Kudzu Kongzi

Preliminary Notes to Laruelle's The Concept of Non-Photography and Barthes' Camera Lucida

2011-10-07T18:40:00.000-04:00

I've been invited to facilitate the initial meeting of an arts criticism readings group at the gallery {Poem 88} over in the Westside Arts District (thank you Robin and Jon!) If you're in the metro Atlanta area, please come join us, it's fun and stimulating! We're taking a vote on next readings, here.

For our first meeting, since October is Atlanta Celebrates Photography and the current show at {Poem 88} is a collection of photographs from Ryan Nablusi we agreed to read excerpts from Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida (1981) as well as from François Laruelle's The Concept of Non-Photography (2011).

I am very grateful to the participants in our conversation on Wednesday night. I also welcome your feedback over the next several months as I will be presenting a modified version of this discussion at Parsons (The New School for Design) in the spring of 2012 at the invitation of some friends teaching there.

Like my friends in the reading group, I am new to the work of Laruelle and his non-philosophy project. So, this reading group serves two purposes for me, as I will also be sharing a paper currently titled "What Is a Thing?" later this month as part of Robert Cheatham's Thresholds series, where I will share some more of this budding speculative/object-oriented/non-correlationist sort of thinking.

And here are the opening remarks I made to facilitate our conversation:

Reading Group Notes
Laruelle's The Concept of Non-Philosophy + Barthes' Camera Lucida
{Poem 88} Gallery; October 5, 2011
Paul Boshears

I really appreciate your enthusiasm and presence here today, thank you. I've chosen these two texts because I think that they speak to each other and since this is Atlanta Celebrates Photography month, it seems fitting to read these. François Laruelle, in a very Deleuzean manner asks, “What can an image do, what is it that can be done in an image?” (56) It's a great question for us as we take part in ACP this month.

I'd like to lead our conversation for a few minutes, to give an overall sketch of the conversation between these two selected passages in these books and I'd like to focus our conversation tonight on a problem that Laruelle presents in his book. Where Camera Lucida, at least in the section we've read together, offers some techniques or rules (it's his word) to appreciate a photograph, Laruelle has significant metaphysical concerns, which we can sense when he states, “The traditional double conception of the image as description and as iconic manifestation, applies to the photo even less than to any other type of image.” (68)

Between the two texts I would suppose we found the Barthes to be more accessible than the Laruelle. Barthes is likely a very familiar figure to many of you and Camera Lucida is unique among his texts because it is written in such a personal manner. As you may have read, this was the book Barthes wrote while grieving the passing of his mother with whom he had lived almost all of his life. The subtitle to the book is “Reflections on Photography” and I think we get a clear sense of this almost meditative quality as Barthes shares particular images and their impact on him.

In the selection from Camera Lucida we encounter two important terms that will, I hope, serve to guide our discussion tonight. Barthes characterizes photography as an “uncertain art” and curiously introduces in that same sentence that this uncertain art is as uncertain as “a science of desirable or detestable bodies.” (18) And here we have the term that is going to guide our discussion of these two very different texts. Both Barthes and Laruelle are presenting us with their criteria for developing a science of photography.

I'd like to bring up another item to guide our talk: both Barthes and Laruelle, in their own ways, present a world of objects that do things. The world is seen, in both authors, as composed of thrumming material “vibrant matter” to take a phrase from Jane Bennett. Barthes discusses how those photographs that “reach” him—unlike those that simply present themselves to him uninvited—animate him and he, somehow, reciprocates and animates the photographs. This exchange of, what? energy?, is “what creates every adventure,” (20) and without advenience or adventure there can be no field called Photography and no objects called photographs to populate that field. (19)

Barthes admits to borrowing and working, self-consciously, with the paradoxes that accompany Phenomenology. He attempts to sketch an eidetic science of Photography (20). But Classical Phenomenology, perhaps frustratingly for Barthes, has never, “spoken of desire or mourning.” (21) This is the first time that Barthes discusses mourning in Camera Lucida and its introduction here is really interesting because he traces a previous interest in the ontology of photography, but that question, “what is the nature of a photograph” is no longer important for Barthes as he no wants, “to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think.” (21)

Barthes, in trying to establish how he assesses the quality of a photograph, uses two words from Latin: studium and punctum. Barthes describes studium as the “application to a thing” a kind of knowledge that has been metabolized through one's cultural filter, this filtering (or screening, if you will) is the means by which we participate in the world. (26)

The studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste [....] The studium is of the order of liking, not of loving; it mobilizes a half desire, a demi- volition; it is the same sort of vague, slippery, irresponsible interest one takes in thepeople, the entertainments, the books, the clothes one finds "all right." (27)

The existence of studia is what underwrites what we might call a social contract as it is the mechanism by which we recognize each other. (27-28) The studium is the result of mutual intelligibility, it's the reason why I can say tree and you comprehend the concept. But you and I may not be referring or reflecting on the same tree.

The punctum is “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” (27) Puncta disturb studia and do so without any intentionality on the part of the photographer; puncta exist, in this sense, independent of human psychogenesis. Puncta are “partial objects” (43) and do not reveal there reveal themselves except in memory. (42) The relationship between studia and puncta is not one of causality, they are simply co-present when it happens to be the case. (42)

But, when studium and punctum are co-present, we have the potential for subversive and dangerous photographs because the co-presence of these two elements establishes a curious quality in what we tend to say is inert material. The photograph enables an object to speak and this compels us to think (38) and this inducing of thought in the viewer is creates a site of subversive potential, but it's not only in the Spectator, but between the photograph and the view, “Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.” (38)

Such curious object relations here. We would think, then, that the role of the critic or the philosopher would be to facilitate the Spectators' relationship to those objects which happen to possess both studia and puncta. But not so, according to Laruelle. “What can an image do, what is it that can be done in an image? The philosopher's role is not to manifest this to us, but to hide it from us, inscribing the photo in a prosthesis [...] that denatures its truth.” (56) The philosopher, he says in another text, “A philosopher has never looked a man directly in the eyes [....] The philosopher misrecognizes the immediate for he himself is not immediate.” ("Biography of the Eye," 2009)

Where Barthes constantly suggests an interiority to photographs (and perhaps all objects), a certain call to immanence, Laruelle seems to be saying that no philosopher can tolerate immediacy. And this has to do with a maniacal refusal to relinquish the terms by which identity is formed. “Philosophy represses the identity of the photo, divides it or puts a blank in its place, a blank it no longer sees any more than It sees this identity.” (57)

Laruelle's position is that Western philosophy is so entrenched in transcendental metaphysics that no thing can be what it is without first being screened, that is represented. That is to say, processed through the lens of culture.

Any philosophy whatsoever (empiricism, rationalism, semiology and even
phenomenology) will try to conflate the being-photo (of) the photo with a
transcendent content of representation, the ideal or the a priori with the effective,
on the pretext of 'shedding light on' or rendering comprehensible—by reflection
—the photographic irreflective. It simply comes down to an attempt at reification,
an attempt to enclose the infinite uni-verse that every time, every single photon
deploys … (58)

Where did this position come from? Let's try to situate the conversation Laruelle has been having for some time now.

(from Alexander Galloway's Translator's Note in the essay “The Truth According to Hermes: Theorems on the Secret and Communication” in the journal Parrhesia 2010)

“Philosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it,” wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari late in life. By non-philosophy they point not simply to a general inversion of philosophical thought, but to the work of one particular compatriot, the author and self-proclaimed “non-philosopher” François Laruelle.

Non-philosophy hinges on a rejection of what Laruelle calls the philosophical decision. To engage in the philosophical decision is to endorse the position that anything and everything is a candidate for philosophical reflection. Thus to do philosophy means to reflect on the world, and likewise if one is being philosophical, one is necessarily being reflective or meta-philosophical. Non-philosophy means simply to refuse such a decision. In other words non-philosophy refuses to reflect on things. Instead non-philosophy withdraws from the decision, and in doing so enters into a space of what Laruelle calls science.

Laruelle’s goal is to cut through the correlationist thinking associated with hermeneutics that forever breaks truth in half as: truth and its communication, or the secret and its manifestation. We must instead, as Laruelle writes here, “let the philosophers in on the secret,” so that they may pursue a rigorous science of truth. (18)

Why should we be concerned at all with this distinction between a radical immanence and the traditional transcendental approach which most of us here today are so accustomed to employing, and why would photography be the field or the objects through which we can understand what's at stake in the shifting from the transcendental perspective to that of radical immanence? “As soon as the photo is understood in the context of Transcendence in general, it is the object of a double causality, with one the inverse of the other.” (63) Causality itself goes wonky in this perspectival shift.

Attempts, such as those developed in Deconstruction, may delay the sleight of hand, but ultimately they, too, subsume under the gaze of Philosophy, the very subjects which the practice tries to address. “No philosophical interpretation escapes this illusion, not even those that deconstruct this convenibility of the image and the real, that differ this transcendent mimesis but which do not know that what can be in an image does not stem from the Other but from the One. The Other radicalizes absence and exacerbates the 'symptomatic' nature of the photo [....]” (65)

What Laruelle is putting forward in his redefinition of science is the potential for understanding through relationship that is not mediated, or broadcasted, it is immediate. This immediacy has a reality that we tend to occlude through a layering onto the world an anthropocentrism that is perhaps ill-equipped to provide solutions to real problems facing us.

If there is a photographic realism, it is a realism 'in-the-last-instance'; which
explains why to take a photograph is not, at least as far as science is concerned, to
convert one's gaze, to alter one's consciousness, to pragmatically orientate
perception or to deconstruct painting, but to produce a new presentation, emergent
and novel in relation to the imagination, and in principle more universal than the latter.
Now, this might seem like a bunch of hullabaloo but let me put forward what I believe to be a real-world, practical application of where Laruelle's position can lead us.

Currently we have technologies at work that have amplified and made possible a vast universe of scientific production. Neuroscience, for example, has developed in a manner that presents stunning, Science-fiction sounding headlines, suggesting that soon we will be able to use technologies to read individuals' minds, or record dreams. But this is a claim to realism, that the technologies are presenting images of the universe that are more real than the universes we interact with already. As Laruelle states “If resemblance is a resemblance to the absent but supposed perceptible (or indeed on the contrary, opposed to perception) object, this distinction still inscribes itself within the horizon of transcendence or of the World.” (62) The images that an fMRI scanner present are not how your mind works. We're barely able to understand how the brain works. Nonetheless these images are regularly being called upon to act as empirical proof of criminality and of a curious legal conceit we call intent. Laruelle's critiques of the wholesale subsuming of photography into philosophy isn't unique to only photography, but our worldview itself is in need of a reconsideration.

Note About My New Post at BURNAWAY

2011-09-15T13:11:00.000-04:00

You can read my review of Performances in Nearly-Inaccessible Environs, Public and Private over at BURNAWAY.
In the review I briefly touch on the question, "what does it mean to be contemporary?" It's a simple question, but there are significant problems that burble-up when we try to answer it.

Hans Ulrich Obrist's article, "Manifestos for the Future," in e-flux is pretty great reading. As he states,

the phrase “contemporary art” has special currency today, as a commonplace of the media and of society in general. If “contemporary art” has largely replaced “modern art” in the public consciousness, then it is no doubt due in part to the term’s apparent simplicity [....]

But, of course, every work of art, every text, every action is always committed to in the present; and as such is always a product of contemporaneity, right?

The Street Enters The House. Umberto Boccioni (1911)

"Not necessarily," says Giorgio Agamben (with whom I studied this summer at the European Graduate School). As he states in his essay "What Is the Contemporary?" contemporariness is a singular relationship with times in which one lives. "Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it" (41). It sounds like an easy, off-the-cuff, maybe even elitist, dismissal: there are important people and then there's the rest of the rabble, and they are unimportant and of little currency with which to effect current events. But then Agamben goes on to discuss the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (whose works we studied this summer in Judith Balso's poetry class—my notes from these classes will be available as soon as I can get them typed-up, promise).

Mandlestam's poetry exemplifies well what I'm getting at in my review of Performances in Nearly-Inaccessible Environs: works of art have a weird temporality. Mendelstam's poetry is written at a particular time in Russia's history, but his poetry speaks to more than only Russianness or 20th centuriness. This is because, for Mandelstam, the relationship between world and language is not fixed; they elide one another. As a result of this slippage, the work of Mandlestam's poems are never finished—they continue to create the worlds they seem to be describing.

This is why I am asking for your help in collecting the documentation of the Performances in Nearly-Inaccessible Environs... series. By allowing the documentation to evaporate, the works are forced closed and that's a shame because I suspect some of those works still have a lot to say about Atlanta and, perhaps more interestingly, about the housing boom that swept-up the country during the Aughts and precipitated this (why aren't we just calling it a depression already) prolonged recession.

As an aside: for those of you not familiar with Giorgio Agamben, maybe you could start by reading the introduction from the editors of a special issue of the journal Theory & Event.

Call for Performance Works (Please Distribute Widely)

2011-09-15T12:54:00.000-04:00

I am very excited to have been invited to curate the public works section of the inaugural Off the EDGE contemporary dance event at the Rialto Center for the arts this January.

There will be some very significant dance makers at this week-long event and the opportunity for peer-learning is excellent.

Below is the call for works; my curator's statement is on the second page.
Edge PUBLIC Call for Works

A Tale of Three Terrorists/Freedom Fighters

2011-09-01T22:24:00.000-04:00

If it's not entertaining, it's not really happening

The Christian Science Monitor (syndicated by MSNBC) has this cheery story of a Math major from UCLA who has decided to spend his summer vacation—wait for it—fighting with Libyan rebels. How exciting! He's just a young man who knows how to have a "'sick' vacation" as he told his classmates. It's a plucky little story.

But it's hard not to think about Detainees number 001 & 002 at Guantanamo Bay: John Walker Lindh and David Hicks.

Hicks' new book has brought about this uninforming pile of dreck from David Penberthy at The Punch "Maybe Dave Just Shouldn't Have Joined the Taliban." The chief complaint here being that Hicks should have known that the tides of history were going to shift against the former US-sponsored freedom fighters and now the kid's gotta take his lumps for being in support of a currently-unpopular political group that most of his compatriots probably knew next to nothing about before the war spectacle began in 2002. Never mind the serious violations of international law that put Hicks in a US kangaroo court and illegally held by the US government.

What's really compelling, though is the narrative of how John Walker Lindh was acquired by the US military in Afghanistan as told by his father in The Guardian this July. This is a must-read.

The Quebec Provincial Police had to eventually admit that these three terrorists captured during last year's G20 summit in Toronto were actually police operatives used to justify the state of exception and suspension of civil rights.

I'm not saying that either Hicks or Lindh were not morally wrong, although I suspect there was systemic violations of their rights by the US government (just as was the case for dozens of citizens from the UK and Germany, etc.) The truth is neither Lindh nor Hicks were guilty of the crimes for which they were tortured and mistreated and held captive and paraded as bogeymen by the US government. Laws matter, it's what makes a country worth defending and living in; Lindh and Walker were made to serve as homo sacer.

new post at BURNAWAY

2011-07-08T21:38:00.000-04:00

Last week The Blow came through Atlanta on their tour of the U.S. and while in the A they gave an artist talk. Their discussion of audience dynamics got me thinking about the nature of publics, which is a significant aspect of my work on spectacular agency and since we're on the eve of another U.S. Presidential election season the mediasphere will be chock full of talk about the American public as though we all understand what a (the) public is.

You can read my thinking on the matter at BURNAWAY.

"Interventions" Symposium at the Autonomous School in Zürich

2011-07-04T12:54:00.000-04:00

"Drills 22 & 23," from The Palmer Method of Business Writing. A.N. Palmer (1935)

Christian Hänggi has been busily arranging for a two day symposium at the Autonomous School in Zürich at the end of July.

There will be presentations from Julia Hölzl, Jennifer Davy, myself, Benedikt Wahner, Jacob Miller, and Jamie Allen (who's going to be leading a soundwalk).

The flyer is available here (.pdf).

The event also presents an opportunity for Jamie and I to discuss the newest issue of continent. which is now available. With Nico Jenkins, we are also planning an event in Saas-Fee with our colleagues at EGS.

new post at BURNAWAY

2011-04-26T10:57:00.000-04:00

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Lauri Stallings and Nicole Johnson of gloATL and record another episode of ARTSpeak on AM1690 WMLB. The three of us discussed gloATL's world premier of Chapter III: This Is a World.

You can hear it today on WMLB AM1690 during your drive home or also by visiting BURNAWAY.

new post at BURNAWAY

2011-04-12T13:22:00.000-04:00

I have a review of Craig Dongoski's show Attack/Decay/Sustain/Release (Whitespace, 814 Edgewood) over at BURNAWAY.

It's a great show and I enjoyed writing this review so please visit both the gallery and BA.

Moving Bodies for Democracy in Canada

2011-04-06T12:02:00.000-04:00

From the always-awesome Department of Biological Flow I am glad to share the following press release:

3 FUCKING METRES
Moving Bodies for Democracy in Canada

#CAN3FM

While struggles continue around the world for the democratic right to vote, Canada had a voter turnout rate in its 2008 election of 58.8 percent, the lowest percentage in Canadian electoral history. Clearly we need to start thinking much smaller.

