Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Brilliant thought provoking dis-cussion again, Empyrycysts.I think about different points on the law, the law as something that must beinterpreted, how the law rubs sapiens the wrong way and provokes art. The lawis art. Human activity in general is art according to Shelley and some others. Judges,politicians, are artists, newscasters, carpenters…….. I question what the Law(capitalizing just once) does if it (they?) runs out of money. What if thebankruptcy in such a hypothetical case were feigned? My thoughts turn to Kleeand other artists working on cardboard when other supports are unavailable. AndI think of the fact of people forced to create in prisons—Jafar Panahi,mentioned by Murat, perhaps not exactly creating inside a prison, but workingin the face of strict repressive regimes. What is to be done? In a sense stillalready the question/answer daily. In some poem would I ever bring K beforeHamlet? Before Ophelia? Perhaps these are only tiresome pipe dreams but at themoment they offer a way of keeping myself from what I think is a mistake, whichis to think that nothing works anymore. Which would be dis-respectful to Kleeto say the very least. Salud, William ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear Ana ah, maybe I misunderstood you, as you argued that societies are fundamentally unhealthy: [Ana schreibt] we talk a lot about healing, but suppose we don't need to be healed? I mean the idea of a healthy society is ludicrous, there is not a healthy society in the world. and if that were the case, you'd be confirming the bleak outlook or nihilistic overview that Alan enumerated insistingly earlier this morning, and your hope, which you do express, against the odds, perhaps in sync with the artistic work and cultural production critical education foregrounded by Monika Weiss and Christina Spiesel, namely to live in a real polyphonic society - what of this hope? Alan, I hear your despair and it weighs heavily, and yet you spoke out, at that lecture or presentation you gave on Wednesday, and so did Andreas when he addressed the law on either side of a wall in Jerusalem, and this speaking out is what Christina meant I think. I can''t manage to ponder the angels now (William must have Klee's/Benjamin Angel of History in mind who flies high, backwards, looking at the horror piled up, and yes, Alan, that horror grows and historically, how do you compare what cannot be forgotten or must be forgotten and ought not be forgotten? Johannes Birringer ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I ment that maybe societies are normally unhealthy and our try to normalize things, the frame violence and despair and happiness are risen from our beliefs, born with the Modernity, on a shiny good world where health and happiness were norms. If we compare in strict terms the number of beheadings carried on by ISIS and the number of people killed in drunk accidents on the motorways or in random killings in the US schools, what ISIS does is a grain of sand. But the frame makes the difference :) Ana On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear Ana ah, maybe I misunderstood you, as you argued that societies are fundamentally unhealthy: [Ana schreibt] we talk a lot about healing, but suppose we don't need to be healed? I mean the idea of a healthy society is ludicrous, there is not a healthy society in the world. and if that were the case, you'd be confirming the bleak outlook or nihilistic overview that Alan enumerated insistingly earlier this morning, and your hope, which you do express, against the odds, perhaps in sync with the artistic work and cultural production critical education foregrounded by Monika Weiss and Christina Spiesel, namely to live in a real polyphonic society - what of this hope? Alan, I hear your despair and it weighs heavily, and yet you spoke out, at that lecture or presentation you gave on Wednesday, and so did Andreas when he addressed the law on either side of a wall in Jerusalem, and this speaking out is what Christina meant I think. I can''t manage to ponder the angels now (William must have Klee's/Benjamin Angel of History in mind who flies high, backwards, looking at the horror piled up, and yes, Alan, that horror grows and historically, how do you compare what cannot be forgotten or must be forgotten and ought not be forgotten? Johannes Birringer ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- thank you Christina for offering a clear and sober approach to the conflagrations and to absolute violence which have been discussed, and you counsel making, naming, small acts, conversation, small acts. I agree with you, and that is direct, for me, and not, perhaps, paraphrasable. [Christina schreibt] I have been writing about education in the arts/humanities as critical in resisting technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity. So I see cultural production. and not just education about it, as a form of resistance. So while it is hard to match advanced weaponry, it is easy for people who feel powerless to address it through violent performance. And so we watch it all unfolding. So what can mere mortals do? For starters, name what is going on which I have experienced this conversation as doing. Be makers. Protect what we can. Small acts make ripples. What does happen, and of course i am included in this when i reference the readings i have done or the listening to fellow artists/cultural workers and their plays or performances, is that sometimes the analysis or the philosophy of just war or unjust war, and the naming of all the horros, the speaking about trauma, the speaking of technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity, take on a different dress. Our extended theorizing shrouds too. I am glad Aneta has arrived and just posted her long and intricate prose, which of course was partly a sketching of the critical landscape for this new book on endangered bodies.. And now that I reflect, as I did when Monika first mentioned the metaphor of the garden, I am trying to understand what you mentioned, this necropolitics, this war machine, this pop-up body [?