have your sympathies, but are they not lobal responses?
Murat

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 10:34 AM, Ricardo Dominguez rrdoming...@ucsd.edu
wrote:

 --empyre- soft-skinned space--
 Hola Diana and Tod@s,

 I am in agreement about the strategic nature of the politics of the answer
 and
 that it should be pursued and connected to the local answer as well.

 And I do think that multiple communities on the ground and on-line in from
 Mexico to Hong Kong understand these networks of violence in terms of the
 scales of the strategic global targets-those networks of command and
 control that profit from the violence on a local level. But other parts of
 these movements the local violence overwhelms the global connections, and
 people may not want to dislocate their local concerns beyond that-which is
 not necessarily a bad thing to do.

 To a certain degree I feel that the lobal politics of the question is
 perhaps more sharable and open to the possibility of local-conditions
 becoming global-strategic actions-than the reverse. The strategic
 connection resonates more from a lobal expression and connection when the
 singular qualities of the local are not completely negated by the politics
 of the answer on global scale.

 Abrazos,
 Ricardo



  Ricardo--
  thanks for this. I would add that the violence produced by neoliberalisms
  also works in this networked fashion. The disappearances in Colombia, the
  expulsion of minoritarian communities in Honduras and Guatemala, or the
  massacre of the students (and so many more) in Mexico, police killings of
  black men and so on are not isolated events, but they are also not
 causal.
  To the politics of the question--how can we make for a more equitable,
  just
  society? the politics of the answer seems shockingly similar--eliminate
  those who challenge our authority or stand in the way of profits. Banks,
  businesses, the drug trade, and the politicians these all control tacitly
  endorse the glocal gestures that are enacted locally, both online
  (Argentina) and on the streets (Ayotzinapa).
  Just a thought!
  Diana
 
  On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 6:00 AM, Ricardo Dominguez rrdoming...@ucsd.edu
 
  wrote:
 
  --empyre- soft-skinned space--
  Hola Tod@s,
 
  Thanks for inviting me to participate and meditate on local/global
  platforms of care, resistance, and activation. Especially in terms of
  the
  back and forth quality of activist real-bodies in the streets and
  data-bodies interacting with one another and amplifying one another. But
  for the moment I would like to make a more general presentation on the
  idea of lobal gestures.
 
  One of the main projects of Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0/2.0 and
  b.a.n.g. lab is that neoliberalism(s) often function within the
  trajectory
  of the glocalâ€”that is transnational corporations parachute their
  agendas,
  economies, stores, on a global level to the local level. Starbucks,
  McDonalds, they're like the cathedrals of old; they are centers of
  command
  and control on a glocal level. So the gestures that we have participated
  in might be named or located around what we name the lobal, and the
  lobal
  isn't about trying to establish a field of homogeneity, say, like
  McDonaldsâ€™s golden arches, but more specifically to share a condition
  of
  the local to local, as a peer-to-peer gesture, on a global scale.
 
  This is perhaps not so much about materialization of the social-as-copy,
  but a conceptual sharing of a politics of the question. For instance, we
  could look at the Zapatistas as a lobal network that spreads a question
  about the nature of what a local in response might be to the golden
  arches
  that neoliberalism(s) drop on us and embed into the local space-time
  continuum. Each response is different for each locality. The local
  response in San Diego, California to this question is different than the
  one in Chiapas in terms of seeking alternative forms of living beyond
  â€œcapitalist realism(s).â€
 
  Then (and still today) we are faced with the glocal movements of
  neoliberalism(s), so we had to imagine how we could, on a local level,
  respond to, trespass, or access conflicts transpiring globally. So those
  involved in the Zapatistas movement would say, â€œWe share peer-to-peer
  the
  politics of the question: â€˜what are savage neoliberalism(s) doing
  where
  you are?â€™â€  But the response or the tactics of

Re: [-empyre-] Social Media Use across Campaigns for Social Justice

2014-12-10 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--David's analysis equating electronic medium to power, rather than to
justice or freedom, is the point I was driving at also.
Murat

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 11:04 AM, David Golumbia dgolum...@gmail.com
wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

the obvious logical fallacy in celebrating the usefulness of social media
in campaigns for social justice is that what one is celebrating in practice
is the power of the communications medium to realize whatever we think
social justice is.

but that power does not know social justice, however we construe that
term. it is just power.

consider parallel and equally specious formulations: the power of
language to create social justice. the power of writing to create social
justice.

all real powers, but improperly framed. the power really being described
is the power of communications to shape society and culture *tout court*.

that power can be used for good or evil, and any thoughtful social
philosophy will recognize that 'good and evil are in the eyes of the
beholder.

unless someone has developed a filter of some sort that makes social
media (or language or writing etc.) ONLY useful for that which we all
agree is social justice, what one is actually celebrating is a power
which is just as useful for those who *oppose* whatever one's vision of
social justice is, as for those who support it.

it also obscures discussions of the affordances of power itself, and of
particular communications media in their relation to power. I am not at all
convinced, to take a specific example, that the things Twitter does that I
consider hospitable to my vision of social justice undo or even
substantially mitigate its uses for what I consider not good, in particular
urging us to replace *slightly* more considered debate of important topics
with the heat and fire of our very immediate reactions, separated from the
bodily considerations that, in person, often make us think twice.

there is no more ironic way to cross this t than to think about the
incredibly fluent use of social media by ISIS. I have absolutely no doubt
that the members of ISIS see this as directly contributing to their vision
of social justice. It doesn't happen to be mine. But the idea that we
should segment off *our *vision of what social justice is, and then look
at social media only and exclusively for how its power contributes to that
vision, is one of the more dangerous developments in recent years. It is
tunnel vision of the most pernicious sort. and it is everywhere in the
scholarship on social media in particular: I'm going to look exclusively
at the thing I consider good and how social media contributes to it, and
put aside any consideration of the things I consider bad. That's not
scholarship: it's advertising.

--
David Golumbia
dgolum...@gmail.com

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Re: [-empyre-] Lobal Gestures

2014-12-10 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Since the historical importance of the electronic media in its various
incarnations derives from a tripod, communication, information, control, an
analysis of ideas (as parts of communication and information) is essential.
I may be in the minority, but I do not think the Occupy movement was a
wasted effort. It was, I think, instrumental in making inequality part of
the political discourse in the United States. Even the Wall Street people
admit that the inequality of income (the flattening of wages for the 99%)
is a problem that some day has to be dealt with even, though this
awareness has resulted in no political action. That is why there was
cheering even among some wall street people when the last job report showed
some increase in wages instead of a knee jerk panic about inflation. Ideas
are slow, their power of a different sort. But that does not mean it is
unreal or futile. I think the discussion should include some specific
analyses of the way ideas (or propaganda, the other face of the beast)
function in the electronic media. Here again, ISIL presents a very
interesting case. A small but significant number of people from different
countries are joining ISIL in Iraq or Syria, often to die. To what extent
are these people drawn by ISIL's ideas and to what extent by the power
these ideas gain, in my view, because of the exaggerated importance the
West attaches to it? As far as I can see, the idea of the caliphate as an
imperial concept, a la the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century, is pure
phantasy. What will happen to it if the West had ignored it? Will the
people joining ISIL still find it as attractive? I don't know the answer to
that.
Murat

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Ricardo Dominguez rrdoming...@ucsd.edu
wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hola Murat,

These gestures can of course be used by any entity at any level of
global/local scale.
That why it is important, as you do in you analysis, is to consider the
uniqueness of different actions, different community responses, and the
use of multiple platforms-and yes all of these events can be used by
nations-states, para-states, and local/global powers for purposes other
than what my sympathies might be. And they without a doubt participate in
using something like a lobal process to do it.