Do NOT use your remote control to turn on your TV for the national Canadian Leaders' Debates on APRIL 12+14: Walk, Run, Wheel, Crawl, Skip to the TV instead. Cover the 3 fucking metres under your own power. Move your body for democracy.

Once you complete the basic training, move to discuss politics in a public space (coffee shop, gym, community centre, mall, market, transit, etc, etc, etc) with a friend, acquaintance, stranger, or anyone else of interest! Suggested non-partisan phrasing may include: "Are you voting in this election?"

Finally, vote! No remote controls! Walk, run, wheel, crawl, or skip, to your polling station on MAY 2, 2011.

One-week training program starts today for 3 FUCKING METRES!

3 FUCKING METRES
http://tinyurl.com/CAN3FM-2011

Get VOTER FIT in just ONE WEEK!! ®
http://tinyurl.com/CAN3FM-voter-fit

How to create VOTING SHOES ®
http://tinyurl.com/CAN3FM-voting-shoes

"To appropriate the historic transformations of human nature that capitalism wants to limit to the spectacle, to link together image and body in a space where they can no longer be separated, and thus to forge the whatever body, whose physis is resemblance — this is the good that humanity must learn how to wrest from commodities in their decline. Advertising and pornography, which escort the commodity to the grave like hired mourners, are the unknowing midwives of this new body of humanity" (Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, p.50).

All artwork by Department of Biological Flow

.....

Post at New American Paintings

2011-03-09T17:08:00.000-05:00

I had the pleasure of visiting Craig Drennen's studio at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and it can be read over at New American Paintings' blog.

new post at BURNAWAY

2011-03-01T22:23:00.000-05:00

I had the great pleasure to sit down with Annette Cone-Skelton (CEO/President/Director) and Shana Barefoot (Collections & Exhibitions Manager) of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA) for a new episode of ARTSpeak at AM1690 WMLB - The Voice of the Arts.

You can hear the three of us talking about MOCA GA's (accidentally) biennial "Movers & Shakers" exhibit over at BURNAWAY.

Interview with Marina Abramović at BURNAWAY

2011-02-28T13:04:00.000-05:00

I had the singular pleasure of sitting down with Marina Abramović at SCAD-Atlanta's Digital Media Center last week and with the kind assistance of some friends we asked her some questions.

You can read our conversation at BURNAWAY.

Many thanks to Jeremy Abernathy and Jennifer Jones for providing the logistical support to make this possible.

Far out!

First Issue of continent. Is Available

2011-02-17T16:14:00.001-05:00

The editors of continent. are pleased to announce the release of the first issue of their new journal.

The contents include a dab o' speculative realism from Ben Woodard (of Speculative Heresy and Naught Thought), a photo essay by Rainer Ganahl, a short story by the inimitable Gary Lutz, and more!

We are profoundly thankful for the support of our Board of Advisors and to the Culture Lab at Newcastle University.

We're very excited to do this work and we hope that you enjoy.

New Post at the International Schopenhauer Association

2011-02-11T11:03:00.000-05:00

Some might laugh that I have Google Alerts set-up for variations of my name. But you know what? It's really useful. With these alerts I learn about how people can see me and how they might form opinions about me.

Today I was greeted with an alert that said my name was listed on the website of the Internationale Schopenhauer-Vereinigung – Forum für offenes Philosophieren e.V. (the International Schopenhauer Association, based in Hamburg, Germany). Which was odd at first, but then I remembered that the Director of the European Graduate School, Wolfgang Schirmacher, is the President of this Association. And, of course, I took Herr Doktor President Professor Schirmacher's seminar on Schopenhauer, titled "Living Disaster" if I recall, this previous summer while in Saas-Fee.

While in the seminar--which was quite good--we had to write several quick response papers to Schirmacher's questions and in response to selected readings from his translations. If you follow this link, you can read one of the responses I wrote for that class.

The writing is a bit short on quotes from Schopenhauer, but it's full of enthusiasm.

new post at BURNAWAY

2011-02-05T07:58:00.000-05:00

Jiha Moon has curated a group print show at Get This! Gallery on view now through early March. At BURNAWAY I've shared my conversation with Moon about the need for painters to share their vision through celebrating the successes of their peers. Moon calls for a revaluation of works on paper, which are often denigrated as simply vehicles for making money, but not collectible in the ways that paintings are.

Post at New American Paintings

2011-01-31T11:15:00.000-05:00

I recently had the great pleasure of visiting the studio of Atlanta-based painter, Jiha Moon. We had a fine talk and my interview with her is now available for your pleasure at New American Paintings' blog.

Moon was also generous in sharing images of her paintings and you should definitely click over and check out her amazing work.

Laura U. Marks Evening Lecture

2011-01-25T14:33:00.000-05:00

Epicurean atoms: in motion, varying sizes
Kalāmic atoms: stable, one size

The universe only exists of God and atoms in accidents

Absolute Occasionalism -- God sustains the universe in a series of commands, one body at a time, "continue to exist, continue to exist, continue..."

This was continuous command hypothesis was opposed by the Willing of God.

We can see the anxiety of living in a universe that is constantly on the verge of being eradicated.

The Sunni world closed-off the rational exploration of the Qur'an

In the 13th century there was the rational ordering of how the letters of of the Qur'an would be written. The letters were based on the point in a rhomboid shape. These square shapes harmonize with the square pixel and both serve as the entry to an exploration of the infinite.

What interpellates the subject isn't the image but the jump-cut

Islamic Atomism can help account for the appearance and disappearance in lived experience. The on-off of the signal, the pixel, the voxel; digital media rely on a minimal parts model.

While the Sunni Caliphate held a prohibition against exploring the parts comprising the minimal parts, in Cairo the Shiite Ismaelis were exploring these composing elements.

As writing developed the tiny writing of letter began to become tiny fields of intensive expressions of the infinitesimal sublime

New Post at Burnaway

2010-12-17T13:36:00.001-05:00

The fine folks that make BURNAWAY have published my review of gloATL & Luminocity Atlanta's Hinterland.

Profuse thanks to Jeremy Abernathy and Rachel Chamberlain for their excellent editorial guidance!

Adrian Smith's YouCut Video Is Wrong About NSF

2010-12-08T15:42:00.001-05:00

I called Congressman Smith's office (202) 225-6435, spoke with "Nate" and asked him to forward this message:

My wife risks her life everyday conducting research that brings hope to the families of those stricken with neurodegenerative diseases, specifically Parkinson's disease (PD).

She is a postdoctoral fellow at the leading PD research lab in the world. It's not in Japan (we've worked there), and it's not in New Zealand (she's worked there, too), and it's not in Italy (where another researcher actually memorized my wife's paper and quoted it to her at a recent conference). The best lab in the world for what she does is here, in the U.S.

And it is the U.S. that continues to lead in scientific innovation because of the nature of the funding structures that exists at places like NIH, NIDA, and NSF.

The funding mechanisms in the U.S. work well. If you ask any scientist that's worth their salt, they will tell you that they actively seek more public participation in the process of research innovation and creation. That's what Cornell's Doug James and Northwestern's Luis Amaral (the two scientists whose work is singled-out in the above video) even said in this article.

My wife's research is dangerous. Everyday she could potentially die from conducting her research. Her colleagues are regularly threatened and intimated by activists. In fact, at the recent Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, there was a bomb threat at her hotel.

When people learn that my wife's a neuroscientist they tend to think that she's two things: 1) a neurosurgeon and 2) rich. She is neither. She would make more money if she was managing a coffee shop.

So why should she risk being killed by the work she does, or being killed by some disgruntled populist? She'll quietly tell you that she does this work because she believes in serving the greater good.

And shame on Adrian Smith for stirring-up public ill-will with a campaign like this.

As someone who sits on the Committee on Science & Technology, Rep. Smith has an obligation to foster participation in promoting science, not fomenting distrust.

New Post at Burnaway

2010-12-06T10:20:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to Rachel Chamberlain for her editing prowess and to the fine folks at Burnaway for publishing my review of Laura Poitras's O' Say Can You See? which is showing at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

I've written about this over at my MA thesis blog, Spectacular Agency, and I've also had a fine conversation with Jeremy Abernathy (Editor in Chief of Burnaway), which you can hear on their podcast, here.

gloATL's Luminocity | Hinterland - Brief Review

2010-11-28T17:28:00.002-05:00

Dance performances should not be understood in the same way as other media that can be projected on a screen or a canvas. Dance should not be understood in the same way that theatrical events are presented.

Last night's performance illuminated what dance is about: choreographing relationships with objects.

We tend to think of us doing things to objects, as though the relationship is one-way. Dance points out that there is mutual influence between objects. The manner in which a space is arranged already forecloses what movements are possible.

Last night gloATL presented Luminocity Atlanta's Hinterland, a "parade-like" event that was a collaboration between gloATL and Big Boi from Outkast. Arriving from Five Points station Woodruff Park's Atrium and Speaker's Square (a speaker's box right there, nod to Outkast) was packed. Just beyond the initial crowd was an even larger crowd in the center of the park between the Atrium and the waterfall wall at Luckie Street. Throughout the park are lights, dancers wrapped in LEDs, a mobile light trucks, smoke machines every where, the buildings were blasted with projections. Wandering form one end of the park to the next, the event then burst from the confines of the original block and, with a cadre of drummers, some on a steampunk-styled float, the crowd could dance down Peachtree Street and across town to Centennial Olympic Park. It was very ambitious in terms of scale.

Reading the event's website it's hard to get a cohesive sense of what the event would entail or what it was "about." Clearly many people arrived with an agenda for how to see Big Boi. He should be on a Jumbotron, there should be speakers pumping out enormous sound (never mind that you're in the enormous sound cave called Woodruff Park, etc. That sound could be lost so easily points out how enormous the space called "downtown" is: more than simply the square footage of office space, or sidewalks, or lanes of interstate highway that flow through it - there is also the enormous negative space above us.

I think last night's event was successful in doing several difficult things:

overcoming what everyone who lives in town already knows (and tacitly supports): that no one hangs-out downtown, and downtown is not a place where people walk around.
getting Big Boi to perform in an event that illustrates hiphop's open secret: it's all about gesture. Big Boi took risks in performing in this event, something that hip hop avoids at all cost. It was risky for Big Boi to perform in an event where it was obvious that the purpose was not to have a live hip hop show but instead to explore what performances are possible in that particular place. How else could we understand why it was possible for me to drown-out the song he lip-synced to with a small cough?
related to the first issue, dance, like any athletic event, begs the question, "What can a body do? How can a body flow in a space?" This is a crucial question for Atlanta at this moment. How will the city engage in alternate flows of bodies across its area? Is it necessarily the case that Atlanta is forever doomed to pockets of cultures never interconnecting?

The event was, seemingly by design, contingent. Contingent upon who would show up, who was willing to participate (vs. those who simply wanted to ogle), how the ground conditions effected the dancers bodies, who was willing to allow their bodies be joined in the dance troupe and then allow themselves (these now multiple selves) to dance across downtown. Contingent events like these are expressions of optimism and affirmations of the creative potential in collaboration. Whoever cheers when contingent events don't congeal, doesn't reduce the truth affirmed, rather they affirm their inability to create.

Last night I watched hundreds and hundreds of bodies flow across Atlanta. And we did so in the cold, cold night. I, personally, haven't walked to Centennial Olympic Park since the bombing during the Olympics in '96. There is something stirring in the air...

[UPDATED: cleaned-up some of the wording.]

ARTSpeak on AM1690 and Burnaway - Laura Poitras

2010-11-03T10:53:00.000-04:00

Jeremy Abernathy, Editor in Chief of Burnaway, and I had a fine chat about the Laura Poitras exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, O' Say Can You See?

You can hear our discussion and download it from Burnaway, here.

I've written a bit about the Poitras piece at the site where I've been developing my MA thesis, Spectacular Agency and you can view it here.

This was a good Election Day episode. Many huge thanks to both Jeremy and the wonderful folks at AM 1690 WMLB, voice of the arts in Atlanta, for making me sound so good. I really love the intro and outro music.

ARTSpeak on AM1690 and Burnaway - RLand

2010-10-26T14:51:00.000-04:00

I had the great pleasure of meeting with Jeremy Abernathy, Editor in Chief of the Atlanta-based arts criticism blog, Burnaway, to talk about a local artist we like named R. Land.

You can hear our conversation over here.

We wanted to have a Halloween-y type-show because AM1690 is sponsoring a showing of Hitchcock's Psycho at the Plaza Theater around the corner on Ponce.

Of course, R. Land has a special relationship with that corner there: last year he hosted the screening of the 70s bizarro horror flick, Zaat. Promotional materials for the screening included appropriating the local Re/Max agent, Zac (also on the corner there) so that they then stated:

But also, mysteriously paintings from an unknown "Royce Riley" showed up at the Righteous Room (also on the corner with the Plaza Theater and Zac's realty). No big thing that the Righteous Room would have paintings, but look at them:

It's hard not to think that Royce Riley is R. Land's doppelganger, how unheimlich. So there's this spooky double out there, also involved in painting, also hangin' out on Land's block, but if we look at many of the characters that Land creates they seem to be in perpetual shudder or trembling. These involuntary movements, called dystonia, is a strong indicator of neurodegenerative diseases in both Parkinson's and Huntington's Diseases. Spooky.

But I also wanted to talk about R. Land as a painter that seems to capture a lot of the bizarre charm of being from the Southeast and also being in these times.

Though a longtime Atlantan, he's from Jacksonville, Florida. When we look at some of his contemporary paintings, like Itchitucknee Songbook (2008) that I mentioned in the talk with Jeremy, we begin to suss some of that Southern-ness out.

When I look at Itchitucknee Songbook (right) I see something quintessentially lowcountry. The lowcountry is a term used primarily to describe the coastal regions of South Carolina but the geography is fairly consistent from Wilmington to Jacksonville/St. Augustine. It's called the Coastal Empire in Georgia and it's called the First Coast in northeast Florida.

What's consistent in the region are the marshes. But also, a fascinating group called the Geechee-Gullah. These folks are thought to be descended from the earliest African slaves brought to Charleston, South Carolina via Brazil. Because the lowcountry and coastal empire region shares a semitropical environment, yellow fever out breaks were frequent and often the white slave owners would leave the slaves for extended periods of time to work. This physical distance in turn allowed a growing cultural difference between the Gullah and the mainland African slaves. While Gullah communities are largely isolated still, contact can be achieved via folkstories that some children are taught in the region. The folkways of the region have developed, of course, in tandem. While the Wren's Nest talks about Joel Chandler Harris and his popularizing of Uncle Remus, those of us from the Gullah region also learned about Bruh Rabbit (not Br'er Rabbit like in Disney's Song of the South).

Silhouette by Carew Rice to illustrate a collection of Gullah poetry called Dusky Land (1942)

From the Gullah we get also the spiritual, "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore" and the Itchitucknee Songbook also evokes for us the old-timey "Swanee River" that Gershwin made famous via Al Jolson - the Ichetucknee River flows into the Suwanee on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. The source of the Suwanee is that incredible Okefenokee Swamp. Which is, of course, the home of that lovable comic strip by Walt Kelly, Pogo.

from the Pogo Primer for Parents, a U.S. Government document, 1961

It's easy to say that the animal figures in Land's work tends toward the abject and remains always surreal:

But have you seen some of the wildlife in the region?

catfish - they get enormous!

mermaid fishing in Rainbow Springs, Florida (where Zaat was filmed)

are you telling me these manatees are not kinda abject and surreal

The color palette that R. Land uses is fairly typical of comic books, such as the Walt Kelly I've already mentioned but also the ubiquitous Bazooka Joe comics that we read as kids when walking to the Circle K.

But these colors are also found in the early maps of the First Coast region as well:

map of St. Augustine, British East Florida. Thomas Jeffrey (1763)

The map below I think is really interesting - what's the deal with that monstrous fish on the left side of the ships?

Sir Francis Drake lays siege to St. Augustine. Baptista Boazio (1589)

Of course, R. Land also evokes some of his contemporaries such as Reverend Howard Finster (outsider/folk artist par excellence here in Atlanta):

Coke Bottle. Howard Finster (2001)

or Keith Haring:

Untitled. Mural in Pisa, Italy. Keith Haring (1987)

Haring is certainly an influence in a Land piece like Giants of the New Wave (2008):

And this influence can't be played down as we see the repetition of iconic figures in something like "Lacoste Landfill" (Izod), 2008:

Yes, it's a funny appropriation of a global capital icon. But, if we look back to the image records of the region where R. Land is from we see that there is also an historical precedent for seeing in this way that is no less surreal (if we mean it in the Breton manner of becoming "scientists of sleep"):

Crocodile Hunt. Jacques Le Moyne (16th century)

Anyone that lives in the U.S. has to at some point come to terms with the fact that we are not the indigenous people of the continent. Of course, so few of the indigenous people live in the region that their cultures are tenuously maintained and their ways so systematically forgotten that it's fascinating to view how the Europeans viewed them.

Chief Saturiwa. Theodor de Bry (engraving based on Jacques Le Moyne), 16th century

Timucua owl totem. Pre-Columbian era

The Timucua were a group living in the First Coast region of Florida when the Spanish and British began their conquest of the peninsula. If we click the above image of Chief Saturiwa we see the intricate tattoo work. Tattoos, especially of the "Sailor Jerry" or "Ed Hardy" style are commonly exploited and exploded in R. Land's work. The effect is to now look at these sixteenth century engravings and wonder by what mechanism did these Jersey Shore-types get stranded, back in time, in the early days of colonial North America? That is to say, that R.Land's work allows me, now on the tail end of the Modern era to look back at the beginnings of the Modern era and wonder how we get outta here?