} [and Ana just thought we needed to see this photo [!],] this gendered constellation, this new ethical aesthetic .. developed with regard to performing protest and activism. Never mind the diplomat idea. Or, well, okay, has someone here felt they acted as a diplomat and dissensus-maker? You may well have. ( they desire, as a performer-diplomat, to leave “the question of the number of the collective open, a question that, without him, everyone would have a tendency to simplify somewhat”) Hmm, I don't understand this paraphrase from Latour/Rancière.. Well, Aneta, now you have thrown out a number of ideas! We have to grapple. And I had also invited your co-editor Marina Gržinić to the table, as I had heard about her writings (Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism -- Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life), but unfortunately Marina declined. In fact a number of people declined. The other day I cited from Hamed's play (Home is in Our Past) and when I remember it, the no actually was the most reverberant single word I heard next to the unbelievable vocal performance by the woman singer which cut to the bone and was untranslatable. The man/soldier/immgrant in the mud, the one submerged in the dirt and the grey mass of vile liquid, he probably could not hear her. Johannes Birringer ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Fri, 21 Nov 2014, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- out is what high, backwards, looking at the horror piled up, and yes, Alan, that horror grows and historically, how do you compare what cannot be forgotten or must be forgotten and ought not be forgotten? Johannes Birringer It will always be forgotten, it's disappearing at an increasing rate of course. Unfortunately, I think, the 'ought' (cannot be/must be/out not) is words, a turned phrase, a sound. I keep wondering how I am with the topic here in general, I have, deeply, absolutely no hope, and that is hardly a message that bears repeating (although it is one that bares repetition). - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thank you, Johannes! And now asking a favor: 1) I do not want to sidetrack the empyre discussion although my query is in part engendered by the conversation, so if any of you knows something, you might just want to email me directly. Or if it is relevant to the on-going conversation, by all means respond to the list. 2) This is an academic research question. 3) The answer(s) lie in local knowledge of South Asian legal culture. Here goes: We have been discussing acts of horrible violence in part as a form of political performance. When we have discussed the State, is has mostly been about the exercise of war powers. The question that I want to raise is specifically about legal culture in the far east. One of the films I referenced when I joined in this month is called /The Act Of Killing./ During the course of the film, real perpetrators of horrible mass murder are asked about their acts and re-enact some of them without the blood, real bodies, etc. I remembered my law teaching colleague telling me about a trial in Japan that he witnessed -- or I should say he was there for part of a day -- during which a still photo of a jailhouse reenactment of the crime with a police officer acting the part of victim was presented as evidence. Meanwhile, this same colleague interviewed a South Korean colleague of his at another institution. Apparently in South Korea re-enactments often occur with cases and they are performed out in the open, fully public, after a confession but before a jury is chosen, etc. With today's communications, there is no structural reason why all potential jurors would not have seen this before they are called for service on the court case. So I am wondering about whether South Asian countries have related practices. The site of the film is Indonesia and I am wondering whether its re-enactments arise in part from a specific cultural context local to the story and that they would in some sense have a legal dimension that is not apparent to us viewing the film in America. Anyone know anything about this? With thanks, Christina Spiesel On 11/21/2014 2:29 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- thank you Christina for offering a clear and sober approach to the conflagrations and to absolute violence which have been discussed, and you counsel making, naming, small acts, conversation, small acts. I agree with you, and that is direct, for me, and not, perhaps, paraphrasable. [Christina schreibt] I have been writing about education in the arts/humanities as critical