Re: [-empyre-] Social Media Use across Campaigns for Social Justice
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Renate, I don't know that David or Johan were saying that social media is evil as much as they were pointing out the tendency for people to soften judgment of tools like Twitter because they have proven useful in this instance or that instance. This is the design of something like Twitter… with little messages that whistle at us(!)… using our relationships to earn our gratitude and personalizing it in the way that Ronald McDonald could never quite manage. And, of course, points to the ill uses of these very same tools for repressive projects. I took away from these comments a bit of context, rather than an absolute admonition. Things become a bit difficult because they deal with the unseen powers of the web as a repository of ever increasing amounts of human activity, which are then mined. We see a tool, and we evaluate it for its relationship to human users… but we do not realize that the virtual hammer we grasp when we start typing tweets is not being help by us at all. The interface we type into is not the handle of the hammer, it's the head. And the hand swinging the hammer is located elsewhere. It's a concern that I share with many others… we can wrangle over the question of whether or not digital media is a net harm or benefit based on a comparison of personal interactions that they facilitate…. but the true test of its power is not in the personal interactions themselves, but in its capacity to contain them, coordinate them, and organize them. It is so funny because the rhetoric of the digital… often talking about rhizomes, deterritorialization, and such…. is creating structures that our eyes cannot detect, labeled with taxonomies that correlate to definitive machine actions. Is it discouraging? Daunting? Terrifying? Yes. What can we do about it? My suggestion is to begin with a critique because I don't know what else to do. It's like asking an artist to stop the glaciers from melting. Does this undermine Ricardo's contribution to human society? I don't think so. I didn't see any of these comments as directed at Ricardo (but I could be wrong, as I often am). I do worry when, increasingly, even critical conversations are being optimized, our vocabularies wedded to hash tags, our attention spans getting shorter, our interactions more volatile, etc. Soon, the tools we use to find each other will become the containers for our thoughts, and entire worlds of sensation will be mapped onto a few hundred of emojis. The nice thing about having email or a phone or even a place to drink a cup of coffee (however unjust the global trade might be) is that it gives us a chance to talk about these things. I think I am probably on the side of the apocalyptic. Or I would be, if I did not love anyone. But, if you love someone, it gives you a reason to think about ways beyond the catastrophe… Peace! Davin On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 5:43 PM, Renate Ferro rfe...@cornell.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear David, and John, Your critiques of Ricardo's post seem unfair to me. Your claim that all social media is problematic and that artists who work through these platforms in a critical way seems to provide little leeway. The point of an artist using any tool (and social media is a tool) as a means to make a critical engagement is what artists have been doing for years. Are you saying that social media is evil and that therefore we as artists need to find other tools? Is all digital bad so therefore artists need to go back to the analog methods of the canvas, paint, pencil, and paper? It is very difficult for me to imagine that this is what you intended. Where would you then position this very list serve -empyre? Renate Ferro Ricardo writes: While the research and scholarship you present is extremely important to consider and to understand. It also assumes that artists and activist have no critical awareness of these issues of power above all things or below all things (of algorithms or robots), and I think this wrong. - we have never been utopian about technology or imagined the power and computing in the 20th century would be or become platforms of justice or concern. But we also did not want to fall into the no-waynout zone of the apocalyptic-that seems to some degree at play in your scholarship. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu URL: http://www.renateferro.net http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net Lab: http://www.tinkerfactory.net Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Social Media Use across Campaigns for Social Justice
--empyre- soft-skinned space--This is a great thread here. I think it is important, as David notes, we conflate the efficacy of specific instances of use (this campaign or that campaign) with the fact that it is really just a blank kind of power. What I see more readily is the real difference between a top down deployment of categorical notions under the old media to crowd sourced categories of thought. What Twitter is really good at is in refining the many divergent notions and boiling them down to a basic hashtag or concept… So, instead of Walter Cronkite dictating the basic terms of the debate for tomorrow's water cooler conversation, we supply vocabularies, often idiosyncratically, and then these are the things that we use. What used to take analysts and focus groups, we have streamlined. But in the end, we end up with rigorously policed concepts that are, perhaps, even more potent for the fact that we can no longer operate under the negotiated or oppositional postures that one forms in relation to top down media. Now, we interact directly with the normative communities that manage the encoding and decoding of a specific set of terms… So, as humans relate to humans, there is a difference. I am reluctant to declare this difference significantly better than what came before it… like any powerful institution at its peak, we tend to see its glory and will blind ourselves to its flaws as long as it is working for us. It is potent because it is reduces and channels social activity, while offering the feeling of an expansive and unfettered potential. In this way, social media is a refinement of neoliberal individuation and presentation of self (so much so for being a public space on private property). My own participation with Twitter-based netprov performances has me convinced that any group of people conversing actively enough over Twitter can forge concepts that attain a kind of substance through discourse. Over and over again, I have seen purely imaginary accidents converted into events that can be discussed at length. And I have seen behavior steered by through the cooperation of cunning players. The degree of affective involvement in something that is complete and utter moonshine is what makes netprov fun. And, after playing in this way, I have found that it has also robbed me of some of the pleasures of earnest social media use by unveiling its process. Sure, you can do good things with it. But more than the human process of hegemonic wrangling over meaning, there is the point that John Cayley brings up: the machine participant in this activity. Where we experience a kind of affective stimulation as we see divergent opinions and eccentric words filed away into a coherent trajectory… the machine watches with with a vision that is at once microscopic and macroscopic. And, it too, adjusts and nudges and massages our work of consensus until it becomes useful. In the most basic ways, this machine vision can give the old powers access to vocabularies that will tickle our ears in various ways. And, publics will join their voices to the old powers, effectively advertising the success of the platform. But this is the most rudimentary use. As John notes, the power of Big Software is happening. The only reason to sink so much capital into such a resource is the safe speculation that it will be able to contain and control our process of making meaning and make it into a commercial good for the people who have invested in it. Davin On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 11:09 AM, Tim Murray timm...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thank you, Ricardo. as also evidenced by the posts of Richard and Rahul this week, it's the nuanced approach to social media of activist artists and organizers that we have hoped to hear about this week. What you have taught us over the years is how one miight shift platforms of art and protest in response to fluctuating expressions and manifestations of power, Thanks so much. timp Sent from my iPhone On Dec 12, 2014, at 9:15 AM, Ricardo Dominguez rrdoming...@ucsd.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hola Tod@s and David, While the research and scholarship you present is extremely important to consider and to understand. It also assumes that artists and activist have no critical awareness of these issues of power above all things or below all things (of algorithms or robots), and I think this wrong. At least for me since my days (80's) with Critical Art Ensemble, ACT UP, and spending our days and nights reading Adorno to Virillio, from the Pentagon Papers to the SCUM. Manifesto, working with the Zapatistas and Electronic Disturbance Theater in the 1990's and now under the weight of Cloudy Empires etc., - we have never been utopian about technology or imagined the power and computing in the 20th century would be or become
Re: [-empyre-] Digitality, Authenticity, Decay, Memory
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I can think of many differences between digital objects and the sorts of things we can carry in our hands, but one that matters to me quite a bit is how is the object handled and in what way does this handling situate it within a world. There's a way in which an icon within an an interface or authoring environment or gamespace or whatever…. here, the object corresponds signifies some relational understanding that we carry with us from our daily lives. (I will set this thing down here, it will be there later when I go to pick it up. When I pick it up, I will do this with it. Etc.). Then there are symbolic things that we use in written worlds. I am telling a story, I am going to place a thing here, so the reader knows that the thing is there and when they read this, they will provide the relative understanding needed to make sense of the story. This kind of remembering of a coded thing elicits from us some memory of lived experience with things that are sufficient for us to conjure up the coded representation of experience (or not, in which case, we do not understand. but, often, can figure it out even with really messed up writing: There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.). But with code written for a computer, the objects are handled in a different way, not by a person and a bodily resonance, but by a machine that is going to act on it. There is an implied milieu that they inhabit, with layers of context that make the objects work in relation to other ideas. Something left in one place is not a singular thing, but a representative of an ideal form that is circumscribed by the logic of the milieu. Instead of my coffee mug sitting on this desk right here where I can knock it onto my keyboard (which actually just happened), there is a coffee mug spilling coffee on a keyboard. Any singularity it represents is an expression of the totality of the world which is contained within the memory of the machine…. but any singularity I experience with regards to a story I read does not contain the whole world. I am probably not thinking clearly about this. But I do wonder about the difference between how we hold things in our memory, how we act on these concepts, how these concepts are connected to the world that they inhabit. This article is also a good thing to consider when we think about the relationship between memories and bodies: Anna Gibbs and Maria Angel, At the time of writing. Electronic Book Review. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/gesture Davin On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 10:47 PM, Mark Marino markcmar...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I'm going to return this line of inquiry to computer source code, since that's an aspect of certain digital objects that I feel fairly confident in separating from analogue ones (thinking of Christian's struggle to define the 'ontological' and 'practical' differences between the sorts of objects - digital/analogue). Perhaps there are examples of analog objects that are programmed, but I'm going to bracket them for now. As we pursue the ontological distinctions between digital and analogue objects and their relation to memory, how does computer source code distinguish software in relation to memory? In the sense of code, some of the implications are obvious. Comments in code remind us of what someone (possibly ourselves) was trying to do or had done. Variable and function names can also serve as memory cues. The architecture of a program can be thought of as a remnant of they way we conceived of a certain process, a material manifestation. But what of the source code in general? But take this Sketchpad Demo by Ivan Sutherland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX9yvq5F4Wo I've been told that Alan Kay considers this to be one of the most important moments in computer history. In the video Sutherland is seen working a device lined with switches with one hand and drawing geometric shapes with a kind of stylus on the screen with the other. With a few gestures (that seem to cover a magician's level of familiarity with the interface), Sutherland is able to create a vector-based image of a movable object subject to a physics that can interoperate with other objects. Sutherland is, I am told, programming (which destabilizes a distinction we might have between drawing and programming or using an interface and programming). However, what's the one thing his programming does not leave (as far as the demo indicates)? A trace of the creation process. This is the obstacle to using such a language or environment for programming. There is an expectation that interacting with software objects
Re: [-empyre-] Digitality, Authenticity, Decay, Memory
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- A few years back, Empyre hosted a discussion on the E-Ject… which, eventually, was turned into a paper for DAC: E-Ject: On the Ephemeral Nature, Mechanisms, and Implications of Electronic Objects: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xv6b6n0 This has been a good thread to follow. I wanted to comment on your statement: This being said digital mediums that by nature exist less as authoritative isolated objects and are more dependent on their relationality may allow for multiple, co-existent, even contradictory structures of memory. This is what I am puzzling through with regards to my research on objects created in Flash. Soon, people might not even know how to read or access important works of art from the 1990s. This is different than losing something from culture because it is considered unimportant, or not considered at all. Rather, we are experiencing a split of literacy. On the one hand, media obsolescence is like Hopkins' comment on the forgetting that comes when a language and its community of users dies. To the vast range of human users, swaths of culture die off when a medium becomes obsolete. On the other hand, as Marino notes, the code is still there (even if it is not readily readable to the software/platform/interface you are using). In many cases, there are pre-networked digital objects that are locked into archives, gathering dust, decaying, etc. But there are many inaccessible and dead works that can still be saved, stored, analyzed as code… from a machine perspective. The only thing I can think about, is the situation in the middle ages, when monasteries processed unknown (and even dead) languages while the larger community outside used a spoken vernacular to conduct its affairs (occasionally dipping into the world of deep coding to intervene in the deeper structures of codes like law and theology and record). In a way, it is a reflection of the new power dynamic in which we place machines and their reading practices in a central role. Davin Heckman On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 4:42 AM, Sean Rupka sru...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Attila and Mark, I think this may speak to aspects of both your posts so I will leave this here. Let me echo the thanks to Quinn for organize this and quickly apologize for being a bit late to the game. Just to riff a bit on some of your points Atilla. I think, as I understand it, I completely agree with your suggestion that memory itself, thought of as “human memory” has always been intertwined with techne, dependent on some form of prosthesis outside of ourselves to serve as referent. To this extent as well I agree that immanent to memory is it is consistently built on a lack that is compensated for through a reiteration of the relation to a past. What I mean to say, if memory is considered as a particular relation to the past, the selective nature of memory itself implies the converse as well, that every relation to a past via memory is a non-relation to an alternate past. How might this relate to digital objects or the digitization of information? I would raise multiple questions here that I believe my interlocutors may be better positioned to comment on. The relationship between memory and technological artifice has been problematic at least since the time of Plato. The externalization and perhaps expropriation of memory, the location of memory elsewhere in objects (memorials) could in fact be destructive. The openness of such objects as memorials has long been linked to discussions of their success or failure as memorials. The question I would raise then vis-à-vis digital objects and memory relates directly to the question of what is the digital object and from whence does its authority emanate? The idea of digital archives for example calls to (my) mind the contradictory stances of both something eternal and unchanging but as well their ultimate fragility. This fragility has been pointed out as deriving from the nature of the medium itself (the ease of its re-writeability, erasability, as well as very real possibility for the decay/degeneration or loss of information, vulnerability to changes in technology, obsolescence). Insofar as digital objects' immateriality compared to traditional objects are free from what we generally call decay, their relation to memory itself changes. We could for example say the materiality of decaying objects has traditionally been the ironic source for their identity, by their increasing 'lack' over time of what they once were we judge their authenticity, through their decay we have some referent to the fact that two times (past and present) are bridged. Digital decay I would suggest does not act in the same way. This being said digital mediums that by nature exist less as authoritative isolated objects and are more dependent
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
I have an article that I wrote about a year ago which discusses black boxes, poetics, and default settings: Inside Out of the Box: Default Settings and Electronic Poetics http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2010/heckman/heckman.htm It might be a nice complement to the conversation. I will take a look at Graham's quadruple object. Davin On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 12:12 AM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Hi---each entity (a thought, an amethyst geode, a bartender) emits spacetime just as Einstein argued . Graham's The Quadruple Object and my not yet out Realist Magic go into this. Each entity times in the way Heidegger reserves for Da-sein and Derrida reserves to the trace. Time and space are not neutral containers but are emergent properties of beings. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:15 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: You are right I should do more reading. I find the thoughts engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more information where I can. Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on relationality and time. You have all of these things that have to do with chairs, but only the chair is the chair. And there are these things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own right. But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop. Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object. Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our imagination. On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same as digital iterations. Less like a computer, we pull the modular concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones. I wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which are articulated and taken up into collective discourse and even still, a discursive thing gains a level of significance when it represents some empirical process. I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next. It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five. In other words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair. In my mind, weight might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability, its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its aesthetic elegance though none of these qualities are directly analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types of being. All these thoughts are a jumble I'll take your advice and do some reading. Davin On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention. There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your second paragraph below. NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical) chair primacy over the others. As for the same weight — well, that depends on what you mean by weight. What do you mean? I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress without reading some of this material in depth… Ian On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote: Ian and Tim, Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects? I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_and_Three_Chairs highlight the ways that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways. A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a sculpture is not necessarily a chair. yet, in some fundamental way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and recognition. Put all
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
You are right I should do more reading. I find the thoughts engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more information where I can. Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on relationality and time. You have all of these things that have to do with chairs, but only the chair is the chair. And there are these things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own right. But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop. Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object. Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our imagination. On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same as digital iterations. Less like a computer, we pull the modular concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones. I wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which are articulated and taken up into collective discourse and even still, a discursive thing gains a level of significance when it represents some empirical process. I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next. It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five. In other words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair. In my mind, weight might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability, its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its aesthetic elegance though none of these qualities are directly analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types of being. All these thoughts are a jumble I'll take your advice and do some reading. Davin On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention. There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your second paragraph below. NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical) chair primacy over the others. As for the same weight — well, that depends on what you mean by weight. What do you mean? I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress without reading some of this material in depth… Ian On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote: Ian and Tim, Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects? I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_and_Three_Chairs highlight the ways that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways. A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a sculpture is not necessarily a chair. yet, in some fundamental way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and recognition. Put all three things together, and you have a chair which occupies all three planes of existence simultaneously. On the other hand, they can occupy niches within conceptual frameworks (a chair within a game, for instance, can be very real to the other objects in the game). Each way of recognizing the chair (the picture, instructions, the chair as chair, chair as sculpture, three chairs as conceptual work, etc) would suggest that each is a distinct object in some sense, which makes me wonder then, whether or not all other possible thoughts about a chair have being, or if we afford the material object of the chair primacy. In which case, does a digital rendering of the chair carry the same weight as an unexpressed idea about a chair, too. At some point, doesn't ontology lead into this thicket? Davin On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: There is no reason why holding that everything exists
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
I agree, this is a good starting point that all things that exist have being as their common condition of existence (that is, they are not not beings), which is a sort of foundational ontological similarity. But if the only significant ontological claim we can make about things is either yes or no, do they exist or not, then this means all things carry this single quality, which is to say that there is no difference between things. If we admit difference, then we must account for those differences in meaningful ways. For instance, waffle #1 differs from waffle #2 in a different way than waffle #1 differs from a toaster (or waffle #1 changes in the course of being eaten, it is still in one meaningful sense the same waffle after it has been bitten, but in another sense, it is a different waffle, too. While both toasters and waffles are different from something like an idea or a memory rendered in media (a waffle recipe or story about waffles) or a process habituated in muscle memory (the habit of making a waffle or eating one). My concern is that if we reduce all that can be known about being to a simple recognition of being, we commit to a kind of abstraction and alienation from being of the sort that happens when markets try to mediate everything through the common denominator of dollars. Davin On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Davin, We obviously treat different entities differently. But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically different. Yours, Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you Ian, for these thoughts. My initial encounter with this work came via a brief discussion of flat ontology, which I found somewhat offputting. I followed up by reading through the re:press book. What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating. Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with one of my favorite passages from Hegel. Pardon me for cannibalizing another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here: http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism). * In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process: The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. [1] Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic processes that comprise its totality. This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to fundamentally alter Hegel’s argument, I only mean to suggest that we see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have shaken up the pursuit of knowledge. * I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to embrace a kind of humanism, but one which cannot easily understand as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an ontology that is expressed in our metaphors. One grip I have with the use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines, interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same thing. When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer, while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of obligation to, rather than ownership over) child. If my bike decided to bite me.which it can't, even if it can hurt me I would not feel so simultaneously restrained in my response AND emotionally florid as I would if my 8 year old bit me for some crazy reason (but with my three year old, I he is only a missed nap away from engaging in something so obvious and horrible as biting someone). A bike, on the other hand, can hurt me a lot more than a bite from a toddler, and I suppose I am not above kicking a bike and yelling but I have very limited feelings about a bike malfunction or hitting my thumb with a hammer. On the other hand, a bike goes wherever I want it to go (except when there's an accident
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
it does for Levi and me). I talk about this a bit in the first chapter of Alien Phenomenology, and Levi does as well in the mereology section of Democracy of Objects. Also, here are a blog post from Levi on the subject that weaves the two together: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/more-strange-mereology/ I'm not answering sufficiently but wanted to get something out to you rapidly. ib Ian Bogost, Ph.D. Professor Director, Graduate Program in Digital Media Georgia Institute of Technology Digital Media/TSRB 320B 85 Fifth Street NW Atlanta, GA 30308-1030 ibog...@gatech.edu +1 (404) 894-1160 (tel) +1 (404) 894-2833 (fax) On Jun 15, 2012, at 4:11 AM, davin heckman wrote: Ian, Since we are on the topic of OOO, I was wondering what the ontological status of something like a song is? I have to admit, I have a real hard time swallowing a pure ontology that essentially defines the subjective as outside of being, as a sort of on or off proposition, as opposed to also a turning on (or is it being turned on? Or simply to be turned or to turn?) (I am generally skeptical about a variety of posthumanisms that go beyond a critique of a monolithic Humanism, because I think that consciousness carries specific tendencies that seem to fundamentally frame all possibilities for knowledge). However it is entirely possible that I am missing out on a discussion that has been unfolding without me. But here's my thought: With a song, you have something that can be rendered in objective form maybe an mp3 file or a sheet of notes or record or something. If this is what we mean by a song, then, fine, that's an object. But a song only really starts doing something when it is unfolding within the context of memory and anticipation. It only is a song when it is listened to by a subject, which is to say it is an object that has a singular temporal being as it is listened to, which is distinct from how it is being listened to and replayed even by the same user. (And we aren't even beginning to talk about non-recorded music). The only way a song becomes a purely discrete object is when it is removed from its temporal existence and understood as a totality, and detached from an audience. And while we can sit around and all talk about, say, Another One Bites the Dust, after we squeeze it into a conceptual file type and label it, the fact that we can discuss something that can only mean something if is experienced as a process AND an object within the context of a experience, suggests that sometimes being is realized by the relations of things, rather than the things themselves. My suggestion is that the ontological nature of the song cannot be described in objective terms without missing what a song is. Without the non-objective component of its being, a song is just sound. If we say, well, Hey, when this sound occurs, people do X, Y, and Z, we can find ourself thinking that these effects are produced by the object, but this sort of thought experiment only gives us half an understanding of the object's being. You also have to think of that song in relation to the current context, to itself over time, to the individual and collective experience of its audience, to the culture, etc. Again, a great means to produce estrangement, but not the complete account of what the thing is. At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, I can see that it might be expedient to regard a distant moon without regard to its historical relationship to the human. It's useful to think of a distant moon as a quantity of data. But the closer we get to human existence, the more likely we are to encounter types of things that exist, but that cannot be understood properly as a bundle of discrete data. Maybe there are some texts that address precisly these sorts of concerns. This is where I think ontology cannot simply be objective. It must, of course, be able to establish the differences between things, to render those things it claims to understand in discrete form, insofar as they can be considered as such. On the other hand, we know that most of what the world is made of is common and that the laws of physics, for instance, harness discrete things under a kind of continuity. So, along with the conditions of radical difference that a philosophy of objects implies, there are the conditions of radical connectivity. Both features are equally present, which is to say they offer us little in the way of productive knowledge EXCEPT insofar as we can bind and sever, cut or tie, digitize or analogize within this framework of matter. The 21st century loves digitizing things. it helps computers see the world, it helps them count us, predict our behavior, weigh it, value it, direct it, etc. But the digital is only half of our existence the analog process is equally present in language and cognition and it is just as equpped to help us
Re: [-empyre-] Smelly Objects
I participated in a roundtable that originated in a conversation a while back on Empyre It ended up as a panel entitled: E-Ject: On the Ephemeral Nature, Mechanisms, and Implications of Electronic Objects. http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/2xv6b6n0#page-1 I find that the discussion of the past few weeks has really evoked some strong resonance with the older material In Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, the abject refers to those things that exist psychologically outside of the sphere of representation; the abject is the counterpoint of Lacan’s “Object of Desire.” [10] Practically speaking, the abject is regarded as shit. But if we place the abject within the general economy of sociocritical designations, the abject is neither the subject who desires nor the object desired, the abject is contrary to this libidinal economy. It frustrates our conception of the subject by inducing an automatic response of revulsion, it frustrates our conception of the object because it falls outside of mastery. This makes it difficult (but also disruptive to the system of representation). And, importantly, as a psychoanalytic concept, abjection, though it carries an “objective” character in that it is typically the “victim” of an action, it is a way of being, a subjective state. Thus, it is powerful because of its liminal character. (For Zizek, modern art places the excremental object in “the sacred place of the Thing,” precisely because the sacred object is always already excrement, it never is the Thing). [30] On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 1:04 AM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Lauren, This is a very resonant phrase IMO: as a process that works against being known, and therefore against death. In my theory of causality death is precisely when an entity is fully known, that is, successfully mistranslated. The thing becomes sheer appearance-for others. Say an opera singer matches the resonant frequency of a glass. The glass ripples and explodes into not-glass. The dead (as it were) glass is nowhere, there are just memories, including fragments of glass, which are new things. I believe that at the moment when the sound envelopes the glass perfectly, if the glass could speak, it would say it was experiencing beauty, in the Kantian sense, of an object-like entity that is not-me yet intimately me. In this sense beauty is death. Maintaining the unknown, resisting consistency, is resisting death. What is called life is a small region of an undead, uncanny space where the rifts between things and appearances coexist. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 18, 2012, at 11:00 PM, lauren.berl...@gmail.com lberl...@aol.com wrote: as a process that works against being known, and therefore against death. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] [-empyre-} Consumer Technology as Revolutionary Technology?
I am very interested in the way that people make do. Certainly, guerrilla actions what the weak use, out of necessity. Apart from mortal conflicts, I think this tends to be where people live their lives. On the other hand, I am troubled by how quickly institutional powers have latched on to this idea as a paradigm of control. While it does satisfy people to make do, implicit in this satisfaction is a measure of antagonism and inequality that arises when access to rights and dignity are denied. A great portion of the pleasure comes with the fact that we have gotten away with something when we weren't supposed to. This poses a couple problems for much contemporary thinking on the topic: 1) The foundational anxiety the precedes making do, while it can be productive, ought not be romanticized. 2) Institutional partners, while their support for humanistic concerns is to be encouraged, should be engaged in producing overt processes of legitimation, not for the practices of resistance, but for the aims of resistance (ie. human rights). I have been in Norway for the past year, and the contrasts between political consciousness in the US and Norway is staggering. As a wealthy country, Norway is also saturated with consumer goods and broad access to high technology, but the general tendency towards a critical awareness of these things is much keener here than it is back home. At home, even at the highest levels, the attitude towards consumer electronics tends to privilege early adoption, and relies on the embedded assumption that technology is progressive. What is lost, I think, is the larger sense that, increasingly, the devices and software are not the objects, we are the objects. We are no longer human beings with human rights, we are human resources with inputs and outputs that are technically managed. Contrast this to Norway, which has a robust discourse of human rights and a broad based institutional support for those rights, yoked to a theory of social democracy, and you see a population that is actively engaged with technology, but more prone to critique it (another interesting thing is that Norwegian schools emphasize outdoor activity... kids learn to hike, build fires, knit, etc.) We need to recognize the 21st century innovations in warfare and rethink the metaphor against the backdrop of low-intensity conflict and counterinsurgency. So, to answer the question, I think a good place to look for human survivors of the post-human phase-shift they are probably people in prison, the homeless, the elderly, homeschoolers, anthroposophists, children (before they get plugged in), and, generally, people who are removed, not from technology, but from its popular uses. I think, when we are looking for revolutions, we are trying to identify an individual human impulse so grand that it resonates within a community. The life or death of the one becomes abstracted and universalized into a broad conception of rights and duties for all. We don't need to be scholars to see that this idea is under seige from people in gated communities to anti-equality activists, from arguments over access to education to health care, from the rights of enemy combatants to basic notions of democracy, from prescription complacency to the controlled demolition of our social safety net. Contrast the impulse to shared liberty to the impulse for property and domination and you can see why one side draws its support wherever human beings really live and the other side uses mercenaries and machines. When we juxtapose this to much current thinking, the contrasts are sharp: We are attracted to the outcome of producing distributed effects, but our theory of knowledge tends to be skeptical of a notion of human consciousness capable of producing these effects (we prefer to think it is done by discourse, networks, chemicals, conspiracies, machine processes anything but human compassion, thought, and will). But the upheaval is meaningless without its underlying motivations. If we want a Hacker culture and DIY ethic we probably need to go right to the economic and political roots of the problem. If we want liberating technologies it's probably best that we, as many as possible, form a collective discourse of human rights and start agitating for it. Occupy is a good start. When you want to be free and when you have companions in the struggle, you tend to use every tool at your disposal to make it happen in whatever way possible, small or large. It's the motives that have been eliminated, and that is entirely consistent with counterinsurgency tactics. Peace! Davin On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 6:43 PM, Anne Balsamo annebals...@gmail.com wrote: To push the topic thread in a slightly different direction, I'd like to go back to a point that Margaret raised about consumer technologies becoming revolutionary technology. Directs attention away from the level of innovation that we've been commenting on,
Re: [-empyre-] re/claiming and unsettling / continuing artistic practices
Ana, I think you are right, insofar as it is a web of intersubjective relations, a network does imply some pretty hearty obligations and rights. On the other hand, network can also imply a relationship among objects or objectives, as a command and control tool, more or less. I think sometimes, the lines between the two models of communication, one humanistic and the other informatic, tend to blend together. Davin On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 4:21 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you David for sharing some interesting thoughts. I think networking in itself is a value, a virtue, similar to fortitude, justice, prudence and temperance, the traditional Christian values. When Jose Bové started his fight against MacDonalds and other fastfood chains he was using his knowledge and his contactnet to create a new network. The same thing does the farmes sueing Monsanto. All the best Ana On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 10:08 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: Ana, I wonder if the reason for this lack of sustained critical mass has to do with some of our deeper structures of belief and motivation. I think the 20th century is committed to technique, and insofar as we have been committed to technique, we have been excellent at sustaining the centrality of our belief in technique and our committment to its practice. I was just re-reading Animal Farm and sobbing, along with my children, over its failure. We were wondering why such a sound idea was incapable of producing lasting results. And, the issue is not the problem with animalism in Animal Farm the problem is the belief that animalism in itself, as a formal system, would be enough to sustain its permanent state. But again and again in the story, the problem is not animalism, it is a problem with a belief in animalism as an external technique, rather than an intimately understood, subjectively integral, culturally networked way of being. We wonder why social movements often flounder, it has to do with a lack of belief in anything BUT the technical fix. Find the error, adopt the formula, implement the system and then we can live in utopia without having to constantly concern ourselves with creating it. If we can just get rid of the humans, the animals believe, then the future of animalism is secure. But, really, maybe to sustain a movement, you have to worry yourself constantly with its perpetual renewal. Unfortunately, we are conditioned to believe that the problems of life are solved through discrete purchases even though we have overwhelming evidence that this is not so many behave as though the lack of love in their life can be solved by properly groomed nostrils or scientifically scented skin or the right watch. They might not believe the specific propaganda claims, but at a very deep level, we are always looking for fixes, but we doubt our own capacity to become the fix. I mean, global hunger Monsanto says its about their seeds but really, the world has food, give hungry people food. We don't need a scientist or a machine to do that. Depression Pfizer pushes pills... but really, work less, give your time and effort to people for nothing. The Church was good at building its network because the network wasn't an end in itself. Sure, for some people it is, and these poor people graft themselves to power and try to take something from it without giving themselves to the spirit of the collective project. But the network itself grew and sustained itself because people believe in something else, of which the network is supposed, only, to be a trace, shadow, artifact. Or, to use a more contemporary example--the city--a city does not exist because it is a city, it exists because it offers a means for people to pursue individual existence collectively. The streets, sewers, buildings, law, etc. exist to support that function, and increase the likelihood that people will join the city to pursue life. And, a really good city, eventually becomes a metaphor for the life of its people, and then for people more generally. But this is only a power trick of signification, a way of talking about life through material metaphors. That Chan reference on this thread, really illustrates this idea quite nicely. Peace! Davin On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 4:03 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks Johannes for a very inclusive post where you pinpointed some of the most relevant things we posted these days. I am as you concerned with the concept of networking. I think for the big capital has never haft problems with networking issues. Rome had soldiers and administrators taking to Rome wheat from Egypt, parrots from Africa, grain from everywhere, wine from Spain, etc, etc. The Catholic Church based it's power on networking. Yes, they were vertical and high centralized networkings but their goal was to keep the empire
Re: [-empyre-] benefits of practice to conventional research / could gamification save academia?