Untitled (Owls) R.Land (2008)

Manning/Massumi Day 4

2010-10-01T17:04:00.000-04:00

NOTE: As with all my notes from the European Graduate School, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

Manning & Massumi together offered two classes with us, “Emergent Space(-times)” and “The Choreographic Object – or, How movement moves us.” They were taught together and it created a fantastic experience for me.

We spent some time discussing Manning and Massumi's evening lectures from the previous two nights.

Moshé Feldenkrais, mid-20th century scientist, developed techniques for investigating how the body learns without cognition (the Feldenkrais Method). In our movements we largely operate within our idiosyncratic movement habits. Feldenkrais used, among other things, distraction to overcome these habitual movements.

Jamie Burke, a typing autist.
Spinoza's joy is a kind of affirmation that relies on an ecology.

Manning wants to foreground the craft of autistic thinking.

On this day we had to develop techniques. Our assignment was to develop a clear, concise, precise that can be shared in a 15 minute meeting with another group. Our aim is modulation, exodus, disruption, transduction of the event. How do we move the relation?

We needed to develop a transduction of these technicities, a platform for relating.

What is the representation(demonstration?) of affective tonality?

Our technique was incorporated a group being intertwined in a sheet such that if one member went in a direction the others would also have to respond to their subtle movements. The question stands, how do we transduce the sheet experience to a non-sheet experience so that the lesson can be appropriated?

Consider Gilbert Simondon. His theory of individuation holds that as we develop we alter our trajectories. In the attuning of the direction we realize that the individual points along the way are not moments of stoppage but a metastability that is always on the verge of falling apart, a precarious equilibrium.

This precariousness creates a de-phasing, what propels the transduction, a shifting of the system itself?
The choreographic object catalyzes the relationship and activates other possible interactions.

We have to develop a technique dealing with water; propositional such that it's not in an active/passive dichotomy. The key to ethics is the loss of self/ground.

The dance of attention includes human attentiveness but is not limited to the human. How does the environment attend to the unfolding of the event?

"The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens - A Semblance of a Conversation"
Brian Massumi (2008) Inflexions, no.1.

What is central to interactive art is not so much the aesthetic form in which a work presents itself to an audience [...] but the behaviour the work triggers in the viewer. [....] First, since an interactive work aims to evoke a behaviour in the audience, can it really do without a form that is “interesting”, and therefore in some way aesthetic? Is putting a sign up saying "You may touch the work" or "You may interact with the work" enough? When is the interaction “interesting” enough to keep the audience interacting? Can or should this interaction generate the sort of aesthetic experience that we associate with the phenomenon of art? Or is interactive art about a different kind or type of experiences, compared to more traditional art forms?

Brian Massumi: If “please interact” were enough to define a category, it would be gaming, not art. Beyond gaming in the strict sense, there is a gaming paradigm that has moved into other domains. You see it massively in communications, but also in marketing, design, training, education. Places where it becomes serious and useful. Interactivity can make the useful less boring and the serious more engaging. It is performance-enhancing.

Immediately the question of form comes forward, and the assumption that vision is passive rather than active.

Technology that is supposed to be interactive has to act as a lure (from Whitehead) that announces its relevance in shifting our interrelationality.

How do you speak of form when there is the kind of openness of outcome that you see in a lot of new media art, where participant response determines what exactly happens? When the artwork doesn’t exist, because each time that it operates the interaction produces a variation, and the variations are in principle infinite? When the artwork proliferates? Or when it disseminates, as it does when the work is networked, so that the interaction is distributed in time and space and never ties back together in one particular form? To begin with, you have to get past the idea that form is ever fixed [....] The idea that there is such a thing as fixed form is actually as much an assumption about perception as it is an assumption about art. It assumes that vision is not dynamic – that it is a passive, transparent registering of something that is just there, simply and inertly. If vision is stable, then to make art dynamic you have to add movement. But if vision is already dynamic, the question changes. It’s not an issue of movement or no movement. The movement is always there in any case. So you have to make distinctions between kinds of movement, kinds of experiential dynamics, and then ask what difference they make.

Hardt & Negri's "common" is pointing-out that the tragedy of the commons occurs when we assume that the commons is a resource "out there" only and can be appropriated. The Commons he (who?, I suspect it's Massumi, Hardt, Manning, and Negri) promotes is the surplus always being produced in the multiplicity.

Langer reminds us that we see things we don’t actually see. We all know it, but we tend to brush it off by calling it an illusion, as if something is happening that isn’t real, and doesn’t have anything important to say about experience. But isn’t something happening the very definition of real? The question is: what exactly does the inconvenient reality that we see things we don’t actually see say about the nature of perception? Well, it changes everything. [...]That could be another definition of real: what we can’t not experience when we’re faced with it. Instead of calling it an illusion – this movement we can’t actually see but can’t not see either – why not just call it abstract? Real and abstract. The reality of this abstraction doesn’t replace what’s actually there. It supplements it. We see it with and through the actual form. It takes off from the actual form. The actual form is like a launching pad for it. [...] The actual form and the abstract dynamic are two sides of the same experiential coin. They’re inseparable; they’re fused, like two dimensions of the same reality.

The virtual and the abstract are capable of making effects felt in the world without re-dichotomizing the real and the abstract: the virtual cannot be known as such, the virtual can only be known in reference to the actual.

For example, to see an object is to see volume. We don’t infer volume. We see the voluminousness of an object, directly and immediately, without having to think about it. [...]

We see the “backedness” of it without actually seeing around to the other side. That’s precisely what makes it a perception of an object, rather than a deduction about a surface. We are really but implicitly – abstractly – seeing the object’s voluminousness. The perceived shape of an object is this abstract experience of volume. [...]

For example, We see weightiness through texture. Voluminousness and weightiness are not in themselves visible. But we can’t not see them when we see an object. In fact, we see them in the form of the object. Form is full of all sorts of things that it actually isn’t -- and that actually aren’t visible. Basically, it’s full of potential. When we see an object’s shape we are not seeing around to the other side, but what we are seeing, in a real way, is our capacity to see the other side. We’re seeing, in the form of the object, the potential our body holds to walk around, take another look, extend a hand and touch. [...]

The potential we see in the object is a way our body has of being able to relate to the part of the world it happens to find itself in at this particular life’s moment. What we abstractly see when we directly and immediately see an object is lived relation – a life dynamic. [...]

That’s the doubleness: if you’re not qualitatively seeing what isn’t actually visible, you’re not seeing an object, you’re not seeing objectively.

Baudrillard's thought is still in the logic of representation and as such requires the injection of difference.

When people talk about the visual, what they are actually talking about is almost always a certain mode of what in perception studies is called a cross-modal transfer – a certain way different senses inter-operate. How, for example, does classical perspective painting create an experience of depth? By composing lines and colors in such a way as to trigger a direct experience of the potential I was talking about in relation to object awareness in so-called natural perception: the potential to advance, move around, bring backsides into view, and touch. This is a direct visual experience. [...]

Perspective painting doesn’t “trick” object-perception. It activates it otherwise. The experience of depth is not an optical “illusion.” It’s a real experience of depth, minus the depth. The experience of depth has been made to take off from its usual experiential framing and enter a different frame. [...]

When you are experiencing painted depth, you aren’t looking at a canvas, you are seeing a scene. You’re seeing through the canvas into an abstraction that it has taken off from it, and is a qualitatively different perceptual event. Your perception has been siphoned into the semblance, the canvas’s ghostly perceptual double. The semblance can’t happen without a perch in objecthood. But when it happens, it is in uncanny excess of actual objectivity. [...]

A semblance isn’t just like a force. Its “likeness” is a force, an abstract force of life. Lumière’s moving images were literally capable of launching live bodies into flight.

What we perceive is an act of faith - we trust that there is water in the cup in front of us (even if we can't see the water in front of us). Deleuze calls it a belief in the world - putting faith into the world - contra theology, where faith is from without.

If the virtual can maintain its form in the abstract and never appears in the real, then what is the point of that concept?

The virtual shifts and molds itself in response to the actual, a dynamic conceptual tool that is constantly reinvigorated and retooled in the shifting of its affects in the real.

The mountains of Saas-Fee seem flat and fake in the absence of clouds; we have to have the relational perception to understand their forms.

Habit holds the world up - there is no "it's just" habit.

We see, in vision, something that can't be seen without being felt - vision never just sees. There is some form of judgment in perception.

In memory we can bring out a detail that we weren't aware of in the actual experience. We can't say "we only see what we want" because we haven't been constituted by the experience yet so we can't yet put volition into the equation.

Priming in experimental psychology is preparing the following moment; our perception modulates or transitions throughout the day and we cross thresholds always being tangentially-oriented by perception as it primes our habitual action.

[The uncanny valley - how might that be part of our proprioceptive discussion?]

Perception for Massumi isn't a perception but all modes of perceiving together.

[END OF CLASS]

Brian Massumi Evening Lecture

2010-10-01T14:52:00.001-04:00

NOTE: As with all my notes from the EGS, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

The students are required to attend evening lectures given by the faculty each evening as part of our curriculum. Brian Massumi was the fourth person to give an evening lecture during the August sessions.

[I must apologize for the quality of my notes for this talk: I was very sick during these several days and my ability to write what I heard was very much compromised.]

This paper has a long and checkered history: exploring ritual action and not employing the symbolic but an ontogenetic force.

Thinking of ritual action also gets us reflecting on artistic practice - how art and ethical action are a force. Radical empiricism holds that everything real is felt

Walter Benjamin discussed the difference between how our ancestors danced as clouds is different from how we think of semblance today. "What is this semblance that paradoxically represents nothing?" Benjamin states, "It is relation."

What we feel in the billiard balls is the continued movement, the momentum. Semblance can't be found in snapshots - the relationship of movement is felt rather than composed of discrete units, these units exist, but the dynamism is expressed in relation to their affective tonality - the quality of movement.

The yoking of diverse moments can bring an extreme diversity because it is an expression of nonsensuous linkage (similarity?)

Being nonsensuous, activation contours are a-modal and can jump across orders. Cross-modal transference is inferior to a-modal because [....]

The body is on a life path, a worldline in movement, they are a-modal and present the opportunity to yoking a diversity of potential experience.

To this point, we've been operating with the assumption of a given subject-object relationship. Affect brings form qualitatively to life.

The emergent parent form is an a-modal emergent yoking of diversification. The child will learn to separate-out the sensuous and the objective separation of relationality.

Each new event retraces the historic unfolding traces, even as they advance the worldine. Every body stands for a potential expansion of the universe and are an archive of the shared relationship. Language is where skipping intermediaries is possible.

The autonomy of the qualitative ordering of life [....]

It's not that the world and world order are lost in thought, but language takes up these orders and moves forward the worlding. Language is the potential for movement nonsensuously [....]

Language presents worldlines in advance, language can return us to the sensuous; it's not that the world is lost in language but that we are lost in the delusions of language-speculation.

The constructive truth is pragmactic.
[thinking-feeling (xin 心)]
Through the activity of language (the coming non-local activation, aggregate relation potential), the affective is directly experienced.

Nonsensuous semblance has nothing to do with metaphor or allegory

Thought can be a force toward composition of the world operating on these relational potentialities.

Is the political in need of redefining?

Semblance - ritual action reorders the worlding in its doubling of the event; the [....]

The political needs to avoid reintroducing the content of one locality and imposing it onto another context. A bare activity that animates the other contexts as part of an expansive yoking.

[END OF TALK]

[NOTES TO SELF: ritual propriety (li 禮) requires radical pedagogy which is informed by the transmission of radical empiricism as it teaches the generation of novelty, not aberrance.

Why is peut-être both "maybe" and "perhaps" because this is an event that is activated.

Look at Deleuze's "The Exhausted" about Beckett. Also Benjamin's "On the Mimetic Faculty"

The problem with politics as a term for relationality is like the problem of pharmacy - in both concepts there is this exclusion of the pharmakoi for the purpose of maintaining an economy of what can be yoked in the City's life.

The logic of peut-être both "maybe" and "perhaps" is relationality; it's magical in that it is the allowance of expansive possibility.

Whitehead uses the term penumbra, like a cloud of gnats (from Process and Reality):

Thus, in our actual world of today there is a penumbra of eternal objects, constituted by relevance to the Battle of Waterloo. Some people do admit elements from this penumbral complex into effective feeling, and others wholly exclude them. [...] The elements of this penumbra are propositional prehensions, and not pure conceptual prehensions; for their implication of the particular nexus which is the Battle of Waterloo is an essential factor. Thus an element in this penumbral complex is what is termed a 'proposition.'(185)

Whitehead's is a philosophy of novelty generation so is ritual propriety (li 禮), Ames and Hall use Whitehead in their translations, necessary to avoid aberrance, or is aberrance even possible?]

Erin Manning Evening Lecture

2010-10-01T12:33:00.000-04:00

Manning/Massumi Day 3

2010-09-30T15:06:00.001-04:00

Proposition: Effect an orientation shift. Shift the relationship of your torso to the floor by 90 degrees moving through plié. Take the shape or path of the movement and translate it through your body so that it happens in another area of your body.
Proposition: Drop a Curve. Take any point on your body and, guided by the skeletal-muscular mechanics inherent in the body’s position, drop that point to its logical conclusion following a curved path. Reconfigure the body or set it in motion in a way that varies from the original sequence.
Proposition: Unfold with Inclination Extension. Create a line between elbow and hand. Extend that line by leaving your forearm where it is in space and manoevering your body to create a straight line between shoulder and hand.

Forsythe calls these propositions "time machines" that generate movement.

Note: we went outside and tried a few of these propositions:

Here is a link to the Times Literary Supplement and Siobhan Peiffer's brief introduction to this dance piece.

Also of immense value is Ann Nugent's Doctoral thesis (2000) The Architexts of Eidos:Telos. A critical study through intertextuality of the dance text conceived by William Forsythe, at the University of Surrey.

Choreography is transformed from being the storage site of movement and becomes a laboratory of movement activity.

Forsythe is a distributive node - he's generating propositions with a strong Whiteheadian vocabulary.

Movement in space is not a movement in a pre-defined space but an unfolding of space with movement, an emergent activity.

Forsythe claims that choreography and dance are not the same, these exist in the world separated all the time: dance without choreography, and choreography without dance. He asks, "is it possible to generate autonomous expressions of its principals, a choreographic object, without the body?" (in Manning, pg. 2)

The figure-ground relation (Zidane) is the nodal point, the minimal organization from which generative movement can occur. Where does movement start and where does it stop? It's a relation between a model of transition. "The choreographic object: a model of potential transition from one state to another in any space imaginable." (Manning, 2)

Choreography transforms what a body can do.

Improvisation as incipient choreography - what would we consider the object to be? what moves these bodies?

Waking-up is the threshold between waking and sleeping; in these thresholds there is this turning point and we decide whether to follow habitual action or improvise.

The object is the tending toward, a tendency.

Forsythes’s choreographic process creates conditions for events. When an object becomes the attractor for the event, it in-gathers the event toward the object’s dynamic capacity for reconfiguring spacetimes of composition. [...] These “objects” are always part of an evolving ecosystem in Forsythe’s work. They extend beyond their objectness to become ecologies for complex environments that propose dynamic constellations of space, time and movement. These “objects” are in fact propositions co-constituted by the environments they make possible. They urge participation. [...] The object becomes a missile for experience that inflects a given spacetime with a spirit of experimentation. [...] The object has to be immanent to the event and active in its unfolding. [...] Choreographic objects are an affordance that provokes a singular taking-form: the conjunctive force for the activity of relation. (Manning, 3)

The difference between an object and a choreographic object is the potential activity, the affordances, that the context offers. The object does not allow all movements to be reproduced in the same ways all the time.

What are the conditions necessary to avoid the insistence that the spectator be imposed upon with a predetermined, idealized, choreography?

[This question directly relates to a conversation I had with Manning and Massumi the previous day as we discussed Victor Burgin's evening lecture and the frustration of video installations in galleries]

Dance, music, language -- these are articulatory, but at what level? We look to Guattari and schizoanalysis as metamodeling; modeling with, not onto.

The White Bouncy Castle. Dana Casperson, William Forsythe and Joel Ryan. Co-production with Group.ie (1997)

The White Bouncy Castle is more than a large platform for jumping: it effects a microperceptible change in the feeling of time, shifting the everydayness of time passing from the foregrounded measured time of habitual movement toward the durational time of play. (Manning, 4)

There is the question of time: experiencial time vs. measured time.

Choreographic objects provoke this time-slip in large part because they bring to the fore the role objects play in experience. Objects always resonate with pastness. The everyday objects Forsythe proposes for experimentation exist in an ecology of previous experience. [...] Experience is drawn forth by a pastness of the present. This pastness of the present is specious: it feels like the present even though it is already passing. When we actually perceive this pastness as the present in experience, Alfred North Whitehead calls it non-sensuous perception. [...] We perceive not from sense to sense, but from relation to relation. “The present moment is constituted by the influx of the other into that self-identity which is the continued life of the immediate past within the immediacy of the present” (Whitehead, 1933: 181). It is not the past as such or the object as such we perceive in the here-and-now. It is the activity of relation between different thresholds of spacetime. It is the object from the past in the configuration of the present. The then-with.(Manning, 4-5)

The immediate past is overlapping with the unfolding present; the calling of the future is to a deeper past into the present. This is why routine/habit occurs.