in resisting technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity. So I see cultural production. and not just education about it, as a form of resistance. So while it is hard to match advanced weaponry, it is easy for people who feel powerless to address it through violent performance. And so we watch it all unfolding. So what can mere mortals do? For starters, name what is going on which I have experienced this conversation as doing. Be makers. Protect what we can. Small acts make ripples. What does happen, and of course i am included in this when i reference the readings i have done or the listening to fellow artists/cultural workers and their plays or performances, is that sometimes the analysis or the philosophy of just war or unjust war, and the naming of all the horros, the speaking about trauma, the speaking of technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity, take on a different dress. Our extended theorizing shrouds too. I am glad Aneta has arrived and just posted her long and intricate prose, which of course was partly a sketching of the critical landscape for this new book on endangered bodies.. And now that I reflect, as I did when Monika first mentioned the metaphor of the garden, I am trying to understand what you mentioned, this necropolitics, this war machine, this pop-up body [?} [and Ana just thought we needed to see this photo [!],] this gendered constellation, this new ethical aesthetic .. developed with regard to performing protest and activism. Never mind the diplomat idea. Or, well, okay, has someone here felt they acted as a diplomat and dissensus-maker? You may well have. ( they desire, as a performer-diplomat, to leave “the question of the number of the collective open, a question that, without him, everyone would have a tendency to simplify somewhat”) Hmm, I don't understand this paraphrase from Latour/Rancière.. Well, Aneta, now you have thrown out a number of ideas! We have to grapple. And I had also invited your co-editor Marina Gržinić to the table, as I had heard about her writings (Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism -- Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life), but unfortunately Marina declined. In fact a number of people declined. The other day I
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear all, I have been on an airplane and now I see so much has happened in our writing in the meantime. I will read/address those newer posts later tonight but in this post I would like to share what I wrote on the subject of voice of (for) others in response to Johannes Birringer’s question: _ The voice must be given but only to those who express the desire or need, those who agree to have it projected into space, to have it exist as their voice but also as our voice, shared as an inscription into the public sphere. Those who are here now, our contemporaries, and who live in the shadows of their private or public trauma or who are socially removed from power, including power of voicing. How can we not offer [as we are positioned in the realm of visibility, we work with visibility as our language] to be the conduit, to be the transmitter, the ‘amplifier'? Those who are no longer here, the forty students in Mexico, those disappeared whose relatives I met while working on the project in Chile, whose fragile remains, particles, bone fragments, are still being searched for in the sands, in the dirt surrounding Santiago. How can we refuse to offer to be their microphone? Their amplifier? their resonance box? Their archivist? Their instrument? Their lover/loving listener? Those who are no longer here, the 1,000 young women seamstresses who perished in one of the death marches, on their way out of Gruenberg camp ( “Shrouds”), the abandoned, now forgotten (and sold to a private developer) by the city. The square as actively not remembered, not seen, by the citizens. The women who perished there are in oblivion; the site today looks like a damp, full of debris, which serves as a field for the enacted practice of forgetting, our active forgetting. How could I refuse to give them our/their voice, the voice of now living young women that worked with me on that site, lamenting, and who wanted to speak through their presence (the young women living in this town today), in order to give the voice to that absence and erasure. A ribbon came out of the young women raped by a group of citizens on a bus. One of them recalled during the trial a certain feeling of surprise at the site of that red ribbon, which was her intestines taken out by a rod inserted violently into her already devastated and destroyed bleeding body, inserted by the youngest of the rapists. Her heroic attempts to stay alive without internal organs left inside, just for a little while, some days following the destruction, where her body was literally turned inside out, her RIBBON (something I am working with right now), and her dramatic whispered call. She addressed us to us to not to forget . Her voice and her ribbon waving at us, still today. How can I not give her the voice, the amplification. How can we not give the voice to the raped and murdered daily victims of the horrific uses of war and sexual violence understood as means to destroy, as means to kill, to penetrate with rods, with bottles, with weapons, harsh objects, those taking ribbons out, in horrific acts of