I think we need another word for the opposite of gamification, maybe there already is one, and a pedagogy and ethos that can contribute to the formation of solidarity, critical awareness, and life-sustaining activity. Gamification tries to turn play into a productive activity what about turning productive activity into occasions for play? On a cultural level, we are in the habit of thinking these are the same things, but one is about capturing energy and turning into money the other is about taking wage labor and setting it free. In an academic setting, this involves turning students away from the narrow conception of education as certification for employment, held into place by debt. The alternative is an education which recognizes these formal disciplinary structures, but teaches students how to understand disciplinary structure, how to subvert it, and how to create spaces of social dialogue, exploration of common interests, and the collective pursuit of the good. A second thought is that many of our concepts of gaming are heavily influenced by the impact of electronic gaming. While much of it is increasingly social, and this is good, electronic gaming also has shifted broad cultural practices of gaming in an individual direction (single player mode). While games have always contained the potential for competition, the contractual nature of gaming has counterbalanced the competing need for individual subjectivity. An individual can only engage others in the contest insofar as he or she can convince them to participate in the social activity of gaming. As any Monopoly player discovers, however, once the game begins to privilege a certain player and the possibilities for meaningful participation diminish, the game gets boring and the game ends before you or your friends are made totally penniless. This dynamic is not as strong in electronic games, participation falls very heavily on the solo player who chooses to play or not to play, and almost every game has a solo mode. Even the multiplayer games are not as easily held into place by the social negotiation between players agreeing to play for a time (though this does happen). You leave when you get bored. Gamification erodes the aspect of social agreement that is present in traditional gaming (and the playfulness, even, of electronic gaming), and in its place, erects a solo-player, merit driven economics to social behavior. It wraps activity in a fairly transparent currency with no value beyond our decision to buy into this new form of compensation in exchange for more direct forms of compensation (shorter workdays, better wages, reliable healthcare and shelter, ergonomics, collective bargaining, etc.). The old marxist critiques of religion are probably better applied to gamification. The opposite of this tendency is what is needed. People have done this to a degree. It is an art, poesis. DeCerteau describes it in the Practice of Everyday Life (an argument which has been appropriated by a culture industry anxious to merge governmentality with participation). Davin On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 4:59 AM, Gabriel Menotti gabriel.meno...@gmail.comwrote: Interestingly though, until very recently these developments have only been Cybernetic by structure, not by name (mainly because it carried the smell of a hype from the past). [LASSE SCHERFFIG] How efficient is this sort of symbolic camouflage to disentangle a discipline (structures of thought, conceptual frameworks, methods) from the hype (of the past)? From another perspective: should the changing of names/labels (from KYB to INF?) be taken as a “superficially” administrative or as a “deeply” philosophical operation? Or is it one of these cases in which such separation makes no sense whatsoever? Is there any advantage in sticking to the old, overused/abused concepts, and forcing them to perform new operations? I generally feel uneasy with talking about benefits of artistic research, […] But of course both inform each other to some extend. [LS] I’m curious whether this information remains as a form of silent inspiration to the thesis, or if it is actually written down in some way. Do you refer to the artworks even in passing? If so, do you conceptually reframe them as experiments? How personal is (would be?) your account of them in any academic form (such as an essay)? the objects on a game's screen do not exist in the loops we created, although they exist (a) in code and (b) for us, i.e. as sign and signal. The game, however, functions without them. [LS] The game “functions”, but can it be /played/? And if it can’t, is it still a game? Considering the amount of material resources spent on these “objects” (memory, processing cycles, etc - which is critical in older console systems), how redundant they should be considered to the overall feedback structure entailed by the gaming system? (And: is this relation between “functionality” and
Re: [-empyre-] ambiguous artistic strategies critical engineering
Having worked in a field of criticism where a lot of the theory originates with artists/programmers, I'd have to say that there is some value in being committed to a sort of naive pluralism. I agree with Simon that literacy requires more than a mere superficial grasp of language, I would also like to suggest that literacy cannot require a comprehensive grasp of language. A great poet, for instance, does not need to master grammar or etymology, in some cases, the poet can do everything necessary with an appreciation for the sounds of langauge. Also, a poet does not necessarily need to worry about sound, but could accomplish much with an understanding of a particular form or structure. With technical systems, we are talking about much more than computer programming. In some cases, a tight focus on programmerly language comes at the expense of the larger cultural scripts within which the programmed object operates. That we are rapidly developing deep habits with regards to mobile devices also means that an aspect of understanding how computers work in a broad sense has a great deal to do with the ubiquity of the commodity, the politics of hidden labor, the absent-mindedness with which humans make the abysmal leap from being tool using animals to being subroutines of automated systems. Which, ironically, indicates the need for the kind of literacy we are talking about: Understanding the logic and function of complex systems. However, we might also need to reexamine the old critical model, pull out the supressed aspects of this tradition, and guard ourselves against the fetishized aspects. The critical tradition has always been rooted in a process of dialogue and a social contract. Yet, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, we tend to individualize critical accomplishments, hanging author names on specific ideas, and implying that critical understanding is a product of individual genius. Yet, the entire time, these great works were accompanied by the production of countless creative works, the development of archives, indexes, face-to-face conversations, written arguments, a system of publication, norms for documentation, and a university committed to fostering this kind of activity. My abilities as a computer programmer do not go beyond basic html, some dabbling with action script, fidgeting with databases, and a committed curiosity to what other people can do and how they do it. Thus, I am utterly dependent on the artists' willingness to share, access to free information about the way technologies work, a collegial community willing and able to correct me when I am wrong, the software developed by others, the machines by still more, etc. In other words, I am hopelessly dependent on a vast network of people to do the work that I do, and the work that I do is hopelessly inadequate to the task of the constituent parts. I am not advocating a return to Kant, but it strikes me that critical thinking still parallels Kant's understanding of the role of philosophy within the realm of knowledge: The Lower Faculty, not expert in any field, thus enabled to make more comprehensive claims about human experience. What we have today that Kant didn't have, is broader access to information and greater means for embarking on the sort of philosophical discourse that the University enabled. But a major stumbling block is our investment in individuality, which pushes us unecessarily towards self-sufficiency as a pre-requisite for competence. However, it is our self-inusfficiency that requires us to build human systems, communities, which enables collective competence. I see something promethean in this. Technology offers each of us the hope of greater agency. It exploits one concept of humanism inherited from the enlightenment, that of individuality, to secure our dependency on a technical system that is superior to us (Notice that we are warned not to let human interests interfere in the economy for fear that it will stifle growth and innovation.) Further, this reinforces the sort of limited literacy that Simon warns us about (Use the stuff, don't make it. Develop a cargo-cult view.) All the while, the actual achievement of human agency via collective effort is hidden from us, doled out in regulated doses, administered by managers, filtered by consciousness industries. It is as though the gods are withholding from us the secret of fire, hiding us from what we could be, channelling our communal impulses into wage labor, football games, and, when things get really bad, political theatre. But unlike the Promethean myth from the Enlightenment era, the power that is withheld from us is that of collective effort it's not the individual will... it's the ability to cooperate, share, distribute, network. To bring it back to the point: The ideal state is a progressively improving critical knowledge of the way things work. The obstacle, perhaps, is the impression that this critical knowledge needs to be
Re: [-empyre-] the pitfalls of trendy theory and popular art projects
I think it is a good point to think about trendy theory and the problems with hype. I am almost always seduced by hype. It tricks me into seeing something concrete to wrap my head around, while making me realize I am a fool for mistaking currency with solidity. But the logic of hype or its resistance isn't a simple binary. The feelings we associate with hype and excitement over ideas serve a role within society... and I think the key is trying to figure out which system can mobilize our interest and attention without letting it lapse into mindless, vapid enthusiasm. We could, and sometimes probably do, market ourselves as thinkers here on Empyre. It's a real temptation. But the general trend in society is to aestheticize injustice and to exempt the powerless from seeking justice, so it stands to reason that we should be uneasy with this. (On the other hand, if an artist is clever enough to subvert the prevailing aesthetic order, then they deserve to be called artists! iMine seems like a good example of this impulse in action.) There is a powerful current developing. And, at the risk of hyping it, we should try to be a part of it. Talking with people about stuff that is useful, having a real, good, old-fashioned dialogue is what a lot of the p2p initiatives are trying to get at. If we pull away the label and name identifications from our accomplishments, and instead divert our energy to doing something that registers as useful to the people we are engaged with at the particular moment we can experience the flurry of attentiveness that we seek in hype. We ought to notice useful things. We ought to express our appreciation for these useful realizations. Our enthusiasm for good things ought to be contagious, and we should try to persuade others to beware when we recognize a bad thing. We become important to a community as a member of that community by contributing to the broader effort to achieve the aims of that community, instead of signing autographs for people or racking up footnotes or whatever sad metrics we seek comfort in. In the long term, society (academic culture, especially) needs to recontextualize individuality, and find a work ethic that is rooted in the development of strong communal identifications. This requires that we rewire the impulse towards a dead-end celebration of individual effort and achievement and towards the needs of human community. The luxury culture that we are trained to worship as the logical reward for hard work is a joke. It ought to burn our eyes to see individual achievement marked by glaring shows of inequality, when individuals are being crushed daily to build these displays. Rather than measuring merit through the nexus of commerce, we have to find a new vocabulary for social validation. The fact that so much human communication is devoted to small acts of mutual affirmation, nods and uh huhs, and the degree to which we are susceptible to hype indicates that we already have a strong social inclination in place. The challenge is to form, cultivate, and guide these sensibilities towards the social. The most logical place to go for this is to use things that are useful and evaluate them in relation to their ability to contribute to flourishing, communication, the production of knowledge, etc. This, of course, would require us to develop a vision of society in which such contributions are recognizable, which means we would have to develop a broad-based critical capacity that is capable of looking beyond simplistic explanations and measures. In other words, it would require a society that was consistently preoccupied with the very idea of society and a constant and expanding negotiation of precisely what we hope to achieve by having a society and that is a far cry from the prevailing ethos of neoliberalism, which regards society as a fiction to begin with. Davin On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 8:11 PM, Baruch Gottlieb b...@transmediale.de wrote: On Feb 8, 2012, at 11:01 AM, Gabriel Menotti wrote: Media Archaeology is thus really a fashion, something inordinately hyped to sell more books, music, clothes, etc... […] Meanwhile, Zielinski is always (if he still uses the label) explicitly not a media archaeologist but a Media (an)archaeologist, a practice which has been increasingly one of biographing the anarchic margins of western thought and knowledge. [Baruch Gottlieb] To be diluted/ crystallized seems to be the gloomy fate of every theoretical framework that becomes originally successful and is then propagated and made trendy. Was Zielinski quick to jump off the boat of “anarcheology” before it felt prey to the same cycle? I would have to ask Prof. Zielinski about his interest in the term 'archaeology' in general today. But one must be careful to leave the space for the multiple interpretations possible of the word. Archaeology, is not necessary (and certainly not originally, c.1600) all about arkhon, but from
Re: [-empyre-] OSW: open source writing in the network
Marc, you are right to clarify the definition of elitism. Often, especially in the American context, it gets treated rather roughly, deployed as a very specific kind of class critique, which taps into deep American fears about European culture. But in a fundamental way, elitism is a theory of leadership based on the reasonable proposition that good decision-making is tied to knowledge of the situation at hand, an ethical principle that conforms to the social vision, and the ability to make wise decisions. If I think of elitism this way, I don't have a problem with it. But, very commonly, when I suggest to my students, even the most democratic variant of this idea--voters should educate themselves on the issues that face the public through research, critical thinking, and dialogue--various aspects are met with resistance by some students. I think a lot of this is a flash in the pan, American political drama, but there is also the question of whose knowledge, what critical approach, dialogue on what terms, etc. And, of course, people are often selfish, and people in positions of authority, whether they know it or not, even in the most enlightened circumstances, will take action to preserve the continuity of their class (for the good of society, of course), even if it means that others suffer by default. In less enlightened circumstances, leaders mercilessly exploit everyone else. But the idea itself is appealing because we understand the value of information in decision-making. So, like you, I think this recongition of specialized knowledge and ability is a tool and it all comes down to how it is used. In a democratic context, with academic freedom, a free press, an open forum for debate, and a transparent voting process this is what the public does. Among many things the public does, it negotiates the application of elite power, forging consensus on what ought to be legally binding applications of elite knowledge. At once, it allows experts and specialists to share their views, and exposes these views to scrutiny by everyone else. I think in an ideal future we, we would take the fruits of elitism and depersonalize them, creating, in a sense, elite ideas rather than elite classes. Assigning value to accomplishments based on their universal applicability, rather than by restricting access to these ideas in such a way that they will consistently benefit an information oligopoly. This of course, requires that we think fundamentally about how we distribute goods and services in society, so that we can experience, more fully, the flourishing that accompanies the free flow of life-sustaining and life-enriching knowledge. I think Bauwens' work here is very useful, because he furnishes many great examples of the good consequences of filtering information in a public, transparent way. But in the end, we have to pivot from a model of individuality that is measured through metrics like net worth and salary to a model of individuality that is rooted in one's potential to contribute to many, and is supported by a firm recognition of this potentiality in a discourse of human rights which emphasizes society's reciprocal obligation to support each individual. Joss, I'm agreed that filtering doesn't mean elitism if done carefully an openly, but is that what publishers generally do? This is right, private business are never transparent or open. And its hard to expect competitors to behave transparently. The old publishing model benefited from capitalism in the classically liberal way many businesses, competing with each other, motivates the production of many texts from many perspectives in the pursuit of a reading public in all its variations. In its time, it seems, perhaps, like it was the best possible way to get the widest variety of texts vetted, distributed, with the public picking the winners and losers. But we just don't need this model to get information to the public. It might still be functional for select markets and I think there are many virtues to the print model that I think we would be foolish to abandon but as a social good, getting reliable information into the hands of anyone that can use it to live better, we simply have to find ways to sort this information with a high level of discernment (and preserving access to the raw materials, because it is less and less and either/or proposition), and distribute it widely and fight privatization. If, for instance, democratic models can allow us to choose elite ideas, while insulating us from the dangers of an elite class then applying democratic principles to information probably can achieve a similar effect, without replicating the high/low cultural divide and its associations with privilege. Davin On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 6:08 PM, Hands, Joss joss.ha...@anglia.ac.uk wrote: Dear All – I've tried to engage some of the points made in the last posts, if not always directly. As Marc argues, If publishing is
Re: [-empyre-] OSW: open source writing in the network
Joss, You raise some very good points, points which highlight the truly profound nature of digital communication technologies. Such a policing is indeed necessary to justify the very existence of pubic life as a distinct arena that ‘represents’ us, and in that sense is the essence of the democratic life of the bourgeois state. However, as the cost of publishing has been reduced to something close to zero for a good number of individuals and organizations, capital, and its concomitant bourgeois state, have significantly diminished in their ability to filter and legitimate the work of a professional class of public intellectuals and cultural critics. In my own study of electronic literature, I find that many of our attitudes towards the literary are shaped by accidents of history. Fortunately, we have found a good medium for storing and transmitting human expression in the book, itself, prefigured by an oral language which was similarly crystallized in the creation of alphabetic writing but over time, we have become habituated to seeing human thought represented and archived in this format, so many believe that this quality is intrinsic to the literary. Ignoring the possibility that these are specific incarnations of an impulse that precedes it and ignoring the possibility that this impulse will continue to be carried forward in continuity with the present. Now, without getting into semantic quibbling over whether or not we want to provide a strict prescription for literature, I think it is interesting that we depend upon the limiting effects of the material object to accomplish what it is that we desire from literature: Meaning over meaninglessness, virtuosity over thoughtless crap, quality that stands out against quantity. In other words, we still prefer to spend our time using it in ways that reflect our interests, thus some would rather read Literature instead of crap or, in the case you describe, reliable publications over unreliable ones. At the same time, we are keenly aware of marketing, pr, and consumerism in the 21st century so we know that many operators will exploit the logic of scarcity to present unreliable or crappy texts as though they are worth the paper they are printed on. It costs a lot to print a book. People have to buy a lot of copies to make the bestseller list. Glenn Beck's latest book must be AWESOME! In other words, we know by now that the material limitations of print publishing are no longer a reliable indicator of a book's aesthetic merit, moral quality, truth value, scientific significance, etc. Now, often times when I say that I think we need to have some sort of reliable means to sort useful information from crap, people suggest that there is some elitism there. And certainly, when print was the only game in town, such statements were directly tied to an implied economic threshold, which kept some out and some in. But when, as you note, many people can publish many things online with no filtering it is a mistake to assume that the process of conscious human discernment means we privilege the haves against the have-nots. It could be. In the case of commercial content and professionally marketed materials, it is. But this, too, is an accident of history, rather than something essential to the act of critical thinking. Critical thinking does require time to read, think, communicate. It does require the existence of a community capable of supporting and sustaining this activity. (As an aside, if wanting to create a community in which people can read, think, communicate, create is elitist, then what would an anti-elitist community look like?). To get back around to my comment I think that you hit the nail on the head when you point out the need for critical structures and practices that are capable of looking at the broad field of cultural information we swim in, and to filter those results in accordance with values negotiated by a community. Once you take heavy hand of material scarcity off the scales of publication, we have an opportunity to think about what ought to be published without worrying about the dynamics that made many of the hard decisions on our behalf. We now have to decide how to prioritize information, because the price of paper isn't doing it for us. And we need to think about how search engines, social media, and government institutions are actively trying to perform this role on our behalf. If you look out there, and empyre as a community, has been very good at trying to explore the potential of the new environment (and has given a lot of similar projects, artists, critics, and activists, the space to share other models for sharing work), there are groups of people working on exploring the new models. And, as these little perturbations in art and academic culture go, so there are wild vortexes of widespread social change that are being negotiated. We have to figure out how to articulate community in a
Re: [-empyre-] OSW: open source writing in the network
You wrote: We don't need to 'change the world', we have to change ourselves. do things differently. make something work and then, as soon as you have it, spread and communicate o other people. a TAZ with legs, a 1-meter revolution, and an intense communication phase after it. and this is exactly what we do: invent new spaces and new sustainable practices stratified on top of the existing world. and as soon as they're there, explain to people how we did it, give them the tools and support, and proceed in doing the next step. I wish I had read this before writing that long message I send just a minute ago. This really strikes me as a great practice. Do you have any video of the iSee app in action? I don't have a mobile phone, smart or otherwise. But if I did, I would want to try this app. Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] After ISEA: Traveling Artists
Hello Cynthia! I am not an artist, but I have noticed that I am gripped by two aesthetic (maybe spiritual?) impulses when I am travelling. The first is that I sometimes want to be swallowed up by the place that I'm in. On first arrival, I want to walk until I am exhausted, I want to get lost, and then try to find my way again. Tied to this is some desire to just kind of bounce around in the city, confused, stumbling through language, never trying to pretend I belong there, but trying to see if I can get by just by following everyone else. I think there is something a bit perverse about this, some romantic imperialist residue in the desire to lose myself and find myself again in the alien landscape, to return home in reconstituted form. On the other hand, there is something positive tucked in here, too. I want proof that I can entrust myself to whoever happens to be around me. I haven't sought out other artists or theories, the guy in the cafe, a walk in a crowded street, from my own naive perspective, presents just as formidable challenge to my senses as anything else, trapped where I am on the steep part of the learning curve. So far, so good. Lurking behind this is enormous anxiety about the future of the United States. When I am home, I feel like we are a country that has only become more isolated in our thinking. Those we regard as beneath us, we tend to view as hostile, threatening, avaricious, and nihilistic. Those who might appear superior in some way, we tend to view as elitist and pretentious and imagine them looking down on us from some smug position. I want to crush this paranoid impulse under my heel. I want to come home and tell people that a Muslim majority country like Turkey holds many lessons for us, and I want to know those lessons firsthand. I want to say that a Scandinavian country like Norway has many lessons for us to learn, and I want to know those lessons firsthand.. And, in Turkey and Norway, I want to tell people that I am concerned about the direction of my country, we are not all Tea Partyers, the future of my country is a bit up in the air, but there are many people who want to carve out a more peaceful and just future. I don't know what it would take to get rid of our national paranoia. Since before the Salem Witch Trials, we have had a paranoid streak that we have managed to externalize to devastating effect. On the other hand, many places people generally seem to think that Americans, on a personal level, are flexible and friendly. So maybe there is something about Neoliberalism tucked into my recent (and extremely limited) jet-setting. I am on the micro-level, some fluffy little agent of culture smiling my way stupidly through city streets, but on the macro-level, I am tied to hard-handed military, cultural, and economic practices. I go some place, and I soothe. I come home, and I reinforce the idea that all people want the same thing. If I am not careful, my micro-level self could distort, obscure, and conceal the macro-level realities of collective action. The little impulses germinate in the soil of narcissism and if these seeds germinate in soil that is in a little terra cotta pot (as is the case in atomized, individualistic societies), then they flower into an isolated specimen that only serves a narrow purpose: Beauty, fruit, etc. If Americans grow our ideas like potted plants, we will only continue to select for seeds that produce ever more paranoid, self-centered blossoms, with well developed root systems spreading. And, following the logic of privatization, if the world is given over to this individualized system, paranoid seeds will tend to thrive in these conditions, and global consciousness will be remade in this atomized image (though, the planet will likely be destroyed before this view is universalized, tidily justifying the cloudy paranoid views that made such mutual destruction inevitable). But if they soil is part of a larger field of growth (say, in the context of a public sphere, democratic civil societies, and a global framework for human rights), the little seeds that are nurtured by small acts of identification eventually have to find there way within an ecosystem. Suddenly the plant is part of a network, and its flower or fruit might only be a small part of its full beautiful participation in the flourishing of the system. So, alongside my dirty little neoliberal adventures, I am hoping to find systems where my habituated potted plant mentality can be broken free from its confines. I want to go back and tell stories of beautiful forests that are bigger than our little ideas lined up in perfect little terra cotta pots. This requires two (maybe three) perspectives. It requires the first-person account of life in the forest, which compared to the story of life in the terra cotta pot, is thrilling and beautiful, but also fraught with danger. Some ideas thrive, some are choked out and die miserably. When your idea is
Re: [-empyre-] who owns the city? (Istanbul)
On a more mundane level, my friends and I went to dinner at a kebap house, the first one in Istanbul. And, as we enjoyed the meal, they mentioned that there was a downside to kebap restaurants, and that was that they were delicious, inexpensive, and hearty but that they were crowding out the Ottoman cuisine, with all of its widely varied flavors and laborious techniques. They then added that the traditional food of Istanbul was the refinement of many years of hybridization, reflecting the general uneasiness of change, modernity, and cosmopolitanism. It was a regionally specific version of the debates about fast food culture (convenience, taste, expense), but one that I could very easily relate to, but never would have even noticed had I not been staying with Turkish friends. Davin On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 2:43 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I was there a week only but all ppl I met (Turks everyone) told me they felt the turkization and the erasing of the Byzantine past, very well related in the book From the Holy Mountain, by William Dalrymple. He did a trip between the monasteries in Syria, Palestina and Turkey and saw the intentionality of the erasing of all traces of former cultures. Did you enter the Hagia Sofia? Crumbling away with zero maintenance... Ana On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Michel Bauwens mic...@p2pfoundation.net wrote: hi Ana, just wondering why you feel 'all the remnants of the past are crumbling away' ? On the contrary, I feel the successive layers of history are very much alive, and also the mixity of the population and the neighborhoods , with so many recent first-generation immigrants from the rural Anatolian countryside, represent quite a mixture of temporalities, etc ... very unlike western europe, where only the buildings remain ... extented families and village cooperative solidarity also remain realities, as far as I could ascertain from speaking with Turkish friends (I gave a lecture to an all-turkish audience yesterday) Michel On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 6:36 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I am bit curious about how did the people who travelled to Istanbul for the first time experienced the city itself, Turkey and all the contradictions and the multiple layers of meaning residing in this old city where all the remnants of it's past are crumbling away. As you know many Turks want to be a part of Europe and join the EC, but many others want keep the country's isolation. Ana -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia1585353 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia, wi mobil/cell +4670-3213370 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://www.subtle.net/empyre -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens55; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15853 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 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://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] can we avoid the corporate pyramid scheme model
Simon, In a way, isn't some sort of pyramid model inevitable when critical methods and institutions are under stress. I mean, there might have been a time when fields of critical and aesthetic activity could either be narrowed by disciplinary strictures or could be selective based on some standard of veracity. But over the last couple decades, disciplines are called into question, aesthetic merit is called into question, and basic assertions of truth are called into question so we have no simple way to create focus around an event based either upon the promise of intensively focused activity or upon the promise of some fidelity to commonly held measures of truth. Instead, we have currency, economic and discursive. We can organize activity around capital or organize activity where it is taking place, but the pull of a juried exhibition or an exceptional argument has been weakened by neoliberalism. The same mechanics that have chipped away at the public sphere are now operating within other institutions. The pyramid scheme offers a quick answer we don't know what is good or true, but this is what everyone is looking at, and these people are willing to put money on the line to prove it. It's like selling Acai Berry juice it makes you feel better because if you didn't feel better and you convinced all your friends buy it, then convinced them to sell it, then discovered it didn't make you feel better, you'd lose everything, everyone would lose everything. It's creative destruction. It rips out our beating hearts in pursuit of bitter crumbs of coal. However, this isn't the only way out of the late capitalist, poststructualist morass. I think there is plenty of evidence that art, artists, and critics want to get at more fundamental issues. There is still much to learn about currency in the sense that social activity matters, but I think we are seeing that this activity is about something, it's not simply about widgets talking about widgets. It's not some calf to be fattened, butchered and sold... rather it is the very preciousness and power of human life that all this social activity circulates around, that forms us. The kind of dizziness of postmodernism has come to a halt, and now everyone with any sense understands that the things we say and do have stakes that transcend mere currency. I think that many people are thinking about the world as though it exists and as though what we do matters. This is certainly what I experienced in my talks with people at ISEA (and in reading the chatter that has ensued). A lot of the art was very fun, pleasurable, and light, even, but it wasn't vapid. For years I avoided contemporary art because it left me feeling kind of alienated and fragile, but lately I haven't felt that way. And that, I think, is a reflection of years of critical activity and engagement that has been simmering for some time now, but which has been brought to the forefront by history. Davin On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 10:06 AM, Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk wrote: Water quality and machine guns aside, I had been under the impression that ISEA was not so much collapsing under its own weight but being built into a corporatised pyramid scheme, two decades ago. That's why I stopped going after Sydney (1991). I was pleasantly surprised at this year's event that whilst we were housed in an uber-corporate environment the consensus amongst delegates was that this was a very bad thing. Anarchy seemed to be just under the surface (a good thing). Ergo, perhaps I had previously been hasty in my judgement. If ISEA now does functionally collapse that would be a pity as it seems there is a new generation of participants looking to turn it into something else. However, to some degree, and this is regrettable, there is something about ISEA that seems a bit like the Olympics and how they are managed by a board with relatively static membership employing an economic model that is completely open to, indeed encourages, corruption. Many journalists (at least in the UK) have argued for the IOC to be disbanded and replaced by an entirely different type of organisation (that will not happen, even though IOC corruption is clear for all to see). If ISEA is to evolve then perhaps it's management and economic models need reconsideration. In Istanbul I met with Gavin Antz, the current Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (introduced to him, ironically by Wim van der Plas, as one of the people who founded ANAT - which is true). Julianne Pierce was also there, a previous ANAT Director. ANAT and ISEA are about the same age and we discussed how they are different models. I pointed out that ANAT was conceived as a light weight organisation that would exist as a network with none of its own resources or facilities, the idea being it could work with other organisations and their resources and function to connect people in new ways,
Re: [-empyre-] Layers of ISEA2011: Corporate/Financial (Murat Germen)