The difference between the lobal networks I am attaching the politics of
the question to and the premeditions of power that are working at
nation-state scales (Putin) or local acts of violence (ISIL) or the
NSA-often function almost completely with a politics of the answer frame.
And they all have deep funding to do long term research to establish not
just a lobal gestures, but long term premediation-as-research to stop any
lobal gestures happening and out the control of politics of the answer.
(This is one of the reasons Occupy annoyed a number of communities because
they were not offering an answer, but embodying a question)-but back to
research:

...in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD 'Minerva
Research Initiative' partners with universities to improve DoD's basic
understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces
that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US...Among
the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led
study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims
to develop an empirical model of the dynamics of social movement
mobilization and contagions. The project will determine the critical
mass (tipping point) of social contagions by studying their digital
traces in the cases of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian
Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi
park protests in Turkey. Twitter posts and conversations will be examined
to identify individuals mobilized in a social contagion and when they
become mobilized.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown

At least for me the lobal gestures that I am attaching the term to-do not
have this type of funding. But I think that what Diana was touching on was
the need to establish something like it. We often do premediation-research
on the fly and on the cheap.

Ricardo

Hola Ricardo,
One thing Putin did in response to the sanctions by the United States is
to
force MacDonald places to shut down for health violations in Russia, or
ISIL wants to shut down all western institutions, or someone blowing
himself/herself up in the middle of a market in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Aren't
all these (and the list goes on) attacks against local institutions for
one
reason or another? My assumption is they do not necessarily share your
ideology or have your sympathies, but are they not lobal responses?
Murat

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 10:34 AM, Ricardo Dominguez

Re: [-empyre-] discussion on track again

2014-11-26 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Ana, maybe it is because sexual images are easier to censure. The
authorities create a code, as in the movies. Though they may occur as
often, if not more, one should not forget *scenes* of violence are not
shown in the United States, such as executions that occur every day by
means of *forbidden to be named* drugs. Though everybody else saw it, we in
the United States were not shown images of people jumping off the Twin
Towers on September 11. As a revolutionary medium (either for the good,
freedom, or the bad, control) the internet crosses national lines and
weakens the enforcement of those codes. The powerless may actively search
those sights, access to information. Is that not a way of gain power
through powerlessness?

What I am struggling with is the ambiguous nature of the concept of
violence. It can be physical or social (beheadings, tortures,
enslavements), mostly what we are discussing here. But violence can be on
the level of ideas, something that does damage to our prejudices, jams our
natural flow of thought (that is partly what Artaud, Bataille are referring
to, a symbolic violence).

Ana, to me the most intriguing part of your post is Voltaire being places
in the cubicle of hell after two hundred and fifty years in a country
where, I assume, one can find Sade's writings in public book stalls. What
is that virulent, violent idea by Voltaire that has lot lost its potency
after so many years, at least in one country that still believes in the
power of ideas. That discovery would be the elixir of of benevolent
violence (a contra-violence), power thtough powerlessness that we are
looking for. Ciao.
Murat

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 10:02 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
I was trying to find a red line in our discussion, reading what others
wrote, Aneta, Monika, Murat, Alan, Johannes, Christina, Aristita,
Andreas, Simon, Rustom, Alicia, Leandro, others...
I go always back to Modernity. Yesterday we discussed with Alicia
about Bataille and all the French writers and painters using erotic as
a kind of rebellion against the power, again the etablished norms. In
the French National Library there is a place called Enfer (Hell)
where erotic texts written by Voltaire, Diderot and many other are
hidden from public view. They can only be consulted and peroused by
researchers with several degrees of clearing.
Why are these texts so revulsive today? In a society where pornography
is an industry with millions of people employed these texts are still
so revulsive and must be kept secret.
The same with the paintings. Gustave Courbet L'Origine du Monde,
showing the vulva of a woman, was censored by Facebook several times
only a few years ago.
Bear with me, I am trying to find paralleles here between beheadings
and naked women. The beheadings are shown in You Tube and can be seen
by anyone with a screen nearby, the real erotic seems more powerful
and more dissident and must be kept from the public.
Isis marriages with small girls and the selling of women as slaves are
for me more horrific than the beheadings.
Ana

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Re: [-empyre-] discussion on track again

2014-11-26 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--I do not know the work. Is it its politics that is keeping it in enfer or
the eroticism?

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 2:38 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/arts/design/16eros.html?_r=2oref=slogin;

http://www.expatica.com/fr/out-and-about/arts-culture/Adults-only-as-Frances-National-Library-allows-peep-at-sex-hell_100043.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/sex-please-were-french-pariss-dirty-secret-761348.html

And Voltaire's long erotic and politcal poem about Jean d'Arc is also
there, La Pucele d'Orleans.

Ana

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 4:51 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat mura...@gmail.com
wrote:
--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Ana, maybe it is because sexual images are easier to censure. The
authorities create a code, as in the movies. Though they may occur as
often, if not more, one should not forget scenes of violence are not shown
in the United States, such as executions that occur every day by means of
forbidden to be named drugs. Though everybody else saw it, we in the United
States were not shown images of people jumping off the Twin Towers on
September 11. As a revolutionary medium (either for the good, freedom, or
the bad, control) the internet crosses national lines and weakens the
enforcement of those codes. The powerless may actively search those
sights, access to information. Is that not a way of gain power through
powerlessness?

Ana, to me the most intriguing part of your post is Voltaire being
places in the cubicle of hell after two hundred and fifty years in a
country where, I assume, one can find Sade's writings in public book
stalls. What is that virulent, violent idea by Voltaire that has lot lost
its potency after so many years, at least in one country that still
believes in the power of ideas. That discovery would be the elixir of of
benevolent violence (a contra-violence), power thtough powerlessness that
we are looking for. Ciao.
Murat

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 10:02 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote:

--
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

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cell Uruguay +598-99470758

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Re: [-empyre-] discussion on track again

2014-11-26 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Christina, much of our American culture also arose from the cultural
extermination of the American Indians (which luckily did not occur with the
black culture) rather than integrating that culture into the American
mainstream, an integration which I think occurred in a country like Brazil.
This extermination occurred in the 19th century simultaneously, if De
Tocqueville is to be believed, when the seeds of a vibrant middle class was
being sown.

I want to be clear the integration I am referring to occurs independently
from the suppression of one group of another. Historically, the defeated
have often left big imprints over the triumphant. The only cultural echo I
see of the American Indian in the United States is in place names so many
of which derive from American Indian language. I refer to one of them
Oklahoma (as in Kafka's Theatre of Oklahoma) in my essay Questions of
Accent.