violence against human beings. We all ought to see the ribbon. It needs to glow before us, in our memory, in our wake and in our sleep. I dream of a monument to her internal ribbon that should occupy a public sphere. Perhaps within the canopy in front of the India Gate. A monument abolishing rape and abolishing gender based prosecution. We ought to stand by, identify with, those who’re tortured, silenced, disappeared, raped, killed, wounded, beaten, forgotten, invisible, impoverished, deprived, removed. We as artists have at least a chance, a potential, a chance at visibility, through the artifacts that we sometimes make, the conditions of enunciation. Art making as the realm of the visible, always within public domain Art as pollution and as an accusation and as a trial. Cultural production as political production, including poetry. Activating and transformational, even if only nearing this potential of transformation. The artifact, the poetic entity, the place, the site of the encounter, bordelinkings (Bracha Ettinger) . Artifact as the amplifier, as the conduit, as the transmitter, as a fluid membrane, as a form of resonance, as the act of waving our silents and often forcibly silenced arms towards the volume of violence. Potentiality of the realm of the symbolic, what Kristeva calls the “thing”. The shortcut, the residue, voice, voice over, voicing, speaking up, voice as presence. —— Monika Weiss On Nov 20, 2014, at 3:57 PM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all So much to ponder, in your postings, that one doesn't know where to go, following Simon's dark pronouncement of our dilemma, and the fear projected onto us all? Is it possible to talk about a
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear All, Taking up Johannes' extensions of the questions (below), let me do a wee bit of back and fill. Antonio Damasio in /Descartes' Error/ (1994) tells the story of a judge who gave up judging after suffering neurological impairment because he could no longer access emotion which is a guide in the complex equation of factors that go into judging. There are people in the legal system now who just think of it as the fair application of rules, [punishments being just desserts, and there are people devoting themselves to creating judging machines and software to predict how one or another judge will decide a case. There is a lot of thinking about justice at stake in our legal system right now. All the time humans make judgments but our options are being foreclosed by the mentality of the systems in which we now live. This is, of course, a first world issue except that our inability to come to terms with the third world as being real and complex in its own right means that we do not have good matches between our efforts and our results. Democracy cannot be exported as we've fantasized and neither can our health care system -- look at all the cultural factors that have made medical interventions so difficult in the Ebola epidemic begun in Liberia for instance. We are in the grips of a historical moment when emotions are being excluded for many reasons. So the education of our subjectivities through history, humanities, the arts is being cut out in favor of instrumental and concrete thinking. People don't stop feeling, cannot turn off their emotions, but with these big holes in their education, they have fewer tools to understand what to do with them, to understand their own humanity. Yesterday the New York Times ran an op ed by two doctors talking about how medicine is being done in by large intermediaries -- insurers and drug companies and medical organizations focused on externals -- and how doctors are under pressure to treat by the book. As they wrote, patients are NOT populations (the stuff of statistics) but individuals and the cookbooks might advocate treatments that are inappropriate for that individual. Doctors are now caught in between because their institutional self-interest is now at odds with their role as healers. This is a long introduction to a simple thought: we need the arts to come to the rescue. I keep thinking of the art teacher in (Teresin?) who taught the interned young very advanced modernist aesthetic tools to express themselves even as they waited for transfer to extermination camps. Their wonderful works are on now display in Prague. Was it foolish to keep them spiritually alive in the face of atrocity or the best protest possible under the circumstances? What comfort did the teaching give the teacher when all other sources of power were eliminated? And for the children? Didn't it give them an experience of freedom and possibilty? We need arts both in the universities and out there in public spaces. And we need artists to keep themselves alive, somehow, both as beings and as creators. I believe that this is the counter story to the awfulness of our perceptions of the world these days. And there is always an inter-generational conversation between arts makers and their forebears, and hopefully, inventively, we'll find ways to play it forward. CS On 11/19/2014 10:04 AM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- ps (to last night) I just wanted to acknowledge, in addition, some of the contributions to our discussions over the past days, from John Hopkins, Erik Ehn, and Christina Spiesel; and I found it interesting, in the contexts of human rights, the law and legal