I was grateful for the overall messiness of the event. I was staying with Turkish friends, and was pleased to hear that they heard about the gallery shows through radio ads for the Biennale, and though they are not artists or academics they wanted to come with me to see what it was all about. I don't know what overall attendance at the ISEA exhibitions will be, and how much of that will be drawn from the Istanbul but it was the first time that I have gone to a conference of this sort where there seemed like a realistic possibility that the academic/artist bubble would be pierced by the people living in and around the event. Uncontainable was a theme, and I felt like it was achieved. And though some of the logistical difficulties experienced by artists and scholars getting from event to event were certainly there, I am glad that this was also a part of the event. At every turn, I found that the daily realities of life in Istanbul present in the conference itself. Walking through security barriers, spending hours in traffic, crossing the street with an eye on traffic, riding the buses and trains, witnessing rather directly just how effectively wealth stratifies... these were inescapable realities of the conference. I found that the mixed feelings I have all the time... needing to pay bills and care for my family, depending on institutions, but knowing the injustice they often represent, wanting something better, trying to find what is good about the fine things and what is bad about them, seeing what is good about the low things and what is bad about them, too. There was something madenning about walking into and out of the towers, and it made the critical experience of the works and the criticism feel sharper and more acute than any other conference I have been to. I could walk into a paper discussion, and get lost in something light and trivial, and then it would vanish just as quickly as I left the room. On the other hand, there are certain experiences that stuck with me and resonated in a way that might not have, had it not been for the irresistable power of 15 million people throbbing like a heart in the center of the world. For instance, this piece, http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/dr.montgomery, made me breathe deeply in and out, wanting my pulse to join with the millions around me, my blood to flow through the wires and out into the street, and into the veins of everyone there. I wanted their pulse to move my heart, to carry me. I wanted to cry. I don't know when the last time I felt this way about a work of art (it happened at when I was touching Light Contacts, too). I know that these thoughts don't critically address the serious issues raised here but the serious issues raised here are the same ones that magnified these sentiments and blew them all out of proportion for me. Instead of spending a couple minutes watching cool biofeedback, I wanted to my heart to be able to solve every problem for everyone for all time. And I think that can only happen when art confronts reality with such intensity. I didn't care how the piece worked or why it was made or what anyone else thought of it. For a moment in time, I was a better person. I don't really know how else to describe it. However, I do think that we should do anything and everything to make events such as these readily available. Keeping fees down, lining up institutional support that is consistent with the mission, figuring out clever ways to get people in the door these are important things to me. I was only able to go because I am already in Europe and could afford the out of pocket expense as a result. But if I were an independent artist or an adjunct faculty member or had chosen to attend a different conference this year or did not have friends to stay with in Istanbul, ISEA would have been unattainable for me. And, of course, I felt bad that my hosts wanted to attend my presentation, but would not have been admitted through the security without badges. on the other hand, they were very happy that the galleries were open to them. I don't know if a sliding scale might be the way to help blunt the costs people who have department budgets that support travel should pay, people with other means should pay less, and those without should pay nothing. I'm back in Norway, now. But I was very happy to see those who made it! And I hope that you are enjoying the time in Istanbul as much as I did. Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] pirates and clapping
Thinking on this point of being products of the Google and their famously banal motto, Don't be evil, I wonder if some of what we are experiencing a flattening out of ethics. Don't be evil sounds like a fine corporate motto, but I think it really speaks to an absence of what it is that we should strive for: The Good. Nobody wants to bother defining it, and in the process we are left to the default system of value offered by capitalism. The only thing that matters is what end you are willing to serve in exchange for access to greater means (by which you can barter someone else into serving your ends). Piracy is attractive to me because it lays this bare. Like true Teenagers from Mars, We want, we need it, we take it. There's a raw honesty to this sort of existence that exposes the shame of capitalism. But this is precisely the concern of politics: to hammer out a notion of the good and to negotiate means within which we can pursue it. Maybe the best we can do is Don't be evil or Get what you can. But I think Michel is onto something when he speaks of getting beyond the avoidance strategies offered by resistance. at some point, people forget about what they are against and get into what they are for. Davin On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 9:44 AM, mag...@ditch.org.uk wrote: At the inauguration ceremony, the Google representative said that the company is looking forward to the research outcomes, and that they are glad to anticipate the outcomes, which will help us to make better products. Yes, it's worth extending our piratic probe to institutions, newly created and pirated. Open Access is one response to constraints on knowledge sharing. we are the products of Google, not clients, nor pirates. An interesting point. Can you elaborate? Best wishes, Magnus ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] laws, outlaws golden pirates
Marc, I'll try to tuck some comments into the message: An interesting read, consisting of thoughts reflecting social anxieties of our troubling age. Everything you mention includes the spectre of social engineering, and the most troubling aspect of all this, is how deeply 'comfort' is linked to it all. How a desire (or very human need) to be warm, safe and relating to others is a psychological factor, that tends to incorporate a kind of default of submission or even sacrifice in order to live without fear. Here, I think is where the arts can serve a powerful role. I think, for instance, of John the Savage in Huxley's Brave New World. Look at first, how John is moved by Shakespeare to seek something good beyond mere comfort. And then, thinking about the many discussions I have had with students regarding this book: Do they like John? Does he go too far? Is he pathological? Etc. This little book brings us into a great discussion about whether or not there is value in seeking a good that exists beyond comfort. I also have my students read Burgess' Clockwork Orange, and ask them how far Alex can go to pursue his comfort, to what extent society is right to reform Alex's mind in the way that they do. We think about the extent to which the state itself provides context for Alex's antisocial behavior. And then, of course, there are the deeper questions of human nature or biologically determined behavior. Because all of these things are true: Comfort does matter, personally and collectively. But to what extent must our notions of comfort be sublimated, transformed, and repurposed? To what end can fear be harnessed? And how? By whom? Etc. You mention the word 'Vandalism', which is typically associated with senseless destruction. Where the contemporary notion of it, consists of it meaning private citizens damaging the property of others, generally. Yet, I view vandalism as a two-way process, where people's lives have been vandalized by the state, corporations and privileged elites. And these groups of confidence tricksters have fooled generations of individuals and common people, exploiting human sensibilities and everyday, functional needs, from basic experience right through to consumer orientated desires and use of (now) functional, networked protocols, where behaviours become more a collective noise of data ready for harvesting. I agree with you on vandalism. I think, for instance, of the freeway projects in many US cities (LA in particular), that were used to bulldoze ghettos, and build giant barriers between neighborhoods all for the sake of progress and ease. If that's not vandalism, I don't know what is. And so, within the general economy of destructive acts, I think that ethics and politics are critical. Wanton, unfocused, small scale acts of vandalism are in a sense, instruments of power as much as they are acts of aggression against power. I often go to a Chinese restaurant in my town, a solid working-class customer base, and marvel at the cruelty of the bathroom graffiti. Lots of anti-Mexican slurs, which other patrons respond to with counter-slurs (occasionally, someone edits the graffiti to make it into a positive messages). And then when you think of the role that talk radio plays in capitalizing on and cultivating xenophobia, and connect it to the history of populism in the US, you see that this exploitation is real. The only way through it is to forge solidarity. Which is hard work. It cannot be automated. It must always be personalized and felt. But, the good news is, that relationships are hearty once they are formed. I can see social anthropology, with postmodern thought along with contemporary tools opening up new contexts, for what neo-liberalists wish to see as a pre post socialist age. As in, just like indigenous societies and groups are actively reclaiming much of their own cultural agency and histories before and post the industrial revolution, neo-liberalism will aid this, and then own whatever comes of these processes as 'sourced' recovery and material, for their own marketing revenues. This is not to say, that anthropologists are seeking to please such powers, but we are in a world where information and the study of it is feeding not only those who wish for positive social change, but also helps those who wish to exploit and control others. Thus, mediation becomes more a narrow define via specific protocols under the scheme and management of top-down initiations, allowed not because of the importance, values, political knowledge, or critique of the subject itself, but because it feeds a greater body of power networks that need to consume all, to continue existing. I think that you are right, neo-liberalism lurks like a vulture waiting to harvest the energies of our social desires and turn them into products. I don't know the way around this. But I think that the critical impulse itself, the very motivation, the
Re: [-empyre-] laws, outlaws golden pirates
The question is how to short circuit that process? Vandalism might be part of that - to take away more than you put in, to ensure whatever it is you do its destructive tendency is greater than its creative. However, until now, I cannot think of a single strategy that has worked. That doesn't mean there isn't one... I wonder if the solution might have less to do with the actions and the relative rates of production and consumption, than with the underlying ethical and social motivations. At some level, what we are all expressing (both the petite pirates and the official pirates) is the fundamental silliness of an extremely focused application of a particular enlightenment sensibility: the realization of individual subjectivity and a notion of human rights that includes individual autonomy, free-thinking, and the right exercise these rights over one's body and related material possessions (a good thing) taken to an extreme form of hyperindividuality and a radical notion of property rights. But these notions of rights an individuality are supported by laws, but held into place only as far as we are willing to recognize the personal nature of the rights of others. The Law doesn't keep me from stealing my neighbor's stuff or wrecking his car or rifling through his mailbox. I don't do those things, primarily because I don't want to mess up his life. And, I don't do those things to people who live across town because I imagine that it would just not be worth it. Even if I don't like someone or disagree with someone, I am not going to attack them. They don't want people creeping around inside their homes. They don't want someone taking their mail. They don't want to pick up messes made by other people. Etc. But, really, it is simply hard to imagine an equivalent relationship between a corporation and an individual. I have never had a corporation treat me as a person. Sure, maybe the person working for the corporation has bent the rules (or even interpreted existing rules in my favor) out of some feeling of solidarity and identification. But some entity that exists as the expression of a charter, that is ruled by mechanisms which relentlessly abstract my worth to them in terms of stock prices, is neither able to interact with me as a person and I cannot imagine that entity as a person. Thus, companies have to try to humanize themselves to us create characters and identities run ads that emphasize the humanity of their employees... or resort to propaganda that casts the offending individual as some sort of anti-social person (You wouldn't steal a car, would you?). But it's hard to feel like you are killing someone by ripping an mp3 when people routinely starve for the global market. They are clinging to the very trappings of a culture they have tried to destroy. I think the pervasiveness of mutual piracy doesn't really do much and I think this is its most important point... it's a mutual recognition that culture linked to materiality is absent, and in its place we are seeing the official reassertion of culture as a virtual quality, as a sort of puppet show (as private property has always been). The puppets are fighting over ownership, but really what's at stake is social relationships. I think those will continue to exist. And, maybe they will even get better as the puppet show gets sillier. Property rights, like money, like food, like fashion, like all the other superficialities really are rising to meet the postmodern critique. All the things we once imagined were deep are floating to the surface, are beginning to look shallow. But maybe this crisis of being (of which ubiquitous piracy is a symptom) is clearing away the dross of consumer culture, pruning back a particular enlightenment tendency (radical individualism) that we might fully explore the critical role that community plays in the formation of being. And property rights and the prices for goods and services can be re-aligned with basic questions of justice and equity, where they belong. Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Wearable Technologies: Cross-disciplinary Ventures”
Melinda (and everyone else), I am sorry to have let my participation lapse... between grading and a lot of other obligations, I have dropped out for a while. BUT, I am really interested in this month's topic and have been quite fascinated by what I have read so far. I want to respond to Melinda's question: i'm imagining a future of wearables that work on electrodermal activity, that feed both off and back into the body and the bodies, environments and networks around them - and i'm DEFINITELY NOT thinking along the lines of the old father of cybersex stahl stenslie's full-body, tele-tactile communication system -cyberSM of 1993. We should have come a long way in this area in 20 years -- but have we? I think that there is a good question about the spectacular way in which we have imagined wearable technology in the past, and the way it actually looks once said technology is incorporated into being. I think that Heidegger's discussion of dwelling and being are useful here. I recall in my own dissertation research on smart houses, I was dealing with similar issues: The difference between the spectacular futurism of the previous cultural imaginary and the more modest futurisms of the present. Leaning on Foucault's Technologies of the Self, think the true full-body, tele-tactile system would be realized primarily in psychic terms. That the apparatus itself could be shrunken and minimalized might, perhaps, be the sign of its centrality. When we talk about SM as a sort of fantasy role-play, it seems to lend itself to a certain amount of setting, staging, costuming, and external markers that seem to exist precisely to shore up the fantasy in the absence of real sadism/masochism. When we talk of truly sadistic behavior, not as a role-play, it usually presents itself as its opposite. For instance, abuse often marked by elaborate performances of domestic harmony? So, we might be talking about the difference between fantasies about technology that we wish could release us from responsibility for our actions AND/OR extend our power and real technologies that could conceivably do the inverse rob us of responsibility (via compulsory connectivity) AND/OR hold us accountable (via surveillance). While a house is very different from a jumpsuit in a certain sense, as these objects relate to our being, our presentation in the world, and the memory we manage... they are quite similar. So, maybe we haven't come a long way, except in the sense that we have to live with the actual technologies, rather than merely signify them through fashion. A second useful thing to think about, and pardon me if I am inadvertently repeating a point made earlier in the month, is that Bourdieu's discussion of the habitus. Here you have a term for the person's immediate region of consciousness which can be expressed through dress, posture, voice, vocabulary, identity, thought. I am particularly keen on seeing the resonance between wearable technology and more archaic notions of habitus, particularly the religious habit, which is a garment that denotes a way of being. BUT it also habituates the individual towards a mode of being. In this sense, the wearable technology departs from sensory signification and migrates more towards modifying action and interaction (which is what clothing has done historically), but does so with a programmed memory and more deeply codified structure. In other words, the interactions do not carry the same sort of performative character that old cloths might have required to legitimate their function (i.e. a police uniform requires a certain performance of virtual authority, while the gun and billyclub perform a sort of ultimate actual authority). I am still trying to creep through the month's messages. But this represents the half-baked form of my thinking on what I have read so far. I am hoping that whoever makes it to Istanbul might want to sit down and talk about this stuff face to face. Peace! Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 77, Issue 7
Alan, For me, inequality in access is a recurring concern. I think that AR is appealing because it formalizes folk practices. I think the poor man's (or woman's) AR can be seen in virtually any bathroom stall, bus stop, high school desktop, etc.: graffiti. But even graffiti is a material representation of consciousness, directing thought towards another. The iphone offers the ability to apply narrative and interpretation to space in the same way that graffiti and storytelling do but where it might differ is in the personal stakes for the writer, the permanence of the writing, and in the reading public that it engages. Writing in public space immediately puts the writer into dialogue with the other inhabitants of that space. Various AR apps engage a narrower slice of the public, which calls into question the notion of the public at all, but which is also why they are permitted. Hacker attacks on websites are also AR applications, but like graffiti, they are considered criminal as opposed to merely fun. At the same time, I think most people want to be a part of culture and society in this neoliberal era so simulated folk practices are incredibly appealing. I think the test is how to push our way from simulated practices into the real. Davin On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 12:12 AM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: I was fascinated by the link Paul Brown sent in, http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/04/new-augmented-reality-app-unle.html - because of the creativity unleashed; the iphone, whatever, becomes an active tool instead of a receiver. I have two questions, occasioned in part by my relative poverty in relation to this discussion (I can't see my own pieces!) - 1 - What, if anything is being done to eliminate the various headgear or even smartphone receivers that are current necessary to receive AR and its extensions? The last issue of Lusitania, Beyond Form, Architecture and Art in the Space of Media, focuses on the physico-inert-kinetic constructs of situated responsive liquid architectures, some of which have been realized. But even these require an over-emphasis on things. I was taken in this regard by Newstweek which runs interference on a wide variety of platforms, augmenting inscription. 2 - A vast number of people already carry smartphones etc., constantly use them on the move (too many walks/hikes with people staring at the screens etc.); for them, the media environment is already amalgamated, physical reality already augmented simply by the presence of the screen. So there's an enclave set up in the midst of the practico-inert, one occasioned by surplus income, local/technological accesspoints, etc. The second question is related to the first and my previous post - what can be done to extend this, breakdown the enclave? The uses are tremendous - think of a device that might be employed around Fukushima, directly outlining radiation levels as AR. This would have application for all sorts of pollutions; one might use it in a firefight, for example, in order to avoid oncoming. Sorry, I'm writing blurrily at the moment. ... What I'm asking - how does one break the enclave - the sense of privilege AR implies - how does one make the creative version of the $100 or $10 laptop here? Why is this important? It's not in a lot of places, but in the US at this point, 1% of the country owns 95-99% of the wealth (depending on the stats) and the relative income of the poor is decreasing quickly: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110408/ts_yblog_thelookout/off-the-charts-income-gains-for-super-rich and http://l.yimg.com/a/i/ww/news/2011/04/08/inequality.jpg - these are people who would socially benefit from AR, and yet it's totally out of reach. I might add that the elderly obviously fall into this category as well, etc. So is there a way for AR to reach out? Is there a technology that doesn't require technology? Or an AR-technological equivalent, say, of the old Bread-and-Puppet Theater? Finally I want to thank everyone for an fascinating discussion, and it's really heartening to see so much amazing work, so many directions! I particularly want to thank Patrick here, and Mark Skwarek, who has nurtured me to some extent. - Alan == email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ webpage http://www.alansondheim.org music archive: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/qy.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] escaping work having your mass and monad too
Simon, Aristide, Cara, I apologize for only partly following the conversation this month but your comments inspired me to jump in. I have a friend from graduate school, Patrick Vrooman, who used to talk about acquiescence every time the conversation turned to resistance. And I wonder if part of finding an escapist's strategy that doesn't end up in escapism might be to think in similar terms worry less about what we want to get away from and more about what we want to get into. I think Deleuze's discussion of desire comes in handy here as the means by which consciousness migrates across the material world to create new organs of sensation and modes of experience. If you join up with someone in a deep and committed way, you effectively surrender to them, you depend upon them, and they depend upon you. This kind of thinking is threatening, especially for contemporary subjects, who enjoy their autonomy, who imagine themselves as pure individuals, who are trained to experience their consciousness via decisions about what to buy and what not to buy, etc. And beyond inconvenience, it carries substantial ethical and physiological risks. If we look, for instance, at the link that Cara has provided: Occupy Everything, I think we can get a sense of how these dynamics work. While there are clear expressions of resistance backed by astute critiques, Occupying space is first about being present within that space. It begins with a utopian goal of being. And my experience in successful interventions is that they achieve a level of community and pleasure at the site of practice that suggests things could work out well if the normal order is suspended and control is left to the community. On a daily level, the difference between a livable and an unlivable locality has everything to do with our willingness to give in to each other, whether it means riding a bike without getting smashed by a car or answering the door when someone knocks. On the other hand, we live in a world that has systematically destroyed that trust. Restaurants and food manufacturers want us to trust their products over street vendors, home-cooked meals, and farm foods which we are conditioned to see as dirty. We (and I know this is not a universal, immutable we) trust something with a label or corporate identity before trusting something made by hand. The solution, from the individual perspective, is to run towards those earthy, interpersonal pleasures, to explore them, and to share them. Beyond our personal experience, however, we must also teach, train, cultivate, and habituate virtues of trust and human interaction and dismantle the general feeling of fear and dread that can be crippling. Davin On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 7:30 PM, simon s...@clear.net.nz wrote: Dear empyreans, Two moments: [to talk to Aristide Antonas's post] escaping work or the work of escaping the representation according to which the telos of every field is visibility correlates with the work of resisting. How to encourage escape but by an escapist's strategy that doesn't end up in escapism? What David Foster Wallace calls the liberal education has this good and admirable goal in its sights, by giving the student to gain insight into the chains binding them to ways of thinking and ways of behaving, leading the student to ask questions, which in themselves are nodal points of escape - points all too soon coopted into an optic of resistance, like the field of a mass action. Recuperation of resistance as information. A new barbarism is intriguing. It smacks of a desire for an effort of thought, of critical thought, or archeology - shouldn't that be a geology? as in a crossing of the threshold of slowmo? - with the quick violence of the earth as the upsetter? The point is taken, however, that this cooption of liberatory knowledge to information, that is, representation, and this appropriation of action to the field of visibility, likewise, representation, tank up civilization - but as we know it, uncommonly well. The desperation of facing urgent situations without recourse to action, is it more or less a black hole for the civilian, more or less a barbarism, for the city, than spontaneous unorganised violence due to the urgency of desperate situations? The political space need not immediately become a place enclosed by the three theatrical walls of a living archive accessible by screen imagery, its fourth porous wall, its magic. If it is not an open space any more, we should look for the exits? I must admit, I am attracted rather than repelled by the concatenation of political space, live archive and interweb or net. And I would like to add the note that it might be precisely the violence and the urgency of desperate situations that make the thought think. Less a tank, than a gnawing at the earth, a disturbance in the field, a sudden inrush, a tremour, more than surface, less than depth. An illiberal, illegal,
Re: [-empyre-] contesting the netopticon
Yes, thank you for having me as a part of this discussion. It is always a good group. If anyone wants to pick anything up off list, I am always happy to talk. Davin On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 8:29 AM, marc garrett marc.garr...@furtherfield.org wrote: Simon all, Thank you for inviting me to be part of this discussion. I enjoyed it immensely... Unfortunately, I was unable to jump back into the discussion last week due to being too busy. I will reread all contributions rethink my own assumptions :-) wishing you all well. marc www.furtherfield.org So, we come to the end of the month of January and our discussion on the theme of the Netopticon. To remind us where we began, abstracted from the original post setting out the theme: The Panoptic structures innate in social space are often cited in relation to the internet and its governance. The term Netopticon suggests a mesh-work structure of how a socially networked Panoptic apparatus can operate. Malkit Shoshan describes how the social technologies that characterise Web 2.0 facilitate the emergence of the internet as a Panoptic space, where individuals are complicit in their own surveillance. The internet is pervasive in how people construct their social lives. If we accept that people are emergent, through social activities that are a process of becoming, issues around net neutrality, Web 2.0 and surveillance have implications reaching into the psycho-social. Within a Foucauldian appreciation of the social, where the Panopticon (nee: super-ego) is manifest at the heart of our social relations, the Netopticon engages our entwined individual and social ontologies. How will the codification of individual and collective relations develop? Over the past month invited guests and members of empyre have addressed this theme from a range of perspectives. I am not going to summarise the various viewpoints here as I fear my attempt would be inadequate. The empyre archive is accessible and makes an excellent read, organised by date, thread and author. https://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/ I would like to thank everybody who contributed to the discussion; our guest discussants Joseph Delappe, Marc Garrett, Davin Heckman, Patrick Lichty, Heidi May, Christina Spiesel, Jon Thompson and Alison Craighead, all of whom gave generously of their time to post provocative and inspiring texts. I would like to thank Renate Ferro and Tim Murray for inviting me to moderate the discussion and for continuing to host and maintain empyre. We can present the netoptic as automatic social formation but sites for debate like empyre are precious and survive because of the efforts of individuals. I would also like to thank all those members of empyre who contributed to the discussion and also all those members who participated silently. Whilst lurking should be seen as a public good it is perhaps this silent reading, the nitrogen (as distinct to the oxygen) of listservs, which presents the most appropriate image for the netopticon. By having our conversations in public we can render our inter-subjectivities as a performative instance of the netopticon in play. Best Simon Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ s.bi...@eca.ac.uk http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Indra's Net
I also think that the various strategies of resistance, the more I think about them, are not without their own problems. In reflecting on Simon's discussion of anonymous in a parallel thread.. it is interesting to think about how anonymity works as an appropriate response to ubiquitous surveillance. In order to be anonymous, you have to engage in blending in. I live in a small town that happens to have a medical marijuana dispensary (two, actually). But because of the nature of small towns (and the large segment of the population that is freaked out about it), there seems to be two strategies among those who use the dispensary: One group believes that they should go into the dispensary as conspicuously as possible. They have their card and the appropriate permissions from the state. The best thing they can do is demonstrate their identity and use publicly, to help mainstream the practice of buying and using medical marijuana. And hope that the community, insofar as it recognizes them as members of the community, will accept their behavior because they accept the people. The second group believes that they should try to look as anonymous as possible, because they are unsure if the legalization will stand, and they are worried about what might happen to them if the police happen to spot them or if their boss sees them or they run into a disapproving person from their church or whatever. They don't want to be recognized as medical marijuana users (and some will travel to neighboring cities to avoid being identified). In both cases, these individuals have submitted their intention to smoke pot to the central authority. But beyond what the state of Michigan says, they have to also consider what the local powers might do with knowledge acquired the old fashioned way (looking) and what federal powers might do with the state's records. And so, either there are two group survival strategies one relies upon strong individual presentation nested within a hypothetical community of support and the other relies upon aggressive strategies of deindividuation to the point of anonymity. While I don't begrudge people the peace of mind that comes with deindividuation. I do think that it can have the side-effect of complementing the strategies of the panopticon. Insofar as one can be recognized, one must appear to be a law abiding citizen. Insofar as one can blend in all other things, one can avoid getting hammered on the head. It doesn't mean that the revolutionary desire disappears, it only means that this revolutionary desire is sublimated and repressed, channeled into more general forms of social rebellion that seem to be as likely to attack the premise of the social itself as they are to attack the mechanisms of power. Davin On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Simon Biggs s.bi...@eca.ac.uk wrote: Actually, the term netopticon works quite well here as an augmentation of the panopticon as it implies the networked, mesh-like and rhizomic character of the surveillance culture you describe in your email Pat. I think this is what Shoshan was trying to get at. Best Simon On 27/01/2011 12:36, Lichty, Patrick plic...@colum.edu wrote: The Age of the Transparent ³The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as the little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose into everybody else¹s business. The global village is a world in which you don¹t necessarily have harmony; you have extreme concern with every else¹s business and much involvement in everybody else¹s life. It¹s a sort of Ann Landers column written larger. And it doesn¹t necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet, but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else¹s affairs. And so, the global village is as big as a planet and as small as the village post office.² -- ³McLuhan on McLuhanism,² WNDT Educational Broadcasting Network, 1966 There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind. Paul Virilio Given Foucault¹s reflection on Bentham, I would like to say that his analysis of the Panopticon seems almost quaint by comparison when McLuhan and Virilio are taken into consideration. The Panopticon assumes a sort of top-down Orwellian scenario of ubiquitous but uncertain surveillance. The issue here is that the Panopticon exists, but like artificial intelligence and infopower, it did not turn out to be like 1984. I have my picture taken several times a week by tourists, casual phone users, bank machines, friends. Facebook privacy controls are useless, whether from social engineering or holes in the protocols, same for gmail. Skype stores a database of all communications that you and anyone else have had for as long as you leave your history on. WIRED Magazine ran an article chronicling a man who tried to go ³dark², but was found within 30 days. People can have
Re: [-empyre-] vigilar y castigar
Marc, I think you hit the nail on the head: Perhaps It would be more appropriate to introduce small, human-scale initiatives which include individuals and groups, according to their own needs and shared resources, and then build from there. As far as I am concerned (personally with others), this has already been happening in regard to furtherfield and other forms of networked peer production, and independent community ventures, on-line and off-line. I think that the hope for a successful, mass, grassroots awakening seems to be a remote one (mainly because most people in the world are already awake to the need for change, but lack power). If being aware of inequity was enough, the billions would have changed the world already. But the possibility of localized interventions is incredibly appealing to me. It's hard not to find little bundles of people working together, sharing skills, providing goods, etc. that create their own currents. Where I live and work... a small town in an economically depressed region there are many, many troubling facets of existence. But there are also networks of people growing, sharing, producing, trading food. There are people making objects and art. There are various cooperative endeavors taking place that aren't built around a culture of economic predation. This doesn't solve all the problems in our community, but if these patterns of activity are nurtured and the ethos of mutual support spreads, then the ability for these simple solutions to offer at least partial alternatives to the monolithic Super Wal*Mart at the edge of town. Alongside these almost intuitive practices, however, there needs to be a philosophical basis for action, and this philosophy should be engaged in dialog with the practical, not simply imposed upon it. Aside from the practical matter of keeping one's hands busy or putting food in one's belly a way of thinking needs to accompany these practices. And that, I think, is the greatest obstacle. We have no patience for dialogic cultural processes. We are in the habit of consuming things as they appear and forgetting them when they go away. And, while certain models of community necessitate more long term thinking, we also need theories that encourage us to think about history and the future, to plan, to reflect, to be human. In turn, it is the ability to slow down and think, which enables more productive forms of organization. If we want a historical parallel, it might be something along the lines of a transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society that we are looking for. The widespread proletarianization of the world's people has robbed us of our ability to build culture. But, if we are able to, locally and efficiently, provide or supplement basic human needs we carve out space and provide the fuel for enriched consciousness if we cooperate, we not only have more time as individuals to think, but we are in cooperation with others, and thus have more opportunities to network our consciousness via culture. If we have more opportunities to think better collectively, we can, in turn, create more time for cultural activity, which is tied very closely to practical production (here, I am very interested in the break between Techne and Poesis, which Cynthia points to, as craft is increasingly independent from concept). My worry about strictly web-based models of community is that they use time and allow for thinking. but they don't necessarily create more time for thinking by producing tangible goods of the sort that can provide material sustenance for the community. (Though, programming cultures are an exception to this general observation, as are established institutions which deal primarily in intellectual property). Which is why your point about the small scale (especially offline and/or intellectually-committed) ventures is a real occasion for hope. Davin On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 7:15 AM, marc garrett marc.garr...@furtherfield.org wrote: Hi Davin all, Sorry for not getting back earlier, it has been rather busy here... I think it is easier to see that art from a blank anthropological view, over our lifetime, has expressed an ironically posthuman set of priorities--the service of markets, the expression of those markets, and the general reification of market mythology. Posthumanism is an interesting element which I feel can be included in the larger context of what is being discussed. If we include the netopticon, neoliberalism and postmodern marketing appropriations and its techniques as well, we see a vista so profound and absolute in its influence on our world; surely then 'as you suggest', we are unable to build alternatives as 'equally' powerful. Rather than surrender to the bleak view that resistance is futile or flee to the false view that resistance is inevitable, I hope to join my voice with the growing chorus of people who are saying that a better world is possible, but