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 3:41 PM, Christina Spiesel
christina.spie...@yale.edu wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thank you Ana for the links to the French exhibition! Ana raised many
issues and this is only a partly, and personal, reply. There is a point
where grown men beheaded and little girls sexually exploited meet in the
common theme of the exertion of absolute power over the bodies of others.
These are demonstrations of what the group can do/get away with. And it is
terrorism, meant to create fear and compliance in others. I think this is
distinct from the far more common theme of the maintenance of patriarchal
social power through control of sexual information. A very influential book
for me is Walter Kendrick's *The Secret Museum, Pornography in Modern
Culture* (1987)*. *He makes many arguments but the most compelling for me
is that erotic materials actually convey sexual information and that
protected classes -- women and youths, poor men -- are kept in subjugation
by denial of sexual information. (We can see the latest iteration of this
in the United States where some people are trying to put the genie back in
the bottle by trying to repress birth control, sexual education, abortion
rights, etc.) Traditionally, young warriors (and athletes before
competition) are taught that their prowess will be diminished if they have
sex before battle. It is not hard to imagine that having sex would reaffirm
life's pleasures and make one less inclined to risk life and limb in
warfare. Upper classes have always had access to materials forbidden to the
rest of us -- hence the Enfer sections of libraries that have become the
repositories of materials once held in private collections. L'origine du
Monde was painted for Khalil Bey, Ottoman diplomat, who had a collection
of erotica. Reportedly he kept it behind a curtain which would be pulled
back to show particular guests -- performance as display. Circling back, I
do wonder what particular cultural arrangements has produced ISIS. Yes, of
course, official propaganda might talk about rejection of western
colonialism, etc. but what of the psychological factors local tpo that
culture? And somewhere in this discussion we might ask about DeSade who
would probably assert that we are dealing with the human condition. And one
more circling back -- Alan is writing about what happens to humans when
their culture is going off the rails. In the case of the United States,
much of our culture arose from the existence of a middle class, now under
extreme threat.

On 11/26/2014 10:02 AM, Ana Valdés wrote:

Re: [-empyre-] nothing gives - mathematical reality of biopolitical implants

2014-11-26 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Simon, how internet businesses (from Facebook to younameit) are monetized
give the underlying malevolent dynamic in the web. The populace is given
candy, a product for them to enjoy, whereas themselves (their psyche)
are the product sold (in a sense, that is a kind of slavery), as you
describe, for an elusive, impersonal statistical construct. All of us, to
the degree that we use a smart phone, are caught in it. It is the incipient
violence (like the climate change) in the air.

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 4:27 PM, simon s...@clear.net.nz wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
On 27/11/14 09:15, Alan Sondheim wrote:

this country, for all its military power and swashbuckling and back-room
international deals, operates on the principle of endocolonization

two areas of IBM expenditure last year interested me: the internet of
things (of course they don't call it this, the actual nomenclature is
closer to 'control society' for reversing it as Smart) and Big Data. The
first category deals with the widening spread of networked sensor and
surveillance technics across cities and fields, inserted into urban traffic
flows and agribusiness (and actual bodies, of course - to keep it
visceral). This data gathering is for the sake of governing complex
systems; for example, water supply in African countries, ensuring greater
supply where there is greater need; the traffic system in London uses an
IBM system to promote efficient transit, steer flows around obstacles,
minimise bottlenecks, distribute peak time across the wider network -
controlling the signs which in turn control the people. Potato farmers in
Idaho use field sensors to communicate their crops. They tell them when and
where fertiliser is needed, pest control, watering. The Idaho data is
compiled and 'analysed', processed by a group in Canterbury, New Zealand.

Then there is the shibboleth of Big Data. A goldmine for consultants, who,
like oracles (shaman) claim to be able to parse an iota of sense from it.
Data is in fact not analysed - for detail or to its genesis - but is the
object of recursive and reticulating operations of organisation through
statistical relationality, following a non-intensive or powerless line of
(re)searching for the difference of the same. This statistical same - of
these identical organs that are brought to emergence - subjects the
erstwhile subjects of states to the governance of a mathematical reality,
an abstraction layer isolating power from the points at which it is
inflicted.

'endocolonisation' recalls the sometimes cited axiom whereby capitalist
states having exhausted their violent energy-resource grab, and having
extended the borders of capitalism, its reach and their reach, globally,
now turn their violence on their own populations, particularly the middle
classes, which history contrived to construct as sacrifice. This process
has been called neoliberalism. I know it from the example of Chile and then
New Zealand, from 1984, a propitious date. And like the previous colonial
period of empire, and the golden Keynesian post-war rise of middle class
values - education, art, humanities - that followed for a handful of
nations, this present colonisation is dirty, malevolent and violent. And as
Ana has indicated it is misogynist. It is misogynist before it is
misanthropic.

Best,
Simon

PS: On 26/11/14 20:02, Alan Sondheim wrote:

thank you for this - is are there any particular references? would be
useful - alan

Heisig, James W. *Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto
School*

but, respectfully, this was nothing compared to travelling in Japan.

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Re: [-empyre-] discussion on track again

2014-11-26 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--... Christina, much of our American culture also arose from the cultural
extermination of the American Indians (which luckily did not occur with the
black culture) rather than integrating that culture into the American
mainstream...

Reading my previous post, I realize that a section of it may be read in a
different way than how I intended. I do not mean that Native Indian culture
has been exterminated. It has remained alive through ceremonies, social
gatherings like powwows all over the country. I was referring to the
integration of the beliefs, ceremonies into the middle class, midstream
culture.

Alan has pointed out to me the Native Indian culture has been thriving in
the last fifty years. And perhaps the penetration of the sensibility has
been deeper than I think. It made me think of films, the medium I am most
intimate with, like Jarmousch's Dead Man and The Way of the Samurai, Powwow
Highway, Smoke Signals in all of which the actor Gary Farmer, besides his
part, embodies an iconic spiritual presence or Thunderheart where Val
Kilmer, an FBI agent, has to face his own Native Indian identity as a
dreamer of visions. The list goes on... Recently I discovered to my utter
surprise that Myrna Loy, the very essence of urban sophistication, had
Native Indian roots.

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat mura...@gmail.com
wrote:

Christina, much of our American culture also arose from the cultural
extermination of the American Indians (which luckily did not occur with the
black culture) rather than integrating that culture into the American
mainstream, an integration which I think occurred in a country like Brazil.
This extermination occurred in the 19th century simultaneously, if De
Tocqueville is to be believed, when the seeds of a vibrant middle class was
being sown.