philosophy raised yesterday, that Christina chose to focus on the educational system and various aspects of teaching, cognition (machine) learning, assessment, etc., presumably in the evolving corporatized and privatized neoliberal higher education sectors. Christina also very persuasively points out that teaching that produces critical thinking is labor intensive -- it actually requires teachers who have real knowledge/preparation before they get to students and then students who can be responsive to inter-generational conversations. This notion of the inter-generational conversation, and the various modes and possibilities of cultural performance and knowledge transmission is an important one that deserves further attention, I believe, also especially because it seems to me that 'justice,' but also existing laws (and any form of dialogue and exchange based on situated codes and conventions and discourses of specific historical and cultural contexts) and rules of propriety, debt, compensation, or distribution, are intimately connected to teaching and learning. And of course, Christina, I agree with what you argue, namely that feeling
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Thu, 20 Nov 2014, Christina Spiesel wrote: This is a long introduction to a simple thought: we need the arts to come to the rescue. I keep thinking of the art teacher in (Teresin?) who taught the interned young very advanced modernist aesthetic tools to express themselves even as they waited for transfer to extermination camps. Their wonderful works are on now display in Prague. Was it foolish to keep them spiritually alive in the face of atrocity or the best protest possible under the circumstances? What comfort did the teaching give the teacher when all other sources of power were eliminated? And for the children? Didn't it give them an experience of freedom and possibilty? We need arts both in the universities and out there in public spaces. And we need artists to keep themselves alive, somehow, both as beings and as creators. I believe that this is the counter story to the awfulness of our perceptions of the world these days. And there is always an inter-generational conversation between arts makers and their forebears, and hopefully, inventively, we'll find ways to play it forward. CS Of course I agree with you, but what is happening is the reverse - budgets are being drastically cut back, arts in the schools are being eliminated, and even art colleges are suffering or turning into vocational schools for digital technicians who dream of the next big game but end up doing commercials. There are so many disconnects. I feel that the right wants less education - 1. It interferes with religious dogma; 2. It's an imposition from cabals with liberal agenda; 3. Those cabals are elsewhere and are dangerous; 4. It forces things like a belief in global warming upon us; 5. It teaches that slavery was all bad and overlooks the good slave-owners; 6. It interferes with producing well-behaved workers; and 7. It's going to break up _my_ family. So the result is a war on education and teachers, and the further result is an inability of a large number of people do understand the complexity of the world geopolitical system and its miserable consequences. ISIS becomes and produces spectacle and gains thereby, and education in so many areas of the world (not just the U.S., but Nigeria for a horrific example) is seen as dangerous, and decadent. If we can't even support decent K-12 in our own country, if we can't support the arts (which are notoriously underfunded here) or critical dialog, how can we act in the world at all? Who even knows where Syria, Iran, Iraq, are on the map? The difference between Sunni and Shiite? This might as well apply to the United States, change the religion: In 1928, four years after the abolishment of the caliphate, the Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna founded the first Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Sunni world, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). Al-Banna was appalled bythe wave of atheism and lewdness [that] engulfed Egypt following World War I. The victorious Europeans hadimported their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theatres, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices. Suddenly the very heart of the Islamic world was penetrated by Europeanschools and scientific and cultural institutes that cast doubt and heresy into the souls of its sons and taught them how to demean themselves, disparage their religion and their fatherland, divest themselves of their traditions and beliefs, and to regard as sacred anything Western. ( http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/934 ) So the usual question: What is to be done? - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear All -- I have been writing about education in the arts/humanities as critical in resisting technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity. So I see cultural production. and not just education about it, as a form of resistance. Yes, it is mind-boggling the extent to which performance is being used as adjunct to bad acts -- or maybe essentially a warped picture is the envelope in which some actors feel they need to operate. So while it is hard to match advanced weaponry, it is easy for people who feel powerless to address it