Re: [-empyre-] netopticon and personal culture
Jon and Alison, how far can the metaphor of the Panopticon go and still seem intact as it travels towards to the surface of the many-layered onion that is our collective understanding of things? In the Netopticon, is it the browser? or internet protocols? In our culture, is language our (panoptic) prison (Jameson's 'The Prison house of Language')? Or can we think of the speed of light as a panoptic prison, or mortality, or the idea of the Panopticon/Netopticon itself etc. My thought is that we want metaphors of this nature to go as far as they possibly can in pursuit of a limit that cannot realistically be achieved. In other words, the panopticon is a great metaphor for enculturation because it highlights the ways that we internalize social pressures and apply them to ourselves, not only in superficial ways, but in the most intimate reaches of our psyche. In an earlier era, God was sufficiently awe-inspiring for some people that they would discipline their thoughts and behavior to conform to God's watchful eye Foucault provides a secular and thoroughly modern metaphor of the bureaucratic observer who might catch us being indecent. The social network, after neoliberalism, steps in for a state bureaucracy which nobody believes in and replaces the watchful eye with that of your fellow citizen, not citizen, I mean, your social competitor, your friend. It rather nicely conforms to Thatcher's glib statement on the non-existence of society. Underlying all this is the reality that things like light speed and mortality apparently DO, as far as we are able to realistically know, pose limits to the spatiotemporal existence of humans. If we find a way out of the panopticon, we still have to confront this thing called culture or, retreating from it, we face alienation (which is also, in its way, a cultural phenomenon). Lurking at the periphery, there is the very strict limitation to human existence posed by biological things like eating, shitting, drinking, breathing, and death. (Which, incidentally, are the means by which proletarianized populations are kept in line). At the same time, the connotations of imprisonment can only carry us so far. Language (and culture) make some courses of thought easier to follow than others, but if we compare the relative elasticity afforded by culture to the rather cut and dried restrictions imposed by a raw biological existence Language and culture can as something other than a prison house but as a refuge from a rather rigid existence dictated by its absence, which is difficult to even conceive of, where daily life is similar to breathing. In other words, when we step into culture, we step into temporality. When we step out of culture, we step into something that resembling raw gestures in service of metabolic processes. In other words, just as Foucault paints a rather oppressive picture in Discipline and Punish, he also offers an obverse view in the History of Sexuality, suggesting that this prison house can also be produce desire. In regards to digital culture and the netoptic, then, we can think about the prison house of these panoptic social media practices. but we can also think about the profound desire that this panopticism might lead to. I was listening to my radio and heard Sherry Turkle on NPR talking about robots that need our love... and she mentioned that in her research she has met a number of young people who have grown up within a digital culture, who are actually seeking out more authentic experiences by leaving things like Facebook behind. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1122816 Of course, we all know that this type of nostalgia is not an objective thing, but the fact that people can form desire for more visceral forms of contact is very interesting. I was part of a generation that got swept up in the romance of new media. To see people (including Turkle) pierce through this romance is a very welcome development. But the question is not a simple one: some are pro-technology and some are anti- (as the luddites are mischaracterized), the question is about how humans can make decisions that serve a set of priorities that cannot be simply answered by the adoption of new technology or the function of markets. Again, these little pockets of resistance will not inevitably lead to a better world. What is needed is cooperation, cultivation, thinking, etc. Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] vigilar y castigar
Dear Johannes, I believe that I should probably offer some clarifications in response to your thoughtful reply. Most importantly, I don't want to suggest that all art accomplishes the same end (I am talking about the larger conception of art as techne, where, perhaps, a subset of techne would be those works which strive for poesis). When I think of art, I am not simply thinking of the Fine Arts, critical arts movements, socially invested art communities, and, even, subversive designers who have managed to find themselves in commercial firms. Rather, I am thinking about the general tide of art, which includes all the symbolic activities of culture, sensual or conceptual and aesthetic, empistemological, or practical. So, to answer your concern, I would say that there is a great deal of art that strives for meaningful resistance. but that these works are exceptional against the larger backdrop of cultural production (which ranges from highly-wrought, big budget consumer media productions down to quotidian presentations of self). My sense is that resistance is not simply registered in a dialectical way, and that in the course of forming opposition to various systems of oppression there are always opportunities to for multiple expressions of resistance (which is why, as you note, it is difficult to manage public consciousness). US history is filled with examples of counterinsurgency, the most obvious examples being the conspicuous rise of racism whenever an economic downturn inspires a progressive turn. When rich people start getting richer and working people start getting beat down, the class critique is diluted by populism that pits working people against working people (it's the Mexicans! the blacks! the Chinese! the Irish! the Unions!). It is so recurrent, that I would be inclined to say it is human nature (certainly, Rene Girard's work on scapegoating affirms this inclination) but the fact that these populist turns are fairly consistently backed by capital and fairly well-orchestrated at this stage suggests that this is a strategic move, rather than a purely accidental one. Panopticism IS a powerful metaphor for the way that culture operates. In this sense, there is no resistance to a process which is a general process of culture (except, maybe, to live alone in the woods, without a community). On the other hand, there is something meaningful about what priorities and which culture is programmed into us. We can live in a culture that is built by market forces, with human priorities taking a back seat. Or we can cultivate ways of being that arise from communities that are ordered by the people who inhabit them. So, I am not talking about resisting the panopticon, but talking about a struggle for control over systems of representation. I think it is easier to see that art from a blank anthropological view, over our lifetime, has expressed an ironically posthuman set of priorities--the service of markets, the expression of those markets, and the general reification of market mythology. Rather than surrender to the bleak view that resistance is futile or flee to the false view that resistance is inevitable, I hope to join my voice with the growing chorus of people who are saying that a better world is possible, but we have to work for it. We need critical thinking. We need aesthetic practices. We need each other. I hope this helps clarify Davin On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 1:31 AM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: dear all if allowed (as it's part of last week) , can I briefly take up Cynthia Rubin's response, where she proposes that now that everything is digital the need to push artists to define themselves as tied to a specific medium is now longer relevant, as anyone who is computer literate can move from video to still image print to 3D output. What counts is the idea, the research behind the work, the concept... and wonder what that means? why would there not be plenty of practitioners out there, in many part of the world, who still define their practice (and I mean this obviously in relation to the theme of our discussion here on the panopticon/netopticon) through their medium of choice, whether it's painting or theatre or photography, etc.? and thus in relation to protocols, gate-keepers, guardians, control mechanisms, techniques, formal languages and art markets and venues and professional sectors? Some of these practices will indeed continue quite perfectly sans-web, and no new protocols need be invented.. Cynthia, you ask : The mode of presentation is also dependent on what is available and what is the trend of the day that is likely to get work seen. Do artists make works specifically to post them on YouTube, or would they make the same works to show at film festivals, or to sell on DVDs? i doubt much that artists make work specifically for YouTube (some may do so, many may
Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
In some ways, I think the question of games as art can be enriched by looking back to poiesis and techne. On the one hand, we are trying to describe formal questions of how someone creates a representation of something (a sculpture, a text, a game, a painting, an utterance) which is expressed via technique. On the other hand, we are talking about what those representations accomplish with regards to the being that engages with this representation. If we step back from the modern conception of art and consider that there are a whole number of crafts that people engage in, and that these crafts have to do with being then we can consider the level of skill with which the craft is accomplished AND we can consider the way that this craft engages with questions of being. What I tend to consider art are those works which engage the user, reader, viewer in reflection upon being. But this is a limited definition, and, really, it is an evaluation of quality: I think good works allow people to see the context in which individual and collective consciousness is thought. The best works enable people to direct their attention differently, productively (and I don't mean productive from a purely economic perspective, though it does intervene in the general ecology of human interaction. It's funny if you think about the relationship between economy and ecology oikos for dwelling with a distinction between nomos and logos, perhaps as the distinction between the law as imposed order versus the word as emergent order or even an immanent order, particular to the logical relationships among those which it contains). In this sense, I owe a bit to Badiou's discussion of art as one of the means for truth: The more important issue today is the main contradiction between capitalistic universality on one hand, universality of the market if you want, of money and power and so on, and singularities, particularities, the self of the community. It’s the principal contradiction between two kinds of universalities. On one side the abstract universality of money and power, and on the other the concrete universality of truth and creation. My position is that artistic creation today should suggest a new universality, not to express only the self or the community, but that it’s a necessity for the artistic creation to propose to us, to humanity in general, a new sort of universality, and my name for that is truth. Truth is only the philosophical name for a new universality against the forced universality of globalization, the forced universality of money and power, and in that sort of proposition, the question of art is a very important question because art is always a proposition about a new universality, and art is a signification of the second thesis. (Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art in Lacanian Ink 23). I suppose what I like most about Badiou's discussion is not that it is a unique point but it resonates with points that I have struggled to understand through my own research and that I have heard repeated by many people in this community (and elsewhere). Many want something from art. Many seek to identify that aspect of creativity which suggests not simply improved efficiencies, but helps us chase down different efficacies (as in exploring new modes of creation and making that empower people to make the world). Certainly, this sense of agency was running through previous discussions of Creativity as Social Ontology. To return to videogames it's probably a lot like anything people make or do. There is a whole lot of worthless and even harmful (either in its mode of production or its content) shit that industry creates. Then there are games which, as Daniel Cook describes, are well-designed and with an internal mode of consistency. I think about how great a deck of playing cards works as a utilitarian object they become a framework for all sorts of human encounters... theology (gambling and divination), work (gambling and hustling), socialization (friendly games peppered with conversation or learning how to deal with disappointment/success without making everyone think you are an asshole), learning (math and memory games), even seduction (strip poker).And then there are games which aren't really games at all but art. They might have formal game-like qualities, but have a different function within social life. In the same way that sometimes TV is art and sometimes some cut up trash glued to something is art. Not all trash is art, but some art is made from trash. I live in an economically depressed community, and even trash day is a spectacle of utopian desire. The comfortable tend to buy lots of shit and throw lots of it away every week. The least comfortable (the evicted) have all their belongings thrown out on the curb at the end of the month. And then, in between, everyone else picks through the weekly trash to find objects that can be resused, refurbished, sold, kept, etc.
Re: [-empyre-] pre-designed decay / gamifing the archive
Maybe this is not exactly what you are thinking about, but one historical analogue might be the published lecture notes of various teaching philosophers. What you see, in the form of the published manuscript is something akin to what you might find in a natural history museum. The discussion is distilled into notes, and the discursive nature decomposes to skeletal form. Time and calcification of ideas transforms the remnants of organic tissue into fossil, distorting them and warping them. Paleontologists take the fossils, assemble and inflate them, flesh them out, put clay and skin on the models. Biologists argue about how bones and sinews were attached and how the body functioned. Before long, you have an idea of what this creature was, how it acted, and what it looked like. Various people have attempted strategies to preserve their legacies into futurity, generating cults, recording themselves with ever greater fidelity, even preserving their heads and corpses in cryogenic containers. Probably, the greatest system for preservation involves a combination of habituation and mutation. Copying the format into the consciousness of living subjects while allowing the format to mutate in response to larger cultural changes. One example of gaming strategies that have persisted are playing cards although the role that something like a tarot deck plays in relation to popular card games is quite removed, the rise of televised poker games seems to capture at least some of the significance of earlier iterations of the deck (apparently, they were for games, before they were used for divination, which is to say that divination and gaming are probably not all that far apart... if you think of them from a philosophical perspective). What is TV poker if it isn't a metaphysics of our current world. I have been trying to think at how one might write such a story. A story that contains both its decay and its reconstruction, but am still eager to see what that would look like. Thank you for bringing this up I'll be following this thread eagerly. Davin On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 8:50 AM, Gabriel Menotti gabriel.meno...@gmail.com wrote: “It's sort of unfortunate from a preservationist point of view, as it would be desirable to try to minimize the number of strategies employed to preserve games, but at this point I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all strategy for keeping games alive.” [Jerome McDonough] Wouldn’t it be the case maybe of creating a self-adaptable / malleable strategy of maintenance? Or incorporating it to the games themselves, so that they have their own pre-designed form of decay (I mean, historical persistence)? In that sense, and considering that archives are themselves socio-technical systems, could they be “gamified”? Would that facilitate preservation? Or create another problem in the preservation of the archive? (I'm sorry, but I can't think of any examples of either case right now. I invite you to speculate with me. =)) Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] playing vs productivity (and what does it has to do with videogames?)
I really enjoy certain tabletop games (Settlers of Catan, Caracassonne, and Illuminati) and rarely play video games (I would, I suppose, if I owned some). But a large part of the gaming experience is intensely social. There is a circle of people that get together, students and faculty, that play these kinds of games. I also play Carcassonne a few evenings a week with my wife. At times the play can be competitive, even vengeful, trying to make up for previous humiliations. At other times it is very peaceful and collaborative. It all depends on who is playing and how you are feeling. My thought with these games is not that they are utilitarian or frivolous, but that they simply offer another dimension of social experience which can be estranged from the purely subjective. The game offers opportunities to play with aggression and cooperation via a contractual buffer. In some sense, it is not all that different from the more obvious forms of play-acting that people engage in through other estrangement strategies: Larping, inebriation, costume parties, etc. I think that we all have this artistic faculty that wants to abstract, detach, examine, modify, and reincorporate our various experiences into our being. Having said all that, I don't think that all games are neutral. I think, for instance, we need to notice which games are social and solitary, and pay close attention to both the overt content, but also the deeper significance of these activities. We also need to look at the form of the games, do they operate on a visceral or cognitive level, to what extent, how do they operate on both, etc. Geertz's Notes on Balinese Cockfight comes to mind, here. Davin On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 12:18 PM, Cynthia Beth Rubin c...@cbrubin.net wrote: Rafael and all: Thanks for the observation that the ultimate drive is to stay within the experience. This points to a connection between video games and other immersive experiences. Think of Char Davies' early immersive VR work Osmose http://www.immersence.com/osmose, in which you had to learn the rules (special breathing techniques) in order to move through the space and have the full experience. There was no competition - nothing to brag about (although some users found ways to brag). This work is all about the experience itself being so alluring, so absorbing, that they wanted to move among the many non-heirarchical levels of the work just to be in the experience. A great example using a video gaming engine is Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli' s Swan Quake http://www.swanquake.com. As in Char's work, we move through levels, with the experience itself as the goal, not competition. Simon's observation that play is rehearsal is helpful for clarifying that games are not useless. Rehearsal for young learners, but perhaps we crave new experience and challenge at every stage? In this age of so much cultural production being tied to a supposed market analysis, it is no wonder that mass produced games would be modeled after competitive activities, such as war and football. After all, war (I have been told) is the ultimate challenge to be fully aware and alert - a challenge that we may need (crave) to stay fully alert as humans. Therefore the challenge may be to produce inter-active activities that stimulate our need to be on edge and fully alert -- with competition as just one way to do this. Cynthia Cynthia B Rubin http://CBRubin.net On Nov 30, 2010, at 11:08 AM, Rafael Trindade wrote: It's about winning, in order to stay within the experience; to keep the thing going on. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
I have been scanning the emails the last couple weeks and am sorry I haven't had time to jump in. But I think this month's theme is explored in an interesting way in the film, Inception (which is in theaters, now). Scott writes, In general, I agree with the idea that creativity, or creative practice, is the outcome of an agency that is located as much in a community or an environment as much as it is in an individual. The genius, the solitary author is a thing of the past, which was always already an economic construct used to assign rights more than it was a description of creative practice. I believe both that creativity is enabled by communities (among other ways, by recognizing and validating creative work as real work) and is in most cases actually the outcome of a collaborative process (books, for instance, involve a designer, a typesetter, a bookbinder, an editor, a distributor, and so on). I think Inception, when viewed in light of comments like these by Scott (and others on the list, makes for an interesting experience. The basic premise of the film is that creativity is expressed at a deep level (a psychological one), but is drawn from social experience. Circulating around this, is a running discussion of how ideas can have radical implications for being, for our notions of reality. Purely individualistic knowledge is held up in ethical distinction to collectively held knowledge, but certainty is never a luxury for viewers (or characters). Similarly, there are practical limitations to individual genius, not the least of which is the disruption to creativity posed by certain knowledge the other is necessary in this world that Nolan has created. The film also touches on aspects of play and virtual reality, although it roots these discussions in human consciousness (rather than machine intelligence, as you get with the Matrix and the typical scifi headtrip films). In it, you'll see shades of Nolan's earlier Memento, but as a whole, I think it is a better film. Peace! Davin On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 8:08 AM, Scott Rettberg scott.rettb...@uib.no wrote: Hello everyone, I have just spent some time reading through the stream of messages written over the course of this month regarding creativity as a social ontology in an attempt to begin to frame my thoughts around these questions and determine how I can most productively contribute to the discussion. I think I can contribute best via some discussion of the work I have done over the past decade with the Electronic Literature Organization (eliterature.org) and with the project Developing a Network Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (elmcip.net), a Humanities in the European Research Area project which Simon and I are working on with other researchers at institutions in the UK, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and Slovenia. Largely due to Simon's thought and efforts, one of the central research questions of this project essentially connected to theme of this month's empire discussion, in that much of the research will b e focused on how the conditions of social and technological networks can enable the formation of creative communities. In doing so, the project will both examine electronic literature and digital arts communities as case studies of creativity as a social ontology, and produce a number of outcomes that we hope will help to develop creative and research communities of e-lit within Europe. These will include an ethnographic study of specific creative communities, a knowledge base with bibliographic(style) records and descriptions of individual works, artists and events related to electronic literature, an anthology of works of electronic literature including pedagogical materials which will be distributed on a free and open base, several seminars on specific aspects of electronic literature and its relationship to specific cultural contexts, such as performance and publishing, an international conference, and exhibition. A simple way to put it is that we will be engaged in a r eflective research practice, doing work we help will advance and develop a field of creative and critical practice at the same time as we are examining structures and practices within that field in order to discern characteristics and patterns that are generalizable and useful to the formation and development of other fields of network-based creative practice. I hope that Simon will provide an explanation of how the overall frame of this project is in many ways a reaction to the idea that the phrase Creativity and Innovation has largely been co-opted as a term of corporate parlance. Like many other creative practitioners and humanities researchers, I am resistant to the idea that creativity or innovation could or should be framed in an instrumentalist way. That is to say that one way of thinking of
Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
Simon and Eugenio, there is always Hatebook http://www.hatebook.org/. But, really, I think that this thread touches upon the general spirit of depression that seems so pervasive these days (as well as the counterinsurgency techniques that have been deployed to neutralize it). For a period of time, just about every adult that I associated with was on a medication to correct a chemical imbalance. So, at once, this means people have a hard time feeling OK. And, that there was nothing they could do to feel OK. And my worry is that this medicalization of being dissatisfied robs the person of the validity of their feelings of dissatisfaction. I understand that when one doesn't feel OK, they should try to figure out how to feel OK. But when the world basically tells you that you have nothing to feel bad about, except that your brain makes you feel bad until you take this pill you are basically being told that nothing in your life matters except how you feel about it. It always sounds judgmental to argue against the banal neutrality of technocapitalism, but I think it's a pretty big slap in the face to be told that a pill is going to fix you up, if you are upset about the absurdities of the workplace, the tragedy of widespread disenfranchisement and dispossession, the lack of agency you have in the world, the banal ideals of love advanced in self-help industries, the disappointment of the spectacle, and, finally, the idea that your life is a treatable disorder. It seems to me that the real solution to feeling shitty is to know that no matter how shitty you feel, your life is not without consequence. I watch my four year old climb trees he loves to climb trees And he doesn't care if he gets these big bloody scrapes, bruises on his knees, knots on his head. It would be easy to say, let's make a game where you pretend to climb a tree, but you only get hurt for pretend, because climbing trees is dangerous he's not going to go for it. Because it is great to do things that are hard. It feels good to take risks. It is assuring to pass through danger successfully. There might be something immature about adults doing dangerous things for no good reason (I cringe when I see a grown man doing wheelies on a motorcycle where other people are trying to drive). But I do think that, socially, we do really want our relationships to have consequences. We want our deeply held ideas to effect people. And we want the people that we value to be able to effect us. I think most of us actually kind of feel good when someone changes our mind about something. We might argue like hell about it. But in the end, it feels good to have learned something. And, if you have something to share, and another person responds to it, either positively or negatively, that is also a powerful feeling, too. To get back to Johannes' question, what is a relational consciousness?, maybe human consciousness itself is relational, maybe it is at the point of relationality that we come into our being. At some level, it is possible for us to think things without communicating them to an other. But even in isolation, when we take our thoughts away from impulse, and place them into the stream of time we are relating our thoughts to prior situations and speculative situations. We take thought into representation, into the ought, into the ethical. Yet this relation to what we were and what we might become is not entirely unlike our relationship to external others--both relationships are based in speculation, in assessing probabilities, trying for the one we desire, coping in various ways with the failure to achieve this desire, and initiating the anew process instantaneously. This might not be art (but I think it is, if we view art as techne), but it certainly is creativity. Davin On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Eugenio Tisselli cub...@yahoo.com wrote: Simon, I have seen people in Facebook toy around with the idea of having a dislike button, but it hasn't been implemented. I wonder what would happen with such a button. My guess is that few people would use it. It's so easy to shut down anyone in Facebook (or other large-scale digital networks, for that matter)... you can simply ignore dislikers and, as an extreme case, delete them from your list. People would not use the button because of fear of being excluded or deleted. Can networks like Facebook be regarded as disciplining technologies for individuals, as training grounds for adapting to the disengaged, everybody happy, positive thinking stance favored (and needed) by contemporary capitalism? Eugenio Tisselli Vélez cub...@yahoo.com http://www.motorhueso.net --- El jue, 7/8/10, Simon Biggs s.bi...@eca.ac.uk escribió: De: Simon Biggs s.bi...@eca.ac.uk Asunto: Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology A: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Fecha: jueves, 8 de julio de 2010, 02:01 pm This begs the
Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
In reference Simon's comment, I suppose I should have offered clarity as to what I meant rather than the sloppy generalization I offered previously. I meant to associate the term with an expression of ego. Not so much that it is the first word. But it is a word that seems to require extensive testing. No is a word which tends to cascade very quickly into a multitude of applications, and that it is at once differential and referential. It establishes the presence of the self and the other in one moment. It's so hard to tell what children mean when they are being contrary, except that, perhaps, they mean to say, Whatever it is you want, I can want something, too. Which, once again, is a pretty ham-handed characterization of ego formation. But I do think that these moments where the self is realized as individual, it is also realized in connection with an external will. And it is the experience of desire, as something you yourself hold, alongside the realization that desire might not be shared, is what takes us into the realization that we aren't the center of all things (and that is not only OK, but kind of thrilling). The word no as linguistic naissance, as individuated ontology, evokes an Aristotlean apprehension of identity and creativity, a proto-Platonic/Christian view that assumes a duality of the human and nature, the individual and the collective. Are we to be fixed as light and shadow? We are not black and white photographs...although the Lacanian evocations here are seductive (many artists played with this theoretical rhetoric in the 1970's and 80's). But I think you get at the perils of my comment in your comments above. I would be reluctant to say that this no is all there is to human subjectivty. But I also think that there is something critical to this point of realization even if it is only a stepping stone to other moments in the formation of the self. And, I guess, I'd like to wonder at the productivity of the dualism not as contrary poles but as partners entangled in a fecund relationship. Particlarly against the backdrop of contemporary US culture where individual and collective are pitted against each other in a perpetual cold war, I am tempted to grasp for models that affirm the necessity of a society that is more than just a gaggle of selfish monads. Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
Simon, I think this is a valid question if we don't let it insist on a firm resolution. At times, it certainly does seem like people want to go somewhere. At other times it seems as though we can be quite content where we are. This points back to Eugenio Tisselli's comments regarding the theological underpinnings of creativity as creation ex nihilo, which presents us with a philosophical brick wall, when we are trying to explore the idea of creation and art. I rather like Bernard Stiegler's account of technics (which, itself, is in default, in that its novelty is certainly not its own, but in its synthesis). Stiegler points in his work to the various instances in which emerging technical arrangements do not emerge simply as positive eruptions from nothing. Urbanization is something which arises alongside ruralization. The individual exist when the collective is realized. To be human is to need a supplement (to be without essence). Etc. But if we get back to that question of relationality and process (especially recent discussions on empyre), I think there is something to be gained from looking at the idea of desire, which does provide a motive for creation, even if it is not original creation. I would be disappointed to arrive at a definition of consciousness which does not include desire. For some, this would be close to essentialist, but in terms of essentialisms, desire really describes a process of cognitive behavior oriented towards some anticipated future state. It is at this moment when the functions of the brain are directed in the present, to ponder the past, and imagine a future. But this doesn't even really tell the full story as it is difficult to imagine this consciousness outside of language. Situated in our own personal archive (individual memory), we reach into the collective archive (culture). Thinking of our individual futures (self-determination), we move into a commonly held future (politics). (Here, my thinking really breaks down... my imagination fails maybe our language fails?) But, the upshot of this, I think, is that, perhaps, the reality of creation is social and relational. The process of art, both as something emerging from language (Hovagimyan) and as an effort to reach beyond the perceived limits of representation (Tisselli), sits on that crucible of desire. What is it that makes people want to manifest ideas? To fabricate methods for representing them to an other? This is why we call the substance in which art is expressed a medium, because it is interstitial, relational, between subject positions, etc, a point which Jamieson makes in relation to UpStage. Not to get theological, but this is not entirely unlike Leonardo Boff's discussion of deity, which is entirely relational--the idea that what makes us who we are is the same principle that is involved with creation as a discursive process. I rather like this idea, because there is often an implied lessening of art when it is declared somehow derivative, as if humble acts of communication are not themselves spectacular in their effects! Is the myth of the modern artist somehow more important than using a familiar word to achieve an ethical purpose? What could be more cliched than the first word a child tries to master-- NO! Yet it is precisely at this moment of the expression that the child tries to enter into human community--to realize him or herself within a community. The child who says, No, wants to participate on equal terms, through communication. To get back to Tisselli's expressed wariness with creativity. I will try to get my hands on Steiner's book. I think that your wariness is merited, if society insists that we operate from a skewed definition of creativity. If creativity has to follow the paradigm of pure originality then we are telling tales. And those of us who are artists (or critics) working under this paradigm, are being dishonest. However, if creativity is a human process of desire, an expression of our consciousness, consistently repeated, using what's available to reach into the social beyond the limited position of the individual then I think creativity is, ultimately, something more powerful. In any case, I have very high hopes for July. Peace! Davin P.S. If I am silent, it is only because I am traveling. But I WILL be reading carefully. On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 4:20 AM, Simon Biggs s.bi...@eca.ac.uk wrote: Perhaps there is a distinction to be made between creativity (a trait most, if not all, humans seem to possess) and art (an activity that emerged a couple of hundred years ago that places value upon a specific socially defined mode of creative activity). As for art being akin to language and both being somehow hard-wired into the brain...this is contentious territory. This Chomskian view, popular in neuroscience and other empirical domains, that regards language (and thus many aspects of self) as determined by cerebral biology