This is how the choreographic object works. [...] You half turn your attention to the quality of ‘having fun’ and before you know it, your posture has shifted. You’re tending toward the fun. This movement-with becomes the initiating gesture toward the time of the event the choreographic object proposes. [...] When an object no longer seems to be quite what you thought it was and the experience of time no longer feels as linear, it’s because the event is beginning to take over. No longer as concerned with your ‘self’, you are now experiencing the potential of the future mixed in with the resonance of the past: a futurity of pastness in the present. Play. (Manning, 5)

This experience is specious: it takes us into the time-slip of the event. This speciousness has a quality of fabulation: it enervates us toward the paradox of time and incites us to invent with time. [7] Choreographic objects draw us into this speciousness by infiltrating our experience with the verge of this doubling [....] they exist in the between of a proposition and its eventness, inciting the participant to invent through them, to move with [....] Choreographic objects draw out this paradox of the linearity of measured time versus the duration of experiential time. “The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time” (James, 1890: 609). (Manning, 6)

This leads us to Whithead's discussion of the proposition. These are lures that brings into activity certain potentialities. The proposition builds a bridging across; the activation of the potential.

Nostalgia do Corpo: Corpo Coletivo. Lygia Clark (1986)

[NOTE TO SELF: The problem of psychastenia in spectacular agency is that there is this absence of model - by reducing the horizon of potentiality in promoting standardized commodity production]

The proposition is not the same here as in linguistics; the proposition as thought here allows the event to unfold itself in its relationality.

Whitehead’s concept of the proposition does not find its voice in an already-conceived language. “Spoken language,” Whitehead warns, “is merely a series of squeaks” (Whitehead, 1978: 264). Language by itself means little. “The vagueness of verbal statement is such that the same form of words is taken to represent a whole set of allied propositions of various grades of abstractness” (1978: 193). When language moves us, it is because it operates in relation, becoming-propositional. A proposition can unfold in language, but not as an additive to an already-stable matrix of denotation. Propositions alter the ground of active relations between language, affect and gesture (to name a few), intensifying, attenuating, inhibiting, transmuting not meaning as such, but the affective force of the time-slip of experience. (Manning, 7)

There can be many propositions, but artistically it's best to keep it simple.

The proposition provokes but cannot predetermine. Whitehead uses this word because it is usually synonymous with judgment and he wants to forground the ability to create an affective tonality.

Every conception of the new is the actualisation of a contrast. For Whitehead, contrast is a conduit to creativity. What the proposition calls for is not a newness as something never before invented, but a set of conditions that tweak experience in the making. Propositions are lures. [...] Propositions that incite creativity lure difference into the pact of their unfolding through the tweaking of the occasion. This tweaking brings about the resolution of potentiality and actuality while leaving a trace of the virtual nonetheless. This is the subtraction in the addition, the more-than less-than of experience. (Manning, 6)

Manning and Massumi characterize their work as "creating emerging attunements." They stress, "relations as event and not as communication." The point is that we have to invent our own languages and give that a texture.

Tarkovsky described his film making style as "sculpting in time" which is the translated name, also, of his book in which he discusses his film making. But note that this is the translation into English of the title in Russian Запечатлённое время (literally, "Depicted Time") His films are now freely available online from Open Culture.

Also consider Chris Marker's Sans Soleil and La Jetee for a visualization of time.
(Both films are available if you follow the links.)

An event hospitality - where the context itself allows for much.

Given the folding of the text and deformation of forms, we get this topology; the object here is in motion, yeah? thus the objectile - playing on the word "projectile." Objectile, as in "object-ish."

Rhythm is a central concept in this text, distinct from "beat." A beat is formalized and we're searching for the potentialized, rather than the formalized.

Rhythm is not added to movement from outside its taking form. Rhythm is its taking form. Because each rhythm is itself a duration, rhythm is what gives time to incipient movement, characterizing that singular movement’s in-timeness. This in-timeness is not a beat or a measure but a quality of becoming that is co-terminous with the incipiency of the movement’s preacceleration and the elasticity of its unfolding. (Manning, 18-9)

Here we can also consider Deleuze's discussion of Bergson's thinking on duration. Corry Shores has an excellent blog for reading Bergsonism over at Pirates & Revolutionaries. Here I am linking to the site directory for the 4th chapter from Bergsonism called, "One or Many Durations." Also look to the fine blog Lectures by Gilles Deleuze and specifically this entry "Theory of Multiplicities in Bergson"

[Forsythe says that a body is that which folds. Deleuze says that anything can be a body - a concept can be a body." Could time be a body (that folds)? Without animating time with an event it's simply an abstract thought.]

Think of the cover song: each cover has its own rhythm, they apprehend the time signatures that potentially could have been deployed. It's incipient in the original and brought forward in the cover.

Choreography’s ecology is rhythmical. Choreography is composed of an infinity of slightly varying velocities, vibrations, sensations. These qualities are in and of matter, active in the transduction from force to form. These individuating qualities give specificity to the environment, inflecting the ways bodies move with and through it. The movement in turn creates time-volumes that populate the co-configuring atmosphere. Choreography, as Forsythe emphasizes, is not strictly about human bodies. It is about the creation of spacetimes of experience. (Manning,19)

You can't dance a movement in time - it's too fast. Of course the dance is done in time, but dance is unlike movement which is the "sounding of rhythm."

When we develop technicities, perhaps we background rhythm and we take time for granted -- we might feel responsible for the occurrence of an event, producing an "event" or making a scene, but the event has its own time.

[Xunzi (荀子)'s "proper naming would, then, be understanding when the naming is appropriate or not.]

"Forms of Process"
A.N. Whitehead, from Modes of Thought (1938)
Whitehead's "eternal object" (see Steven Shaviro's entry over at Pinocchio Theory) is neither eternal not is it an object. We don't see "green" out the window, we see a green - an exhibit of green in the world. Green is real but what is its mode of reality across seasons? across existence?

It's eternal because it can always come back. It's always there potentially to ingress into the world. The green happens in the relation between our bodies, the photons, and the grass. His theory of God is the exploration of this eternality.

The green-ness, the gerunding of qualities as events. Physical prehensions are objects coming into the world, in the flourishing of the event. Autists live in the -ness and unfortunately for them the social world demands that they live outside of -ness.

The essence of life is to be found in the frustrations of established order. The Universe refuses the deadening influence of complete conformity. And yet in its refusal, it passes towards novel order as a primary requisite for important experience. We have to explain the aim at forms of order, and the aim at novelty of order, and the measure of success, and the measure of failure. Apart from some understanding, however dim, of these characteristics of the historic process, we enjoy no rationality of experience. (119)

Whitehead sees that rationality is really successful when it's capable of establishing novelty. An event generates a cloud of propositions.

This unit of process is the 'specious present' of the actuality in question. It is a process of composition, of gradation, and of elimination. Every detail in the process of being actual involves its own gradation in reference to the other details. The effectiveness of any one such factor involves the elimination of elements in the data not to be reconciled with that detail playing that part in the process. Now elimination is a positive fact, so that the background of discarded data adds a tone of feeling to the whole pulsation. No fact of history, personal or social; is understood until we know what it has escaped and the narrowness of the escape. You cannot fully understand the history of the European races in North America, without reference to the double failure of Spanish domination over California in the nineteenth century, and over England in the sixteenth century. (122)

Whitehead asks us to think of the worst events, those that reconstruct our world also brought with them a host of potential outcomes that could have been and also continue to await activation under conditions amenable to their becoming.

We become artists of occasions.

Events will never happen again, they are singular, the conditions might be such that something similar occurs but it is nonetheless unique.

[END OF CLASS]

Chris Fynsk Evening Lecture, 2010

2010-09-29T18:35:00.000-04:00

In his place, I will not try to analyze. He was perhaps (Il était peut-être) suddenly invincible. Dead -- immortal. Perhaps (Peut-être l'extase) ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship.

I think the choice to translate "peut-être" as "perhaps" twice rather than "maybe" in the second instance is a really interesting one to make.

If we're talking about compassion in Blanchot's thought I think we ought to consider deeply that these "peut-être"s are multiple calls to a mode of interbeing that is immanent and emergent. I say this because the root of the term perhaps is "hap" which we, in English, get from the Icelandic happ meaning "fate." Happenstance, happening, happiness, perhaps - these terms all reflect a relationship not unlike Nietzsche's amor fati. They are driven by the engine of event-ing, which sounds like Blanchot's "lived matrix of future thought."

"Hap" is an event. One finds happiness in aligning something like their lot, their fate. Is compassion also an event, such that the fictive self is completed in the telling?

(I've written about this etymology before)

Fynsk replied that, "We are not consummated (another word I offered as he thought about the question and jotted the notes to the etymology of "hap"), not completed. Writing is a becoming other - a passage that disrupts fate."

Avital Ronell suggests a PhD topic to us: Consider the ecstatic falls in the development of Modern thought - the epic falls of both Rousseau and of Barthes; these untellable near-death experiences.

As the conversation continued I thought about the difference between event and advent:

event -- e (out of) + venio (come)
advent -- ad (to, near) + venio (come)

Manning/Massumi Day 2

2010-09-29T16:14:00.001-04:00

§4. Prehensions.-A more formal explanation is as follows. An occasion of experience is an activity, analysable into modes of functioning which jointly constitute its process of becoming. Each mode is analysable into the total experience as active subject, and into the thing or object with which the special activity is concerned. This thing is a datum, that is to say, is describable without reference to its entertainment in that occasion. An object is anything performing this function of a datum provoking some special activity of the occasion in question. Thus subject and object are relative terms. An occasion is a subject in respect to its special activity concerning an object; and anything is an object in respect to its provocation of some special activity within a subject. Such a mode of activity is termed a 'prehension'. Thus a prehension involves three factors. There is the occasion of experience within which the prehension is a detail of activity; there is the datum whose relevance provokes the origination of this prehension; this datum is the prehended object; there is the subjective form, which is the affective tone determining the effectiveness of that prehension in that occasion of experience. How the experience constitutes itself depends on its complex of subjective forms.

Prehension is Whitehead's term for what we would call perception, but it is a perception that is bigger than simple human perception.

Prehension involves three factors:

experience as active perception
the provocation of events
the affectivity of the emergent experience

Objectivity is about relationality for Whitehead; we might want to gerund all our nouns.

The subjective form is an affordance for capability: a chair's subjective form is the relationship between the chair and the object sitting. The prehension of the subjective form as a unity of an event is possible in focusing on the field.

Prehension delimits/activates what is occurring, grasping the multiplicity.

Process philosophy is not a continuity only but is one of continuity and discontinuity; a deformable matrix rather than a template on which to hang matter.

Even that which is excluded in the subjective form is present in the excluding of the excluded.

A self-defining grasps others in the composing of what exists.

Affective tone is the internal milieu as well as the many events in the field. "A simple total vastness" such that the many events are each contributing their dynamism.

Affective tone is the dynamic potentiality to interact with the other data in the field: One level's oneness is another level's manyness. The extensive continuum is what allows for the manyness and it is the largest level of prehension.

§5. Individuality.- The individual immediacy of an occasion is the final unity of subjective form, which is the occasion as an absolute reality. This immediacy is its moment of sheer individuality, bounded on either side by essential relativity. The occasion arises from relevant objects, and perishes into the status of an object for other occasions. But it enjoys its decisive moment of absolute self-attainment as emotional unity. As used here the words 'individual' and 'atom' have the same meaning, that they apply to composite things with an absolute reality which their components lack. These words properly apply to an actual entity in its immediacy of self-attainment when it stands out as for itself alone, with its own affective self-enjoyment. The term 'monad' also expresses this essential unity at the decisive moment, which stands between its birth and its perishing. The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact. It is the flying dart, of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of the world.

"The occasion arises from relevant objects, and perishes into the status of an object for other occasions." This is where the dynamic unity feeds into other unities.

There is a similarity between Carl Schmitt and Whitehead's notion of choice - for Whitehead it is the making of the decision and this restructuring of the possible.

[NOTE TO SELF: Amor fati is driven by necessity in Nietzsche]

For Whitehead, unlike Deleuze, there is no virtual.

§ 12. Non-Sensuous Perception.- This wider definition of perception can be of no importance unless we can detect occasions of experience exhibiting modes of functioning which fall within its wider scope. If we discover such instances of non-sensuous perception. then the tacit identification of perception with sense-perception must be a fatal error barring the advance of systematic metaphysics.
Our first step must involve the clear recognition of the limitations inherent in the scope of sense-perception. This special mode of functioning essentially exhibits percepta as here, now, immediate, and discrete. Every impression of sensation is a distinct existence. declares Hume; and there can be no reasonable doubt of this doctrine. But even Hume clothes each impression with force and liveliness. It must be distinctly understood that no prehension, even of bare sensa, can be divested of its affective tone, that is to say, of its character of a 'concern' in the Quaker sense. Concernedness is of the essence of perception.
Gaze at a patch of red. In itself as an object, and apart from other factors of concern, this patch of red, as the mere object of that present act of perception, is silent as to the past or the future. How it originates, how it will vanish, whether indeed there was a past and whether there will be a future, are not disclosed by its own nature. No material for the interpretation of sensa is provided by the sensa themselves. as they stand starkly, barely, present and immediate. We do interpret them; but no thanks for the feat is due to them. The epistemologies of the last two hundred years are employed in the tacit introduction of alien considerations by the uncritical use of current forms of speech. A copious use of simple literary forms can thus provide a philosophy delightful to read, easy to understand, and entirely fallacious. Yet the usages of language do prove that our habitual interpretations of the se barren sensa are in the main satisfying to common sense, though in particular instances liable to error. But the evidence on which these interpretations are based is entirely drawn from the vast background and foreground of non-sensuous perception with which sense-perception is fused, and without which it can never be. We can discern no clean-cut sense-perception wholly concerned with present fact.

The principle philosopher of sense for Whitehead was Hume; the problem Whitehead sees is putting a direct communication between the sense organs and the world, not mediated by the cogito.

§ 12. Non-Sensuous Perception. (continued)

In human experience, the most compelling example of nonsensuous perception is our knowledge of our own immediate past. I am not referring to our memories of a day past, or of an hour past, or of a minute past. Such memories are blurred and confused by the intervening occasions of our personal existence. But our immediate past is constituted by that occasion, or by that group of fused occasions, which enters into experience devoid of any perceptible medium intervening between it and the present immediate fact. Roughly speaking, it is that portion of our past lying between a tenth of a second and half a second ago. It is gone, and yet it is here. It is our indubitable self, the foundation of our present existence. Yet the present occasion while claiming self-identity, while sharing the very nature of the bygone occasion in all its living activities, nevertheless is engaged in modifying it, in adjusting it to other influences, in completing it with other values, in deflecting it to other purposes. The present moment is constituted by the influx of the other into that self-identity which is the continued life of the immediate past within the immediacy of the present.

Whitehead has no real sense of the present - always in the future, gathering the past. It's being called-in to the future, given past performance.

Reality is background and appearance is the foreground. Points in time and space are infinitely regressing, they are wholly immaterial and infinitely divisible; it's self-undermining but useful for many tasks. Any cut in the duration alters the whole field.

Because this is a specious present, a smudge of the past is like an afterimage that overlaps with the future.

What kinds of techniques can we invent to reproduce or reiterate the affective tonality rather than reiterating the content. The content is so specific of a context that translation doesn't carry the proper weight.

[NOTE TO SELF: could we trust a government, say, that is the culmination of focusing the familiar affairs of our days or do we need a program?]

In Whitehead and Deleuze "desire" is appetition - a pole toward which, a culmination which we are drawn to.

The potential that comes with the nonsensuous is....

What comes into the present is primed - the continuation is already there, the future that is already past. The futurity of what is happening is a carry-over of the past.

When we say we were angry five minutes ago, the feeling persists, even though we say that we have gotten over it. To be promiscuous with philosophers, we need Nietzsche's prescription for a practice of forgetting.

Whitehead is working at an absolute limit, asking "How?" How does this happen? How does it change? What are the techniques that can be developed to make these changes...

[NOTE TO SELF: Reappropriating the context as political action; being appropriate to the context is required to do that. Isn't do this virtuosity? Reappropriation strategies are an increasing mode of artistic expression today; but is this the manner in which we are appropriated by Spectacle?]

One point activates a whole field - it appropriates the context so long as we're not confusing that the form is not prior to this emergence. There is contrast and from this we make appropriate based on natural tendencies, understood from past observations.

[NOTE TO SELF: the last bit above is very much written in terms akin to the Zhongyong (中庸).]

What color are the leaves at night? To say they are green is to have a nonsensuous experience.

Consider the sound of a punch in a movie. See Michel Chion, particularly his book Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen.