through violent performance. And so we watch it all unfolding. So what can mere mortals do? For starters, name what is going on which I have experienced this conversation as doing. Be makers. Protect what we can. Small acts make ripples. CS On 11/20/2014 4:57 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all So much to ponder, in your postings, that one doesn't know where to go, following Simon's dark pronouncement of our dilemma, and the fear projected onto us all? Is it possible to talk about a political intention in accelerating violent imagery, collapsing historical precedence, dividing societies by reversing meanings, that debt will be credit, that risk and danger will be security, that wars are humanitarian, that is eradicating rights because they threaten democracy, privatising and marketising weapons manufacture, including nuclear arms, while directing their deployment in a controlled market of the senseless consumption of living flesh, enslaving governments to corporations, while violently overthrowing states who fail to surrender sovereignty or economic self-determination? [Simon] The reversing of meanings, or the crossing over (inside/outside, before/after) the Law, also haunts me after reading Andreas' letter. And yet, last night, I felt encouraged to think of poetry, yes, and the power of accents in the very ambiguity, unassimilated to power, towards law and power, also the power of joke - thank you Murat for the text you linked us to [http://ziyalan.com/marmara/murat_nemet_nejat3.html] - I laughed loud, and cried as well as you recount your wild dissimulations and self-immolations , migrating to an Am-erika without poetic continuities (and thus no anxiety of influence..of rights or rites); and I had to think of Rustom Bharucha's last chapter as well, where he struggles to explain Ghandi's training to die, training the body to become the proper source of sacrifice (Terror and Performance, p. 156), training non-violence in Ghandi's Hindu understanding of 'ahimsa' (non-violence) and 'satya' (truth) but thus also training to be sacrificed, to be beaten and to my horror Rustom then engages a longer discussion of the performatives of suicide bombers who record their video testimonials, auto-erotically preparing the destruction of self, before the act of killing, or 'martyrdom.' The Jihadists of ISIS, in interviews, are not sick in the sense in which the US secretary of state thinks they are. They knew their camera work too, in the videos, and two of them, believed to have been recruited from France and Britain, spoke yesterday of their 'spectacular' mission, perfectly ready, as Maxime Hauchard is quoted, for martyrdom, obviously. After reading Monika's powerful plea for healing, lamenting as pollution and indictment of public space-against-forgetting-and-in-need-of-communal enunciation-rituals, and Ana's resigned response that there is too much un-health -- it occurred to me that quite a few here amongst our participants, including Christina and Mine, who insist on the arts as educational techniques, and Murat, Rustom and Monika, and also Fereshteh with her new play, and of course Alan when he makes music and writes apocalyptic poetry -- are probing performance and theatre along a potential line -- maybe also considered spatial/physical practice - that can rupture emotionally (as briefly evoked last night in my reading of Hamed Taheri's lost home) and aurally the terrible legal spectacle , the thick liquid undecidablity, as Andreas ponders. Fereshteh, what were you (not) able to take from there to there, what accent do you speak in now? what garden do you tend now? And as a small but not irrespectful question to Monika, which was on my tongue last night when I ran into Olga Danylyuk, the question of speaking for others or of voice. [Monika schreibt] Leila Sadat, a scholar of international crime and law ... would travel around the globe, she would see and meet the communities, the individuals, the whole generations and nations affected, mourning, in suspension of trauma, but not fully mourning. What voice do they have, she asked me. Where does it live, the voice This is why subjectivity appears as witness; this is why it can speak for those who cannot speak’ When
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Johannes my answer was not resigned at all (I am not the kind of resigned people :) but wondered if our dilemma was not a typical dilemma risen from Modernity, to make Humanity happier and more enlightened with the help of education, health and good housing...The rethoric trap of progress, linear developing and shiny ny motorways but with the cost of diversity and ancient forests being cut down and ancient peoples losing their cultures and their habitat. I saw tonight a great documentary movie made by two Swedish directors about the politician and prime minister of Sweden, murdered by unknown in February 1986. I lived in Sweden at that time and we were all in schocked, should this crime be the end of the open society, wherer the prime minister and his wife could attend a film in a central movietheater without body guards? It was not, in shock but the Swedes coped with the loss of the inocence. Some years later their Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh, was murdered by a Serb in a store where she went with a friend to buy some clothes. The violence didn't succed in transforming the society, still today in Sweden the ministers travel in the subway and live in unguarded apartaments. It's quite similar here in Uruguay where our own president drives his old battered Wolkswagen to work and live in a shackle outside Montevideo. Ana On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 9:03 PM, Christina Spiesel christina.spie...