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 3:41 PM, Christina Spiesel
christina.spie...@yale.edu wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thank you Ana for the links to the French exhibition! Ana raised many
issues and this is only a partly, and personal, reply. There is a point
where grown men beheaded and little girls sexually exploited meet in the
common theme of the exertion of absolute power over the bodies of others.
These are demonstrations of what the group can do/get away with. And it is
terrorism, meant to create fear and compliance in others. I think this is
distinct from the far more common theme of the maintenance of patriarchal
social power through control of sexual information. A very influential book
for me is Walter Kendrick's *The Secret Museum, Pornography in Modern
Culture* (1987)*. *He makes many arguments but the most compelling for
me is that erotic materials actually convey sexual information and that
protected classes -- women and youths, poor men -- are kept in subjugation
by denial of sexual information. (We can see the latest iteration of this
in the United States where some people are trying to put the genie back in
the bottle by trying to repress birth control, sexual education, abortion
rights, etc.) Traditionally, young warriors (and athletes before
competition) are taught that their prowess will be diminished if they have
sex before battle. It is not hard to imagine that having sex would reaffirm
life's pleasures and make one less inclined to risk life and limb in
warfare. Upper classes have always had access to materials forbidden to the
rest of us -- hence the Enfer sections of libraries that have become the
repositories of materials once held in private collections. L'origine du
Monde was painted for Khalil Bey, Ottoman diplomat, who had a collection
of erotica. Reportedly he kept it behind a curtain which would be pulled
back to show particular guests -- performance as display. Circling back, I
do wonder what particular cultural arrangements has produced ISIS. Yes, of
course, official propaganda might talk about rejection of western
colonialism, etc. but what of the psychological factors local tpo that
culture? And somewhere in this discussion we might ask about DeSade who
would probably assert that we are dealing with the human condition. And one
more circling back -- Alan is writing about what happens to humans when
their culture is going off the rails. In the case of the United States,
much of our culture arose from the existence of a middle class, now under
extreme threat.

On 11/26/2014 10:02 AM, Ana Valdés wrote

Re: [-empyre-] Notes and a comment -

2014-11-25 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--...My own work carries failure in its heart, it helps some people (I hope)
cope with the world - we all
hope for that - it has no effect on the systemic, however

In this sentence by Alan, I think, the most succinct crystalization of
power in powerlessness is expressed. In the objective sense of political
action, political change, art (Alan's or others) may be useless. But in
hope -created out of hope and projected in hope- *creating* a conversation
between soul and soul, art is all powerful. Deleuze said, conversation
between soul and things [human or non-human, living or un-living, not
facts] is what idea is. The power of ideas is slow, deriving from deceptive
seeping passivity.
Murat

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Re: [-empyre-] Wood, what calms (if one has the luxury of calming)

2014-11-24 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Good healing!

On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 4:40 PM, simon s...@clear.net.nz wrote:

 --empyre- soft-skinned space--
 good wood oud.

 thanks,
 Simon

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Re: [-empyre-] introducing week 3

2014-11-23 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--I was in Buenos Aires last year. I think there were still family members
demonstrating at the plaza de Mayo.

On Sun, Nov 23, 2014 at 12:43 AM, Ana Valdes agora...@gmail.com wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
The Mothers of May started to walk round the plaza de Mayo, in Buenos
Aires, silent, with huckles in their heads, carrying posters with the
images of their missing children. It was in the 70:s. More than 3
people dissapeared in Argentina and Uruguay. Many were buried alive. Many
were drugged and thrown from airplanes to río de la Plata.
We are still finding old bones in hidden graves.
Ana

Enviado desde Samsung Mobile

Mensaje original
De: Murat Nemet-Nejat
Fecha:23/11/2014 02:42 (GMT-03:00)
A: christina.spie...@yale.edu,soft_skinned_space
Asunto: Re: [-empyre-] introducing week 3

Perhaps the most powerful form of symbolic space is the plaza, from
Tienanmen Square to Tahir Square to Maidan (which is a Turkish word) to
Damascus to Taksim Square in Istanbul, to cite a few relatively recent
examples, the symbolic action most feared by governments. I wrote a poem
about thirty years ago Fatima's Winter exactly on the idea of the square
(attached to a tool) as a potentially revolutionary space. Participants to
our dialogue at Empyre may be interested in it. Though published, the poem
is not on line. I don't know whether I can include it within the the post
or attach is as a document. The poem is a few pages.

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Re: [-empyre-] introducing week 3

2014-11-23 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--My awareness of the history of Argentina is so much in clash with my direct
experience of the country when I visited it last year. To every single
person, the people I encountered were gentle, absolutely lovely. In fact
that gentleness, in addition to the beauty of the country, were my total
impression. On the other hand, from the corner of my mind so to speak, I
saw mothers and abuelas demonstrating at the plaza de Mayo just in front of
the modest apartment where the present pope used to live when he was the
archbishop. Giving the children of the killed to the families of the
perpetrators of violence to be raised is itself such a jarring act. Was it
a new wrinkle of violence or cruelty (punishment!) itself (like the Romans
turning the cities that resisted them into ploughing fields, the children
of victims into executioner's) or were the adoptions odd attempts at
atonement in a Catholic country? I also was told, by a Brazilian I was
chatting with, the reason for the total absence of non-whites in the
country. Unlike in Brazil, the indigenous population was exterminated by
the Europeans.

Ana, my question is: was the epic violence the history shows perpetrated by
the same kind of gentle people I encountered or was it done by another
separate people I never came across?

On Sun, Nov 23, 2014 at 9:26 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Yes Murat the Mothers still demonstrate walking around the Plaza de
Mayo, as the Abuelas (the Grandmothers) do. The grandmothers has
recovered 130 kids who were kidnapped by the military and given to the
families of the executors who killed their parents. One of them,
Macarena Gelman, grandchild of Juan Gelman, one of Argrentinas
greatest poets, grew up in Uruguay, in the house of a police
headmaster. She is now elected as deputy/representative in the
Parliament in Uruguay.
But many of the grandchildren are still unrecovered and their true
identity identity hidden.
Ana

On Sun, Nov 23, 2014 at 5:02 AM, Murat Nemet-Nejat mura...@gmail.com
wrote:
--empyre- soft-skinned space--
I was in Buenos Aires last year. I think there were still family members
demonstrating at the plaza de Mayo.

On Sun, Nov 23, 2014 at 12:43 AM, Ana Valdes agora...@gmail.com wrote:

Enviado desde Samsung Mobile

Mensaje original
De: Murat Nemet-Nejat
Fecha:23/11/2014 02:42 (GMT-03:00)
A: christina.spie...@yale.edu,soft_skinned_space
Asunto: Re: [-empyre-] introducing week 3

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--
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

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Re: [-empyre-] introducing week 3

2014-11-22 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Ana,

Let me put my question differently. Most of us respond to the extreme
violence we experience around us, on TV or reading newspapers, etc., by
writing a play or poem or creating a document. I am not clear how these
activities help the victims of the violence. That is why I am asking if our
acts are acts of self-preservation, attempts not to feel helpless,
powerless. That is why the question of powerlessness interested me so
much? Is there a process by which the powerlessness may become potent, a
significant act?

On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 12:54 PM, Aneta Stojnic aneta...@gmail.com wrote:

 --empyre- soft-skinned space--

 Murat Nemet-Nejat mura...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre-
 soft-skinned space--

 Welcome, Aneta.

 All through our discussions during the last weeks, I find most of my
 reactions to different incarnations of unspeakable violence to occur on a
 moral level, on the level of an increase one's consciousness. Then I ask
 myself: is a moral reaction an act, or a response of *self-preservation*
 not to go insane? Are we doing something to help the sufferer? One should
 realize, at its root, art also is a moral response. I would appreciate
 others' opinion on this.


 Thanx, Murat.