William James' "Local Signs"
(from The Principles of Psychology, Ch. XX: 155-167. 1890)

Can these differences of mere quality in feeling, varying according to locality yet having each sensibly and intrinsically and by itself nothing to do with position, constitute the 'susceptibilities' we mentioned, the conditions of being perceived in position, of the localities to which they belong? The numbers on a row of houses, the initial letters of a set of words, have no intrinsic kinship with points of space, and yet they are the conditions of our knowledge of where any house is in the row, or any word in the dictionary. Can the modifications of feeling in question be tags or labels of this kind which in no wise originally reveal the position of the spot to which they are attached, but guide us to it by what Berkeley would call a 'customary tie'? Many authors have unhesitatingly replied in the affirmative; Lotze, who in his Medzinische Psychologie [23] first described the sensations in this way, designating them, thus conceived, as local-signs. This term has obtained wide currency in Germany, and in speaking of the 'LOCAL-SIGN THEORY' hereafter, I shall always mean the theory which denies that there can be in a sensation any element of actual locality, of inherent spatial order, any tone as [p. 158] it were which cries to us immediately and without further ado, 'I am here,' or 'I am there.' If, as may well be the case, we by this time and ourselves tempted to accept the Local-sign theory in a general way, we have to clear up several farther matters. If a sign is to lead us to the thing it means, we must have some other source of knowledge of that thing. Either the thing has been given in a previous experience of which the sign also formed part-they are associated ; or it is what Reid calls a 'natural' sign, that is, a feeling which, the first time it enters the mind, evokes from the native powers thereof a cognition of the thing that hitherto had lain dormant. In both cases, however, the sign is one thing, and the thing another. In the instance that now concerns us, the sign is a quality of feeling and the thing is a position. Now we have seen that the position of a point is not only revealed, but created, by the existence of other points to which it stands in determinate relations. If the sign can by any machinery which it sets in motion evoke consciousness either of the other points, or of the relations, or of both, it would seem to fulfil its function, and reveal to us the position we seek. (157-8)

E. H. Weber, in the famous article in which he laid the foundations of all our accurate knowledge of these subjects, laid it down as the logical requisite for the perception of two separated points, that the mind should, along with its consciousness of them, become aware of an unexcited interval as such I have only tried to show how the known laws of experience may cause this requisite to be fulfilled. Of course, if the local signs of the entire region offer but little qualitative contrast inter se, the line suggested will be but dimly defined or discriminated in length or direction from other possible lines in its neighborhood. This is what happens in the back, where consciousness can sunder two spots, whilst only vaguely apprehending their distance and direction apart. (160)

This "unexcited interval" to which he refers above is interchangeable with "relation."

If we contemplate a blank wall or sheet of paper, we always observe in a moment that we are directly looking at some speck upon it which, unnoticed at first, ended by 'catching our eye.' Thus whenever an image falling on the point P of the retina excites attention, it more habitually moves from that point towards the fovea than in any one other direction. The line traced thus by the image is not always a straight line. When the direction of the point from the fovea is neither vertical nor horizontal but oblique, the line traced is often a curve, with its concavity directed upwards if the direction is upwards, downwards if the direction is downwards. This may be verified by anyone who will take the trouble to make a simple experiment with a luminous body like a candle-flame in a dark enclosure, or a star. Gazing first at some point remote from the source of light, let the eye be suddenly turned full upon the latter. The luminous image will necessarily fall in succession upon a continuous series of points, reaching from the one first affected to the fovea. But by virtue of the slowness with which retinal excitements die away, the entire series of points will for an instant be visible as an after-image, displaying the above peculiarity of form according to its situation. [27] These radiating lines are neither regular nor invariable in the same person, nor, probably, equally curved in different individuals. We are incessantly drawing them between the fovea and every point of the held of view. Objects remain in their peripheral indistinctness only so long as they are unnoticed. The moment we attend to them they grow distinct through one of these motions -- which leads to the idea prevalent among uninstructed persons that we see distinctly all parts of the field of view at once. The result of this incessant tracing of radii is that whenever a local sign P is awakened by a spot of light falling upon it, it recalls forthwith, even though the eyeball be unmoved, the local signs of all the other points which lie between P and the fovea. It recalls them in imaginary form, just as the normal reflex movement would recall them in vivid form; and with their recall is given a consciousness more or less [p. 163] faint of the whole line on which they lie. In other words, no ray of light can fall on any retinal spot without the local sign of that spot revealing to us, by recalling the line of its most habitual associates, its direction and distance from the centre of the held. The fovea acts thus as the origin of a system of polar co-ordinates, in relation to which each and every retinal point has through an incessantly-repeated process of association its distance and direction determined. Were P alone illumined and all the rest of the field dark we should still, even with motionless eyes, know whether P lay high or low, right or left, through the ideal streak, different from all other streaks, which P alone has the power of awakening." [28] (162-4)

"In other words, no ray of light can fall on any retinal spot without the local sign of that spot revealing to us [....] Were P alone illumined and all the rest of the field dark we should still, even with motionless eyes, know whether P lay high or low, right or left, through the ideal streak, different from all other streaks, which P alone has the power of awakening." This is the nonsensuous that Whitehead is referring to, a line that has no sensuous cause.

The local sign does not necessarily allow you to reconstruct the entire body.

A creative reading practice creates a new text, read the tendencies and generate new thoughts to the text. This is the process of appreciation - Zhongyong-ing what is at-hand.

We then watched about 15 minutes of Gordon/Parreno's Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.

Consider the above in conjunction with chapter 4 of Massumi's Parables of the Virtual.

Radical empiricism, another name for process philosophy, holds that relations are real and the reality of relation is directly perceived.

The "ideal streak" is that unfocusing on objects and refocusing on the field and identifying the places where the context can be appropriated.

At a less spectacular level than the Zidane film, look at the sidewalk: look at how few people crash into each other and how much they are doing while walking.

Without taking the mobility of the work seriously we are back at interaction.

[NOTE TO SELF: I ask about their take on Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics - the works tend to be radically non-communicative, there needs to be not just riffing on the idea but rigorous examination.]

Not a community of individuals but a fusion of tendencies in an event. Community has to perform its own failure and recompose, what is common? A differential (here it is from the mathematical sense meaning non-identity: two vectors share movement and the area between them is the differential). See Aden Evens "Math Anxiety." in Angelaki (2000).

Differential is not debate, it's merging into the affective tonality, attunement.

Another place to look would be Arun Saldanha's Psychedelic White which is an ethnographic study of racial difference in the trance scene of Goa, India.

Robert Irwin
check-out Lawrence Weschler's Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees which is a biography of Irwin.

Irwin started as a painter and early on realized that he was being held back, curiously, by being too good of a draftsman, by being too good at producing images. So he gave up what he was really good at and spent the next ten years in the desert so that he could learn how to see. Can the canvas do what perception does?

He creates a kinosthetic vision that is not the movement of images but shows the movement of seeing itself.

His scrim walls show that a wall is intelligible in perception by the shadow. The scrim quivers and so no such shadow can fall, thus it's indeterminate. The determinate room has become inchoate.

This is a relational aesthetic but without making any claims to participation and alters the way in which one perceives the world.

[END OF CLASS]

Giorgio Agamben Evening Lecture, 2010

2010-09-29T12:09:00.000-04:00

NOTE: As with all my notes from the EGS, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

The students are required to attend evening lectures given by the faculty each evening as part of our curriculum. Giorgio Agamben was the second person to give an evening lecture during the August sessions.

What Is a Mystery?
(This talk is related to the research he's been conducting over the recent years, and resonates with his evening lecture last year on uficium.)

Imagine yourself in Germany in the 1920s, in a Benedictine Abbey in Rhineland. Odo Casel (also known as Johannes Casel) and his book, Das Christliche Kultmysterium, gives birth to the Liturgical Movement. This was the age of movement. At the heart of Casel's work is that the Catholic liturgy is a mystery.

My first thesis is that the Pagan Mysteries are not a secret.
My second thesis is that there is a genetic relation between Greek and Catholic mysteries/dramas and at the heart of this is a practice, not a doctrine. The Church is defined by the participation of the body to the mystery of the liturgies.

The immediate political relevance of this is the primacy of the action on the doctrine. Liturgy comes from a word meaning "public activity." [NOTE: from Ancient Greek λειτουργία < λειτ-, from λαός, people + -ουργός < ἔργον, work (the public work of the people done on behalf of the people)]

The Church, then, is a community of action.

The Christian Mysteries are not a symbolic action but an actual presentation, not of the historical Christ but, of soteriological effectivity. He is present in His effects.

Thus what is at stake is an effective action. These effects will be produced in any case. We are here to hear about the effectiveness of Christian liturgical action.

The sacramental acts have effectivity regardless of what the intensions of the priest committing the sacraments might be. (Though, if you recall from last year's discussion of uficium, the only time the effectivity is compromised is when the priest is joking.)

It is thus effective not because of the work of the person but rather because it is Divinely designed.

We are released from the false notion that a Mystery (see also the Disciplina arcani) is an inarticulatable and secret. Rather, these are actual (from Latin actus, the perfect passive participle of agō “make, do.”), an action (cognates include Ancient Greek ἄγω) of effectivity/efficacy.

Let's return to the Pagan Mysteries:
"Precarious" is what is obtained by a request (prex). In the Pagan Mysteries there is not certitude (extended form of Latin certus and of the same origin as cretus whose two meanings are "to be separated" and "to have become visible"), this is the opposite of the Christian Mysteries.

There is a strong link between Mystery in this sense and the novel.

In the Mystery and the novel we see the individual life related to the supernatural such that they become mysteric. The plot is what constitutes the mystery. What takes place in the novel is initiation into the Mystery.

Life itself is the initiator and content of the Mystery.

Q&A starts here. Wolfgang says something like, "My heart is full." The joke becomes, because he is the author of artificial life that he actually said "My hard drive is full."

Agamben clarifies:

Truth is doctrine because Christ is operating in them, thus the Mysteries have efficacity. Liturgy is the most perfect paradigm of action for Western Civilization. There is nothing that is not effective in the Mystery/Liturgy.

There is this strong influence, then, in our civilization for finding an action that is perfectly effective. This liturgical pattern spread and was secularized. It's in our pursuit of an effectivity of operationalism.

Life is an initiation into life itself - this is what the novel also does.

Agamben finds it suspect to find a perfect efficacious action - perhaps we must abandon that quest. Today we have no other idea of life outside of effectuality, this should change, no?

We do not perceive the liturgical basis of our contemporary lives.

[END OF LECTURE]

Erin Manning/Brian Massumi Day 1

2010-09-29T10:48:00.000-04:00

NOTE: As with all my notes from the European Graduate School, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. She is also the director of the Sense Lab, a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement.

Brian Massumi collaborates with Manning at the Sense Lab and is is also known for English-language translations of recent French philosophy, including Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (with Geoffrey Bennington), Jacques Attali's Noise and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus.

Manning & Massumi together offered two classes with us, “Emergent Space(-times)” and “The Choreographic Object – or, How movement moves us.” They were taught together and it created a fantastic experience for me. I am inclined to

How does the writing do what it does?
Space will be a key concept for us.

Beginning our thinking with an ordered nature boxes things in and can limit our ability to understand ethical and political action. Process theory sees an open, emergent ground and the question becomes pragmatic and technical: what kind of order will we create?

It's the opposite of the bracketing of all presuppositions as in phenomenology - in process there is an over-rich field of presuppositions.

For William James and A.N. Whitehead this means not starting with the cognition of the world through the subject-object dichotomy.

We start with the assumption that the world exists but in what way do we find them? For Deleuze the matter is how to maintain the intensity of the qualities of the world. So we will be focusing on feeling in the world and what is the relation between action and agency.

Whitehead uses the term "affective tonality" rather than "feelings"

We're going to explore a radical rethinking of space and time where the event is space-time. Rather than the subject there is the event.

It's not eliminative thinking it is additive -- everything in the world is real, under what mode do they have an effect? What mode of action?

Agamben's "example" (from The Coming Community) fits into a class and so is of that class simultaneously. Every event is exemplary and there is this constant focus on the context.

William James' "The Perception of Space"
(from The Principles of Psychology, 1890)

So far, all we have established or sought to establish is the existence of the vague form or quale of spatiality as an inseparable element bound up with the other peculiarities of each and every one of our sensations. The numerous examples we have adduced of the variations of this extensive element have only been meant to make clear its strictly sensational character. In very few of them will the reader have been able to explain the variation by an added intellectual element, such as the suggestion of a recollected experience. In almost all it has seemed to be the immediate psychic effect of a peculiar sort of nerve-process excited; and all the nerve-processes in question agree in yielding what space they do yield, to the mind, in the shape of a simple total vastness, in which, primitively at least, no order of parts or of subdivisions reigns. (145)

James problematizes the term by sandwiching it between simple and vastness in the phrase "a simple total vastness." In his own language he is problematizing language itself.

Extension and intensivity have to be thought together in this James text, he is stating that to measure the extension we have to use a qualitative approach.

IN the sensations of hearing, touch, sight, and pain we are accustomed to distinguish from among the other elements the element of voluminousness. We call the reverberations of a thunderstorm more voluminous than the squeaking of a slate-pencil; the entrance into a warm bath gives our skin a more massive feeling than the prick of a pin; a little neuralgic pain, fine as a cobweb, in the face, seems less extensive than the heavy soreness of a boil or the vast discomfort of a colic or a lumbago; and a solitary star looks smaller than the noonday sky. In the sensation of dizziness or subjective motion, which recent investigation has proved to be connected with stimulation of the semi-circular canals of the ear, the spatial character is very prominent. Whether the 'muscular sense' directly yields us knowledge of space is still a matter of litigation among psychologists. Whilst some go so far as to ascribe our entire cognition of extension to its exclusive aid, others deny to it all extensive quality whatever. Under these circumstances we shall do better to adjourn its consideration; admitting, however, that it seems at first sight as if we felt something decidedly more voluminous when we contract our thigh-muscles than when we twitch an eyelid or some small muscle in the face. It seems, moreover, as if this difference lay in the feeling of the thigh-muscles themselves. (134)

Proprioception, the sense of movement, is probably the most important sense for James. He doesn't use the term affective, nor affectivity, but that is what is being presented here. There is a complication of the sensible because they are synesthetic.

Our entire cubic content seems then sensibly manifest to us as such, and feels much larger than any local pulsation, pressure, or discomfort. Skin and retina are, however, the organs in which the space-element plays the most active part. Not only does the maximal vastness yielded by the retina surpass that yielded by any other organ, but the intricacy with which our attention can subdivide this vastness and perceive it to be composed of lesser portions simultaneously coexisting along-side of each other is without a parallel elsewhere. [2] The ear gives a greater vastness than the skin, but is considerably less able to subdivide it. [3] (135)

A panic attack is intensely felt locally, but generally distributed; there is a difficulty in understanding where the body begins and ends, and where the world begins and ends such that we are unable to understand from where the feeling originates.

Now my first thesis is that this element, discernible in each and every sensation, though more developed in some than in others, is the original sensation of space, out of which all the exact knowledge about space that we afterwards come to have is woven by processes of discrimination, association, and selection. 'Extensity,' as Mr. James Ward calls it [4] on this view, becomes an element in each sensation just as intensity is. The latter every one will admit to be a distinguishable though not separable ingredient of the sensible quality. In like manner extensity, being an entirely peculiar kind of feeling indescribable except in terms of itself, and inseparable in actual experience from some sensational quality which it must accompany, can itself receive no other name than that of sensational element. (135)

To talk of "original sensation of space," is not to only talk of a "once" but a "making of feelings" -- the emergent quality, a constant beginning that is always occurring.

It must now be noted that the vastness hitherto spoken of is as great in one direction as in another. Its dimensions are so vague that in it there is no question as yet of surface as opposed to depth; 'volume' being the best short name for the sensation in question. Sensations of different orders are roughly comparable, inter se, with respect to their volumes. (135-6)

The cup (was holding one in class) presents itself extensively because we have accustomed ourselves to the ways they have been filled by us; James is highlighting the presuppositions that we have about how the world is selected by us.

Knowledge, selection, emphasis, association -- these are modalities of expression of intensity; the process of the formation of knowledge mediates the actual and the virtual.

The way we think of space as the distance between two places: this gridding of space took Western civilization a very long time to create but has become second nature in the Modern era. This is such that when James talks about this presupposition he seems more abstract than how truly abstract this thinking of space as a grid really is.

(This is an essay of how unheimlich our own sense of sense is, me)

Habit is a generalization. It jumps to what comes next based on association -- it's a thinking without thinking, an automatic reenactment. We are eliding the moment. The habit is about technicity: the years of developing one's technique come to the object of habitual use such that to only speak of what we and our developed technique have done to the object ignores what the object does to us.

(Habit-at: our home is the site of mutual influence, me)

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri's so-called "map series" are fascinating examples of how this gridding and abstraction of the real world is a presupposition.

James is trying to discuss space but it's not of the same language - not 3D vs. 2D, for example. There is something vaguely indiscernible, a species of experience and how do we create the formal dimensions we call 3D, etc?

The point at which experience distinguishes itself but is not separable from the situation, what do we do with the experience?