Re: [-empyre-] post for convergence; print to pixels
On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 12:07 PM, katherine hayles nk_hay...@yahoo.com wrote: two books was of entering a different world, a world in which I was in passionate and deep conversation with the authors. The experience refreshed me in a way that no Web reading has, notwithstanding the huge advantages of Web reading. What I fear is not the passing of books--I think they have too many advantages to be going anyway anytime soon--but the passing of a mode of engagement that is not distracted, not hurried, not always rushing toward the next big thing. How can I make sure that the re-wiring of my brain, which is surely well advanced by now, still has the capacity to have this kind of experience? Dr. Hayles, This is a great comment. Like you, I have experienced that divergence. I can read online stuff energetically and enthusiastically, flying through texts or over them, snatching up the things I need and moving on to the next thing. It has gotten to the point where an entire day can go by, and I can scarcely remember what I have done, but I have written thousands of words and put many urgent pieces of information into the trash can. On the other hand, I can sit with a book and a pen and fill the margins, taking hours to chew on a single chapter, and then go home haunted by the idea that I cannot get out of my head. My thinking on the matter is that there are two strategies for cultivating a culture of careful reading. One is to educate people to read long texts, slowly, carefully, taking notes and re-reading. Readers thus trained can even bring this disciplined attention to online reading and writing. The other strategy, and I think its value remains to be seen, is to look for pieces of electronic writing that work cultivate a new mode of careful reading. I think, for instance, of works by someone like Serge Bouchardon (check out: http://www.to-touch.com/), seem great at getting readers to slow down and explore the text more fully. Surely, this mode of reading does not educate readers in the traditional mode of reading literature but it does educate users in the readerly exploration of a literary text. In general, I think that electronic literature, while it cleaves very closely to whatever new technology of writing is available, also tends to subvert (or at least problematize) the heavily instrumental role of new media (and the consequent instrumentalization of social life). I don't know that this alone is enough to preserve the concentration and critical thinking skills necessary to sustain a humanistic culture (and, some have argued, and they might be right, that this is the wrong way to frame the problem). The enormous resources that have been put into place to cultivate a civilization committed to serving the interests of corporate persons, I think, would require that humanists develop a radical educational program committed to developing equivalent modes of reflection, thought, criticism. Schools would need to teach students to read, think, and act as something more than mere instruments which is why I am interested in promoting the study of e-lit. It might not solve all the problems, but each work is an occasion of hope. And the best works are more than that. Peace! Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Process as paradigm: Time/Tools/Agency
I really like this idea, Antoine: Like Philip Galanter said somewhere some time, 'In medieval times painting was about God. With the Enlightenment painting was about man. In Modern times painting was about paint. And now in Postmodern times painting is about painting.' I don't know where we stand now in Art History, but there is no reason why processual art should (or should not) be about processes (or processing). But maybe, another way of saying this (painting about God---man---paint---painting---) is to say that the history of art is a developing encounter with agency. As philosophers have chased down concepts like truth, perhaps artists remain engaged with the idea of practical agency. And, at its most basic level, isn't working from concept to artifact a process of giving form to an impulse against the backdrop of material limitation? Davin On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 3:06 AM, Antoine Schmitt a...@gratin.org wrote: Dear Yann, I think that our respective opinions are not incompatible... Just to be precise, I indeed consider that programs, computers and processes are an artistic mean (call it a tool, medium, material, whatever, we can argue interestingly on the best notion..). Then with this mean, we as artist do address subjects, themes, have intentions, talk about something. And with processual art, we can address any theme, including the theme of programs and computers. I understand and agree with your idea that computers, internet and programs today constitutes an environment for us humans, that blends into the real environment of atoms (and moreover a programmable environment which is a nice concept). This is very interesting and new and contemporary, and even real shit. But, but, but, there is no reason that any processual artist _should_ address this subject when using programs and processes as an artistic material. Like Philip Galanter said somewhere some time, In medieval times painting was about God. With the Enlightenment painting was about man. In Modern times painting was about paint. And now in Postmodern times painting is about painting. I don't know where we stand now in Art History, but there is no reason why processual art should (or should not) be about processes (or processing). But of course, it is very tempting, practical and adequate to use it just for that, especially in a world, as you say, that is more and more processual itself, and where the process paradigm (point of view) is more and more prevalent. In a world where God, man, processes, processing and processors tend to become just the same thing. Le 28 mai 10 à 19:58, Yann Le Guennec a écrit : Antoine Schmitt a écrit : Le 25 mai 10 à 06:38, christopher sullivan a écrit : a computer IS a tool Of course a computer is a tool, like anything else that an artists uses to create the artwork, like paint or programs. The fact is that it is a very special tool because it executes programs that implement processes. Programs and processes provide the artists with a new way to make artworks. I think that this new way is radically new, but this is another discussion. It is new and different. And we like it (indeed). So, from a materialist perspective, if you consider for example that there is a computer in your car, one in your cellphone, both communicating with satellites, and computers from your cellphone operator, and computers from your car provider, and other systems on the road, etc... softwares and data are able to circulate from one point to another in this network, with or without your knowledge. Do you consider this kind of system is a tool or an environment ? Something you can use or something you are in ? Surely both, i think this is more like an environment, an usable environment, like a forest or city, but an environment. Today's cloud computing and ubiquitous computing are going that way. And considering that all radio communications (Wifi, GSM, bluetooth..) ,are literally going through our bodies, we are now physicaly living *in* computers. But when i say that a computer is an environment and not (just) a tool, i think more about the logic contained in computed processes, based on boolean logical doors. When you use such tools, you must accept them, and adapt your mind to this kind of processes, your mind is in the process, the process surrounds it, it's an archetypal environment made of binary digits and processors. At another level, this logic is now everywhere in the social, economical, political space. All these spaces are computed, processed by processors, and that's why we really live now in the computer, and that's why i can't see it just like a tool anymore. So now the question could be: how is integrated processor's logic in processual art ? Best, Yann ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ++ as
Re: [-empyre-] Process as paradigm: Time/Tools/Agency
I have been far too busy to really get into the discussion that's taking place, but I like it. I used to, on the one hand, seeing a computer as a tool. I also like seeing the activity of processing as something with value as content. I also like the idea of the computer as an environment. Maybe computers are more like cages for consciousness that keep us tied to a particular mode of experience/expression so that our labor is more easily harvested. Each of these frames has different implications, and might be true within particular modes of practice. And where they play against each other, itself, is an important point to scrutinize. When a process is self-contained, it functions as a unit within a larger context. A hammer, for instance, is a hammer when you are using it to hammer. But when this process is opened up, say, the hammer is broken apart for some reason or put together, is it still properly regarded as a tool or as an end in itself? Similarly, if a hammer is incorporated into a larger apparatus, as Yann points out would you say that the hammer is the tool of the apparatus or a component of the apparatus? And what would you say of the operator of the apparatus? Or the shareholders who ultimately drive the machine? When we step out of the instrumental consideration of the tool, the raw materials, or the apparatus, then how do these various ways of thinking about a hammer become strange? Does the tool in the context of my rustic philosophizing become something other than a tool? Does it become a figure of speech? A paranoid delusion? A winning argument? An object of derision? Do my feeble musings even succeed at altering the hammer at all? (Maybe this is the real test of art: Does a work create more than it consumes? Maybe this is why I am not an artist!) I think nothing is hermetically sealed off from the imagination. A tidy little system, itself, is subject to the imagination, like Shrodinger's cat, the material fact of the closed system of potential outcomes is the creative fact of theory. The material fact of the compromised, opened, corrupted system becomes the creative fact of practice. Each of these approaches can lead people to new thinking and new feeling. In other words, isn't one of the values of art that it can work to draw people out of the delusion of fixed systems, rigidity, purity? Which gets us to that question of serious shit. Art seems to perform an inherently critical function, though I am suspicious of the efficacy of the critical function when the work in question simply reiterates an argument that could be communicated more effectively through technical writing. At the end of the day, I want art to initiate an affective response, as opposed to a purely intellectual one (which isn't to say that intellectual arguments can't alter one's way of being). Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Tactical Media - university research - knowledge production
Thank you, everyone. I have been doing nothing but lurking this past month, due to a combination of circumstances. But I HAVE been reading and I will spend the first weeks of summer re-reading more carefully. Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] seeing yourself a prototype - the limits of open source
I ran into the case of the disposable diaper and the result it has had in increasing by an average of several years now how long it takes for children to be potty trained. On the surface it is valuable to eliminate children's discomfort by optimizing the diaper. In fact current diapers increase general comfort by expanding in a soothing way and becoming warm. Likewise diaper changers appreciate all the gadgets to facilitate the change. The problem here is that the same object (the result of dozens of years of prototyping and field testing) is ergonomic at one time scale and not at a larger one in time or at the scale of an entire society. What a brilliant example! These sorts of discussions circulate in natural parenting groups. And, in fact, various conceptions of comfort circulate around discussions of cloth diapers. On the one hand, there is an argument that children wearing cloth diapers get uncomfortable faster, learning to associate the feeling of having to pee with immediate discomfort, which alters the parent/child dynamic in such a way that you change your child's diapers more quickly and frequently, your child might hold it for longer periods of time, and will also potty train sooner. Beyond this, there are folks who advocate different kinds of cloth diapers, as well as no diapers (this method requires extremely close living, learning to recognize signs, and develop awareness at an early stage). But at its fundamental level, you (and Cynthia, too, in reaching towards an open exchange of knowledge in your fine arts program) are gesturing here towards developing singular relationships based in trial and error, adaptation and refinement. I suppose the utopian aspect of this type of emergent consciousness is that it is utterly directed at improving the communication between two very different people. It cannot restrict itself to a single quality (comfort) and, in fact, resists any effort to reduce relationships to a simple measure of effectiveness. In each case, it involves seeking out the other's needs, seeking the other's desires, recognizing the other's limitations. bringing these uneven and changing considerations closer to one's own needs, desires, limitations (all of which, I would argue, might be just as surprising as those of the other, when put into conversation with the other) and forging a relationship that is itself just as rich as any of its constituent parts. Of course these things to do not always come up roses, but I'd like to think that the terrain of community/communication itself is just as rewarding as the ends which we seek. As usual, I've gone on too long. But, I should also recommend an article by Irving Goh (which was recommended to me by a bright light name Nick Knouf) on Structural Rejects: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v012/12.1.goh.html It works very well with the discussions we are having here. Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] the man as a prototype - the limits of open source
I think, at some level, we are always engaged in some level of prototyping the self. Certainly, this is the gist of Foucault's Technologies of the Self and the larger theory of discourse, where competing ideas about how to understand and fabricate the self compete for ascendancy. There are also shades of Lacan's future anterior here, that interrelation between present and future in the form of an anticipated sense of what one will have become. Fiction, too, is an area where we experiment with alternative methods of interaction, social organization, belief, imagination, and history. Spiritual practices, drug cultures, and political utopian movements also engage in these sorts of experiments in altered states and constructs, creating new types of people for immanent eschatological scenarios. And, finally, there are the many, many practical examples of mundane experimentation from fashion to body modification.We are forever adjusting culture and matter to suit our needs. My concern, I suppose, following Christopher Sullivan's comments, is in the adoption of a technical paradigm to account for practices which have a wide and rambling established history. As a thought experiment, I think there is much value to thinking about our everyday practices as prototyping. On the other hand, I think we do lose something if we embrace this metaphor with too much enthusiasm. Prototyping implies the pursuit of a desired utility. The very things which make it useful, perhaps, from an ad hoc, tactical sort of perspective also might make it onerous in another perspective (imagine, for instance, if div prototyping were a prescriptive, ethical imperative or something, if it were invoked with connotations of goodness). I think of some of the great art that rides the edge (like subRosa), playing with the culture of technocapitalism without falling back on essentialisms, these experiments can inspire rigorous questioning of utility itself. In this case, some diy bio prototyping might serve as a pretext for interrogating the very practice of controlling our bodies. (Who the hell are we managing ourselves for? For our anticipated career? To service long term debt? To get married and make babies? To consume more effectively? What the hell are all these treadmills for? Why do people need a phone on their ear? Why should I take these pills?) At some level, putting the question of daily life through the crucible of capital can be a productive exercise, in the same way that I can imagine that their might be something useful about giving a mean drunk a dozen bottles of Midori to drink (provided they aren't riding home in my car). The nauseating pain of the encounter might lead to a moment of clarity (at the very least, allowing a belligerent booze troll to baste in green, sticky-sweet, melon-flavored vomit is sweet revenge). For my thinking, the language of prototyping is useful in that it can be used to intervene against time. I would say one of the most pressing problems we face is the very pressing nature of the problems we face--there is too little time for thought, reflection, and deliberate action. The result is real drive to augment decision-making through automated processes or to constantly adopt the changes, applying feedback in retrospect. The construct of the prototype allows people to engage in this process with a certain level of consciousness, transparency, and reflexivity. To prototype is to anticipate the shortcoming in the current model. To allow progress to unfold while allowing for disasters of various stripes, displacing accountability from the self onto the apparatus. This certainly might be unavoidable in cases. I think squatters certainly are exploring a new models of dwelling in response to the crisis of capitalism. I think that people who share information as simply hashing out new norms for intellectual property in a changing world. In these case, the diy prototyping model offers a new way of thinking about social norms, outside of the established patterns. On the other hand, I don't know that anyone should be asked to live as a prototype. It frames the question of existence as a problem to be solved, while skirting the larger social question of practical problems in need of solutions. Finding the bugs in the system means that these same people will also have to confront various challenges to their existence. Yet this is the pattern I see across society at large. I have lots of friends that like living in big cities and I am always impressed by the creative ways they solve problems that I had never even imagined but it is also horrible that people are consistently expected to make do with a smaller and smaller share of society's wealth. If the best we can imagine is a world where change or die remains the law, while an entire social class exists who is always accelerating this change, while consolidating its privileges I think that we shouldn't bother
Re: [-empyre-] animation and short term memory (was, a long time ago: interpreting datasets, etc)
I know that this is far away from the original point that Richard Wright was getting at in terms of memory and animation. But I do think that there are aspects of animation that do get tied up in questions of memory and production, which are expressed not through formal experiments, but through content. If you look, for instance, at Pixar's films (Toy Story, Cars, Monsters Inc, Wall-E, etc), there is a pervasive sense of loss and nostalgia (which reminds me of a conversation I had with Stephanie Boluk at DAC on melancholia.) Here, you have people who love animation working on a form beyond the brink of transformation (the employed animators that I know all prepared themselves for a Hollywood that needed lots of hands to draw things). Animation has become a highly rationalized endeavor, where the animation itself (beyond character design, storyboarding, etc) tend to be handled through automation or outsourcing. The highly paid labor has been reduced, primarily, to conceptual work. Maybe I am reading too much into this, but when I watched Toy Story or Cars, the big message seems to be that growth results in a form of forgetfulness. And this forgetfulness is a forgetfulness of intimacy, humanity, care. In live-action filmmaking, on the other hand, the estrangement produced by efficiency is different. In live action, the actors and crew still work in the presence of each other. However, to make movies more efficiently, the production of the film exists outside of the narrative flow of the film. The director shoots all the scenes at a particular location at once. And then it is assembled by an editor. This means that for some people, working on a film is the experience of little arcs of narration held together by scene. Yet the larger narrative structure of the the production process is organized by the logic of proximity. Perhaps the narrative differences between animation and live action have more to do with the aesthetics of the relationships between workers and management than with the avant-garde impulse? Peace! Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
Having seen Lev Manovich's presentation at DAC, I am dazzled by the strong potential of cultural analytics. I have been doing the pauper's version of this for years, telling some of my more dedicated visual culture students: head to the library, grab a stack of bound periodicals (or one of the various design annuals) and flip through them manually, after looking at twenty years, you will see a progression. Shifts in palette, layout, font. What this enhanced method allows is for a person to do the same thing, except with a certain layer of abstraction imposed by larger quantities, and without the distraction of overt content. The strength of this method, as I see it, is not in the conclusive nature of such analysis, but in the support that it offers for certain types of thinking about visual culture. For instance, you would not be able to point to particular changes in rhetoric and narrative, but at points of radical shifts in visual composition, you could go back and see if the visual shifts correspond with shifts in ways of thinking/speaking. A particularly interesting case study, I imagine, would be to look at cinematic imagery across the period in which CGI is introduced. While digital effects strive for a certain continuity with the visual register of the remainder of the film (for instance, the Matrix, for all its animation, works hard to keep its animated sequences consistent with the live action sequences), it would be interesting to see how the introduction of this technology transforms the overall character of live action. In other words, will our conception of reality become cartoonish? I would speculate that the tendency with representational innovation moves along the same path as technological innovation in general. It begins with a few eccentric, paradigm shifting examples, but then as the technology is universally adopted, it is moderated by a strong reactionary tendency, and the process of change happens more slowly from this point out. (I don't know if this model of change is specific to consumer cultures and the need to maintain profitability in the face of revolutionary change). Using these sort of macroscopic views would help us understand these phenomena better, provided they are constantly recirculated through various critical approaches. In other words, they can alert us to shifts, but cannot interpret those shifts. A second interesting relationship would be to map the effectiveness of culture industries in initiating shifts in popular taste. For instance, it is a common practice for clothing designers to decide which color schemes will be in style for a given season. The new color scheme must at once depart significantly from previous regimes (to ensure more purchasing), to be internally coherent (so that this year's styles will function at sufficient scale to be profitable), to be distinct from competing brands, and to be desirable to their clientele. It would be interesting to study the epidemiology of subdued colors or clashing juxtapositions. (Although you run a real risk of teaching people how to sell crap more effectively so, I suppose any knowledge generated by this method should be married to wisdom of some sort.). What I would hope to see emerge out of the long range use of cultural analytics is a more robust critique of the various analytical processes themselves. If cultural studies scholars learn how to use and interpret these studies, we have opened the back door to a more fully developed study of an emerging force in the culture at large. Where we find problems with cultural analytics, we will also find problems with the various other data-mining projects that are being used to predict and manipulate human behavior without concern for humanistic questions (rather, the description of people's shopping habits, for example, is being used as an explanation for human behavior Detroit makes SUVs because people buy SUVs.). Finally, I have to admire the openness with which this work is being shared. I simply do not have the resources or technical support to have supercomputers do this work. And the fact that someone is doing it in the spirit of the University, from a humanistic perspective, means that this type of study is not totally monopolized by military and corporate institutions. It is, in the end, a scary form of knowledge both for what it can reveal about human behavior AND for its general inaccessibility. But, it is knowledge, nonetheless. Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
I just had a chance to look at Patrick Crogan's excellent article THE NINTENDO Wii, VIRTUALISATION AND GESTURAL ANALOGICS: http://culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/374/397 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13
Gerry, I hate to continue pushing on a point... because I don't want to be a pest. At the same time, I'd like to get a better understanding of your comments. I do believe that art could very well be the product of some primordial impulse, that it might be useful to assign it something resembling a transcendental value. Certainly, this is the way I experience my most gratifying ideas when I write stories, cobble together poems, draw, or just kind of sit around and think about the kinds of jokes that only I laugh at. I think we could also assign a similar sort of singular existence to individuals and events. My real question, however, is about the transition from something singular to a representation. Sure, at the point of origin, I am totally willing to accept the idea that art is an enigma. But once it enters into materiality once it is cast into the realm of representation... I don't know how it can avoid being entangled and burdened by the stuff it is made of (its words, its substance, its space of presentation, its framing discourse, the interpretive traditions around art). Maybe it enters into the social, not with an obligation (in the sense of, You artists really should stick up for so-and-so), but it does start accruing value in the sense that it engages viewers to respond. It becomes ladened with responsibility in the sense that it no longer exists purely as an enigma, but immediately evokes interpretation. The more enigmatic works, here, become more compelling because they generate meaningful interpretations but compelling works also (imo) tend to be enigmatic enough to engender multiple interpretations. They resist being fixed, but our minds struggle to fix them. For me, the real punch in art is that it carves out space for indeterminacy not BEFORE its execution but that its indeterminacy expands the interval BETWEEN its creation and consumption. In other words, its fecundity is in the space between artist and audience. It connects the singular aesthetic experience of creation to the singular aesthetic experience of consumption marking the meeting of two entities who are radically other vis-a-vis the object. In other words, it offers something like presence via representation. Respectfully, Davin On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 5:14 PM, Gerry Coulter gcoul...@ubishops.ca wrote: Art is not responsible to anyone or anything. Neither should academics feel the need to speak for others. It is nice when are makes the world more enigmatic -- artists who disentangle themselkves from theory do the world a favour. Art is amoral, irresponsible, it ceases to be art when we make it otherwise. Political art and political theory share the same overwrought character. Art is stronger than politics and morality -- it comes from a time before politics, from elsewhere. best g From: empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of davin heckman [davinheck...@gmail.com] Sent: January 12, 2010 12:19 PM To: soft_skinned_space Cc: jha...@haberarts.com; soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13 This is shaping up to be an interesting week on Empyre. Thank you, everyone. Sometimes, I think it is good to think about art, politics, criticism, theory, morality, etc. from a naive perspective, a sort of psychic backtracking, so that we follow the paths that we have avoided in the past, and imagine what would be if we were not where we are today. The knot of art, theory, politics, and commerce that we live in right now is singular, and so it is treacherous to extrapolate this into a general theory of how artists or critics or anyone should operate (in fact, all speculation is fraught with peril, because other people do and want other things). If art is not meant to communicate, what is it for? Is it for the artist to express him or herself? If so, then for what end? I don't want to burden art with too much of a redemptive mission... but at the very least, I think art ought to be communicable in some way. That the event can be reproduced (as a concept, as a record, a trace, an object, a text, whatever)... that it is has to go from one person to another person in some way that intervenes against the flow of time and space. Art has to refer to an idea that at least one other person (even a hypothetical one) could agree upon. To offer the most meager definition of art, at the very least, it could be like the words in your head that give shape to your ideas. Undoubtedly, our brains do things. Animals' brains do things. But when we put these neural actions into representation, whether we share this representation or not, we enter into that socially constructed space outside of the whatever-would-have-happened-had-we-not-intervened (nature? the animal? physics?). Now, this is a naive explanation of art
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13
This is shaping up to be an interesting week on Empyre. Thank you, everyone. Sometimes, I think it is good to think about art, politics, criticism, theory, morality, etc. from a naive perspective, a sort of psychic backtracking, so that we follow the paths that we have avoided in the past, and imagine what would be if we were not where we are today. The knot of art, theory, politics, and commerce that we live in right now is singular, and so it is treacherous to extrapolate this into a general theory of how artists or critics or anyone should operate (in fact, all speculation is fraught with peril, because other people do and want other things). If art is not meant to communicate, what is it for? Is it for the artist to express him or herself? If so, then for what end? I don't want to burden art with too much of a redemptive mission... but at the very least, I think art ought to be communicable in some way. That the event can be reproduced (as a concept, as a record, a trace, an object, a text, whatever)... that it is has to go from one person to another person in some way that intervenes against the flow of time and space. Art has to refer to an idea that at least one other person (even a hypothetical one) could agree upon. To offer the most meager definition of art, at the very least, it could be like the words in your head that give shape to your ideas. Undoubtedly, our brains do things. Animals' brains do things. But when we put these neural actions into representation, whether we share this representation or not, we enter into that socially constructed space outside of the whatever-would-have-happened-had-we-not-intervened (nature? the animal? physics?). Now, this is a naive explanation of art. It ignores many of the specifics that determine what we think about when we talk about art today. It even lends art a certain innocence that might be a good conceit to work under, but which itself is just an artifice erected against doubt. But I think it also ties the notion of art to politics in the sense that art always has something to do with the other (the other who it aims to represent, the other who is its intended audience, the other who it is supposed to be hidden from, etc.) Art, as long as it is made and has any meaning, would seem to be concerned with communication of some sort. And thus it seems that it cannot easily be untangled from the moral, the ethical, the political. Furthermore, anything that expresses human will could conceivably be formed in the awareness of how this will effect others (friends, enemies, nations, environments, species... even, perhaps, yourselfthe other that you will become). What limits we want to draw around introspection and moral accountability are things that we might be able to hammer out some kind of agreement on. We might even be able to establish some system like the one sketched out by Matthew Arnold, where artists do the primary work (and make the messes) while critics do the lesser work (present the work as socially valuable). Maybe we can hammer out some other system of art with no critics, but just robots which count diggs and direct individuals to works that were sufficiently dugg by people like you (with a little bit of extra recommending going to sponsored content --yuck). In any case, figuring out just what the relationship between art, criticism, and audience carries with it moral implications. But to just say that art and politics or art and theory do not belong together, while it might solve some historically specific problems we have today with art institutions, theoretical fashions, a debased public sphere, and out of control financial markets We live in an age where capitalism has radically separated itself from moral concern. It is a social invention that we treat as though it operates through natural laws, and should protected from human intervention, protected from art. The greatest artifice in the history of civilization and its priests proclaim it beyond art, beyond representation, beyond control. I don't know what we gain, what artists gain, by following the examples of a degraded culture. I don't know why artists should resist social, moral, political intervention. I don't see why artists should disentangle themselves from the responsibility of theorizing their work. Or why artist should be shielded from criticism, either. (On the other hand, I can see why artists might want to avoid the sort of normative stances we associate with Theory or Politics, as these terms relate to respected schools of thought). And if we are looking at radical interventions I cannot see how art can intervene against a system which is, at its root, hostile to culture, community, life by removing itself from the very kernel of hope that we have the idea that maybe we ought to take better care of each other. Davin On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 9:47 AM, Saul Ostrow sost...@cia.edu wrote:
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13
You are right, Gerry, in a sense. Artists, like anyone else, should not simply carry water for causes or movements that are defined by others with no room for reflection, inspiration, interpretation, criticism, etc. I think most people would agree, that say, a whole of of commercial art and propaganda art carry this in common. The artist is more or less a hired gun, paid to make ideas that cannot easily be adopted on their own merits appear sexy and fun. (Has anyone played America's Army?). Maybe there are artists who make ads for Shell who really do believe that Ken Saro-Wiwa got what he deserved... but my guess is that most people making ads for Shell don't know who he is, don't care to know, and if they do care, figure out some way to disconnect their job from Shell's actions in the Niger River Delta... because at the end of the day, they want to get paid, quite possibly need to get paid. (It's not really for me to say whether or not they are good or bad... but if they haven't thought it through, they probably ought to.) On the other hand, I don't see why it is necessarily destructive for an artist to say, I want to make something that reflects my values and my values circulate around concepts like 'justice' and 'truth' and might find their purest expression in representing the ways that injustice or dishonesty is expressed in our world... Or, maybe the internal dialogue isn't even like that maybe they think, Critics are assholes I am going to make something for them. (Which is also a political stance). I think what a lot of people refer to as politics is really another way of talking about how a preferred form of social connection with others is expressed in the public sphere. If it hurts an artist to think this way then the artist should do something else. BUT you cannot expect everyone else to stop caring about how what you do effects them. I wouldn't say that people should censor artists... but I do think that people have a right to criticize works of art, especially if that art is made in ignorance of how it might impact their lives. A good example of this public obligation is in the Tilted Arc case: http://www.cfa.arizona.edu/are476/files/tilted_arc.htm In particular, I direct you to the words of Danny Katz: I didn't expect to hear the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It's not a great plaza by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in sealed rooms, and breathe re-circulated air all day. Is the purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy and hope? I can't believe that this was the artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has been the dominant effect of the work, and it's all the fault of its position and location. I can accept anything in art, but I can't accept physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human activity. And, here, I think is where the question of art, theory, and politics collide. In the case of Serra's work, Art and Theory exclude politics. But, to what end? To make a point, which is itself political. I'm not going to say whether or not the Tilted Arc should have been destroyed I only want to highlight what happens when you remove the burden of politics from the mix. It just becomes another species of politics. Davin On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 11:25 AM, Gerry Coulter gcoul...@ubishops.ca wrote: When we attempt to task art -- as artists -- it ceases to be art and declines into politics. Art makes itself manifest through us -- we are its vehicles, it is not ours. best g From: empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of David Chirot [david.chi...@gmail.com] Sent: January 12, 2010 8:04 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13 Thinking more on the question of art being tasked--or not--with being a moral conscience--for anyone-- Yeats wrote that out of the quarrel with others, one makes politics; out of the quarrel with oneself, poetry. Thinking of this, i have actually asked myself for ever it seems if there is not a certain form of amorality no matter what the quarrel when it comes to being an artist, a writer--how many times in observing an event has one not found oneself being at least two beings-if not, often, several more---one who is more or less involved and another who is recording, documenting, making inner observations of details, tones of voices, the physical background to a space--they way a person looks at such a such time, allusions which arises in one's mind which little or nothing to do with the situation at hand but everything to do with the manner in which one may make use of the 'amterial--not necessarily as direct reportage but as
Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
Simon, Of course you are right. These are contingencies, relative to biological existence. However, our episteme owes a lot to these contingencies. Even the ability to cast a discursive frame that can account for our values as opposed to the values of other systems, suggest that these values might be more than merely arbitrary, they might beget an entire mode of being. As a scholar, I am very interested in technical change. And I am interested in seeing how certain social technologies might change the way we see things that I take for granted as good. For instance, I value concentration and the ability to shift consciously between non-linear and linear modes of thought, which requires something like a traditional text-based literacy and liberal education, with its systems of abstract representation, its rhetorical conventions, and the ability to hold ideas in place for long periods of time while information is added, challenged, amended, its committment to intercourse between different fields of knowledge, etc. But more than anything, I think the culmination of this mode of thinking has been the beginning of the realization that, maybe, we really should all share our stuff and act kindly towards each other. In the past, it was up to mystics and radicals to push crazy ideas like this. Yet, it is clear to me that this is changing. Perhaps this change is even being imposed. But at the very least, it is clear that we have, for the last 100 years, seen the emergence of an authentic popular global consciousness as well as a fiercely orchestrated backlash against the idea of universal solidarity, even as the financial sector tries to create a universal system of exploitation. Christina, Bad is a funny word. But it is good one. Most words either comment on the aesthetic (Ugly, Grotesque, Hideous, etc) or the ethical (Evil, Unethical, Anti-social, etc.) or material (Erasure, Deletion, Destruction, etc.), but bad kind of yokes these spheres together. It creates trouble for our thinking, of course. But it is productive, nevertheless. On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 3:13 AM, Simon Biggs s.bi...@eca.ac.uk wrote: Hi David I agree with many of your definitions of bad, which basically boil down to the following. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Exploitation of others is bad. Not taking responsibility for your own actions is bad. I agree with you because, like you, I am socialised to agree that these are shared values. However, these are the elements of a moral framework which derives from and informs a social system – which is a set of contingencies. My argument was that this system is not absolute. For example, animals often do things which we would consider bad. They will exploit others and pass the buck. They do this to survive. When they behave in a manner that we consider “good” they do so because it benefits themselves or members of their immediate community in a manner that enhances their survival. They behave “badly” for the same reason. The shared moral systems people have developed are also a survival strategy. We can dress them up as “good” and “bad” - but we should be honest about why we do what we do and have the values we have. It is to survive, individually and collectively. It is not because the social mores we share have intrinsic value. If you entertain that idea then you are into the domain of faith. Best Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art s.bi...@eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk *C*reative *I*nterdisciplinary *R*esearch into *C*o*L*laborative *E* nvironments CIRCLE research group www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ si...@littlepig.org.uk www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk -- *From: *davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com *Reply-To: *soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au *Date: *Wed, 6 Jan 2010 14:30:12 -0500 *To: *soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au *Subject: *Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic Sorry to take my time getting back to your question, Simon. I am still mulling over David Chirot's comment, too (although I think that the question of dangerous poetry hiding code is an interesting and rare official admission that art is precisely about some of the very things we have been talking about here. And that, we should reflect on just why someone might be hasty to define a certain work as bad. I do think that outcomes matter. But there are many other aspects to determining whether something is good or bad. For instance, I think that the level of ignorance under which a person acts could be considered bad, if the person shows no reasonable effort to figure out whether or not what they are doing is in fact bad. In this sense, carelessness could be a kind of badness (I certainly make many mistakes in this way). If a person is employing a means that is widely understood to be harmful, with predictably harmful effects. Using another
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 8
John, apologies for the generalization. I didn't mean to refer to your ability to figure out what was right and wrong...only lamenting what I see as a deficiency in the public sphere where I live (the United States). And, I have to admit that my ability to act and think of justice is severely hampered by my own complicity in the system (I know I paid too little and ate too much for lunch, for instance). Sure, there are plenty of people who are basically dependent on the political apparatuses' collective ability to care and I would say these people tend to be aware of the overall lack of justice (although, there are entire regions of the US where the tendency is to respond to injustice with feelings of enmity If only the illegals weren't here! We'd all have good jobs!). And, in fact, many of the things which should be basic assumptions (access to health care, living wages, education, housing... and on top of this, honesty, trust, mutuality) are luxuries (as Christina pointed out)... but the fact that such basic necessities are considered excessive speaks to the grave injustice that we live under. Until I see the overal injustice in the world corrected by popular engagement and action I will continue to doubt in the ability of American society to begin to think about right and wrong. Take care. Davin On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 1:18 PM, John Haber jha...@haberarts.com wrote: we have lost our ability to even begin thinking about right and wrong. Um, speak for yourself g. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
. And, as a personal value statement, I like those works which inspire us to think, feel, and imagine broadly about solidarity, interconnectivity, and love. So, I don't care what form it takes, as long as it is there to generate a social order outside of the imposed social order to replace the false social contract (the one that is imposed and enforced) and in its space to offer the possibility of an actual social contract (produced by the desire to enter into relationships of with others, and to commit to those relationships across differences, to sacrifice to those relationships, to find happiness in them). In a way, I guess I am saying that good art is good, not in the conventional moral sense, but because it tends to render its users complicit with an alternate mode of acting... that it leads to reflection, consciousness, awareness. And bad art tries to distract from this mode of critical engagement, and preserves the recieved order. But now that I am thinking about it it all strikes me as a lot of flakiness. Maybe it's only an idea. Maybe I just want my artists to be my heroes. But even if life is lived as the futile pursuit of a desired ideal it seems, in the end, better than one which is lived in psychological obedience to the managment. In any case I hope you are having a good day. Davin On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 5:23 AM, Simon Biggs s.bi...@eca.ac.uk wrote: One could argue that the primary value of art is not in its outcomes, whether an artefact is good or bad, but in how it operates as the “dark matter” that mediates our social contracts. In this respect one can consider art as folded into creativity per se and not privileged as it has traditionally been. Skateboarding culture binds people together as much as the opera. The creative forms that are skateboarding and opera are incidental to the social operations executed as creativity. In this context what is good or bad? Can one conceive of bad social contracts? Best Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art s.bi...@eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk *C*reative *I*nterdisciplinary *R*esearch into *C*o*L*laborative *E* nvironments CIRCLE research group www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ si...@littlepig.org.uk www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk -- *From: *davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com *Reply-To: *soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au *Date: *Mon, 4 Jan 2010 12:37:25 -0500 *To: *soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au *Subject: *Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic Simon, I agree with your post, wholeheartedly. But would add an extra emphasis to your statement and suggest that it might be a bad idea to deny the contingency of relative axes of value. Sometimes, there is a tendency to push art into purely aesthetic or purely moral scales of relation, and I think there is something important about evaluating the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. It is find to impose a separation between form and content, as long as people acknowledge that this itself is a word-game. The beautiful and the grotesque are never purely aesthetic, but they are expressions of ideas, social relations, philosophies, etc. I think there is something great about engaging and arguing over questions of values that can lead to progress, provided, of course, there are certain values to which people are going to accept (either willingly, by hammering out a minimal sort of social contract, or through coercion, simply imposing them). It is a hard-handed approach to social existence, but social existence is what we make it, and if we don't make it widely agreeable then it will be, as it is today in most parts of the world, increasingly disagreeable (and even murderous). The disengaged view (which says there is nothing to agree upon, so just worry about yourself) is increasingly ugly. There might have been a time when being venal and trivial was considered brilliantly clever but today it just seems obvious. Early on these moves might have conveyed an unpleasant truth about art's complicity... but I think this is something that most people kind of understand (that artists, styles, ideas are promoted by institutions in accordance with market logics). And I think this is why you see such a bloom of great works that convey such a strong desire for sketching out and cultivating a social consciousness, that might start with a foot in the art world, and might make use of those institutions, but which yearns for something else (see, for instance, http://vectors.usc.edu/index.php?page=7projectId=57). In some cases, this desire for social existence is not even political in the conventional sense (I recently sat in on a children's workshop sponsored by the Minnesota Center for Book Arts http://www.mnbookarts.org/aboutmcba/aboutmcba.html and spent some time in the Robot Store in Michigan http://www
Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
Simon, I agree with your post, wholeheartedly. But would add an extra emphasis to your statement and suggest that it might be a bad idea to deny the contingency of relative axes of value. Sometimes, there is a tendency to push art into purely aesthetic or purely moral scales of relation, and I think there is something important about evaluating the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. It is find to impose a separation between form and content, as long as people acknowledge that this itself is a word-game. The beautiful and the grotesque are never purely aesthetic, but they are expressions of ideas, social relations, philosophies, etc. I think there is something great about engaging and arguing over questions of values that can lead to progress, provided, of course, there are certain values to which people are going to accept (either willingly, by hammering out a minimal sort of social contract, or through coercion, simply imposing them). It is a hard-handed approach to social existence, but social existence is what we make it, and if we don't make it widely agreeable then it will be, as it is today in most parts of the world, increasingly disagreeable (and even murderous). The disengaged view (which says there is nothing to agree upon, so just worry about yourself) is increasingly ugly. There might have been a time when being venal and trivial was considered brilliantly clever but today it just seems obvious. Early on these moves might have conveyed an unpleasant truth about art's complicity... but I think this is something that most people kind of understand (that artists, styles, ideas are promoted by institutions in accordance with market logics). And I think this is why you see such a bloom of great works that convey such a strong desire for sketching out and cultivating a social consciousness, that might start with a foot in the art world, and might make use of those institutions, but which yearns for something else (see, for instance, http://vectors.usc.edu/index.php?page=7projectId=57). In some cases, this desire for social existence is not even political in the conventional sense (I recently sat in on a children's workshop sponsored by the Minnesota Center for Book Arts http://www.mnbookarts.org/aboutmcba/aboutmcba.html and spent some time in the Robot Store in Michigan http://www.826michigan.org/, both of which are examples of a wider interest in teaching communities how to make... More importantly, they teach people that art is not something you appreciate it's something you use. Take care. Davin On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 5:06 AM, Simon Biggs s.bi...@eca.ac.uk wrote: Good and bad are relative concepts, being the poles of an axis of value. That axis might be personal or public but it is always contingent. It does not exist as an absolute geometry but is variable, depending on context. That context is prescribed by other values of equal contingency. Art is a relative concept. Some people consider something to be art, others do not. There will rarely be agreement and it will not include everyone. You cannot please all the people all the time. It is only a good idea to get into arguments about relative concepts if you enjoy interminable word-play and the ultimate outcome of agreeing to disagree. Best Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art s.bi...@eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments CIRCLE research group www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ si...@littlepig.org.uk www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com Reply-To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 19:13:43 -0600 To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic Maybe bad art is art that does a bad thing. There is art which tries to make a moral evil look like a moral good (take, for instance, nature photography that is used to give a notorious polluter a positive reputation or, say, propaganda which seeks to convince people that a human rights abuser is a human rights defender.) Yet, even art which seeks to tell a lie, at least has the good sense to know that the fictional utopian world is preferable to the grim realities that they mask. Then there is the kind of badness is that which wants to wash its hands of ethical considerations, altogether. I would argue that works that aestheticize violence might fit into this category. There are plenty of games, for example, which have no content beyond the representation of killing as fun. But I would also lump purely capitalistic art into this category think about high-concept movie merchandise (novelizations of films, picture book adaptations, direct to video sequels, coloring books, soundtrack theme songs, etc.). For every dozen crap trinkets
Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
Maybe bad art is art that does a bad thing. There is art which tries to make a moral evil look like a moral good (take, for instance, nature photography that is used to give a notorious polluter a positive reputation or, say, propaganda which seeks to convince people that a human rights abuser is a human rights defender.) Yet, even art which seeks to tell a lie, at least has the good sense to know that the fictional utopian world is preferable to the grim realities that they mask. Then there is the kind of badness is that which wants to wash its hands of ethical considerations, altogether. I would argue that works that aestheticize violence might fit into this category. There are plenty of games, for example, which have no content beyond the representation of killing as fun. But I would also lump purely capitalistic art into this category think about high-concept movie merchandise (novelizations of films, picture book adaptations, direct to video sequels, coloring books, soundtrack theme songs, etc.). For every dozen crap trinkets, the manufacturer could concievably hire an actual artist to make something meaningful but instead they choose to flood the world with garbage, made in sweatshops, that hurts the minds (and sometimes the bodies) of the people who consume them. (But you could argue that the mindless acquisition of tripe represents a different utopian impulse, working in an archival/d-base aesthetic). And then there are those works that are productively complicit that exist in the zone between two worlds... the kinds of things which might fit into one system, but which create change in another. I think of the many movies that actually do make me think, but without the heaviness that comes with message films... (I think that Where the Wild Things Are, for instance, is a great movie that goes beyond simply cashing in on children's desire). As always, where somebody begins is an interesting thing. But where people are going, or trying to go, is much more so. It is always fascinating when someone betrays their narrow interests in favor of broader ones Or when someone unexpectedly questions their own biases. Even if people end up in the wrong place, there is something to be said for effort, intention, affect, etc. Happy New Year! Davin On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 8:40 AM, G.H. Hovagimyan g...@thing.net wrote: gh comments below: On Jan 3, 2010, at 4:30 AM, Sally Jane Norman wrote: where and how do/ can we draw the line between bad art and bad causes? gh comments: Bad art is an aesthetic decision that is subjective. I've seen in my lifetime art that was considered bad to become re-evaluated as good. Actually I think the aesthetic kick is in playing with that contradiction and skating close to the line of bad art and bad taste. Otherwise good taste and good art turn into so much decoration. I don't know what you mean by bad causes but in terms of art I would say that when you make art as a political statement its propaganda rather than art. If you make art to make money it's commerce rather than art. If you make art to illustrate a particular theory or piece demonstrate a piece of software it's illustration. I think the only proper cause for making art is to advance the art discourse or critique it or expand the aesthetic milieu. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Demand Nothing, Occupy Everything?
I know there are lots of strands of media and communication documenting these events. But I would like to invite people to post relevant comments and citations on the following site: http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/The+Post-Corporate+University I think it would be great, even if someone wants to sling some links and resources, so that we can sift through the information. Davin On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 1:30 AM, Cara Baldwin feraly...@earthlink.net wrote: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/11/21/18629828.php On 11/21/09 10:24 PM, Cara Baldwin feraly...@earthlink.net wrote: --- Cynthia Walker Approximately 300 supporters outside Kerr Hall. #kerroccupation about a minute ago · Comment · Like Hide Cynthia Walker 9:51 The barricades are up! 2 minutes ago · Comment · Like On 11/21/09 12:31 PM, micha cardenas / azdel slade azdelsl...@gmail.com wrote: I think its curious how all of these websites, like the Tarnac 9, the invisible committee calling for uc occupations and the necrosocial all have the same wordpress theme... 2009/11/20 nicholas knouf na...@cornell.edu: And on this point, a text by a group at Berkeley on The Necrosocial: http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-necrosocial/ Their interrogation of the role of high theory, capital, and the University qua Institution is extremely cogent at this moment. nick Marco Deseriis wrote: Hi Micha, yes, thank you for sharing those precious links. At UCSD, very few students, faculty and staff that I've talked to knew about or support the strike do. Myself and a handful of other faculty, staff and students are striking, but is the very idea of a strike not viral but more based in monolothic constituencies and factory models of labor? No, I just think that after 3-4 decades of resting on dreams of unabated growth Americans (and Californians in particular) need to be re-educated and reawakened as to what it means to lose one's job, as to what it means to fight for it, and what it means to risk of losing your job for defending it. So thank you for taking on this rather humongous task ;-) To me it is not a matter of virality but of culture. People in Latin America, Asia, Europe and all over the world keep going on strike for defending their jobs, demanding higher wages, security on the workplace, etc. It is only in this country that three decades of brainwashing have led to the obliteration of historic memory (the cancellation of May1st being the most notable example), and to the perception that going on strike is somehow out of fashion. In actual fact, there exists a growing global movement to defend public education, and to build an entirely different model of knowledge sharing. You are probably familiar with this site: http://www.edu-factory.org which reports the news of 15 arrests at UCLA: http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/index.php?option=com_contentview=article; i d=240:students-arrested-at-uclacatid=34:strugglesItemid=53 and whose picture eloquently show the response of public authorities to this growing mobilization. Perhaps the spreading occupations are more viral? I wonder about this as I start going on strike tomorrow and join actions at UCSD... Well, it is not up to me to say that strikes and occupations are just two sides of the same coin. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Queer *Is* Violent: Response to Part of Judith's Position/Statement
Virginia, I wouldn't necessarily say that my comments were meant to condemn ontological violence, particularly as it has been deployed as a defense against actual physical violence... only that it strikes me as an area of caution (and the ethical aspects of it most certainly depend on who holds the power). I think it is important to note that ontological violence often paves the way for physical violence. I would say that in post civil rights United States, people with power and privilege seem to do much of their work at the ontological level (defending abstractions, arguing principle, speaking hypothetically), as a way of concealing the real consequences that their policies have for various populations. In many cases, these policies translate into various sorts of hate crimes or policies, but rarely do the leaders of these anti-social culture warrior movements speak in any way where direct lines can be drawn between, say, a particular speech and the random acts of violence that happen daily. Peace! Davin On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 3:47 PM, virginia solomonvirginia.solo...@gmail.com wrote: so in all of this talk of violence and the violence attendant to any sort of queer operation or tactic, I very much understand Robert, Davin, and Christina's arguments but I am nevertheless troubled, with Judith, about the stakes of referring to that as violence. What are the stakes of calling an ontologic/epistemologic shift violence when those enacting that 'violence' face the very real threat of actual physical violence? Is this different for different subjects, ie might calling upon dead male french theorists (ok agamben and guattari aren't men but you get my point) say something about the positioning of the producers of a particular kind of theory? Reconfiguration is certainly violent, enacts a violence, because it changes the meaning of bodies for those whose very bodies have been the site of their power. But what is at stake for emphasizing that violence? I think this is less a meta question than a practical one. Davin discusses definitions of violence from the dictionary (its own framework, to be sure) with a different set of terms - alteration, fervor, discordance. To that I would want to add ambiguity and contradiction. Do these different terms acknowledge the violence inherent in the changes that need to take place for social justice? I think so. And yet they don't place that violence at any kind of premium. I think of practices that practice inaction, but that nevertheless enact what we seem to be collectively arriving upon as a queer operation - the labor slow down, masochism, Jamaica Kincaid's 'Autobiography of My Mother (in which a narrator refuses, though various steps, to be interpellated by any number of the systems with which she comes into contact). I think it might be useful to distinguish ontologic and epistemologic violence from physical violence, where we include in phisycal violence social violence, or the violence enacted upon minoritarian subjects by structures and policies that aren't necessarily a billy club to the head. And that we think about the stakes of Derrida talking about violence in ways that, say, Angela Davis or Gloria Anzaldua don't. On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 11:25 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: I was reading Agamben's State of Exception, and then stumbled across Robert's post. It strikes me that Agamben's discussion of Benjamin's pure violence might be useful here. Also useful here might be Agamben's discussion of anomie (lawlessness) and nomos (the law), and the sort of lawlessness that results where the law is too weak (there is no norm) or too strong (where the norms are impossible to follow). In my mind, queer tactics reside in between the two poles of anomie. On the one hand, as Foucault demonstrates, norms play a critical role in shaping and cultivating desire. On the other hand, where norms are too severe, they have the effect of criminalizing everyone. I think there is a metaphysical violence in queer tactics here, but I think they are the kind of violence that the Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines as undue alteration (as of wording or sense in editing a text). Occasionally, this violence might also describe a category of emotional state (fervor) or aesthetic state (discordance). And, as a fundamental goal, an anomic relation to the law (which verges closer to the kind of physical confrontation associated with violence.) At some point, as we progress from undue alteration towards a critique of the law as a system, we move from a discussion of improvised means towards a discussion of strategically defined ends... which might mean that it is impossible to theorize a queer tactics, as they would more properly regarded as strategies. I don't know what to make of these connections. In my mind, such a conception of a pure violence, if it is to be applied, veers too close
Re: [-empyre-] Queer *Is* Violent: Response to Part of Judith's Position/Statement
Absolutely! And, I must confess, that I am not entirely sure what I think about it either way, only that I have been thinking about it. Even my own professed pacifism is hard to trust, because pacifism itself is only truly pacifism when survival would seem to require one to be something other than a pacifist. Davin On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 6:50 PM, virginia solomonvirginia.solo...@gmail.com wrote: totally, which was the thrust of the not just the billy club point! I wanted to make the point of ontologic/epistemologic violence and change enacted by the minoritarian subject as being distinct from the violence, either physical or let's say ideological, of the dominant. does that make sense? On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 7:44 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: Virginia, I wouldn't necessarily say that my comments were meant to condemn ontological violence, particularly as it has been deployed as a defense against actual physical violence... only that it strikes me as an area of caution (and the ethical aspects of it most certainly depend on who holds the power). I think it is important to note that ontological violence often paves the way for physical violence. I would say that in post civil rights United States, people with power and privilege seem to do much of their work at the ontological level (defending abstractions, arguing principle, speaking hypothetically), as a way of concealing the real consequences that their policies have for various populations. In many cases, these policies translate into various sorts of hate crimes or policies, but rarely do the leaders of these anti-social culture warrior movements speak in any way where direct lines can be drawn between, say, a particular speech and the random acts of violence that happen daily. Peace! Davin On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 3:47 PM, virginia solomonvirginia.solo...@gmail.com wrote: so in all of this talk of violence and the violence attendant to any sort of queer operation or tactic, I very much understand Robert, Davin, and Christina's arguments but I am nevertheless troubled, with Judith, about the stakes of referring to that as violence. What are the stakes of calling an ontologic/epistemologic shift violence when those enacting that 'violence' face the very real threat of actual physical violence? Is this different for different subjects, ie might calling upon dead male french theorists (ok agamben and guattari aren't men but you get my point) say something about the positioning of the producers of a particular kind of theory? Reconfiguration is certainly violent, enacts a violence, because it changes the meaning of bodies for those whose very bodies have been the site of their power. But what is at stake for emphasizing that violence? I think this is less a meta question than a practical one. Davin discusses definitions of violence from the dictionary (its own framework, to be sure) with a different set of terms - alteration, fervor, discordance. To that I would want to add ambiguity and contradiction. Do these different terms acknowledge the violence inherent in the changes that need to take place for social justice? I think so. And yet they don't place that violence at any kind of premium. I think of practices that practice inaction, but that nevertheless enact what we seem to be collectively arriving upon as a queer operation - the labor slow down, masochism, Jamaica Kincaid's 'Autobiography of My Mother (in which a narrator refuses, though various steps, to be interpellated by any number of the systems with which she comes into contact). I think it might be useful to distinguish ontologic and epistemologic violence from physical violence, where we include in phisycal violence social violence, or the violence enacted upon minoritarian subjects by structures and policies that aren't necessarily a billy club to the head. And that we think about the stakes of Derrida talking about violence in ways that, say, Angela Davis or Gloria Anzaldua don't. On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 11:25 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: I was reading Agamben's State of Exception, and then stumbled across Robert's post. It strikes me that Agamben's discussion of Benjamin's pure violence might be useful here. Also useful here might be Agamben's discussion of anomie (lawlessness) and nomos (the law), and the sort of lawlessness that results where the law is too weak (there is no norm) or too strong (where the norms are impossible to follow). In my mind, queer tactics reside in between the two poles of anomie. On the one hand, as Foucault demonstrates, norms play a critical role in shaping and cultivating desire. On the other hand, where norms are too severe, they have the effect of criminalizing everyone. I think there is a metaphysical violence in queer tactics here, but I
Re: [-empyre-] relational objects
Norah, thanks for the provocative questions, and I will try my best to give them the attention that they deserve (in spite of my ignorance about dance). First, in relation to the idea of a trace, in our work we've been interested in the idea of a generative trace (meaning that the trace generates creativity more than preserves a past present). Davin and others speak of the idea of an original and of the gap of difference between the event and the representation. Perhaps the decoupling of trace and original is of use here. This also decouples the idea of a trace from the idea of document. Even more traditional dance scholars who work on reconstruction of historically important pieces have begun to question the existence of an original. What is the essence (yikes, not a great work) or better said, what within a moment, a dance, an experience can be traced and represented and created a new with change being a central value, not stasis? While I lack any knowledge of dance in a high art sense, my experience with dance and performance is grounded in the live performances I enjoyed in Southern California in my late teens going to see bands play in various venues (basement shows, small clubs, underground outdoor concerts). The phenomena that I experienced are well described in much of the writing on punk performance--intimacy of the venue, permeability between stage and audience, DIY ethic which encourages consumers become producers, a sense of a strong local culture, physicality and improvisation, etc. Aside from what people write about it, the direct experience of such events is burned into my mind--the feeling of sweaty exhaustion, the mix of fear and exhilaration, the romance of meeting new people, the occasional conflicts (usually caused by neo-Nazis), and the interesting friendships I made. But mostly, I felt like I was a necessary part of something special. Efforts to formalize such an experience tend to fall flat (look at the various efforts to capitalize on specific scenes and you see how much stress corporate commerce and mass consumption can place on the fragility of the specific). They rely almost entirely on the people involved. On the other hand, my desire to seek out a punk scene was inspired largely by watching videos like Decline of Western Civilization, Repoman, Another State of Mind, Suburbia... as well as numerous skate videos which featured bands like Suicidal Tendencies, JFA, NOFX, Pennywise, etc. The representations of punk were influential in forming my desire and expectations for an alternative to what people were doing at school (playing sports and working on the pecking order). So, I may not have had access to the direct experience of exhilaration had it not been for experiencing representations. Similarly, I had been prepared to enjoy the particular experience by watching iterations of its style. But the experience of watching is entirely different from doing. It gets back to the idea that being forgets itself to be felt, but then becomes estranged from itself under observation. Secondly, I'd love to hear from this month's contributors and others on the list about relationships between participatory art and participatory pedagogy and perhaps even some of the rhetoric around cyberlearning these days. I'm finding really productive connections between my research in this area and my teaching and I'd love to hear from others about this as well. On the topic of education, I am working on a project for Liquid Books on The Post-Corporate University. The participatory and performative character of teaching and learning ought to be a part of this discussion. I would love it if interested parties wanted to get involved. http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/The+Post-Corporate+University Peace! Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] A Post-Futurist or a Neo-Baroque perception?