 I am not sure if I understand correctly the dilemma, but I agree that art
 is a moral response, moreover I am convinced that if we want to be anyhow
 relevant when we do art, we need to be able to take the political position.
 Perhaps the more delicate question is not weather to act but how? There are
 also various ways of self-preservation and sometimes acting could be a form
 of self-preservation, and not acting a from of self-distraction, don't you
 think so?

 It makes me think about the poem Ana quoted earlier in the discussion:

 Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote:--empyre- soft-skinned
 space--

 I remember quite well the words of the German pastor Martin Niemöller,

 When the Nazis came for the communists,
 I did not speak out;
 As I was not a communist.
 When they locked up the social democrats,
 I did not speak out;
 I was not a social democrat.

 When they came for the trade unionists,
 I did not speak out;
 As I was not a trade unionist.

 When they came for the Jews,
 I did not speak out;
 As I was not a Jew.

 When they came for me,
 there was no one left to speak out.




 All the best,

 Aneta

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Re: [-empyre-] introducing week 3

2014-11-22 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--...Alicia says when you paint or write the effect of your creation is
often delayed, maybe long time later others see in it the value of the
expressed

Yes. The word maybe is the key. Perhaps of that uncertainty the symbolic
act requires a compulsive courage.
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Re: [-empyre-] introducing week 3

2014-11-22 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Perhaps the most powerful form of symbolic space is the plaza, from
Tienanmen Square to Tahir Square to Maidan (which is a Turkish word) to
Damascus to Taksim Square in Istanbul, to cite a few relatively recent
examples, the symbolic action most feared by governments. I wrote a poem
about thirty years ago Fatima's Winter exactly on the idea of the square
(attached to a tool) as a potentially revolutionary space. Participants to
our dialogue at Empyre may be interested in it. Though published, the poem
is not on line. I don't know whether I can include it within the the post
or attach is as a document. The poem is a few pages.





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Re: [-empyre-] creative powerlessness, expressive violence, performance

2014-11-19 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

 was forbidden to learn German as a child yet I read Goethe and Schiller
 in translation. I work with Goethe because it is the forever stained text
 which no longer can be read without the traces/shadows/stains of the
 victims. My upcoming project will be around/within the frank of the Goethe
 tree, the one that occupied the center of Buchenwald camp, built on purpose
 around a symbol of high culture in Germany, just steps away from Weimar.
 Not that this is only a German language problem, obviously. Should we stop
 using English because of massacres that British committed in past wars?
 Should we not use this language because of Guantanamo? Should we not use
 language here, in this thread of conversation, perhaps not use any
 language? Out of fear of ‘fetishizing’ it? Let’s revise the “usefulness” of
 language or its uselessness.  The hour of poetry, the hour of the
 oppressed, the languages hacked by pain. I don’t know poetry that is not
 soaked in staines, puddles of suffering. In fact I don’t know music this
 way either. Both derive from lament, the unspeakable speech. Thomas Mann
 wrote in his notes, as he was writing Doctor Faustus, I think around 1943,
 that contemporary music finally, then, recognized itself as lament (‘in
 fact all expression being lament’ he wrote), in the 20th century, the
 century of falling apart modernity, its cracking visible at its very
 foundations [at least the modernity understood in the old Eurocentric
 ways]. Zygmunt Bauman writes in Fluid Modernity that our ethics has to
 exist in immediate ways, and not as a result of intellectual reflection or
 decision. [We have to allow the ethical to come first. The word “intuitive”
 sticks with me (as per Ana’s note) and how culturally, in the West, we seem
 to distrust the notion of the ‘intuitive’ and of course it is the gendered
 word in man ways, the word relegated culturally to the realm of the
 ‘feminine’.] The last paragraph of the second part of Faust is Chorus
 Mysticus, which I have dismembered and replaced with its multiple “falling
 apart” fragments, syllables, reversed recordings of words. Perhaps there
 was anger at the clarity of the voices of speakers who I invited to read
 this passage over and over again. The clarity was further stained by the
 voice of a survivor, an elderly, coarse voice, in an unknown language that
 sounds like papers crackling (Polish). She, the survivor, understood what
 was done to Goethe in my Sustenazp, perhaps she could not speak to it in
 our ‘privileged class of poetry’ ways (Murat) but she, the survivor, spent
 days with me and with the idea of the chorus, and the idea of language
 stained, disintegrating into lament.


 On Nov 18, 2014, at 12:39 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat mura...@gmail.com wrote:

 --empyre- soft-skinned space--
 The Iranian cinema has a number of major works that are subtle, survival
 reactions out of powerlessness) exactly to the kind of violence we are
 discussing here. One example is Jafer Panahi's *This Is Not a Film* where
 he documents with his own camera his own house arrest. He begins to imagine
 in full detail the mis-en-scene of the film he is forbidden to make while
 the camera pans affectionately, leisurely on the movements of his pet
 iguana. Here lies, I think, some most profound reactions out of powerless
 one may have towards the violence one is visited upon: gentleness, empathy
 (the extended panning of the camera on the pet iguana); imagination (the
 scenario he imagines even if not permitted to act on it and shoot the
 film). During the film he receives calls from his Persian friend(s) in Iran
 who are writing petitions to the government to free him. Genty, almost
 elliptically, he warns them not to go too far and put their own selves in
 danger with the authorities. That is absolutely amazing to me, once again,
 his empathy for the other beyond his own self.

 Another movie of Panahi's is *Offside*. Women in Iran are not permitted
 to attend soccer games. A few teen age girls do (to the horror of the
 parents) and get caught. The film is what in Western terms would
 approximately be called a black comedy, but in actuality isn't. It is a
 genre to itself coming out of Panahi's sensibility in the face of violence.
 The soldier guarding the girls is also young. Panahi makes it clear that he
 also a victim caught in the state machine. If I remember correctly, he
 himself is conscripted. He wants to return to his village for a specific
 occasion, but he can not. He I think finally lets them go.

 There are two other scenes which may be from the same movie or two
 different movies. The film may or may not be *Kandahar *(perhaps someone
 can help me with this). In one, a big shot Taliban official (wearing the
 usual turban, etc.) around fifty culls a young girl in of around twelve
 among a group of young girls of the same age to make her one of his wives.
 There is a grotesque scene where he is taking a bath and the little girl

Re: [-empyre-] more and the question about performance

2014-11-16 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--SIS uses beheadings, other violent acts to crush civilians, UN report says
Newsday - .5 hours ago. UNITED NATIONS -- Beheadings, stonings and
mutilation are common weapons of terror employed by the Islamic State in
its campaign to subdue civilian populations that have come under its
control in Syria, according to a UN monitoring group.