@yale.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear All -- I have been writing about education in the arts/humanities as critical in resisting technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity. So I see cultural production. and not just education about it, as a form of resistance. Yes, it is mind-boggling the extent to which performance is being used as adjunct to bad acts -- or maybe essentially a warped picture is the envelope in which some actors feel they need to operate. So while it is hard to match advanced weaponry, it is easy for people who feel powerless to address it through violent performance. And so we watch it all unfolding. So what can mere mortals do? For starters, name what is going on which I have experienced this conversation as doing. Be makers. Protect what we can. Small acts make ripples. CS On 11/20/2014 4:57 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all So much to ponder, in your postings, that one doesn't know where to go, following Simon's dark pronouncement of our dilemma, and the fear projected onto us all? Is it possible to talk about a political intention in accelerating violent imagery, collapsing historical precedence, dividing societies by reversing meanings, that debt will be credit, that risk and danger will be security, that wars are humanitarian, that is eradicating rights because they threaten democracy, privatising and marketising weapons manufacture, including nuclear arms, while directing their deployment in a controlled market of the senseless consumption of living flesh, enslaving governments to corporations, while violently overthrowing states who fail to surrender sovereignty or economic self-determination? [Simon] The reversing of meanings, or the crossing over (inside/outside, before/after) the Law, also haunts me after reading Andreas' letter. And yet, last night, I felt encouraged to think of poetry, yes, and the power of accents in the very ambiguity, unassimilated to power, towards law and power, also the power of joke - thank you Murat for the text you linked us to [http://ziyalan.com/marmara/murat_nemet_nejat3.html] - I laughed loud, and cried as well as you recount your wild dissimulations and self-immolations , migrating to an Am-erika without poetic continuities (and thus no anxiety of influence..of rights or rites); and I had to think of Rustom Bharucha's last chapter as well, where he struggles to explain Ghandi's training to die, training the body to become the proper source of sacrifice (Terror and Performance, p. 156), training non-violence in Ghandi's Hindu understanding of 'ahimsa' (non-violence) and 'satya' (truth) but thus also training to be sacrificed, to be beaten and to my horror Rustom then engages a longer discussion of the performatives of suicide bombers who record their video testimonials, auto-erotically preparing the destruction of self, before the act of killing, or 'martyrdom.' The Jihadists of ISIS, in interviews, are not sick in the sense in which the US secretary of state thinks they are. They knew their camera work too, in the videos, and two of them, believed to have been recruited from France and Britain, spoke yesterday of their 'spectacular' mission, perfectly ready, as Maxime Hauchard is quoted, for martyrdom, obviously. After reading Monika's powerful plea for healing, lamenting as pollution and
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- ps (to last night) I just wanted to acknowledge, in addition, some of the contributions to our discussions over the past days, from John Hopkins, Erik Ehn, and Christina Spiesel; and I found it interesting, in the contexts of human rights, the law and legal philosophy raised yesterday, that Christina chose to focus on the educational system and various aspects of teaching, cognition (machine) learning, assessment, etc., presumably in the evolving corporatized and privatized neoliberal higher education sectors. Christina also very persuasively points out that teaching that produces critical thinking is labor intensive -- it actually requires teachers who have real knowledge/preparation before they get to students and then students who can be responsive to inter-generational conversations. This notion of the inter-generational conversation, and the various modes and possibilities of cultural performance and knowledge transmission is an important one that deserves further attention, I believe, also especially because it seems to me that 'justice,' but also existing laws (and any form of dialogue and exchange based on situated codes and conventions and discourses of specific historical and cultural contexts) and rules of propriety, debt, compensation, or distribution, are intimately connected to teaching and learning. And of course, Christina, I agree with what you argue, namely that feeling and the emotions are also guides to value; what one would probably have to address, also when I listened to Fereshteh's brief report on her new play, featuring a female protagonist (educated) who has experienced