In the sphere of vision we have facts of the same order. 'Glowing' bodies, as Hering says, give us a perception "which seems roomy (raumhaft) in comparison with that of strictly surface color. A glowing iron looks luminous through and through, and so does a flame." [6] A luminous fog, a band of sunshine, affect us in the same way. As Hering urges: [p. 137]
" We must distinguish roomy from superficial, as well as distinctly from indistinctly bounded, sensations. The dark which with closed eyes one sees before one is, for example, a roomy sensation. We do not see a black surface like a wall in front of us, but a space fined with darkness, and even when we succeed in seeing this darkness as terminated by a black wall there still remains in front of this wall the dark space. The same thing happens when we find ourselves with open eyes in an absolutely dark room. This sensation of darkness is also vaguely bounded. An example of a distinctly bounded roomy sensation is that of a clear and colored fluid seen in a glass; the yellow of the wine is seen not, only on the bounding surface of the glass; the yellow sensation fins the whole interior of the glass. By day the so-called empty space between us and objects seen appears very different from what it is by night. The increasing darkness settles not only upon the things but also between us and the things. so as at last to cover them completely and fin the space alone. If I look into a dark box I find it fined with darkness, and this is seen not merely as the dark-colored sides or walls of the box. A shady corner in an otherwise well-lighted room is full of a darkness which is not only on the walls and floor but between them in the space they include. Every sensation is there where I experience it, and if I have it at once at every point of a certain roomy space, it is then a voluminous sensation. A cube of transparent green glass gives us a spatial sensation; an opaque cube painted green, on the contrary, only sensations of surface." [7](137-8)

This example of the shaded room is not a human "they" this is the inclusion of nonhuman perspective: an emergent becoming, order.

There are certain quasi-motor sensations in the head when we change the direction of the attention, which equally seem to involve three dimensions. If with closed eyes we think of the top of the house and then of the cellar, of the distance in front of us and then of that behind us, of space far to the right and then far to the left, we have something far stronger than an idea, -- an actual feeling, namely, as if something in the head moved into another direction. Fechner was, I believe, the first to publish any remarks on these feelings. He writes as follows:
"When we transfer the attention from objects of one sense to those of another we have an indescribable feeling (though at the same time one perfectly determinate and reproducible at pleasure) of altered direction, or differently localized tension (Spannung). We feel a strain forward in the eyes, one directed sideways in the ears, increasing with the degree of our attention, and changing according as we look at an object carefully, or listen to something attentively ; wherefore we speak of straining the attention. The difference is most plainly felt when [p. 138] the attention vibrates rapidly between eye and ear. This feeling localizes itself with most decided difference in regard to the various sense-organs according as we wish to discriminate a thing delicately by touch, taste, or smell.
"But now I have, when I try to vividly recall a picture of memory or fancy, a feeling perfectly analogous to that which I experience when I seek to grasp a thing keenly by eye or ear; and this analogous feeling is very differently localized. While in sharpest possible attention to real objects (as well as to after-images) the strain is plainly forwards, and, when the attention changes from one sense to another, only alters its direction between the sense-organs, leaving the rest of the head free from strain, the case is different in memory or fancy; for here the feeling withdraws entirely from the external sense-organs, and seems rather to take refuge in that part of the head which the brain fins. If I wish, for example, to recall a place or person, it will arise before me with vividness, not according as I strain my attention forwards, but rather in proportion as I, so to speak, retract it backwards." [8]

[...] We are considering now, not the objective causes of the spatial feeling, but its subjective varieties.... (137-9)

We go from roominess to movement, but the movement isn't actual. We are allowed the roominess first introduced above and we are called into that roomy space. The roominess calls our attention to it and we think we are deciding but we're actually only habituated to that movement.

Strain pushes/pulls attention in this spaciness and James later talks of a "moreness" because every space calls us to that roominess. All the spaciness of the senses, all added-up doesn't give us the totality of space, except by allowing the overlaps of their perception. This is how we understand their roominess.

So far, all we have established or sought to establish is the existence of the vague form or quale of spatiality as an inseparable element bound up with the other peculiarities of each and every one of our sensations. The numerous examples we have adduced of the variations of this extensive element have only been meant to make clear its strictly sensational character. In very few of them will the reader have been able to explain the variation by an added intellectual element, such as the suggestion of a recollected experience. In almost all it has seemed to be the immediate psychic effect of a peculiar sort of nerve-process excited; and all the nerve-processes in question agree in yielding what space they do yield, to the mind, in the shape of a simple total vastness, in which, primitively at least, no order of parts or of subdivisions reigns. (145)

The dream as a place where the extensive pull meets the intensive attention....

The challenge of relation is that we presuppose an abstract universal. We could think of translation between two points, but here we'd rather think in terms of Simondon and transduction, a chemical change.

Position, for example, can never be a sensation, for it has nothing intrinsic about it; it can only obtain between a spot, line, or other figure and extraneous coordinates, and can never be an element of the sensible datum, the line or the spot, in itself. [...]

'Relation' is a very slippery word. It has so many different concrete meanings that the use of it as an abstract universal may easily introduce bewilderment into our thought. We must therefore be careful to avoid ambiguity by making sure, wherever we have to employ it, what its precise meaning is in that particular sphere of application. At present we have to do with space-relations, and no others. Most 'relations' are feelings of an entirely different order from the terms they relate. The relation of similarity, e.g., may equally obtain between jasmine and tuberose, or between Mr. Browning's verses and Mr. Story's; it is itself neither odorous nor poetical, and those may well be pardoned who have denied to it all sensational content whatever. But just as, in the field of quantity, the relation between two numbers is another number, so in the field of space the relations are facts of the same order with the facts they relate. If these latter be catches in the circle of vision, the former are certain other patches between them. When we speak of the relation of direction of two points toward each other, we mean simply the sensation of the line that joins the two points together. The line is the relation; feel it and you feel the relation, see it and you see the relation; nor call you in any conceivable way think the latter except by imagining the former (however vaguely), or describe or indicate the one except by pointing to the other. And the moment you have imagined the line, the relation stands [p. 150] before you in all its completeness, with nothing further to be done. (149-50)

Rather than moralizing that process philosophy is better or that more is better, we should look to how the "moreness" that James discusses operates and is accomplished.

For politics we would consider the privileging of the endpoint to a given problem such that we subsume the journey to the endpoint.

A.N. Whitehead's "Objects and Subjects"
(Chapter 11 from Adventures of Ideas)

§2. Structure of Experience. - No topic has suffered more from this tendency of philosophers than their account of the object-subject structure of experience. In the first place, this structure has been identified with the bare relation of knower to known. The subject is the knower, the object is the known. Thus, with this interpretation, the object-subject relation is the known-knower relation. It then follows that the more clearly any instance of this relation stands out for discrimination, the more safely we can utilize it for the interpretation of the status of experience in the universe of things. Hence Descartes' appeal to clarity and distinctness.
This deduction presupposes that the subject-object relation is the fundamental structural pattern of experience. I agree with this presupposition, but not in the sense in which subject-object is identified with knower-known. I contend that the notion of mere knowledge is a high abstraction, and that conscious discrimination itself is a variable factor only present in the more elaborate examples of occasions of experience. The basis of experience is emotional. Stated more generally, the basic fact is the rise of an affective tone originating from things whose relevance is given. (175-6)

The subject-object relation is really important, but the knower-known relations are not stable positions.

Don't expect clarity here because we're really thinking vagueness.

Affect: Spinozist definition is in Whitehead and Deleuze, the ability to affect and be affected. It's in-between bodies and has to do with capacities. A change of state such that the body capacity is impacted and thus it is something endured. This is accompanied by the feeling of this shift in capacity. Qualitative feeling of that transition. All of reality starts in affect, the glue that holds existence together and fills those transitions.

The relevance of the situation is given -- this is before our understanding, otherwise we wouldn't pay any attention to any of it. Importance is what wells-up to our attention. The quality of experiencing color points-out our own perceptual biases.

§3. Phraseology.- Thus the Quaker word 'concern', divested of any suggestion of knowledge, is more fitted to express this fundamental structure. The occasion as subject has a 'concern' for the object. And the 'concern' at once places the object as a component in the experience of the subject, with an affective tone drawn from this object and directed towards it. With this interpretation the subject-object relation is the fundamental structure of experience.
Quaker usages of language are not widely spread. Also each phraseology leads to a crop of misunderstandings. The subject-object relation can be conceived as Recipient and Provoker, where the fact provoked is an affective tone about the status of the provoker in the provoked experience. Also the total provoked occasion is a totality involving many such examples of provocation. Again this phraseology is unfortunate; for the word 'recipient' suggests a passivity which is erroneous. (176)

Concern -- how does the event have concern for the object? What we see is that Whitehead doesn't have a strong commitment to a subject, maybe a superject because it's about negotiating our togetherness.

"Provoker" perhaps Trigger or Catalyst. The Provoker is the object, it is what enters with its own affective tonality.

Whitehead is working hard to get us to think of perception without assuming that the metaphysically established subject isn't the given doing the perceiving.

What constitutes an event is activity, not just extension of a subject onto an object but the resonating, mutually-activating. The world is activity and at times these activities are moved toward stability, they are not inert matter.

Matter is chaotic potential that is captured in particular formations and modalities. Every form is an accomplishment in the venture of nature's unfolding.

Victor Burgin Evening Lecture

2010-08-31T16:42:00.002-04:00

Burgin feels his work is uncinematic because the cinematic experience in galleries assumes a subject of knowledge. He, rather, makes it these works for a subject of signification.

When we visit a theater it is very unusual to leave before the story is done. In the gallery, cinematic works are those of repetition: we presume that the viewer will walk in and out at odd times. "Visual ritornelli."

The visual/audio work of the gallery space is recursive and non-hierarchical and as such may be more akin to the psychoanalytic situation where any response may be a jumping-off point for a chain of associations. Meaning is construed in the dream through the associative ordering but this is not a sequencing, rather it is an unfolding. A Möbius band just like the audio/visual work in a gallery setting.

The uncinematic work is a paratactical organization [....] Cinematic heterotopia [....]

Kristeva saw the work of art as a matrix that made its subject.

How do we make subjects when the images of subjects [....]

We could look to the feminists of the late 60s and early 70s, they spoke well to the politics of representation and the representation of politics. [....]

Martin Hielscher on Adorno's Aesthetics Day (3)

2010-08-31T16:03:00.000-04:00

NOTE TO FACEBOOK VIEWERS: to view any of the clips you'll need to visit the actual blog. Scroll to the bottom and click "View Original Post"

Martin Hielscher is the Fiction Editor at one of Germany's oldest publishing house, C.H. Beck.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the European Graduate School, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

Art has already become a hermetic activity. Communication is already utilized.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 73-4:

In its uncertainty, natural beauty inherits the ambiguity of myth, while at the same time its echo— [74]consolation—distances itself from myth in appearing nature. Contrary to that philosopher of identity, Hegel, natural beauty is close to the truth but veils itself at the moment of greatest proximity. This, too, art learned from natural beauty. [...] The dignity of nature is that of the not-yet-existing; by its expression it repels intentional humanization. This dignity has been transformed into the hermetic character of art, into—as Holderlin taught—art's renunciation of any usefulness whatever, even if it were sublimated by the addition of human meaning. For communication is the adaptation of spirit to utility, with the result that spirit is made one commodity among the rest; and what today is called meaning participates in this disaster. What in artworks is structured, gapless, resting in itself, is an afterimage of the silence that is the single medium through which nature speaks. Vis-a-vis a ruling principle, vis-a-vis a merely diffuse juxtaposition, the beauty of nature is an other; what is reconciled would resemble it. [... 75] Throughout, Hegel's aesthetics lacks receptivity for the speech of what is not significicative; the same is true of his theory of language.

ME: pure ideology is fetishistic

There is a musical character to how this book is written with refrains and phrases that are revisited. In this composition we get a sense of Nietzsche's influence.

Art is rational as well because it is discussed in terms of techniques and each artistic form participates in the general technological...

[We are given several poems by Paul Celan]
Todesfuge (Death Fugue here is an English translation)
The question of metaphorical language in Celan is due to his concern with the euphemistic language that is so prominent in the age of mass communication, whether it be in the form of advertising or political rhetoric.

In the original Romanian, this poem's name was "Death Tango" referring to the forced playing of music by the Jews in the concentration camps. The Nazis required the Jews to perform for them. There exists a recording of this "Death Tango" being performed in the camps. Celan changed the name to "Death Fugue" when he translated it into German.

It's important to understand that this was written in 1944, not after, and it shows that many people in the world knew what was happening in the concentration camps.

Being called a fugue is not only a reference to the musical form (and so, speaks to the role and use of repetition), but it also references Bach - "Death is a master form Germany" is the oft-quoted line in the poem.

Celan highlights that there were many supposed to be the best of society: the well-educated and musicians, such as Höss, that both managed and personally participated in the killings at the camps.

What if the "Black milk of daybreak" is not metaphorical? The milk is black from the ashes falling into your milk that you drink. As Höss stated, there was no way the surrounding villagers could not know that there were exterminations happening at Auschwitz because of the intense stink of burning bodies.

"Golden hair Margarete" = Faust character; Faust, the Renaissance man, seduces Margarete who then dies after her pregnancy is terminated. Shulamith is a Hebrew name from the Song of Songs. These names both refer to Celan's mother who was killed in a death camp.

Celan was disappointed with this poem because it was quite popular - even being taught in German high schools. He would often receive letters form these students stating their enjoyment of the poem and that they were grateful that Celan had made peace with Germany.

Clearly the poem was too accessible and beautiful. It was received by a public that assumed that this was a gesture of both peace-making and healthy processing of the events. He refused to read the poem in public because of this misconception.

There is only one rhyme in the poem:

death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true

so there is a need for precision in this moment of the poem.

There are no graves, only ashes and bones; so Celan asks where is his home? Where is the grave of his family, the place(s) to mourn? The poem becomes the cemetery. He asks if he is capable to arrive at a language that is adequate to discuss this problem and this historical situation.

Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is also asking this question.

Given this frustration, Celan wrote another poem, Engführung (The Straitening in English)
Engführung is an open grave, perhaps. Eng- is employed frequently in Death Fugue and eng- is the root of the word "angst" which means to feel a tightened chest.

With this poem Celan tries to close the gap between the words and the subject of the poem:

Do not read anymore -- look!
Do not look anymore -- go!

The terrain is not the death camps of "Death Fugue" which is so musical, this poem is more concrete -- we are at the very stones of the camps. This is another attempt at tackling the inadequacy of language.

He is alone in this world: those that should hear him won't because they live in America or in Israel and then those that do read him are from the other side of the trenches. He was fluent in maybe six languages and studied medicine as well as botany in addition to literature from around the world which he then translated. Yet, he must write; it is not an option not to write. An aporia.

In Death Fugue there was the repetition of whole lines but here it is the repetition of single words or even letters; again, the problem of finding an adequate language to be true to the subject-object relationship.

MY NOTE: In a fugue the stretto (in German this Italian word is Engführung) is the imitation of the subject in close succession, so that the answer enters before the subject is completed.

The poem uses "I" to refer to both the author and also the poem itself as an "I." When it speaks of a finger palpating, the poem approaches being an action, that the poem is touching the bones under the grass.

What the form of Death Fugue does is introduce distance by referring to those ideas but with Engführung there is the closing of this distance through the stammer and confusion of who or what is speaking or referred to.

Spasmen (Spasms) from Fadensonnen (Fathomsuns), 1963.
This, unlike Death Fugue or Straitening is written in an unfamiliar German. There is a logic but it has to be endured and unfolded over time. It is a poem about sex; the words themselves intermingle sometimes in a sing-song.

It's a grounding for a spiritual, ecstatic experience in language. It's not "about" but in it. It also has a Medieval German Court Poetry sensibility in it as well, this "hei," hearkens back to when these songs were sung.

Adorno defined happiness as being a state where we could show weakness without having to fear being taken advantage of by another.

The task for us is not to comprehend artworks but their incomprehensibility in our contemporary situation.
From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 118:

The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the contemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended. What is so resistlessly absorbed as a cliche by the watchword—the absurd—could only be recuperated by a theory that thinks its truth.

FROM ME: The Daily Show's John Stewart rests his case in simply offering the absurd theater that is being alive in America today.

Adorno points out that it is not enough to rest in the cliche that man is absurd or that society is grotesque; we must understand what conditions contribute to accepting the absurd as a given.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 118:

It ignites on what is opposed to it, on materiality. In no way is spirit most present in the most spiritual artworks. Art is redemptive in the act by which the spirit in it throws itself away. Art holds true to the shudder, but not by regression to it. Rather, art is its legacy. The spirit of artworks produces the shudder by externalizing it in objects. Thus art participates in the actual movement of history in accord with the law of enlightenment: By virtue of the self-reflection of genius, what once seemed to be reality emigrates into imagination, where it survives by becoming conscious of its own unreality. [...] Form objectivates the particular impulses only when it follows them where they want to go of their own accord. This alone is the methexis of artworks in reconciliation.

