Re: [-empyre-] Introductory post (Alan Sondheim)
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all -empyre! I am going to participate as a guest in the third week, kindly invited by Johannes and Alan. As an old participant of the list many of you know me and my past as political prisoner in Uruguay, in the 70, under our dictatorship. I wrote a book in Swedish, now translated into Spanish and published in a Spanish edition, about our jail, the torture, the deaths, the people who dissapeared...More than 3 in Argentina, 300 in Uruguay. The missing are also part of a narrative. The public beheadings are a kind of choreography, the knive, the head tilting, the body falling. I has been in Paris several times and in the museum of Carnevalet the last guiljotine is exhibited. The public executions were part of the scene in Paris and in the US people travelled around in the deep South seeing black people being lynched. There is a very powerful exhibition and book called Without Sanctuary http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html, where James Allen collected hundreds of goulish postcards showing the spectacle, the lynched person and the crowd gathering around eating and drinking and having a merry time. The postcards were photographies taken by local photographers and the postcards were sent as memory and memento. Which is the difference between these public executions where ppl gather and enjoyed the choreographed death and the deaths mediated by You Tube? Not great difference, I am afraid. In the French Revolution old grandmothers went to the place where the guiljotine stood and saw the aristocrats be beheaded, they were there fro hours, knitting, les tricoteuses, they were called. Making the most banal thing in the same moment thousands of people were killed, it was the time the historians call Le Terreur. Ana Valdés, writer On Tue, Nov 4, 2014 at 3:37 AM, Jon McKenzie jvmcken...@wisc.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Among the tragic-prop scenes I hope to entertain in the daze ahead— the society of the spectacle of the scaffold hypergraphé across jagged scales homo sacre data bodies global feeling pictografs Jon ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu On Nov 3, 2014, at 9:01 AM, James Barrett jim.barr...@umu.se wrote: So how does one fight this vast image of terror? That is a question I would like to see dealt with, among others, in the month ahead on empyre. How does one comprehend such pitiless acts of barbarism as public decapitation when they are combined with the amatuer YouTube asethetic and a resounding chorus of theocratic manipulation as audio and editing and are available online 24/7 from pole to pole? ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Introductory post (Alan Sondheim)
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello Alan, I am looking foward to your month of curation at empyre. I chime in early as an uninvited contributor. The reaction to ISIS, with such speculation, as you put it, on How does one live within the knowledge of annihilation? seems to me to say more about the magnifying powers of modern mass networked media that the strategic capabilities of the barbaric Islamic State. The possibility of us in the Western World being annihalated by the despotic and brutal IS is questionable at best. However, the actions of this group should provoke far more legitimate and pressing questions over the 10+ years of Western investment in the state of Iraq, along with the geo-political future of the region and the fate of the millions of people in the region who have already suffered under this horrible war and occupation. My point is, your statement that the anguish of political situations that seem out of control should be interogated for why these situaitons seem this way, not for the nature of control and how it can be restored to a prefered status quo. I believe it is the representation of the political situations that is out of control, to the point where the most bloody act now gains the most attention, as if rhetoric was now violence and words the flash of a sharpened blade. All maginfied in the echo chanber of an increasingly hierarchical World Wide Web (as in clusters of information centered on powerful producers and organizers) The IS has been described repeatedly as a Death cult by the current Australian Prime Minister, who unwitingly identifies the source of the image for this terror group as online media: “This mob, by contrast, as soon as they’ve done something gruesome and ghastly and unspeakable, they’re advertising it on the internet for all to see which makes them, in my mind, nothing but a death cult and that’s why I think it’s quite proper to respond with extreme force against people like this.” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/02/tony-abbott-says-extreme-force-needed-to-counter-isis-death-cult The horrific executions of nationals on film has become the calling card for the cruel and merciless group known as IS. But actual technologies of annihalation that can kill very large numbers of people have taken vast steps since Walter Heerdt and Bruno Tesch developed and delivered vacum sealed cannisters of Zyklon B to their fascist customers in Nazi Germany. Presently, no such technologies or infrastructures seem to be in the hands of the ISIS thugs and murderers (Thankfully). Instead, today for the majority of us in the world we have a lot of terror by virtue of a social media campaign that is extremely effective. So how does one fight this vast image of terror? That is a question I would like to see dealt with, among others, in the month ahead on empyre. How does one comprehend such pitiless acts of barbarism as public decapitation when they are combined with the amatuer YouTube asethetic and a resounding chorus of theocratic manipulation as audio and editing and are available online 24/7 from pole to pole? Finally, as an after-thought; citizens and non-citizens alike are regularly beheaded and even crucified (crucifixion in this context means the body and head would then be put on public display) in Saudi Arabia. It has been going on for decades- http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/saudi-arabia-five-beheaded-and-crucified-amid-disturbing-rise-executions-2013-05-21 where has been the global outcry over this barbarity? Best James James Barrett PhD Candidate/Adjunct Department of Language Studies/HUMlab Umeå University Sweden http://about.me/James.G.Barrett From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Alan Sondheim [sondh...@panix.com] Sent: 03 November 2014 06:19 To: soft_skinned_space Subject: [-empyre-] Introductory post (Alan Sondheim) --empyre- soft-skinned space-- (The beginning guests will be announced shortly) The topic for this month: ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance Our initial precis: The world seems to be descending into chaos of a qualitatively different dis/order, one characterized by terror, massacre, absolutism. Things are increasingly out of control, and this chaos is a kind of ground-work itself - nothing beyond a scorched earth policy, but more of the same. What might be a cultural or artistic response to this? How does one deal with this psychologically, when every day brings new horrors? Even traditional analyses seem to dissolve in the absolute terror that seems to be daily increasing. We are moderating a month-long investigation on Empyre into the dilemma this dis/order poses. We will ask a variety of people to be discussants in what, hopefully, will be a very open conversation. The debate will invite the empyre community to a deep
Re: [-empyre-] Introductory post (Alan Sondheim)
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Among the tragic-prop scenes I hope to entertain in the daze ahead— the society of the spectacle of the scaffold hypergraphé across jagged scales homo sacre data bodies global feeling pictografs Jon ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu On Nov 3, 2014, at 9:01 AM, James Barrett jim.barr...@umu.se wrote: So how does one fight this vast image of terror? That is a question I would like to see dealt with, among others, in the month ahead on empyre. How does one comprehend such pitiless acts of barbarism as public decapitation when they are combined with the amatuer YouTube asethetic and a resounding chorus of theocratic manipulation as audio and editing and are available online 24/7 from pole to pole? ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