I enjoy reading Virilio's works, so maybe this is the result of some congenital defect on my part, or maybe it is something that I caught through reading, but i really think the question here is one of a human scale. Clock time is not the same thing as human scale, rather it is a rationalization built around a human scale of perception, a parsing of the years, seasons, and days. Following Stamatia's account of the industrialization of the human into something inhuman, we have reached a point where the clock time is considered relatively human next to other regimes of temporality and acceleration... but clock time is the point of departure for further manipulations of scale. On the other hand, there is the experience of time through sequence, memory, and narrative, which might at times attach itself to various techniques and technologies of objective measure, but whose content is radically different from its rational measure. For example, in cases of extreme boredom, where one becomes increasingly agitated while waiting for someone else the invocation of the clock is the supplement to the human experience (I've been waiting for three hours! Where were you?). Conversely, when someone is having fun, the passage of time can be invoked to supplement the subjective experience. (It's been three hours! I was writing and lost track of time!) Time, here, functions as a medium upon which parties can agree, but it is not the same thing as the experience itself, whose time is unrepresentable. This time is so hard to deal with and communicate that this might be precisely why we'd need to invent some external judge, the clock, who can supposedly arbitrate for us. I think once we debate the human and the posthuman on the dialectical grounds of competing regimes of technique, we highlight differences which distort the basic question of being. If we say the time of human being is the time of the clock, then it follows that human being is called into question when the scale of the clock is eradicated. But, if we consider that human being has always been supplemented by various regimes of external temporal regulation which try to impose order upon the subjective experience of time, then we have a great deal more in common with people across history. In a sense, how is clock time much different from a dictionary? Both try to fix meaning for a community. But we know that signs are always more than the dictionary tells us. To put this in the context of this month's discussion, I think that those arts which are based on the movements of the human body and which require the active participation of the human being are tied in some sense to issues of presence and scale in very literal ways. Technologies of capture, acceleration, magnification, or objectification are used upon/used by these persons in a way that highlights the relationships of scale between the human and the particular technique. Particular instances might distort or magnify, exalt or diminish the relative importance of agents, but as a system, such art represents the relationships of scale that are being enacted across the globe by willing and unwilling participants on a daily basis. Peace! Davin On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 12:14 PM, G.H. Hovagimyan g...@thing.net wrote: Manifestos are really old fashioned especially in the digital age. Information systems are constantly being changed and updated. The truth is that any programming language or software tool can be learned in a couple of weeks. In terms of manifestos the only rule I find interesting is the one that is about the democratization of art, this is the consequence of the networks. All information is equivalent on the networks. Time and space really don't exist or rather all information exists at the same time on the networks. The meaning of any bit of information is created by it's use. This goes back to Wittgenstein's axiom, the meaning of word is it's meaning and the meaning of a word is it's use. Since I am an artists, the meaning that I create is art. As an example my group Artists Meeting is doing a series of video shows of curated youTube videos. We use the found material to create art. This is a consequence or result of web 2.0 and the democratization of art. Here's a link -- http://artistsmeeting.org On May 7, 2009, at 12:01 PM, stamatia portanova wrote: In short, my final question is: given our intensive, Post-Futurist conception of time, how do we critically respond to the small-scale quantifications and restrictions, or accelerations, of space-time by digital technology, without going back to a simultaneous chronological and metric conceptions? In the end, one moment can be as long as a life... G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh/ http://artistsmeeting.org http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Re: [-empyre-] failure of success
When I think about failures and breakdowns
I think about my favorite poem:
Pablo Neruda's Ode to Broken Things:
Let's put all our treasures together
-- the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold --
into a sack and carry them
to the sea
and let our possessions sink
into one alarming breaker
that sounds like a river.
May whatever breaks
be reconstructed by the sea
with the long labor of its tides.
So many useless things
which nobody broke
but which got broken anyway.
Davin
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 1:19 PM, { brad brace } bbr...@eskimo.com wrote:
Art Institutions and Museums both celebrate and perpetuate
(and profit from) the singular, exclusionary fate of all
Failed Artists -- there is no other kind.
New Media Art merely encourages the demonstration of
default, marketing content and 'critical support' for new
technological products -- pernicious and pervasive curricula
follow.
Marginal societal scraps are available only to those who
fuel/promote these institutional Ponzi schemes -- new
victims/acolytes are most welcomed.
/:b
We fill the craters left by the bombs
And once again we sing
And once again we sow
Because life never surrenders.
-- anonymous Vietnamese poem
Nothing can be said about the sea.
-- Mr Selvam, Akkrapattai, India 2004
{ brad brace } bbr...@eskimo.com ~finger for pgp
--- bbs: brad brace sound ---
--- http://69.64.229.114:8000 ---
.
The 12hr-ISBN-JPEG Project posted since 1994
+ + + serial ftp://ftp.eskimo.com/u/b/bbrace
+ + + eccentric ftp:// (your-site-here!)
+ + + continuous hotline://artlyin.ftr.va.com.au
+ + + hypermodern ftp://ftp.rdrop.com/pub/users/bbrace
+ + + imagery http://kunst.noemata.net/12hr/
News: alt.binaries.pictures.12hr alt.binaries.pictures.misc
alt.binaries.pictures.fine-art.misc alt.12hr
. 12hr email
subscriptions = http://bbrace.laughingsquid.net/buy-into.html
. Other | Mirror: http://www.eskimo.com/~bbrace/bbrace.html
Projects | Reverse Solidus: http://bbrace.laughingsquid.net/
| http://bbrace.net
. Blog | http://bbrace.laughingsquid.net/wordpress/
. IM | bbr...@unstable.nl
. IRC | #bbrace
. ICQ | 109352289
. SIP | bbr...@ekiga.net
| registered linux user #323978
~
I am not a victim
I am a messenger
/:b
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] On Currencies, Capitalism, and the Fed
Thank you, Jeff. I agree with much of what you are writing. Big, if it equals militarism, is horrible. Wars require that level of coordination, and once you fire up the machine, it does perpetuate itself. But, following Steve's comments, I do think that beyond the question of size, there is the real question of purpose. And, theoretically, we ought to be able to influence the purpose of government as easily as we can influence its size. I am suspicious that anti big government sentiment might be easily used by folks with ulterior motives (like Grover Norquist, who talks about starving the beast--spending to the point of crisis, and then using crisis as a pretext to dismantle the social safety net). On the other hand, working for good, peaceful government could possibly eliminate the huge expense of war. In the short term, it wouldn't explicitly work towards a smaller budget, but a smaller budget could be one of the possibilities that it unleashes. My biggest fear is that in reducing the size of government, the first cuts would be in social services, regulators, education, and infrastructure... the areas where we have seen cuts already we'd cut all of those things before we ever touched the military, law enforcement, and prison budget... and then, we'd be left with a population so poorly educated, poorly paid, and poorly served... that nobody would even be able to change much of anything except through violence. (And, well, you'd have that giant army and all those prisons to keep everyone from rioting). In my mind, it seems like the surest path to reasonable government is to insist upon rational policies that serve the people. Peace! Davin On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 9:44 AM, jeff pierce zentra...@live.ca wrote: Davin, Sorry for the long delay, as I've had many other projects that needed to be attended too, but I wanted to get back to you on this question about big government. I also want to recommend a book I'm currently reading and reviewing for the publisher called Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets. Highly readable and enjoyable for anybody who enjoys learning about history and current events in a comedic fashion. It does an amazing job of education the reader on topics that the media government makes out to be very confusing. Here is an excerpt from this book that was written 2 years ago, and I can only imagine what the sequel to this book (if there even is one) is going to say about what is going on in government these days. Paul Kennedy writes, It is simply staggering to learn that this single country -- a democratic republic that claims to despise large gov't -- now spends more each year on the military than the next 9 largest national defence budgets combined. I'm absolutely positive that our spending now, after a war with Iraq, Afghanistan, and possible Pakistan or Iran next is probably larger than the next 18 countries. Our country, our republic, our empire is simply out of control and not living in reality with how much money they can devote to expanding the Anglo-Saxon empire that is the United States. Printing more money has been the solution for such a long time and it's simply not the correct one. Our government is too big for it's own good. Obama promised in his campaign speeches that one of the first things he's going to do is bring our troops home. Then he backpedalled once he one and said he'd look at bringing them home in 12 months, then 24 months, and then he doubled the amount of troops in Afghanistan to 30,000. He is doing the exact opposite of what he promised. One other quote from the book I want to close on is the following which details exactly what must occur to bring an empire to it's knees. encouraging higher levels of consumption, higher spending for government, more regulation, huge new doses of debt, nationalism, price controls, inflation, and special treatment for favoured industries, particularly defence. Every single one of those are happening right now except price controls, and there is talk among certain circles that this is coming, along with rationing down the road possibly for gas, food, and water when shortages start. Maybe bigger government is needed in 3rd world countries to guide them and jumpstart the development of societies and the economy, but I have to believe it's different for a country like the U.S. which is already developed and doesn't need to be micromanaged at every single level. Government's role should be limited to building infrastructure, social programs, national defence (when we are being attacked) and creating laws/keeping peace. I simply believe that they are too big and have become a burden and a liability of the citizens of this great nation, and if reform doesn't start soon, I fear this age in history is not going to be well remembered in the coming decades. Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:20:21 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Re: [-empyre-] Meta-
Oh... the URL www.sienaheights.edu. Oh... and I was really just referring to malls. I don't know that I would call anyone's school a shopping mall. I don't know that I would go so far as to criticize another scholar's home institution in that way (I have a sister-in-law who works for one of the big online universities out of necessity... but she really tries her best to teach well regardless). Davin On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 10:22 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: My little school is called Siena Heights University. We're sponsored by Dominican nuns. We have about 750 full time undergrads on our main campus. I think it isn't all that uncommon for some of the smaller liberal arts colleges to be this way. Because the so much of the administrative work is handled by teaching professors, the administrative bureaucracy isn't quite as potent as it is at some places. On the one hand, I don't have as much time to research and write as I would like but on the other hand, the overall atmosphere is very low key. Also, if I want to advise dissertations, I have to work as a guest advisor with another school. But, because we are so small, I also work with my most ambitious undergrads very closely, which helps to satisfy that need for intense reading and argument. Small schools have their disadvantages. And, if you consider teaching at one, it is important to make sure that the culture of the school works for you (fortunately, Siena is progressive, but many schools are quite the opposite). But, they can be really fine places to work. (More than anything, I tend to enjoy hanging out with my students much more than hanging out with professionals. It's more unpredictable). Davin On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD mt...@ipublishingllc.com wrote: What is your little school??? Can I see the site? I'd love to learn more, especially it seems that, from an epistemological, as well as pedagogical, standpoint, you face some unique challenges and opportunities so richly different from the ones dealt with by professors at those Zoloft-enriched, air-conditioned shopping mall universities you refer to. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:31:10 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meta- Steve, I do think that there is some good sense in maintaining at least significant portions of Lyotard's understanding. For instance, I am working on curriculum revisions at my home institution which could change the very nature of the education we are providing at my little school. In the 80s and 90s, we drifted in the direction of a consumer-oriented approach... we are a very small school, so the argument that We won't treat you like a number is true in a very real sense and a compelling selling point. Like so many schools, we searched for meaning in the postmodern environment, and, unfortunately, found it in this strategic selling point. Fortunately, we are too small for such a philosophy to have effectively changed what it is that we do. (At least as far as I can tell I've only been here for 5 years). In many ways, we never made the full shift to the service model--we all know each other and our students too personally to adopt the sort of detached, serene benevolence that reigns in zoloft-enriched shopping environments, where secret shoppers enforce friendliness. Plus, we are in Michigan and most of our students are first generation, which means that we work on the edge of a precipice--on the one hand, we have known for a long time that the new economy isn't all it's cracked up to be, on the other hand, we cannot pretend that our students need to be able to survive in whatever situation awaits them. So, while the service narrative has been there, there are also, I think, stronger narratives that run through the school. The task is not to make these narratives official, but to hack away at the consumer narrative that tends to detract from the organic narratives. And, to provide supplemental narratives which might help guide this underlying narrative away from despair, as the economy becomes grim, and turns us all towards a stronger sense of mutual support, solidarity, and creativity. More than anything, I don't want my students to feel helpless. I don't want them to feel like they need to wait for the answer to come to them over the TV or Walmart or GM or Washington. I want them to get into the business of making/finding/revising their own answers, in a practical sense. So, I see Lyotard's observation as useful. These grand narratives may or may not circulate, but they do not rest upon any sort of certain foundation, and even slight scrutiny has the potential to disrupt them. In their place, are other narratives, and maybe
Re: [-empyre-] Meta-
My little school is called Siena Heights University. We're sponsored by Dominican nuns. We have about 750 full time undergrads on our main campus. I think it isn't all that uncommon for some of the smaller liberal arts colleges to be this way. Because the so much of the administrative work is handled by teaching professors, the administrative bureaucracy isn't quite as potent as it is at some places. On the one hand, I don't have as much time to research and write as I would like but on the other hand, the overall atmosphere is very low key. Also, if I want to advise dissertations, I have to work as a guest advisor with another school. But, because we are so small, I also work with my most ambitious undergrads very closely, which helps to satisfy that need for intense reading and argument. Small schools have their disadvantages. And, if you consider teaching at one, it is important to make sure that the culture of the school works for you (fortunately, Siena is progressive, but many schools are quite the opposite). But, they can be really fine places to work. (More than anything, I tend to enjoy hanging out with my students much more than hanging out with professionals. It's more unpredictable). Davin On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD mt...@ipublishingllc.com wrote: What is your little school??? Can I see the site? I'd love to learn more, especially it seems that, from an epistemological, as well as pedagogical, standpoint, you face some unique challenges and opportunities so richly different from the ones dealt with by professors at those Zoloft-enriched, air-conditioned shopping mall universities you refer to. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:31:10 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meta- Steve, I do think that there is some good sense in maintaining at least significant portions of Lyotard's understanding. For instance, I am working on curriculum revisions at my home institution which could change the very nature of the education we are providing at my little school. In the 80s and 90s, we drifted in the direction of a consumer-oriented approach... we are a very small school, so the argument that We won't treat you like a number is true in a very real sense and a compelling selling point. Like so many schools, we searched for meaning in the postmodern environment, and, unfortunately, found it in this strategic selling point. Fortunately, we are too small for such a philosophy to have effectively changed what it is that we do. (At least as far as I can tell I've only been here for 5 years). In many ways, we never made the full shift to the service model--we all know each other and our students too personally to adopt the sort of detached, serene benevolence that reigns in zoloft-enriched shopping environments, where secret shoppers enforce friendliness. Plus, we are in Michigan and most of our students are first generation, which means that we work on the edge of a precipice--on the one hand, we have known for a long time that the new economy isn't all it's cracked up to be, on the other hand, we cannot pretend that our students need to be able to survive in whatever situation awaits them. So, while the service narrative has been there, there are also, I think, stronger narratives that run through the school. The task is not to make these narratives official, but to hack away at the consumer narrative that tends to detract from the organic narratives. And, to provide supplemental narratives which might help guide this underlying narrative away from despair, as the economy becomes grim, and turns us all towards a stronger sense of mutual support, solidarity, and creativity. More than anything, I don't want my students to feel helpless. I don't want them to feel like they need to wait for the answer to come to them over the TV or Walmart or GM or Washington. I want them to get into the business of making/finding/revising their own answers, in a practical sense. So, I see Lyotard's observation as useful. These grand narratives may or may not circulate, but they do not rest upon any sort of certain foundation, and even slight scrutiny has the potential to disrupt them. In their place, are other narratives, and maybe they can be widely held, but I think they fail to rise to the status of Grand narratives when we accept that they tend to be agreements, which are arrived at for the sake of common utility and mutual benefit, and which can be discarded. Now, this brings us back to the question of liberalism, because this certainly is a liberal understanding of commonly held narratives as a sort of social contract. But I don't know that the problem is with liberalism as much as it is with the reification of the fruits of
Re: [-empyre-] Meta-
Steve, I do think that there is some good sense in maintaining at least significant portions of Lyotard's understanding. For instance, I am working on curriculum revisions at my home institution which could change the very nature of the education we are providing at my little school. In the 80s and 90s, we drifted in the direction of a consumer-oriented approach... we are a very small school, so the argument that We won't treat you like a number is true in a very real sense and a compelling selling point. Like so many schools, we searched for meaning in the postmodern environment, and, unfortunately, found it in this strategic selling point. Fortunately, we are too small for such a philosophy to have effectively changed what it is that we do. (At least as far as I can tell I've only been here for 5 years). In many ways, we never made the full shift to the service model--we all know each other and our students too personally to adopt the sort of detached, serene benevolence that reigns in zoloft-enriched shopping environments, where secret shoppers enforce friendliness. Plus, we are in Michigan and most of our students are first generation, which means that we work on the edge of a precipice--on the one hand, we have known for a long time that the new economy isn't all it's cracked up to be, on the other hand, we cannot pretend that our students need to be able to survive in whatever situation awaits them. So, while the service narrative has been there, there are also, I think, stronger narratives that run through the school. The task is not to make these narratives official, but to hack away at the consumer narrative that tends to detract from the organic narratives. And, to provide supplemental narratives which might help guide this underlying narrative away from despair, as the economy becomes grim, and turns us all towards a stronger sense of mutual support, solidarity, and creativity. More than anything, I don't want my students to feel helpless. I don't want them to feel like they need to wait for the answer to come to them over the TV or Walmart or GM or Washington. I want them to get into the business of making/finding/revising their own answers, in a practical sense. So, I see Lyotard's observation as useful. These grand narratives may or may not circulate, but they do not rest upon any sort of certain foundation, and even slight scrutiny has the potential to disrupt them. In their place, are other narratives, and maybe they can be widely held, but I think they fail to rise to the status of Grand narratives when we accept that they tend to be agreements, which are arrived at for the sake of common utility and mutual benefit, and which can be discarded. Now, this brings us back to the question of liberalism, because this certainly is a liberal understanding of commonly held narratives as a sort of social contract. But I don't know that the problem is with liberalism as much as it is with the reification of the fruits of liberalism. If a particular narrative emerges as useful, and then we try to firm it up in such a way that makes any questioning of the narrative into nonsense or blasphemy then it becomes something other than a social contract. This is where I tend to have the most serious issue with neoliberalism--on its surface, it seems like a valid theory, maybe open markets can lead to the extension of certain freedoms (certainly, pornography has loosened up certain attitudes towards sex [but it has tightened up others]). The problem is the notion that free markets will always lead to the extension of all freedoms, even to the absurd point that governments will restrict human freedom to protect the market why!? Because the market will lead to freedom This is not a social contract. This is tyranny, because it forecloses the possibility of a social contract. But, the official narrative is that it makes you free! And, of course, this narrative is rarely questioned, except through the straw men arguments against socialism (which equates even modest regulation with Stalinism). [As an interesting aside: In the thick of the demonization of socialism in the popular press, Bill Moyers was gracious enough to interview Mike Davis: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03202009/profile.html] I believe that social groups need narratives in which to ground their vocabulary... without them, I cannot say with any likelihood that I would even begin to understand what we are talking about. We, right now, are partially situated within the connective tissue of postmodernist discourse. Someone says, Lyotard this. Another says, Lyotard that. A third says, No, Lyotard such and such. And, this is obvious, we are using this common narrative to situate our specific subject positions such that we can have disagreements, and hopefully, come to more useful understandings of each other and the narrative itself, but mostly about those things which were not initially situated
Re: [-empyre-] Beyonce/Burger King
I have a problem with some of Haraway's arguments in When Species Meet (but I must confess, I am not finished reading it, so I am open to corrected). The main problem that I have with Haraway is that a denial of human exceptionalism is a two way street. On the one hand, it does offer plenty of great opportunities for other species, but if you look at the general trend in terms of global poverty, we have been quite finished with human exceptionalism for quite some time. The only exceptional persons are those with the resources to afford exceptional treatment. In fact, we have even deconstructed the exceptionalism of life itself--destroying the biosphere and many of the species that inhabit it. Some might argue that this is caused by the naive belief that cultural savages have that they were created special and that the rape of the world is caused, somehow, by backwards people. But the chief architects of the global financial markets and the giant companies that have the resources to exploit the world's strategic inequalities are not a bunch of religious kooks bent on some biblical mandate to subdue and dominate nature the power players in the world have MBAs from great universities, they have lobbyists in Washington, they hire the best PR firms to sell their agenda to the public. In they believe in anything resembling universal human rights, underpinned by some notion that humans are exceptional I would be stunned. They certainly don't act that way. I don't imagine that Haraway would ever defend such behavior. I just think, in practical terms, at the very least, that human exceptionalism is still incredibly useful. It is so useful, in fact, that even people who deny it still benefit from its vestiges. They are nice people who enjoy their freedom and live around other nice people who enjoy their freedom, so they tend to imagine that deregulation to the point where we question even human rights will result in a flowering of freedom. If I hung around people who took spent their days running agility courses with their dogs and taking them to special doctors when they got sick--I suppose that I might think that all people were so benevolent. But most CHILDREN don't even have such companions. Not to be cranky but encounter value is not simply a positive thing. (I knew someone who had the unfortunate job of guarding detainees in Iraq. This was a pretty open-minded kid, who got along with lots of people, and was even actively opposed to discrimination. He came back with the belief that Iraqis were like animals. This is another kind of encounter value.) I would not trust deregulation in this respect to produce necessarily positive results. Davin On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 7:32 AM, Nicholas Ruiz III edi...@intertheory.org wrote: Good morning...Finding her way indeed...Haraway's When Species Meet intersects right here: What, however, if human labor turns out to be only part of the story of lively capital? Lively Capital? Not very profound once we've made the leap to understanding that Capital is but a currency of the Code...but she biocapitalizes this for us in an interesting way...please read on: Of all philosophers, Marx understood relational sensuousness, and he thought deeply about the metabolism between human beings and the rest of the world enacted in living labor. As I read him, however, he was finally unable to escape from the humanist teleology of that labor--the making of man himself. In the end, no companion species, reciprocal inductions, or multispecies epigenetics are his story. But what if the commodities of interest to those who live within the regime of Lively Capital cannot be understood within the categories of the natural and the social that Marx came so close to reworking but was finally unable to do under the goad of human exceptionalism? So after use and exchange value, Haraway allows for 'encounter value, wherein the encounters of lively beings (dogs especially) materialize a problematics of suspension for human exceptionalism, and theoretical treatment of the commerce and consciousness, evolution and bioengineering, ethics and utilities that are all in play. For us, this month, it seems we are also passengers on such a journey, wherein we are delineating biocapital's artistic impulses along the nerve fibers of our humanly, if tragicomic, artfully financial, networks of time and money. Might we, too, on -empyre-, need to escape from a distinctively 'humanist' teleology of art and creativity, as it relates to our discussion of human financial networks this month? Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org From: Michael Angelo Tata, PhD mt...@ipublishingllc.com To: Soft Skinned Space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 10:52:36 PM Subject: [-empyre-] Beyonce/Burger King Joseph and/or Cynthia and/or tout le monde: What is at stake
Re: [-empyre-] Rock Theory
I suppose it is good to remind ourselves in these situations that we can take nothing for granted, except for those things which we ourselves grant. I can't help but think about Sedgwick's Axiomatic... RIP. Davin On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Nicholas Ruiz III edi...@intertheory.org wrote: ...and to complicate matters further..there is the physiological 'transduction' of sensory phenomena into neurotransmissions understood by the central nervous system...! Abstraction par excellence! Narrative side effects occur in this process as well, limiting what we perceive to be the real...many physicists revel in the work of elucidation of such a 'cognitive' dissonance... :-) Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 9:34:03 AM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Rock Theory This is an intersting thought How does a person abstract themselves? The process of cognition itself is a process of abstraction...a move from the perception of primary phenomena to a restructuring of the present through narrative representation. This is where, I think, the identity of the individual is felt most concretely. On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 10:23 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD mt...@ipublishingllc.com wrote: Yes--it seems that dematerialization and thoughtlessness go together. Whether we are talking about money, capital, or arms. Perhaps to be thoughtful, we need to de-distance ourselves from concrete entities become abstractions: the thing may need to re-appear after all in order for there to be an ethics. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:04:58 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] headline: human interaction reaches junk status! I think you are right to suggest that I am downgrading human interaction to junk status. And I cannot say that it was necessarily ever different. But I still want to the kind of person who does not always act like an idiot and who is willing to make changes to build a world that is different. I don't know that junk status is absolute. If somebody wants to make an argument in favor of one way of doing something over another, then, my judgment is wrong precisely because I have claimed that everything is so thoughtless. If someone says, No, Davin. You are wrong. I am not as thoughtless as you think. And if they can articulate this thought, it would be hard for me to insist otherwise. But, if people don't care to explore the space of their consciousness (and better yet, share it), instead preferring to ride on cruise control, then in that particular case, they have been thoughtless. And, of course, nobody should have to prove they are thoughtful to me but they should try to prove it to themselves from time to time, the more the better. While I am sure that people have always been pretty thoughtless, it strikes me as particularly true in our age of relentless busyness. I am particularly taken by Virilio's arguments about speed and cybernetics, particularly the notion that acceleration leads to decreased capacity to respond responsibly, so judgment is increasingly embodied in formulas and cybernetic systems. When we killed each other with rocks, you had to look at the person you were going to crush before you crushed them. Today, when you kill someone at supersonic speed, you just plug in some coordinates, and the machine does the rest. Or, you can just kill through default by destroying infrastructure and imposing embargoes. This is thoughtlessness on an ultimate scale. I'm plenty thoughtless myself. And I feel like I should be more thoughtful. And when I try to be thoughtful, it is usually fairly exhausting and often frustrating. But, on the other hand, it's also very rewarding in its own way. It's usually accompanied by some feeling of guilt, possibly some immediate changes in my behavior, and eventually a sense that I tried to do something other than what I would have done had I not been mindful. It's a modest reward, and maybe it is an impossible way to change anything in all but the most minute ways, but I would like to believe that if enough people even devoted a modest slice of each day (5 minutes) to something as simple as studying and reflecting upon some injustice that they themselves have inflicted upon another, either through action or omission, directly or indirectly, that the world we would create would be much more ethical. (Jeez! I guess I am becoming a whacko.) Peace! Davin On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Nicholas Ruiz III edi...@intertheory.org wrote: Indeed, the consumer society has been rotten forever...but at least we can switch
Re: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called crisis
I'd like to reply quickly to Anna's point, which is certainly valid, when you talk about various artistic endeavors which are actively opposed to ideological capitalism and its associated phenomena. On the other hand, Nick has a point, if we are speaking from strictly theoretical ground: Capitalism is an art, in that it is an artifice which actualizes its intentions creatively, in the way that, say, a visual artist works from a concept to make an idea manifest itself in a socially effective form. But I don't know that most people would consider it Art, in the way that we normally think of art. Conversely, there is much in art which approaches finance--trading, speculating, working, borrowing, stealing, etc. And while much of the artists which Anna references are likely to contain and, at time, even epitomize some of the traits of capitalism... in practical terms, these movements are opposed to capitalism as an ideology. The difference might be seen in these terms: A hitchhiker might enjoy frequent trips in an automobile, but is different from a car owner. Both ride in cars. But one is responsible for the vehicle, the other one isn't. Personally, I want art that is socially powerful, and that can serve as a battleground for competing ideologies. I want better maps of social relations. But, at the same time, if you imagine that art has the prime responsibility for critiquing capitalism... or even if it has any inherent responsibility at all... you risk overshadowing the responsibility of critics, of legislators, of , even, capitalists, but mostly of citiznes to bear the chief burden of building a just society. Peace! Davin On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 2:48 AM, Anna Munster a.muns...@unsw.edu.au wrote: Sorry Nikos but as to your rhetorical 'no' below, I resoundingly reply NO WAY!!. There is a world of difference between responding (rather than reacting which is really what Joseph is talking about) to a social, economic and political crisis using aesthetic strategies and techniques vs. the 'arts' of finance, government or whatever other institution you want to aestheticise. (a la Benjamin et al). The examples that Nik and Marc are talking about (and also what Brian Holmes has been involved with) are emphatically not abut knee jerk response or reaction but are about using nonrepresentational aesthetic strategies - among a multitude of strategies which also include activist, semiotic, political, social and affective ones – to transform subjective and collective situations. These are immanent, critical, positive and productive relationships with crisis ie they do not respond to crisis but rather work amid, through and via crisis to work with what might be transformative about crises. And these aesthetic strategies are absolutely everywhere both in and out of the 'art world' eg Critical Art Ensemble, Harwood and Mongrel,16Beaver, rebublicart project, The Senselab, eipcp, Make World, edu factory, The Thing, Serial Space (sydney -based for all you North Americans who need to get out more ;-) etc etc etc. And these are just the artists/collectives/projects - there's also a wealth of brilliant art theory around this - try Hito Steyerl, Gerald Raunig, Brian Holmes, Matthew Fuller, Florian Schneider, Brian Massumi all the FLOSS+art etc etc etc There is NO relation between these kind of politics, responses and aesthetics and the 'art' of finance - except a relation of revulsion. On the other hand, if you want to find out about a really fantastic installation that engaged directly with the stock market and in fact used a gambling syndicate's money to trade stocks as part of the actual art work - have a look at Micheal Goldberg's documentation of his 2002 work 'Catch a Falling Knife' (http://www.michael-goldberg.com/main.html - go into Projects and select the title of the piece). Just another point I'd like to make about this month's discussion - I have found some of the posts scary and stupid in their absolute lack of knowledge about anything that is going on about contemporary art, aesthetic strategies and politics. I really think some people need to do a bit of preliminary research and investigation before they start sounding off about how boring or naive the concept of aesthetically responding to crisis is, Best Anna On 24/04/2009, at 10:36 PM, Nicholas Ruiz III wrote: nk...another aspect of interest is the way in which the financial realm in itself is a creative act, and artful...with all of the discussion revolving around the perception/reading parallax, I wonder how people in the artistic/academic community may not perceive/read financial creativity as art at all...I suspect such financial activity is a form of art, which contains all of the aspirations, triumphs and failures that any art project may enable, no? nikos Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: nick knouf