"Art holds true to the shudder..." this is a calling back to an enervation of the lived spiritual life, on the other hand, the shudder is pre-ratio, preconceptual, and it leaves one spellbound. We don't have a choice in deciding to have a shudder, they overcome us and leave us in a state of disbelief.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 118-9:

The divergence of the constructive and the mimetic, which no artwork can resolve and which is virtually the original sin of aesthetic spirit, has its correlative in that element of the ridiculous and clownish that even the most significant works bear and that, unconcealed, is inextricable from their significance. [...] Its ridiculousness is, however, also part of a condemnation of empirical rationality; it accuses the rationality of social praxis of having become an end in itself and as such the irrational and mad reversal of means into ends. [...] Ridiculousness is the residue of the mimetic in art, the price of its self-enclosure. [...] All the same, the ridiculous elements in artworks are most akin to their intentionless levels and therefore, in great works, also closest to their secret. Foolish subjects like those of The Magic Flute and Der Freischiitz have more truth content through the medium of the music than does the Ring, which gravely aims at the ultimate. In its clownishness, art consolingly recollects prehistory in the primordial world of animals. Apes in the zoo together perform what resembles clown routines. The collusion of children with clowns is a collusion with art, which adults drive out of them just as they drive out their collusion with animals. Human beings have not succeeded in so thoroughly repressing their likeness to animals that they are unable in an instant to recapture it and be flooded with joy; the language of little children and animals seems to be the same. In the similarity of clowns to animals the likeness of humans to apes flashes up; the constellation animal/fool/clown is a fundamental layer of art.
As a thing that negates the world of things, every artwork is a priori helpless when
it is called on to legitimate itself to this world....

FROM ME: "Ridiculousness is the residue of the mimetic in art, the price of its self-enclosure." and my definition of cool, here.

If you gravely aim at the ultimate you fail in achieving the ridiculousness that is required in being art. Adorno has a tenderness in his thinking about Nature always in touch with that child, of his living a kreaturlich (German meaning something like that bridge shared between humans and animals).

FROM ME: we get something approaching a definition of kreatürlich in David S. Ferris' The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (160):

Human existence as Kreatur and kreatürlich emphasizes the human condition in its physical subjection to death and decay, the human subject as created rather than creator. This is in contrast to both a dominant bourgeois rhetoric of individual creativity and to the communist rhetoric of a promethean collective creativity. These terms belong to a theological vocabulary, in which the human condition is entangled in a nature overshadowed by guilt, expelled form the garden of Eden into the garden of the flowers of evil.

While there may be something similar between Zarathustra's transformations from camel to child, with Adorno there is the opposite of this saintliness; rather there are only these flashes of Natural Beauty.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 121:

Understanding is itself a problematic category in the face of art's enigmaticalness. Whoever seeks to understand artworks exclusively through the immanence of consciousness within them by this very measure fails to understand them and as such understanding grows, so does the feeling of its insufficiency caught blindly in the spell of art, to which art's own truth content is opposed. If one who exits from this immanent context or was never in it registers the enigmaticalness with animosity, the enigmaticalness disappears deceptively into the artistic experience. The better an artwork is understood, the more it is unpuzzled on one level and the more obscure its constitutive enigmaticalness becomes. It only emerges demonstratively in the profoundest experience of art. If a work opens itself completely, it reveals itself as a question and demands reflection; then the work vanishes into the distance, only to return to those who thought they understood it, overwhelming them for a second time with the question "What is it?" Art's enigmaticalness can, however, be recognized as constitutive where it is absent: Artworks that unfold to contemplation and thought without any remainder are not artworks. Enigma here is not a glib synonym for "problem," a concept that is only aesthetically significant in the strict sense of a task posed by the immanent composition of works. In no less strict terms, artworks are enigmas. They contain the potential for the solution; the solution is not objectively given. Every artwork is a picture puzzle, a puzzle to be solved, but this puzzle is constituted in such a fashion that it remains a vexation, the preestablished routing of its observer.

It's not about taking something out of the artwork but stepping into its context. There is the danger of becoming only a connoisseur and not being able to appreciate that is outside of one's range of taste. A real work of art will never fully open to us -- it is an historical process.

This is where there is overlaps between Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault -- they came to the same conclusions, they see the same aporias; doesn't this speak to the objectivity, the historical moment we find ourselves in?

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 122:

Of all the arts, music is the prototypical example of this: It is at once completely enigmatic and totally evident. It cannot be solved, only its form can be deciphered, and precisely this is requisite for the philosophy of art. He alone would understand music who hears with all the alienness of the unmusical and with all of Siegfried's familiarity with the language of the birds. Understanding, however, does not extinguish the enigmaticalness of art. [...] The solution of the enigma amounts to giving the reason for its insolubility, which is the gaze artworks direct at the viewer. The demand of artworks that they be understood, that their content be grasped, is bound to their specific experience; but it can only be fulfilled by way of the theory that reflects this experience. What the enigmaticalness of artworks refers to can only be thought mediatedly. The objection to the phenomenology of art, as to any phenomenology that imagines it can lay its hands directly on the essence, is not that it is antiempirical but, on the contrary, that it brings thinking experience to a halt. The much derided incomprehensibility of hermetic artworks amounts to the admission of the enigmaticalness of all art. Part of the rage against hermetic works is that they also shatter the comprehensibility of traditional works. [...] No concept that enters an artwork remains what it is; each and every concept is so transformed that its scope can be affected and its meaning refashioned.

Traditional art which has this familiar language needs the historical process; as a contemporary person the work seems familiar but as history unfolds the artwork itself unfolds.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 124:

Works are purposeful in themselves, without having any positive purpose beyond their own arrangement; their purposefulness, however, is legitimated as the figure of the answer to the enigma. Through organization artworks become more than they are. In recent aesthetic debates, especially in the fine arts, the concept of écriture has become relevant, inspired probably by Klee's drawings, which approximate scrawled writing. Like a searchlight, this category of modern art illumines the art of the past; all artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content. Artworks are language only as writing.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 125:

If enigmaticalness disappears completely from the experience, if experience supposes that it has become completely immanent to the object, the enigma's gaze suddenly appears again; thus is preserved the artworks' seriousness, which stares out of archaic images and is masked in traditional art by their familiar language until strengthened to the point of total alienation.

We are interested in art because it is about existence; it declines a usefulness or of generating any meaning. Enigmaticalness is recognizable as relevant but it requires second reflection. Without this enigmacticalness the artwork is something that empowers the subject and so reifies the subject. This empowering that leads to reification of the subject (discursive knowledge), is an instrumentalization of the relationship shared between the subject and the object.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 126:

Artworks speak like elves in fairy tales: "If you want the absolute, you shall have
it, but you will not recognize it when you see it." The truth of discursive knowledge is unshrouded, and thus discursive knowledge does not have it; the knowledge that is art, has truth, but as something incommensurable with art. Through the freedom of the subject in them, artworks are less subjective than is discursive knowledge. With unerring compass, Kant subordinated art to a concept of teleology whose positive application he did not concede to empirical understanding. However, the block that according to Kant's doctrine obstructs the in-itself to people, shapes that in-itself in artworks—the doctrine's proper domain, in which there is no longer to be any difference between what is in-itself and what is for-itself—as enigmatic figures: Precisely because they are blocked, artworks are im-
ages of being-in-itself. Art becomes an enigma because it appears to have solved what is enigmatical in existence, while the enigma in the merely existing is forgotten as a result of its own overwhelming ossification. The more densely people have spun a categorial web around what is other than subjective spirit, the more fundamentally have they disaccustomed themselves to the wonder of that other and deceived themselves with a growing familiarity with what is foreign. Art hopes to correct this, though feebly and with a quickly exhausted gesture. A priori, art causes people to wonder, just as Plato once demanded that philosophy do, which, however, decided for the opposite.
The enigma of artworks is their fracturedness.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 127:

Art's enigmatic image is the configuration of mimesis and rationality. This enigmaticalness emerged out of a historical process. Art is what remains after the loss of what was supposed to exercise a magical, and later a cultic, function.

Philosophy needs art because philosophy needs an Other. Aesthetic Theory is not a theory of aesthetics but the need for theory to be aesthetic. Without an experience of alterity we will not have the necessary materiality.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 131:

Aesthetic experience is not genuine experience unless it becomes philosophy. The condition for the possibility that philosophy and art converge is to be sought in the element of universality that art possesses through its specification as language sui generis. This universality is collective just as philosophical universality, for which the transcendental subject was once the signum, points back to the collective subject. [...] The trace of memory in mimesis, which every artwork seeks, is simultaneously always the anticipation of a condition beyond the diremption of the individual and the collective. [...] This is the locus of the idea of art as the idea of the restoration of nature that has been repressed and drawn into the dynamic of history. Nature, to whose imago art is devoted, does not yet in any way exist; what is true in art is something nonexistent.

Not for-itself but in-itself, what is wants the Other; the artwork is the language of this wanting. The minute displacement of the artwork is perhaps related to Messianic Judaism such that the transcendental world is minutely present in this one and what we do is tend to obscure and cover over this.
From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 131:

Artworks would be powerless if they were no more than longing, though there is no valid artwork without longing. That by which they transcend longing, however, is the neediness inscribed as a figure in the historically existing. By retracing this figure, they are not only more than what simply exists but participate in objective truth to the extent that what is in need summons its fulfillment and change. Not for-itself, with regard to consciousness, but in-itself, what is wants the other; the artwork is the language of this wanting, and the artwork's content [Gehalt] is as substantial as this wanting. The elements of this other are present in reality and they require only the most minute displacement into a new constellation to find their right position. Rather than imitating reality, artworks demonstrate this displacement to reality. Ultimately, the doctrine of imitation should be reversed; in a sublimated sense, reality should imitate the artworks.

Film has the potential to illustrate Natural Beauty because it allows the recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 135:

But because for art, Utopia—the yet-to-exist—is draped in black, it remains in all its mediations recollection; recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it; it is the imaginary reparation of the catastrophe of world history; it is freedom, which under the spell of necessity did not—and may not ever—come to pass. [...] No existing, appearing artwork holds any positive control over the nonexisting. This distinguishes artworks from religious symbols, which in their appearance lay claim to the transcendence of the immediately present. The nonexisting in artworks is a constellation of the existing. By their negativity, even as total negation, artworks make a promise, just as the gesture with which narratives once began or the initial sound struck on a sitar promised what was yet to be heard, yet to be seen, even if it was the most fearsome; and the cover of every book between which the eye loses itself in the text is related to the promise of the camera obscura. The paradox of all modern art is that it seeks to achieve this by casting it away just as the opening of Proust's Recherche ingeniously slips into the book without the whirring of the camera obscura, the peep-show perspective of the omniscient narrator, renouncing the magic of the act and thereby realizing it in the only way possible. Aesthetic experience is that of something that spirit may find neither in the world nor in itself; it is possibility promised by its impossibility. Art is the ever broken promise of happiness.

Look at Adorno's "Meditations on Metaphysics" from Negative Dialectics, especially the last three pages, they are quite beautiful.

[END OF CLASS]

Marin Hielscher on Adorno's Aesthetics (Day 2)

2010-08-29T16:23:00.002-04:00

NOTE TO FACEBOOK VIEWERS: to view any of the clips you'll need to visit the actual blog. Scroll to the bottom and click "View Original Post"

Martin Hielscher is the Fiction Editor at one of Germany's oldest publishing house, C.H. Beck.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the European Graduate School, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

Theodor Adorno died not far from Saas-Fee (home of EGS), he was hiking in Zermat.

To begin, there are two things to understand:

Why "critical theory"
What is Natural Beauty, or what is the role of Natural Experience?

What is called critical theory is a re-reading of the Western Tradition. This was the work of Benjamin, Horkheimer, Marcuse, etc. Their intent was not to be theoretical; they were searching for a new practical experience.

They were trying to think a new practice in the face of the disaster of so-called Advanced Modernity: what is this rational, industrial mode of mass murder that reduces contact with those murdered?

Critical theory tries to understand this rationality -- our Technological Age where the world is apprehended first through a technological viewpoint and mass communication.

Mass media informs how we relate to our personal (inner) nature and to outer nature; these outbursts of violence such as in Srebenica in the dissolution of Yugoslavia, just as in Rwanda. In both cases the UN witnessed and did nothing.

These outbursts are not alien because they are part of a pattern of thinking.

It's not a personal choice to live in the Technological Age; the world presents itself as such and we have no personal choice. The question becomes: will this come to an end; how does it impact our understanding of ourselves?

People are not free, but trapped in "free societies" -- these open, liberal societies are not as free as they proclaim. The Culture Industry and mass communication acts as another mode of social control because it shapes the horizon of what can be perceived.

Given this, there is a deep distrust of public communicative possibilities because it is all standardized.

Adorno takes a concrete phenomenological approach to understanding mass media. The term "critical theory" itself has a time code within it: There is always a horizon beyond what we can theorize.

There is no direct way to approach the phenomena we encounter because everything is already mediatized, so we must reflect on it and step back into this murky circle. There is no easy way out.

Adorno's critique of Heidegger is that Heidegger creates a false sense of direct contact with Truth or the Other.

Adorno's "the nonidentical" is similar to Derrida's "différance." Concept-making is the process of identity-making. This identification-making is a destructive act in that it has the tendency to ignore the inherent identification of those being described, but even their own self-identification is a self-deceptive act.

Critical Theory is a neo-Marxist thinking with a focus on the material existence of society. A pursuit of happiness is manifest in our corporeality. We are constantly fighting our own misreading of our own bodies.

You cannot ignore your own body, it will always be there communicating to us.

How does différance occur?
How do we experience it?
Love is one mode of access, as is philosophy, or the aesthetic experience.

The aesthetic experience shouldn't be confused with entertainment because entertainment is a standardized product and instrument of social control. The aesthetic experience resists entertainment.

Art is a way of Truth presenting itself.

It has a rationality but not for the sake of reifying a metaphysics but speaks a true language more true than the Truth and acts as a commentary on the social.

It's a form of encounter that changes the subject-object relationship: subjectivity is defined through its use of objects and how we make use of the world through this. True aesthetic experience presents the challenge of the inverse of this relationship -- we must step outside of ourselves.

It's not for the sake of uniqueness of myself to be expressed but for us to better understand the object, to experience the primacy of the object.

How do we get out of the narcotizing tendency of living in contemporary society? How do you have a true self in a false society? As Heidegger pointed-out that metaphysics rejects time (resists time), so Critical Theorists seek a thinking of an authentic living in a time where we are inundated with how to live as a consumable.

Adorno has a utopian residue, for Ernst Bloch and Karl Marx there were these utopian horizons and through this mode of thinking we approach the horizon of the Other, a promise of alterity. Postmodernity abandons the utopian project because it's part of a Grand Narrative.

We cannot escape Reason by being unreasonable or introducing an escapist metaphysics that excuses this world.

What is resistance? What does it mean to resist the Culture Industry?

Resistance as direct political action is problematic because the likely result is to impose the exact same violence onto others
To resist, for Adorno, is to think and to create these true aesthetic experiences.
True art calls for philosophy and vice-versa in order to have this break in the repetition of living.

We must go back in history, we need to reread Schelling.
From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 61:

Since Schelling, whose aesthetics is entitled the Philosophy of Art, aesthetic interest has centered on artworks. Natural beauty, which was still the occasion of the most penetrating insights in the Critique of Judgment, is now scarcely even a topic of theory. The reason for this is not that natural beauty was dialectically transcended, both negated and maintained on a higher plane, as Hegel's theory had propounded, but, rather, that it was repressed. The concept of human nature rubs on a wound, and little is needed to prompt one to associate this wound with the violence that the artwork—a pure artifact—inflicts on nature. Wholly artifactual, the artwork seems to be the opposite of what is not made, nature. As pure antitheses, however, each refers to the other: nature to the experience of a mediated and
objectified world, the artwork to nature as the mediated plenipotentiary of immediacy. Therefore reflection on natural beauty is irrevocably requisite to the theory of art.

Art is not outside the subject-object relationship; it is also a violence. We think of Nature as unmediated, but this is already because we live in a totally mediated world.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 63:

The artwork, through and through δέσει (thesei, convention), something human, is the plenipotentiary of φύσει (physei, nature), of what is not merely for the subject, of what, in Kantian terms,would be the thing itself. The identity of the artwork with the subject is as complete as the identity of nature with itself should some day be. [...] Hegel obviously lacked the sensibility needed to recognize that genuine experience of art is not possible without the experience of that elusive dimension whose name—natural beauty—had faded.

The ideal of the artwork is that it is completely constructed; there is an identity within Nature of what Nature wants to be like.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 65:

Just how bound up natural beauty is with art beauty is confirmed by the experience of the former. For it, nature is exclusively appearance, never the stuff of labor and the reproduction of life, let alone the substratum of science. Like the experience of art, the aesthetic experience of nature is that of images. Nature, as appearing beauty, is not perceived as an object of action. The sloughing off of the aims of self-preservation—which is emphatic in art—is carried out to the same degree in aesthetic experience of nature. To this extent the difference between the two forms of beauty is hardly evident. Mediation is no less to be inferred from the relation of art to nature than from the inverse relation. Art is not nature, a belief that idealism hoped to inculcate, but art does want to keep nature's promise. It is capable of this only by breaking that promise; by taking it back into itself. This much is true in Hegel's theorem that art is inspired by negativity, specifically by the deficiency of natural beauty, in the sense that so long as nature is defined only through its antithesis to society, it is not yet what it appears to be. What nature strives for in vain, artworks fulfill: They open their eyes. Once it no longer serves as an object of action, appearing nature itself imparts expression, whether that of melancholy, peace, or something else. Art stands in for nature through its abolition in effigy; all naturalistic art is only deceptively close to nature because, analogous to industry, it relegates nature to raw material.

Natural Beauty is appearance, the experience of images. The form of self-preservation society we have actually brings the extermination of ourselves. The experience of Natural Beauty frees us of this sense of self-preservation.

Nature needs us as much as we need it, its call requires our response. There is an inherent teleology in Nature. It is a question of how we interact with Nature.