a trauma in her islamic homeland and doubts the effectivness of psychotherapy in a world full of violence, war and joblessness, tries to heal herself by writing a play. is the different availabilities of processing a world of violence, through a writing or talking cure, through role models, through action models, and incitement from preachers, elders, brothers and father and mothers and sisters and peers. Your comments, Christina, probably refer to the US (you teach at one of the top Ivy League universities?), but I wondered about the schools that Pia visited in the occupied territories, or schools in Afghanistan and Iraq. I tried to contact Iraqui writer Sherko Fatah after reading about his last stay in the land of his father, near Suleimanija, but he has not replied yet; I also contacted artist./ethnographer Abdel Hernández in La Habana; he teaches at ISA (Instituto Superior de Arte) and I asked him whether he would join our roundtable as I hoped to hear more voices from regions outside euro-american northern hemisphere;due to lack of stable internet connection, Abdel and his students were not able to follow this discussion. Whereupon I saved all the posts into a consecutive text file and sent to Cuba, and Abdel promised he would get back to us. Then, thinking of Rustom's crypt and a recent interview with Snowden in Russia, where he urges professionals to encrypt all client communications - I suggest to Abdel he better encrypt his letter to us. warm regards Johannes Birringer ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- [encryption 3, as promised; from Rustom Bharucha Terror and Performance] towards justice (paraphrased, from the last chapter, on 'performing non-violence in the age of terror') If there is one particularly disheartening leitmotif that underlies the expositions of terror here, it is the sobering and banal fact that justice never seems to materialize for the victims of terror, whether they are targets of terrorism, communal riots, genocides, torture or detention. Almost consistently, the perpetrators of terror (and counter-terror) facilitate a distortion and evasion of justice. In India, most of the worst perpetrators of communal violence and genocide are not just free; in positions of power, they almost mock any attempt to bring them to trial or to acknowledge their crimes. In my reading of this intolerable situation, there can be no truth and reconciliation for the world at large if the existing legal systems at national and international levels are not adequately mobilized to redress this omnipotence of injustice Rather than engaging a vast/complex subject such as the philosophy of justice [cf. Levinas, Derrida, Agamben, as also cited at length by Monika] or the performance of the law, I am now more concerned with the grassroots efforts by activists to engage with the protocols of the law even as the law tends to perpetuate injustice through its endless postponements of trials... Then Bharucha says, if justice is a form of waiting (postponement), it could be argued that terror is always, already, imminent, in the near future. Having read some of the striking posts today, by Andreas, Simon, Murat, Reinhold, William, Leandro, Fereshteh and Monika, I cannot help feeling that the law or the notion of justice, as well as what Monika has refered to as terror's suspension of all rights, perpetuated/perpetual exception from any rules, needs to be spoken about here -- I had asked Pia at the end of the first week, what were the human rights she was monitoring on behalf of NGOs? how are human rights spoken and regarded in occupying/occupied space? what is a monitor? public space that is (if I understand Monika implicitly) to be polluted by sound-voice of lament? Reinhold asks Pier, what catharsis ? (and I did watch Pier's documentary film Say I'm a Jew today - http://vimeo.com/47087841 -- shaken up without knowing yet why by the laughter I hear as well as the silent smiles of these many faces. Pier says: Emmanuel Lévinas refines (Buber's philosophy of) interaction by stating that the meeting with any face implies a distinct responsibility. Now we can reflect on Andreas's story of the jasmine garden where he was last week (East Jerusalem), having spoken on both sides of a wall. how does on address spatial justice from two or many sides? I read somwhere Michael Sfard, lawyer and Open Society Fellow, is completing a book that examines the last four decades of human rights litigation in Israel on issues related to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, studying the dilemma facing human rights defenders who challenge abuses using the abusing country’s own legal institutions. I tracked a website where he posted news on his efforts to help drive litigation against terror, and found numerous feedback comments full of abuse, hate, but also defense of his activism. Thus I wonder tonight, about the powerlessness of poetry, the ecstasy of the camera work -- having just glanced at Judith Butler's comments on camera work as instrument of waging war, as a material instrument (in her Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, 2010) -- and the distinction between lament and litigation. Is not lament also a form of litigation, but is justice necessarily impossible, and thus also to be lamented? respectfully, Johannes Birringer ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