By referring to these, to us, unspeakable acts of violence as terrorism, we
are describing them implicitly as instinctive, irrational acts of
violence ignoring their ritualistic, imitative, therefore, rational, almost
bureaucratic, self-perpetuating aspect. Let us pick up, for instance, the
recent news that ISIS has been picking up little girls,
ten-twelve-year-olds and marrying them to ISIS fighters as spoils of war.
These acts, along with the beheadings, are, perhaps parodic, recreations
of Koranic universe (girls married at pre-puberty age,soldiers of Holy
Jihad rewarded even prior to death). In that respect the the violence by
ISIL, reinforced by TV images ISIL itself shoots, has a theatrical,
self-consciously ritualistic aspect. ISIL itself, it seems to me, sees what
it does as a performance. As I said before, attached to rationality,
violence becomes self-perpetuating, reinforced by its own act. At one time
(that God we are not there yet, I think) we arrive at the banality of
terror. Ciao, Murat

On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote:

 --empyre- soft-skinned space--

 Amery and others talk about the dissolution of the self in torture; the
 'ego' to me is actually a knot that's fairly easily dissolved in dire
 circumstances. The selves are varied, at times they've been related to
 different intelligences (Howard Gardner) or roles in classical capitalism -
 torture, horrendous pain in general, transforms the ego into something else
 entirely, seems to dissolve it. It may just be a matter of nomenclature?

 - Alan

 On Sun, 16 Nov 2014, William Bain wrote:

  --empyre- soft-skinned space--


 ==
 email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
 web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285
 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
 current text http://www.alansondheim.org/sw.txt
 ==
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Re: [-empyre-] sample from today

2014-11-11 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Ana, in the United States, the Libertarians have an idealized version of
19th century America, a De Toquevillean paradise, where freedom
prevailed. In my view, all these are different, but very related,
expressions of alienation. What is the cause of these splintered explosions
of violence? At the heart, it seems to me, is the fall of the Soviet Union.
In the preceding bipolar world, where there was an overarching threat of a
world war/nuclear explosion, these alienations (always there) were
suppressed, very often with the tacit consent of the governed. After the
fall, the overarching, unimaginable, maximal threat gone, the tacit
contract of the cold war is gone. Previously suppressed (or unheard) voices
begin to speak with potentially, often violent, centrifugal force.
Ironically, a lot of the violence, which the majority of us experience
virtually, is primarily the result of increased freedom; second, the
exponential advance in digital technology that makes these
expressions--often of alienating violence we choose to call
terror(ism)--visible to us. One should remember terrorist is a word (an
ism) coined by politicians starting in the 1970's.

I wonder how terrorist is different from anarchist which was the word
of choice a hundred years ago. Do they, in subtle ways, mean different
things? Perhaps, anarchist (along with had, in 19th century, a
philosophical structure underpinning it. Some political thinkers/actors
openly embraced it (read *The Parisian Arcades* or *The Possessed*).
Whereas, in our day, no one, no group embraces the term terrorist; but
tries to rationalize it, often calling the opposing party the real
terrorist. In that sense, terrorism is a violence with no human face, no
intellectual rational; it is a convenient term for those actors of
rationalized violence (states or would-be states) to distinguish
themselves from it.

We all in this thread have been asking how an individual, particularly as
an artist or a thinker or an actor, can react in the face of the pervasive
omni-visible, often virtual but potentially actual violence. In my view,
the best an individual can do is to analyze and develop a *consciousness*
of the machinations of this violence, the methods, the techniques it uses
to impose itself on the rest of us.

Ciao,

Murat

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thank you Murat! I feel that the apocalyptical utopies from Boko Haram and
ISIS trying to shape their own worldorder are signs of our time. ISIS is
invoking the Caliphate, the go back to Al Andalous, a kind of golden age
where Paradise loomed with it's fruits and rewards. Boko Haram want,
regarding to their narrative, go back to the Africa from before
colonization, a continent where mighty empires lived in harmony with the
Earth.
The fact they impose their new order with terror and harshness is a kind
of symbolical and pagane cosmogony, they want take distance from our
gods, for them education in Western terms is an abomination, the suicide
bomber who killed himself yesterday killing 50 students is a true
representant of their philosophy or beliefs. For us is education
normalization, progress, development, enlightenment, for them is education
a deadly sin.
Ana

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 12:46 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat mura...@gmail.com
wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Ana, the kind of new structure without visible heads[, a] new kind of
feudal contract... inhabited by people without voices is actually exactly
what the largest modern states are striving for, China, the United States,
Russia: to give enough food and trinkets and spectacles and popular wars to
the population so that, at least passively, they support you, always the
implicit threat of violence (punishment or withdrawal of goods) against
those who want to have a voice. This is a kind of benevolent feudalism,
la familia of an idealized Godfather-like Mafia. In the United States, the
financial institutions and a small number of corporations are our invisible
citizens, who supposedly, as job creators, are feeding the rest of us and
can keep us at least passively happy..

One should not forget the place of digital technology which, it is
becoming progressively clearer, is the tool that enables the concentration
of power and wealth (therefore, the production of supportive mythologies)
in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

Ciao,

Murat

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 12:01 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thank you Gabriela for your interesting description of the non-violent
answer to the state violence installed in Mexico. I was in Yucatan when I
did my field work in social anthropology and met many zapatistas and
indingeous working in the caracoles, the free zones kept

Re: [-empyre-] sample from today

2014-11-11 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Johannes, Ana, when I think of utopian communities of absolute freedom, of
democratic or scientific anarchy, the spirit of Hobbes raises its head,
that the basis of the social contract is fear. In Stalin, didn't Bukharin
come face to face with a paranoiac Hobbesian?

Ciao,

Murat

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 10:22 PM, Maria Damon damon...@umn.edu wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
xo

On 11/11/14 10:16 PM, Ana Valdés wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Maria, thank you!! I was gone from my computer and could not check his
name! It was my bad memory, for me he is Hakim Bey :)
Ana

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 11:12 PM, Maria Damon damon...@umn.edu wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Peter Lamborn Wilson
sorry to be pedantic :-)

On 11/11/14 5:28 PM, Ana Valdes wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

I read Hakim Bey (William Lambert Wilson) at the beginning of the net
when Autonomedia started and we all believed the myth information want to
be free. He was a big inspiration for me as well and I think his theory of
the TAZ, temporary autonomous zones, is an interesting contribution to a
new geography based more on the imaginary than on political borders.
Ana

Enviado desde Samsung Mobile

Mensaje original
De: Murat Nemet-Nejat
Fecha:11/11/2014 18:22 (GMT-03:00)
A: soft_skinned_space
Asunto: Re: [-empyre-] sample from today

Ana, well not always. Remember Conrad's The Secret Agent? But anarchist
had less power than institutional power to wreak destruction and, as far
as I know, none of them was a suicide bomber, the tool that gives the
modern terrorist the ability to influence minds far beyond their numbers.

Interestingly, Hakim Bey regards himself an anarchist and now lives some
place, I think, upstate New York in retirement. His books on Sufism, its
subversive position within Islam, had a great influence on my work.

I always wandered the adoption of Hakim Bey as a nom de guerre since
Hakim Bey is the name of the uniformed Turkish police officer, played by
Orson Wells, in the film A Cask for Demetrius.