Re: [-empyre-] Rock Theory
This is an intersting thought How does a person abstract themselves? The process of cognition itself is a process of abstraction...a move from the perception of primary phenomena to a restructuring of the present through narrative representation. This is where, I think, the identity of the individual is felt most concretely. On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 10:23 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD mt...@ipublishingllc.com wrote: Yes--it seems that dematerialization and thoughtlessness go together. Whether we are talking about money, capital, or arms. Perhaps to be thoughtful, we need to de-distance ourselves from concrete entities become abstractions: the thing may need to re-appear after all in order for there to be an ethics. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:04:58 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] headline: human interaction reaches junk status! I think you are right to suggest that I am downgrading human interaction to junk status. And I cannot say that it was necessarily ever different. But I still want to the kind of person who does not always act like an idiot and who is willing to make changes to build a world that is different. I don't know that junk status is absolute. If somebody wants to make an argument in favor of one way of doing something over another, then, my judgment is wrong precisely because I have claimed that everything is so thoughtless. If someone says, No, Davin. You are wrong. I am not as thoughtless as you think. And if they can articulate this thought, it would be hard for me to insist otherwise. But, if people don't care to explore the space of their consciousness (and better yet, share it), instead preferring to ride on cruise control, then in that particular case, they have been thoughtless. And, of course, nobody should have to prove they are thoughtful to me but they should try to prove it to themselves from time to time, the more the better. While I am sure that people have always been pretty thoughtless, it strikes me as particularly true in our age of relentless busyness. I am particularly taken by Virilio's arguments about speed and cybernetics, particularly the notion that acceleration leads to decreased capacity to respond responsibly, so judgment is increasingly embodied in formulas and cybernetic systems. When we killed each other with rocks, you had to look at the person you were going to crush before you crushed them. Today, when you kill someone at supersonic speed, you just plug in some coordinates, and the machine does the rest. Or, you can just kill through default by destroying infrastructure and imposing embargoes. This is thoughtlessness on an ultimate scale. I'm plenty thoughtless myself. And I feel like I should be more thoughtful. And when I try to be thoughtful, it is usually fairly exhausting and often frustrating. But, on the other hand, it's also very rewarding in its own way. It's usually accompanied by some feeling of guilt, possibly some immediate changes in my behavior, and eventually a sense that I tried to do something other than what I would have done had I not been mindful. It's a modest reward, and maybe it is an impossible way to change anything in all but the most minute ways, but I would like to believe that if enough people even devoted a modest slice of each day (5 minutes) to something as simple as studying and reflecting upon some injustice that they themselves have inflicted upon another, either through action or omission, directly or indirectly, that the world we would create would be much more ethical. (Jeez! I guess I am becoming a whacko.) Peace! Davin On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Nicholas Ruiz III edi...@intertheory.org wrote: Indeed, the consumer society has been rotten forever...but at least we can switch the channel from the wedding planners to the forensic pathologists...sounds like you're downgrading human interaction to junk status...but we might ask...when was it different? When was the way we were...'here'...I'm just curious to know... :-) NRIII Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Monday, April 6, 2009 10:32:43 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 53, Issue 6 I think this might be why gift giving can be so subversive, because if we were to resign ourselves, say, to viewing the cash nexus as the only medium for exchange... gift giving implies that the cash nexus is incomplete or insufficient. If you give a gift (say, you give someone a copy of your favorite book) and it returns to you with an expected equivalent compensation from the recipient ($27.95
Re: [-empyre-] Meta-
I think if there is any potentially reliable metanarrative, it would have to take into account the interaction between the spaces between finite sets of knowledge. For instance, what is true of cognition might not be true of matter, but you can hash out certain truths about matter via cognition, and you can hash out certain truths of cognition via material process. (Although, at the end of the day, these are all stitched together though cognitive processes. So maybe the only good answer is maybe. I am interested in what Joe Tabbi might have to say about this things. He's got a book called Cognitive Fictions (which is pretty intense, by the way). Also, I don't know if Louis Armand is on the list, but he has several books that deal with these problems of consciousness. Davin On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 10:27 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD mt...@ipublishingllc.com wrote: I am reminded of Rorty: contingency and irony as a basis for solidarity. Despite pomo-ism, have we transcended the meta-N, or is a meta-N of no meta-N a meta-N after all? *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:32:24 -0400 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] A strange bit of luck I agree, it does tend to be a bit vaguely optimistic, but I don't know that there is necessarily anything wrong with broad metanarratives, particularly at a time when people on the bottom of the pile tend be isolated, and often opposed to each other. A broad narrative about justice or working class solidarity provides a pretext for talking about groups of people who share common interests. At some level, the idea that I could not coordinate a narrative with disparate populations, itself, becomes a metanarrative. And, a debilitating one. I do think that the capacity for people to bridge these pockets of humanity is powerful and explosive. NGOs are perfectly positioned to provide accounts provided academics, legislators, artists, and everyday people are willing to listen and help. (I know a lot of farmers and union workers who are very careful about buying fair trade goods. On the other hand, I know a lot of farmers and union workers who think fair trade is a bunch of liberal, socialist nonsense. So I think we really need narratives that can compete with the paranoid, even jingoistic, attitudes towards trade). A perfect example of success can be found in the recent successes that student activists have had in working with NGOs in Honduras against the anti-union practices of Russell Athletics. http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4367/pstudents_wont_sweat_it_p It can't solve everything. But on a practical level, I believe that this type of solidarity is possible, and becomes more and more effective the more it is engaged in. If I can get together with somebody in Detroit and agree to use a particular currency in a particular business network, it is possible for me to work with someone in another country to have a positive impact on a particular transnational network... the only real difference is how the network is organized geographically. Peace! Davin On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Nicholas Ruiz III edi...@intertheory.org wrote: Can't say I'm particularly moved by this.'yes, we can'...was ascliché then as it is now, no? The real question no one cares to answer in this regard is: yes, we can do what exactly?! For example, the local currency movement offers a specific answer to a particular problem...but the broad sweeping metanarratives of global emancipation read more like political speeches than anything else, it seems to me... nick Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Monday, April 6, 2009 6:33:50 PM Subject: [-empyre-] A strange bit of luck I was reading a book today and stumbled across a reference to Arjun Appadurai's Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination. I found a copy from Appadurai's Globalization (Duke UP, 2001) and started reading. First, I was kind of bummed and embarrassed that I hadn't read it before. But after getting over that, I was taken aback by the relevance of this article to the discussions we are having here. Everything from our crises of meaning, to the use of academic language, challenges to neoliberalism, the academic research marketplace, the problems with runaway financial institutions but most importantly, Appadurai offers some constructive suggestions to academics on how to facilitate globalization from below. I won't break down Appadurai's argument here. It is widely available (I found a copy of the article online). I expect that most here have
Re: [-empyre-] A strange bit of luck
I agree, it does tend to be a bit vaguely optimistic, but I don't know that there is necessarily anything wrong with broad metanarratives, particularly at a time when people on the bottom of the pile tend be isolated, and often opposed to each other. A broad narrative about justice or working class solidarity provides a pretext for talking about groups of people who share common interests. At some level, the idea that I could not coordinate a narrative with disparate populations, itself, becomes a metanarrative. And, a debilitating one. I do think that the capacity for people to bridge these pockets of humanity is powerful and explosive. NGOs are perfectly positioned to provide accounts provided academics, legislators, artists, and everyday people are willing to listen and help. (I know a lot of farmers and union workers who are very careful about buying fair trade goods. On the other hand, I know a lot of farmers and union workers who think fair trade is a bunch of liberal, socialist nonsense. So I think we really need narratives that can compete with the paranoid, even jingoistic, attitudes towards trade). A perfect example of success can be found in the recent successes that student activists have had in working with NGOs in Honduras against the anti-union practices of Russell Athletics. http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4367/pstudents_wont_sweat_it_p It can't solve everything. But on a practical level, I believe that this type of solidarity is possible, and becomes more and more effective the more it is engaged in. If I can get together with somebody in Detroit and agree to use a particular currency in a particular business network, it is possible for me to work with someone in another country to have a positive impact on a particular transnational network... the only real difference is how the network is organized geographically. Peace! Davin On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Nicholas Ruiz III edi...@intertheory.org wrote: Can't say I'm particularly moved by this.'yes, we can'...was ascliché then as it is now, no? The real question no one cares to answer in this regard is: yes, we can do what exactly?! For example, the local currency movement offers a specific answer to a particular problem...but the broad sweeping metanarratives of global emancipation read more like political speeches than anything else, it seems to me... nick Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Monday, April 6, 2009 6:33:50 PM Subject: [-empyre-] A strange bit of luck I was reading a book today and stumbled across a reference to Arjun Appadurai's Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination. I found a copy from Appadurai's Globalization (Duke UP, 2001) and started reading. First, I was kind of bummed and embarrassed that I hadn't read it before. But after getting over that, I was taken aback by the relevance of this article to the discussions we are having here. Everything from our crises of meaning, to the use of academic language, challenges to neoliberalism, the academic research marketplace, the problems with runaway financial institutions but most importantly, Appadurai offers some constructive suggestions to academics on how to facilitate globalization from below. I won't break down Appadurai's argument here. It is widely available (I found a copy of the article online). I expect that most here have already read it. It's much more readable than anything I could write. It is worth the time if this is something you are interested in. But I will plunk down a giant quote, just to give you a sense of the scope of his article: Such an account [of globalization from above and below] would belong to a broader effort to understand the variety of projects that fall under the rubric of globalization, and it would also recognize that the word globalization, and words like freedom, choice, and justice, are not inevitably the property of the state-capital nexus. To take up this sort of study involves, for the social sciences, a serious commitment to the study of globalization from below, its institutions, its horizons, and its vocabularies. For those more concerned with the work of culture, it means stepping back from those obsessions and abstractions that constitute our own professional practice to seriously consider the problems of the global everyday. In this exercise, the many existing forms of Marxist critique are a valuable starting point, but they too must be willing to suspend their inner certainty about understanding world histories in advance. In all these instances, academics from the privileged institutions of the West (and the North) must be prepared to reconsider, in the manner I have pointed to, their conventions about world knowledge and about the protocols
Re: [-empyre-] April 2009 on –empyre-
I will also take the time to introduce myself here, too. (Although I was a pretty excited participant last month, too). I am Davin Heckman and I teach in an English department at a small Catholic liberal arts college called Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. My teaching duties are divided between courses in media studies, visual culture, literature, and composition. Some people estimate that the unemployment rate in this little part of Southeast Michigan could be as high as 20%, so at a small school (with under 800 full time undergraduate students at our main campus, a great many of whom are first-generation, working class kids) we are also feeling the squeeze. Being so small, you really get to know students, so I am constantly reminded inside of class, outside of class, and everywhere else, that people are losing jobs, homes, and, in some cases, hope. As far as my research goes, I have spent the last few years with my eyes on neoliberalism (reading lots of David Harvey, Mike Davis, Frederic Jameson, etc.) and exploring a lot of theory through this lens (reading Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek, Virilio, Heidegger, Stiegler, Badiou, deCerteau, etc). In general, I guess I come back quite often to discussions I used to have with my advisor, Hai Ren, about Neoliberalism and Governmentality http://www.rhizomes.net/issue10/, in particular the pervasive character of capitalism. My book on smart houses (A Small World) attempts to discuss these problems in relation to household technologies. In addition, I am quite interested in electronic literature, new media art, popular culture, etc. And so the next step in my research has been to turn my critical concerns towards these things that I enjoy, to ask how the arts (broadly conceived) express, critique, embody, or propose alternatives to the current economic, political, and social malaise. Furthermore, I am interested in how I can function as a scholar and teacher to promote a critical awareness of this malaise. As a result, I have picked up a couple of odd projects. Most immediately, I am trying to initiate broad reforms in my school's liberal arts curriculum. I am also doing a bit of reading and writing on the history of the University as an institution, and am interested in sketching out various theories for the university as a humanist (or posthumanist, the specific terms are unimportant) enterprise after poststructuralism. For this I have been reading Bill Readings' University in Ruins, Gary Hall's Digitize this Book, and Neil Postman's various writings on the topic, Bernard Stiegler's works on Ars Industrialis, etc.) Hopefully, I will be able to sustain some sort of meaningful discussion in this area. Specifically, I am interested in how these philosophies will effect they way I teach courses like Electronic Literature, Visual Culture Studies, Media History, etc. In my travels, I have also identified a number of practical approaches to the problems of the current economy. In the upper Midwestern United States, especially in Minnesota, there is a strong tradition of co-ops. I am especially interested in worker-owned co-ops, community supported agriculture, and, because I work for nuns, religious and/or intentional communities. I am very interested in figuring out how these models might teach us something about how to create better colleges and universities that are not so dependent on the whims of the stock market. As a peripheral matter, I am also interested in the professionalization of academia. Going to various conferences, having many friends who are looking for jobs, and having very recently done the job search thing, I am acutely aware of the desperation that prevails among academic job seekers. This leads to an intensity which strikes me as contrary to intellectual life (the constant jockeying for attention, the obsession with prestige, the pressure of writing and trying to publish, etc.). I cannot blame people for trying hard to compete for jobs that are scarce, but as a whole this is also continually devastating the culture of academic life, which simply should not mirror the Wall Street ethos. Philosophy is about considering how to use our lives differently, in figuring out what to do. Too often, higher education is not about figuring out what to do, it is about learning what you have to do to progress to the next level, so you can hurry up and work. So that was my long-winded introduction. Peace! Davin Heckman www.retrotechnics.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] changing direction:what is the E-poetry of the future?
What I understand poetry to be is dependent on a certain type of subject. I think this subject needs to have some sense of literacy-- that they are conscious of communication forms and are aware that the use and reception of these forms can be developed along certain lines. So that you can move from a basic literacy: Reading a Coke can. To a more advanced literacy: Interpreting the place of that Coke can within a system of signs. To a reflexive literacy: Understanding how your subject position in relation to the Coke can and the system of signs is only one of many possible readings. I also think that this subject needs to have some sense of anticipation and memory. The play of signs is always torn between what they have meant to you. What they could mean to you. This conditions the reader to experience language as a vector of change. By being changed by someone else's language (their poem), the poet is able to make something meaningful (and by making meaning, I mean, stabilizing or destabilizing meaning, provided that it produces change in the consciousness of the subject). Finally, this subject depends on a community. That poetry is written for someone and by someone. Even if someone is writing for themselves or maybe they are writing for their dog, there is something inherently personal about poetry. It expresses some model of consciousness, it is received by some consciousness. My biggest concern with the future of poetry is that these notions of the subject are shifting. I have attended many lectures about how to connect with Millennial students. The Millennial student is multitasker, they have so many hours a day that they commit to writing text messages, they do several things at once, they know the world is messed up but they don't know how to change it, etc. Well, I believe the world is messed up and that people feel powerless, precisely because we cannot focus. And I think poetry does require some amount of focus. You might not have to sit down with the OED to read a poem, but you do need to engage it in multiple ways (and whenever I ask a student to sit down with the OED, they always come stumbling back to class with a destabilized sense of language--Ironic, no?). And I have a hard time imagining that poetry can exist without a subject who is capable of reflexive reading, a flexible range of temporal consciousness, and an awareness of the Other. I don't think these things are all off and on propositions. They exist on a continuum. But I do wonder if the whole idea of poetry is threatened because people are increasingly threatened. Peace! Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Towards (noh) theory of digital poetics
Personally, I prefer detailed replies. It's exactly what I need to open up my thinking. I do wonder if a canon is such a horrible thing. In a sense, things get canonized anyways. Right now, Amazon is building a canon. The New York Times bestseller list is building a canon. Google is building a canon. The canons are based on consumption patterns, which are easily skewed by PR techniques. Also, scholars pick and choose what we teach, and, unfortunately, this is often just based on who is the hot theorist or which subjects are prioritized in current criticism. And, while this idea of a poorly formed canon is appealing to me. I also think it allows other priorities, unnamed priorities, to drive the formation of taste. So, you have canons that are formed by who can generate better press, how much space there is in the marketplace, which cultural leaders have embraced it, and whether or not you can make money off it. But more importantly, having a canon, knowing what we know about language and the value of such things, just makes critics more accountable.Then you can actually hold someone responsible, if they write a book and it comes out of U of Chicago Press, and as a consequence, everybody starts focusing on their idea, and neglecting something else important, you can point to this as a weakness in our system of knowledge. If you are going to make a statement as a critic, then you have to first admit that you are engaging in power, and the idea of a canon provides a nice tidy node to hang these discursive threads so that other people can worship them or curse them. It means that people can and should take more care when they select texts. I have been fairly happy with the Norton Anthology, which creates a canon, but then I can also give my students things that are NOT in the book. (The ELO Collections also serve this function). This usually generates a pretty fantastic discussion about the canon. The same with electronic literature, we start with a definition of literature, but after they look at a few pieces, they start getting uncomfortable with the definition of literature they created on the first day of class. Then, eventually, as they look for their own works, they get unhappy with my syllabus. In this way, definitions, especially those which are held in earnest, can be a really good tool. They might not be what the artist needs, but they certainly seem helpful for more general readers. And, as a critic, I find them useful--in the same way that Derrida uses definitions. You jump off of them, head out into strange territory, and then circle back. (I'm just not as smart imagine if Derrida spent a significant portion of his life huffing gas and watching demolition derbies... that's about where I am at intellectually.) Peace! Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Towards [no] theory of digital poetics
In response to Alan and Juan's exchange: Criticism does accomplish a number of things... 1) For artists, the work of critics can provide challenges to work against or models to strive for. Whether or not they are valid, some of these strange critical flourishes are useful, especially if treated as axioms (to touch on what Jim pointed out). 2) Criticism, while it does weigh down the work of art, serves a practical purpose for the field in the sense that it is a sign of an engaged readership, willing to take works into serious consideration (and have really long-running debates about all the old literary questions as well as some new ones.) 3) Criticism can go a ways towards explaining what and why non-readers should become readers. In my opinion, much criticism tends to be insular, formalist, and directed exclusively toward the community of critics and artists, but it doesn't have to be. I know from my own experience that I can get too wrapped up in theory that references more theory (and I apologize), but criticism doesn't have to be this way. Criticism can serve to question a piece's social relevance, which isn't everything, but it is an important thing. 4) Criticism maintains the literary framework. I'm sure a lot of people don't like this idea. But I think it is important to have this category of things called Literature which we can use to sequester an object for a particular set of operations and diagnostics. It doesn't have to stay in this simulated environment forever, but for a period of time it lets people explore a particular object of desire through a filter, or genre of cognition. It's like taking your partner to the fantasy suites for the weekend, and see what it would be like if we were pirates. Except in this case, we are playing at reading literature. Having said all that, I do wonder about the role of artist as theorist, and theorist as artist. Philosophy tends to be obsessed with trying to nail down definitions of things, while also professing a certain amount of skepticism about those ideas that you are personally attached to. Art, on the other hand, seems to be about actualizing some idea that is put forward by the artist, while being disloyal to the formal restrictions placed around art. (Although there are theories which really seem like art, and there is art that is really just a theory.) So, theory and practice lack each other. Which doesn't mean that they are separate, rather they are in dynamic tension, and that it is a singular moment when the point of synthesis comes, is recognized, achieved, passes, or however you'd want to describe that moment. And, that moment is probably going to be one of those sublime, uncanny things, that is as familiar as it is estranging. To look on the bright side. I have read a great deal of criticism, both professional and amateur, on Frankenstein. I make my students write a paper on it every other year. (I have probably read the book 12-14 times). But each time I read, no matter how much criticism I carry around in my head, it always has something new for me. And, I'm quite certain that without all that criticism, I probably wouldn't keep reading it. Peace! Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Poetry and/or poetic
The way I take Badiou's discussion of the event is in the following way. An even is something which happens, but in order to regard it as an event as opposed to all the other things which happen all the time, but which are not considered events. Another way to think about it is that even stasis, a predictable trajectory, and so-called AIs (trajectories enhanced by algorithms) are situated along the stream of time. They happen, and they yield predictable results. The predictable results can be contained within a set of possible outcomes. But none of these things are events, because, if you consider them within their set, they are quite clearly bounded, they are finite, we can find the edges. And though we might experience such things as happening over time, we can also see the conclusion from the beginning. The event, in Badiou's work, is subjective in character. Not because of some kind of inherent human subjectivity (although I would not necessarily rule this out), but that subjectivity is produced where consciousness perception of the event. Something does happen at the point where the situation defies the expectation (where it differs from the situations described above). For Badiou, the event happens prior to its explanation. It is a revolutionary moment--and he describes four truth procedures--art, love, politics, science--through which events take place. A lot like Heidegger might say, being is something that is experienced precisely at the point where the partitions break down. I don't know that I would call Badiou a Heideggerian but I do think that his idea on this point does resonate strongly with Derrida's interest in openness and D+G's various discussions of Becoming. Another affinity would be between deCerteau's discussion of tactics, versus the grid-like structures of modernity. Thinking about this alongside electronic literature is productive, because my experience of the digital has been one of boredom. Machines are always neat until you figure them out. Games are cool until you figure out how they go (I don't even care about winning them). But where things get exciting is when someone figures out how to make a machine do something it isn't supposed to do. Hackers have been doing this with computers. But poets have been doing this to language for a lot longer. And when I see a poet try to test their are on a machine which is ruled by numbers... it's impressive. Especially if they can make the language of the machine into the language of the human. (And, those two languages are a bit different in their theory, origin, evolution, and daily use). Peace! Davin Heckman On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 5:19 AM, Simon Biggs s.bi...@eca.ac.uk wrote: I am arguing that all language, being a discrete system, is effectively digital, using an expanded definition of language here, including all human languages as well as other phenomena. I am not employing the word digital here limited to its use in computing but in the sense that any discrete system or phenomena can be described as digital. The question remains whether it is possible to signify without or beyond or prior to language. It is unclear if this is possible, but there are certainly cases where it is unclear where the significatory origin of an event lies. There is probable value in taking a relational approach to this, considering all signification to be a function of the relationships between things and that meaning cannot arise where there are no relationships (can anything be situated without a set of relationships?). These relationships (which may themselves be divisible) are discrete (this is probably a tautology) and so are functionally digital systems. Similarly, poetics indicate the dynamics of these relationships. Poetry is a very specific case which I am not addressing here. I am not that familiar with Badiou’s writing. I am rather comfortable with the orthodoxies of postmodernism and apprehend the Zizek’s and Badiou’s of the world as over-bearing in their certainties. In your reference to his writings I am not sure what you are intending to mean when discussing an event and its relationship to our finite rules. What finite rules? In what sense breaking away? Aren’t events the dynamic interaction of things, occuring as a result of their relations? How can something escape those relations and be at the same time of them? I don’t think I understand what you mean here – unless you are seeking to consider these things as a politic. I doubt the value of totalising an apprehension of human interaction and applying it to other kinds of relationships, although I might be tempted to attempt the inverse. Regards Simon On 11/3/09 01:00, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: I do not mean to quibble, but are you saying that since poetics must find their expression in some discernible phenomenon that it cannot escape the digital? I would say that the poetic event can
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 52, Issue 8
Simon Biggs wrote: Your point that poetics is that which escapes such discrete systems is well taken. However, whilst meaning (or not-meaning) might arise as an instance of the poetic obscurely (and apparently irreducibly) it is the case that such an instance surely be internally (and relationally/externally) organised as more than one element. Any other understanding would provoke that most reductionist of all apprehensions, essentialism. Given this, those components must in some manner be discernable. The question then moves to how we ascertain what they and their relations are. In this sense the poetic cannot escape the digital. I do not mean to quibble, but are you saying that since poetics must find their expression in some discernible phenomenon that it cannot escape the digital? I would say that the poetic event can be provoked through digital media and its passage can be marked in digital media, but neither of these are the same as the event itself. If we take it in light of Badiou's writing (and, since I am a lunatic, I may very well be misreading him), an event is what happens when things break away from those things which are bounded by our finite rules. We can always go back, after the fact, and write the equations that can account for the event. But the event itself, happens outside of the set of hypothetical possibilities. And, so, I don't know if this means poetics escapes the digital. I would say that while the digital (or any system of order) must always either incorporate revolution into its system or become a incorporated into the new system, I would say that the event, when it happens, runs contrary to any system of order that cannot contain it at the moment of its occurrence. So, maybe escape is only a fleeting thing. But even fleeting things can alter a person's entire relationship to a system of order. (Look, for instance, at the life of a junkie--all life potentially becomes recast in light of a single event, which is always pursued but can never be reclaimed--an eternity of struggle captured in a single, indelible mark of ecstasy, that is nevertheless written and re-written in the succession of hope and disappointment.) So, I guess I want to have it both ways. Poetics ruptures from any formalized system of communication... but it can always be accounted for in retrospect. (But it is never quite as good the second time around, because the event is no longer there, we are only looking at a snapshot of a happy moment.) Peace! Davin Heckman ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Laura Borràs
With no personal relationship to Laura or her University, it's hard for me to say anything substantial about the situation beyond my gut response: 1) She's a scholar who is obviously a leader in her field. Without ever having any personal interaction with her, I am still very familiar with who she is and what she does. There are people who are well-known because they excel at something in particular. There are people who are famous because they associate with people who excel at things. But in Dr. Borras' case, I think she is something else altogether. Her intelligence comes across in her writing. And she is very well-networked. But beyond that, she seems to be authentically open-minded in who she engages with and what she promotes through her work. As someone who can negotiate an emerging field in several languages, you'd have to be. And, still, she gives time and attention to people who aren't necessarily well-known, but who are doing great things. I always get happy whenever I find an academic who is really open-minded, who is working on doing something for the world, rather than working on their careers. 2) The abrupt sort of termination, without any formal appeal process or review is really scary. I understand that sometimes people don't fit at an institution for whatever reason, and I don't even know that I am too terribly hung up on tenure (at a time when working people everywhere, from adjunct faculty to widget makers, are getting the shaft, it seems inappropriate to get too loud about tenure without making a general complaint about what all working folks deal with.). But, regardless of formal rules protecting workers, the underlying issue is justice. If you are getting canned, you have a right to know why. You have a right to make your case to people higher up the ladder. (And, of course, there do need to be formal rules that make sure this happens). From where I am standing, it seems like Dr. Borras has not been treated justly. The letter I wrote to her school basically said this: Please make sure that you review this decision is reviewed by an outside party. It looks to me like she is being treated unjustly, and that your school runs a substantial risk in being perceived as unfair. More importantly, you are losing an amazing scholar who is widely recognized as a great colleague and a leader in her field. But to answer other people's concerns, I don't know that this is particularly something that targets new media scholars. Many schools see us as commodities that everyone needs to have. Where we tend to suffer is where humanities suffers in general. The humanities always needs to be defended from marginalization and elimination when competing ideological impulses are ascendant (whether they be technocratic or barbaric). Technology and new media are considered to be great capitalist endeavors, and so hiring a new media faculty member can be seen as a means to shift the focus of the humanities in a technocratic direction. Which might explain why some of us don't seem to fit in our humanities departments. It also explains why administrators get disappointed when we teach humanities. My approach to this problem has been to fight for the humanities and liberal arts, and to avoid teaching professionalism. This means you tangle with people who don't value the humanities, but that you make allies among those who do. As far as long term strategies are concerned, I think lists like this, which help us spell out what it is that we do, can help us protect our vocations from elimination. Definitions of e-poetry, while they might be ephemeral, help us commit to a certain approach. Similarly, answering the question, What are the humanities? and Why should we teach them? also might help us see our way out of the woods. For philosophical reasons, many of us are reluctant to articulate in positive terms, what it is that we do as teachers. But we need to do that from time to time. We can revise our answers when we need to. But we do need to defend some of the traditional functions of the University, even if it means getting our hands dirty with metaphysical dirt from time to time, if we want to argue that our subjects should be taught (and, that, as workers, we should be treated humanely). It's better than having to justify your job strictly in economic terms (which is metaphysical in its own way). Does anyone know if they are going to look at the decision again? Peace! Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