Ciao,

Murat

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 1:04 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
I had a discussion with Murray Bookchin once, he visited us, the
anarchist collective I lived with at that time, in Stockholm. We translated
into Swedish his book about Ecology. He was a true individualist anarchist,
he was very suspicious about us, about how we manage to live together work
together and spend free time together :)
He defended the right to wear weapon and to defend himself against
anyone wanting to harm him. For us his these about citizen militie and
armed vigilantes to watch the autogestionated societies was unthinkable.
You are totally right, the anarchists nihilists from the end of the
19th century and beginning to the 20th century were considered today's
terrorists :) But their agenda was less bloody ;(
Ana

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 3:26 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat mura...@gmail.com
wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Ana, in the United States, the Libertarians have an idealized version
of 19th century America, a De Toquevillean paradise, where freedom
prevailed. In my view, all these are different, but very related,
expressions of alienation. What is the cause of these splintered
explosions
of violence? At the heart, it seems to me, is the fall of the Soviet
Union.
In the preceding bipolar world, where there was an overarching threat of a
world war/nuclear explosion, these alienations (always there) were
suppressed, very often with the tacit consent of the governed. After the
fall, the overarching, unimaginable, maximal threat gone, the tacit
contract of the cold war is gone. Previously suppressed (or unheard)
voices
begin to speak with potentially, often violent, centrifugal force.
Ironically, a lot of the violence, which the majority of us experience
virtually, is primarily the result of increased freedom; second, the
exponential advance in digital technology that makes these
expressions--often of alienating violence we choose to call
terror(ism)--visible to us. One should remember terrorist is a word (an
ism) coined by politicians starting in the 1970's.

Re: [-empyre-] concerning violence

2014-11-09 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Olga, if it is O.K. with you (and the rules of empyre), I am posting the
following passage in my poetry page Murat Nemet-Nejat on Facebook:

First of all, I propose to look at each case of war conflict and
violence separately. There is no common experience of war. Also some
combatants experienced both being a perpetrator and later a victim in the
hands of enemy. I came across the issue of beheading when I investigated
representations of Chechen war. There were videos uploaded by Chechen
fighters of beheading young Russian conscripts with knives that were
circulating on the net. It caused an ethical outrage of the internet
community, especially when Belorussian female blogger posted video on her
website under the title: Chechen kill Russian soldies as pigs. She
obviously supported Chechen fight for independence as the rest of
democratic world ( but at what price?). To mock the morbid curiosity of
internet users the false links were created that linked to porn sites
instead of videos. It was also mentioned that there was a black market of
the snuff films brought from Chechnya.

Ciao,

Murat

On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 5:58 AM, O Danylyuk danyl...@gmail.com wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
First of all, I propose to look at each case of war conflict and
violence separately. There is no common experience of war. Also some
combatants experienced both being a perpetrator and later a victim in the
hands of enemy. I came across the issue of beheading when I investigated
representations of Chechen war. There were videos uploaded by Chechen
fighters of beheading young Russian conscripts with knives that were
circulating on the net. It caused an ethical outrage of the internet
community, especially when Belorussian female blogger posted video on her
website under the title: Chechen kill Russian soldies as pigs. She
obviously supported Chechen fight for independence as the rest of
democratic world ( but at what price?). To mock the morbid curiosity of
internet users the false links were created that linked to porn sites
instead of videos. It was also mentioned that there was a black market of
the snuff films brought from Chechnya.

I am also interested in the analytical approach in understanding what
precedes the actual war, any war operation has a very pragmatic frame:
careful planning, calculations, tactics . for this reason I consulted
military sources. We usually deal with the dramatic outcome when people are
in the deadlock of fighting. I think it is important to analyse cultural,
power struggles which lead to wars. Particular the wars by proxy- a
long-standing tradition of Cold War doctrine. I am digging into RAND (
National Defense Research Institute ) report those days, titled Paths to
Victory.Lessons from Modern Insurgencies. The study analyses all
insurgencies completed worldwide between 1944 and 2010. It is
overwhelming...
--
Olga Danylyuk
Director, designer
PhD candidate, Central School of Speech and Drama
London, UK
+447971341395
+380664086948

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Re: [-empyre-] concerning violence, and more Antigone's bones

2014-11-08 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi, to you all. This is my first post, having just dipped my toe on the
middle of an discission.

I would like to approach Alan's idea of anguish-- that language creates
anguish, taking us away from a state of total dissolution, thereby
silence-- from the point of view of violence. Not the intense subjectivity
of pain, leading to the peripheries of death and unconsciousness; but the
subjectivity of violence, equally intense, leading to the same peripheries
from the opposite angle, a position of power.

There are two kinds of violence, it seems to me. One may be called
instinctive, anger, jealousy, fear, etc. The other is rational, war, state
sanctioned punishment, hazing or other rituals of initiation, etc. The
first kind of violence is always punished. Killing out of jealousy or anger
is not a defense. On the other hand, rational violence is never punished.
Rather, it is reinforced, perpetuated through the rational attached to it.
The first kind of violence is consumed in its acting. Anger (hate, etc.)
basically ends with the murder. In the second, this does not occur. The
rational-- a piece of language, a myth-- survives the act, and, therefore,
can perpetuate its violence. Once can kill in the name of security or
justice or tradition or self-defense or freedom or invisible hand of free
markets, you name it, over and over again. I consider these riffs of
language the corresponding opposites of Alan's anguish, a condition seen
from the subjectivities of power of victim/subject.

The God, Abraham, Isaac story about the sacrifice of Isaac in the Bible
embodies the exquisite ambiguity, double bind of this condition. In his
subjectivity, Abraham is asked to become the executioner of one of these
riffs (God's words, his injunction) while he suffers the anguish of
losing his son. Isaac is totally silent, all the way, very close to an
animal state. In fact, at the end he becomes an animal in the shape of an
ewe. God is the creator of language, main actor in his own myth.

Ciao,

Murat

On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 1:05 PM, Johannes Birringer
johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

Pardón, Alicia, I did not know that this news had broken, I am very
dismayed to hear.

(Pardón, Alicia, yo no sabía que esta noticia se había roto, estoy muy
consternado y silenciado.)

[Alicia schreibt]
Los 43 estudiantes mexicanos aparecieron (aparecieron?)ayer como polvo
adentro de bolsas, casi no quedan huesos para examinar. Perd√≥n, pero hoy
estoy muy conmovida para cualquier an√°lisis. Sin embargo la sola
enunciaci√≥n de esto contiene su propia met√°fora.

[translated]
The 43 Mexican students appeared (appeared?) yesterday as dust bags
inside, there are almost no bones to examine. Forgive, but I am very
touched, too touched to any analysis today. But the mere utterance of it
contains its own metaphor.

ps.
The new york times reports the now assumed killings of the young Mexican
student teachers (normalistas) by drug gangs here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/08/world/americas/drug-gang-killed-students-mexico-law-official-says.html?ref=world

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Re: [-empyre-] concerning violence

2014-11-08 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Jon, an interesting parallel between your post and the below passage which
through some form tries to deal with the often visual spectacularity of
modern violence, time and distance disappearing, the *there* collapsing
into *here* through a movie script, a cartoon or a sports game.

From hashassins and anarchist bombings to drone strikes and YouTube
beheadings, modern terror develops within a global network of increasing
density and resonance. Terror one sees “over there” suddenly is here,
collapsing space and time and with them one’s points of reference.

One morning preparing to teach at NYU, my mother called from Florida saying
a plane had just hit the Trade Towers. I hung up and turned on the TV,
transfixed for hours. Eventually I got up to our roof on 103rd and later
downtown to the smoldering site. The air in the subway and streets was
laced with a moist dust, an entire city terrorized, seized for days then
weeks by anthrax attacks, a third plane going down on Long Island, and
blaring, unending sirens. The terror slowly passed, the shock not. It
waits. A friend—a major performance theorist who’ll go unnamed
here—confessed seeing the first tower burning and thinking it was a film
shoot.

From

*Eleven Septembers Later: Film Lumiere*

My mind miniaturized

into a card deck

collapsing by opposing dreams

miniaturized giant in my mind

don't worry

just a dream,

of childhood

cowboys and indians Dick Tracy

Napoleon

sacrifice for a giant cause

my mind miniaturized

twice one more for the road

going the whole way

twins both reach home base

good work kids

my mind miniaturized twice

first as nightmare

second as a joke

I built the towers to stand being hit by a 727

But I forgot the heat.

I sacrificed myself for God

but I forgot the kids.

read during the September 11 Memorial Reading at The Poetry Project, St
Marks Church, NYC
...

The visual precedent of *Vigilance* is photography, born in the middle
of the nineteenth century, the time when The United States starts its
progress as a commercial empire, and the rapacious, fertile producer and
consumer of visual language. The space created by photography/ film lumiere
has an unconscious, to its viewer reflecting, revealing the dreams,
aspirations, fears of her teeming population. Superimpositions of different
media –film, T.V., the web and words emanating from them- on photography,
which film lumiere is, creates a unified field/space which is prophetic. It
tells America’s sense of herself and her relation to the other. It has no
past, present or future, but a continuum folding sinuously on itself
reflecting to the viewer through time what happened and will happen:
America’s ego expanding, the world turning into her lake, while
simultaneously, in this contracting space, in this miniaturization, the
other, as the independent it, hurtling into a collision. The binary,
conflicting structure of film lumiere is exactly that. It is redolent with
the crushing anxiety, the meteor gravitational inevitability, of the
approaching other. The web, for instance, the supreme *a*symmetrical tool,
where time and space are at the mercy of a click, creates the illusion that
anything can be converted into anything, that gravity, the process by which
objects hit the ground, does not exist; while making that space more
vulnerable to those forces.

*Vigilance* cuts into that space, forcing the reader, us, to see,
through its disruptive rhythms, the guilt, the responsibility pock-marking
this self-referring self-love.

Ciao,

Murat

On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 10:42 AM, Erik Ehn shadowtac...@sbcglobal.net
wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
excellent. in the perpetrator, victim, witness triad - the witness is
shocked/severed out of the equation, specifically in order to collapse
imaginative and expressive space for the victim. the witness still exists,
but to demonstrate estrangement. the perpetrators are fine because they
have space behind them, up in the large house they've stolen.

On Saturday, November 8, 2014 7:24 AM, Jon McKenzie jvmcken...@wisc.edu
wrote:

The diversity of voices and texts from so many sites and times of terror
both troubles and consoles. Does sharing violence somehow console even
as/if it amplifies? How to thread ourselves through so many events of
violence, events erupting at different scales and speeds, as well as
different with forms and degrees of animation and annihilation?

It's good to that Reinhold Görling is here and to hear his question: “If
there is a theatricality of violence: can we really be sure that theatre,
art, film, literature does break with the repetition compulsion? “

Our situation/tempo is very complex and shifting and calls for juxtaposing
perspectives. I’ve been grappling with terror, performance, and media
through graphe, understood first through the Platonic oppositions of
logos/graphe,

Re: [-empyre-] concerning Ayotzinapa, and more Antigone's bones

2014-11-08 Thread Murat Nemet-Nejat

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Johannes,

Yest, I'm sure it is true. Isaac doesn't utter a single word. He is least
gifted in speech in the Bible (perhaps along with Moses, the stutterer).
Most Old Testament figures live half in silence, think of Job, with the
exception of the glibness of Jacob who outwits father and brother, or
Aaron, the compromiser. In *Genesis* everyone is unbearably laconic, in
other words imbued in silence, including God. Elegies, prayers, psalms,
songs, incantations occur later.

Incantation is speech, takes place within community. Silence points to
the distant there, alien other, for instance all through and the ending of
Aux Hazard, Balthazar, to the animal (its suffering of violence) and even
to the cyborg, the mineral.



Wall is a discovery.

While wall weaves a wealth of dreams

it keeps itself out.

it has chosen loneliness....

keeps far of everything.

It doesn’t share the house.



While windows, doors, balconies, rooms, ceilings, closets live rubbing
shoulders with each other, it is, as if, the stranger in the house.

A Penelope.
It keeps looking down
without complaint.
Not to reveal itself it hides its neck, its shape,
disposes of all its corners, erases its sharp points
and brings down its weight (the weight which is a wall) to zero.
One can’t say the wall really desires this
(who wishes loneliness?).
There must be a compensation for it in the wall’s eye,
but we will never know it.
...
Wall doesn’t smile. (Ilhan Berk)

Ciao,

Murat

On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 3:00 PM, Johannes Birringer 
johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote:

 --empyre- soft-skinned space--

 yes.

 it is hard to maintain any composure, I also trembled when I read and felt
 sick to my stomach, and it was a different reaction to seeing images (say,
 of ISIS, or conflict areas in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, or the ghostly
 scenario in East Ukraine).

 I merely read.  And just read Ana being at the funeral.
 It was different to September 11, and I will comment on Simon's
 experience, and his visit to Hiroshima some other time, as it moved me a
 lot what he said about the locals (They seemed to acknowledge with their
 smiles that a typhoon is a natural way to die). It moved me deeply, in
 most complex contradictory feelings remembered, mixed up, admittingly, from
 my location in german countryside September 11 (not knowing what
 Stockhausen, composer of 28-hour long performance cycle LICHT (Light) would
 say later), in the moment of rupture or interruption. Rusto Bharucha
 mentions it as well, when he speaks of a second of jubilation confused with
 visceral horror and grief, anguish.


 The sons are dead. Raven gone.


 Murat, thank you for your comments, most alarming perspectives of violence
 (subjectivities of power) you describe, but the silence of the lamb, is
 that true?  Isaac's lament?
 or is it always the preserve of the survivors to lament (Monika Weiss,
 invited to speak about her artwork back in the 2012 debate on Pain,
 Suffering, and Death in the Virtual brilliantly
 articulated her understanding of lamentation)?

 Here is Monika:

 I think of Lament also as a form,incantation, return, calling, echoing,
 hence my use of Lament's ABA format. The pollution that happens when the
 two worlds cross and merge, then and now, dead and alive. I think of Lament
 as enunciation and as anamnesis, also as a direct sibling of historical
 memory which, when real and subversive, is capable of undoing power, to
 some extent. That's why my work has been gradually [over the last 10 years
 or so] moving towards a focus on the idea of a City, specifically City's
 memory and City as a martyr.


 lest we confuse rupture with rapture. but Stockhausen obviously,
 carelessly, evoked the Sublime.



 thank you
 Johannes


 [Alan schreibt]

 oh God, Johannes, how can anyone really 'deal' with this? how could the
 students, Mexico, anyone? I'm sitting here in tears and we're talking
 analytically online and we have to, I just don't always have the
 resources.

 humans do hell to each other, this is just awful, the worst because it's
 breaking now.
 - Alan, thank you for posting


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