True art has become enigmatic for Adorno and there is this threat coming from the Culture Industry. There is no primitive or naive approach to art or to philosophy for Adorno. You need education and to know the material. The material will tell you, you'll have a gut feeling when it's time to change.

Changes in art happen because there is an inherent force (process) to do that. Historically it was not autonomous and was told to artists in large part by the patrons and authorities that commissioned the work.

To focus on the art experience in an aesthetic theory runs the risk of becoming solipsistic and self-focused; Adorno insists on the art object being in the center.
Art is not a given anymore, philosophy is not a given anymore, even humanity is not a given anymore given the way humans behaved in the 20th century

History may be a failed experiment, as Beckett said, "fail again, fail better."

How does social change occur? Classical political theory requires an agent doing direct action but this leads to the repetition of violence. But if you change the agent rather than the agent changing society... We must approach each other without instrumentalizing that Other.

Adorno says that we must stay with our conflicts and endure them (similar to Arendt).

His Negative Dialectics is his mode of ontology, it points to the question, "What is the good life?" and seeks to promote a happier world which depends upon recognizing how lost we are, lost even to the message emanating from our own bodies.

It's a melancholic philosophy but for the sake of of discovering happiness; it's vitalistic and in ways like Nietzsche. There is a deep tenderness in his thought, he writes about ways in which others exploit and do violence to them but he does this because he has such tenderness for others.

Critical Theory is an attempt to understand what is happening and in so doing find another way to act in this context. Key to this reevaluation is second reflection. The Holocaust is the symbolic event to which they point as indicative of the need for this mode of thinking.

"There is no poetry possible after Auschwitz." Adorno

There is a deep difference between humanity before and after the Holocaust. It has changed the way we relate to ourselves.

Paul Celan, a key Frankfurt School figure, wrote in German and asked how it is possible to write in the language of the Perpetrators. It is an aporia and we must stay with this problem and endure it. Celan irritated the practices of metaphor and emblematic language in his writing by using the German tendency of building words. In no small way this is in response to the development of euphemism in propaganda (like in the current Gulf crisis and the so-called "top-kill" of the well spewing oil).

What we need is a deep mistrust of language, especially in the case of literature, as Thomas Mann said, "a writer is someone that has a problem with language."

ME:Perhaps Naptha's suicide might be indicative of Adorno's position that we cannot counter Reason by being unreasonable; or maybe it illustrates Habermas' position that communication must happen again and again until we reach accord.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 63-4:

[63] The anamnesis of freedom in natural beauty deceives because it seeks freedom in the old unfreedom. Natural beauty is myth transposed into the imagination and thus, perhaps, requited. The song of birds is found beautiful by everyone; no feeling person in whom something of the European tradition survives fails to be moved by the sound of a robin after a rain shower. Yet something frightening lurks in the song of birds precisely because it is not a song but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed. The fright appears as well in the threat of migratory flocks, which bespeak ancient divinations, forever presaging ill fortune. With regard to its content, the ambiguity of natural beauty has its origin in mythical ambiguity. This is why genius, once it has become aware of itself, is no longer satisfied with natural beauty. As its prose character intensifies, art extricates itself completely from myth and thus from the spell of nature, which nevertheless continues in the subjective domination of nature. [64] Only what had escaped nature as fate would help nature to its restitution. The more that art is thoroughly organized as an object by the subject and divested of the subject's intentions, the more articulately does it speak according to the model of a nonconceptual, nonrigidified significative language; this would perhaps be the same language that is inscribed in what the sentimental age gave the beautiful if threadbare name, "The Book of Nature." [...] For natural beauty as something that appears is itself an image.

Archaic nature is unfreedom because there is no choice, we are at the mercy of Nature. Thus the bird's song is frightening because it is not a choice for the bird to sing but an echo of the hardwiring, they are limited in their repertoire.

Adorno and Horkheimer see modern life as spell-binding, not unlike this robin after the rain, and this shows us that the whole Enlightenment project has failed.

ME: Why is suicide the predominant mode of political action today?

Hegel's dialectic is one that espouses sacrificing the particular for the whole whereas Adorno's negative dialectic is the reverse: in the particular is the whole.

The attempt to dominate Nature was an attempt to get outside of the spell of Nature and yet this pursuit hands us back to that spell-state. The alternative is not an untouched Nature but another relationship to Nature.

A True work of Art is not a result of the artist's intentions but just the opposite: making the object leads to the primacy of the object.

The art object must survive the death of the author and in this sense the art object exists as a transformed subjectivity.

The contemporary art object remains a contemporary art object because it is more than the intentionality of the artist. The mode of art production is dependent upon the development of history as well as the living moment.

Below is Pollini's performance of Webern's Variationen für Piano op. 27; here's another link that allows you to compare four renditions of the same piece, starting with Glenn Gould.

Adorno studied in Vienna with Schönberg and Webern before he became the philosopher we know him as today.

Below is Pollini performing Beethoven's Opus 111 live in 1973:

Artists are able to transform the reception of the tradition to this point.

It is ideological to propose technique as the antithesis of Nature: bourgeois sexuality leads to talk of "unravished Nature." The artwork can be true to the silence of Nature and yet also it speak; in this way Art is a way out, an agent of change.

Natural beauty, such as it is perceived unmediated in appearing nature, is compromised by the Rousseauian retournons. The mistakenness of the crude antithesis of technique and nature is obvious in the fact that precisely nature that has not been pacified by human cultivation, nature over which no human hand has passed— alpine moraines and taluses—resembles those industrial mountains of debris from which the socially lauded aesthetic need for nature flees. Just how industrial it looks in inorganic outer space will someday be clear. Even in its telluric expansion, as the imprint of total technique, the concept of idyllic nature would retain the provincialism of a minuscule island. In schema borrowed from bourgeois sexual morality, technique is said to have ravished nature, yet under transformed relations of production it would just as easily be able to assist nature and on this sad earth help it to attain what perhaps it wants. Consciousness does justice to the experience of nature only when, like impressionist art, it incorporates nature's wounds. The rigid concept of natural beauty thereby becomes dynamic. It is broadened by what is already no longer nature. Otherwise nature is degraded to a deceptive phantasm.
[...]
For in every particular aesthetic experience of nature the social whole is lodged.
[...]
Experience of nature is coconstituted by the capacity of determinate negation. With the expansion of technique and, even more important, the total expansion of of the exchange principle, natural beauty increasingly fulfills a contrasting function and is thus integrated into the reified world it opposes.
[...]
Natural beauty is ideology where it serves to disguise mediatedness as immediacy.
[...]
[69]
To feel nature, and most of all its silence, has become a rare privilege and has in turn become commercially exploitable.
[...]The "How beautiful!" at the sight of a landscape insults its mute language and reduces its beauty; appearing nature wants silence at the same time that anyone capable of its experience feels compelled to speak in order to find a momentary liberation from monadological confinement. The image of nature survives because its complete negation in the artifact—negation that rescues this image—is necessarily blind to what exists beyond bourgeois society, its labor, and its commodities. Natural beauty remains the allegory of this beyond in spite of its mediation through social immanence. If, however, this allegory were substituted as the achieved state of reconciliation, it would be degraded as an aid for cloaking and legitimating the unreconciled world as one in which—as the claim goes—beauty is indeed possible.

From Adorno's Aesthetic Theory page 70-1:

Although what is beautiful and what is not cannot be categorically distinguished in nature, the consciousness that immerses itself lovingly in something beautiful is compelled to make this distinction. A qualitative distinction in natural beauty can be sought, if at all, in the degree to which something not made by human beings is eloquent: in its expression. What is beautiful in nature is what appears to be more than what is literally there. Without receptivity there would be no such objective expression, but it is not reducible to the subject; natural beauty points to the primacy of the object in subjective experience. Natural beauty is perceived both as authoritatively binding and as something incomprehensible that questioningly awaits its solution. Above all else it is this double character of natural beauty that has been conferred on art. Under its optic, art is not the imitation of nature but the imitation of natural beauty. [...] In natural beauty, natural and historical elements interact in a musical and kaleidoscopically changing fashion.

To insist on the primacy of the art object is to do ethics because it is a shift and deliberated acting in the subject-object relationship. But we mustn't state that the aesthetic relationship is a path to ethics because this is an instrumentalizing of that relationship and necessarily subsumes the object to the desires of the subject.

As indeterminate, as antithetical to definitions, natural beauty is indefinable, and in this it is related to music, which drew the deepest effects in Schubert from such nonobjective similarity with nature. Just as in music what is beautiful flashes up in nature only to disappear in the instant one tries to grasp it. Art does not imitate nature, not even individual instances of natural beauty, but natural beauty as such. This denominates not only the aporia of natural beauty but the aporia of aesthetics as a whole. Its object is determined negatively, as indeterminable. It is for this reason that art requires philosophy, which interprets it in order to say what it is unable to say, whereas art is only able to say it by not saying it. The paradoxes of aesthetics are dictated to it by its object [...]
[73]
The origin of this paradox is the character of nature's language.
[...]
[A]s in all authentic works, it is, rather, that the subject wants to fall silent by way of the work[....] Natural beauty is the trace of the nonidentical in things under the spell of universal identity. As long as this spell prevails, the nonidentical has no positive existence.

The totality of rationality in modern life is this spell; it's a black magic, so to say.

So, this requirement that philosophy speak of the meaning of the art object is a failure on the part of art.
ME: Does this make art criticism a double failure?
Changes in music or art happen and it doesn't happen ex nihilo, these changes need to happen at the times when they do because of the context from which the changes spring-up.

Notes from the European Graduate School Forthcoming

2010-08-25T10:25:00.001-04:00

I've just returned from another round of classes at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and as I did last year, I will be posting the notes I took while there.

Here are the classes I sat:

Adorno's Aesthetics - taught by Martin Hielscher
Critique of Pure Feeling - taught by Brian Massumi
In Moving Color - taught by Erin Manning
Film Art & Cinematic Languages - Atom Egoyan
Political Aesthetics & the Contours of Creativity - Tom Kalin
Schopenhauer - Living Disaster - Wolfgang Schirmacher

I also have notes from the evening lectures by the above as well as the following:

These notes will be posted as quickly as I can type them up from my notebooks. I will do my best to embed the videos from the lectures as well as find .pdf's of the referenced materials as I did last year.

Irish Monks, Tang Dynasty Gnostic Christians, and Greco-Shinto Iconography

2010-07-26T13:38:00.001-04:00

--Or-- Age of Crushed Skulls cont'd.

Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne

The beginning of the Viking Age for the United Kingdom was the sacking of the monastery at Lindisfarne, a small tidal island on the Northeastern coast of England. This monastery was founded by the Irish Saint Aidan, who was living on the island of Iona. Despite Iona's Greek-sounding name, Saint Aidan came to Lindisfarne from the Inner Hebrides in western Scotland. It's difficult to ascertain just how exactly Iona came to be called Iona, some speculate that it means "the yew-place," some say it's a latinized form of a phrase meaning "Calum's island," some suggest it's a from another name meaning "den of the brown bear."

Christianity came to the U.K. region during the 3rd Christian Era. Thus, Christianity came to the region just as Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. But, the Romans largely withdrew their military presence form the British Isles during the 4th and 5th centuries so that they could defend Rome against the Visigoths (who ultimately sacked Rome in 410 CE) This left the monks in the U.K. region largely insulated and accounts for the forms of Christianity known as Celtic Christianity that developed during the early middle ages and would not be reformed until the twelfth century, CE.

Herculean depiction of Vajrapani (right), as the protector of the Buddha, 2nd century CE Gandhara,

The Christians of continental Europe accused some of the British bishops of heresies such as Pelagianism, named after Pelagius who is remembered as stating that Original Sin did not taint human nature and that our will is still possible to choose good over evil without the special aid of Divine intervention. Thus humanity has full control, and responsibility for every sin committed. So, because men are sinners by choice, they are therefore criminals who need the atonement of Jesus Christ. By extension of this argument, the Pelagians believed that it is possible to attain moral purity in this lifetime.

This was in direct opposition to St. Augustine (of City of God fame, who basically is responsible for the Roman Catholic Church) who stated that there is no salvation for humanity except through Divine Grace which humanity can choose to accept or not. The Pelagians argued that St. Augustine was secretly a Manichean, whose beliefs included that the flesh itself was sinful and that Jesus was never present in the flesh (that is, in an impure state).

Manichaean priests, writing at their desks, with panel inscription in Uyghur.

Did you know that Manicheanism, a form of Gnostic Christianity, was the most widespread religion in the world between the 3rd and 7th centuries CE?

The Manicheans were known from the Western Roman Empire, who kicked them out of the Church in 432 CE (and then announced themselves as the Catholic--meaning Universal--Church) and all the way to Southern China, where they were known as 摩尼教 (monijiao). The Manicheans and the Church of the East thrived in Southern China until the 14th century.

The Manicheans get their name from the Prophet Mani, a Persian man who has a vision to leave his parents' Syrian Christian church and travel to "India" (now called Afghanistan). It is believed that while in that region he was influenced by Greco-Buddhism.

Nestorian priests in a procession on Palm Sunday, in a 7th- or 8th-century wall painting from a Nestorian church in China, Tang Dynasty

Greco-Buddhism is a syncretic religion that blends Hellenistic culture and Buddhism. This was made possible by the conquests of Alexander the Great, whose wars brought Hellenistic colonists on his march to the ends of the Earth. Greco-Buddhism flourished for nearly a thousand years from the 4th century BCE to the 5th CE.

Author standing next to statue of Fujin, Shinto god of Wind; Asakusa Temple, Tokyo. Depicting Fujin in this manner has it's origins in the Herculean depictions of Vajrapani, protector of the Buddha, from the Greco-Buddhist syncretism (see above)

new post at the avant guardian

2010-07-25T11:46:00.000-04:00

This week's popOp installment is now available at the avant guardian, here.

A thousand pardons to interested readers: I am heading back up into the Swiss Alps for the next month to sit in classes at the European Graduate School. This is a pretty intensive time and I'm fairly certain that I will primarily be posting little things on FB and checking email.

I will be sure to transcribe my notes, as I did last year, for those of you that are interested.

Anywho.

This week's post is a brief thought on the meaning of the term "deliberate." Since my popOp posts have all been toward understanding the possibility of agency in a time when the subject has become questionable (what I call spectacular agency); this post continues to palpate the judgement. To judge is to think, to think is not a solitary action but is only possible when one has become questionable to oneself.

To deliberate is to evacuate a court room, or a stage, so as to reintroduce the fiction of truth. Discuss amongst yourselves.

What Is the Process of Appreciating

2010-07-24T14:45:00.010-04:00

I'm getting ready to head back to Saas-Fee, Switzerland for another round of classes at the European Graduate School and I'm doing a little cleaning of house.

Even on the ol' blog. Which lead me to this: a post I began in January of this year and just didn't quite put my hand to it further.

Of course, now I'm no longer struck with whatever it was that got me thinking about this. It's probably, actually, now that I think of it, been cut form one of my popOp posts at the avant guardian. Anyways, here's what I found:

To appreciate (which is a process that requires apprehending the appropriateness of what is at hand, and in so doing raising the value of the thing transformed)

Benjamin's flâneur overcomes this dandy problem by way of memory. Benjamin, building on the works of Marx and Weber, saw the ultimate goal of modernity as the dissolution of all community, and this was being achieved by the gradual erosion of the framework of experience itself. The term is Erfahrung, experience, but it is the shared memory, the interpenetration of experiences, a sharing of the personal in the private and vice versa; in the countryside Erfahrung was possible and the lack of this is the feeling of alienation felt in the City. In the urban centers and in the factories, all human relations were intensely personal and incommunicable, Erlebnis, but paradoxically also available as simply information, a statistic. The modern era meant that there could be the Public space, a space everyone owns (say a city park), but no one belongs in (nobody is allowed to live in the park). In response to this intense feeling of dehumanization came many nihilistic responses, this is the danger of dandyism and hedonism, or art for art's sake.

new post at the avant guardian

2010-07-19T13:22:00.000-04:00

I have a new popOp post over at the avant guardian. This week's post discusses that bizarre movie Southland Tales from Richard Kelly (the guy that directed Donnie Darko).

Southland Tales premiered in 2006 at Cannes and was roundly poo-pooed. It was reedited and released to a whopping 63 theatres at the end of 2007. Many critics were fond of calling it sophmoric and pretentious.

I'm saying it's awesome; doing exactly what Delezue & Guattari stated in Anti-Oedipus, "cinema is able to capture the movement of madness, precisely because it is not analytical and regressive, but explores a global field of coexistence."

the avant guardian: the smartest thing you read today.

Mark Twain has the best name ever.

2010-07-10T00:05:00.000-04:00

It's no wonder he's in the American canon, he's got the proper name.

To mark twain means to note that it is safe between these two areas. So it was safe to guide your ship on the river in this manner. To mark twain was to sound the river. Sound is an interesting word in English:

We sound-off when someone is trying to ascertain how we feel. In taking this measurement and we are healthy, we are said to be sound as a bell. When we want serious punishment we call for that person to have a sound thrashing.

It sounds good, but it is still only an impression.

When we are deeply asleep, we are soundly so; it is the depth that whales travel to and it is the body of water in which they might travel (as in the Puget Sound in Seattle).

Emerging at Gather Atlanta

2010-07-07T23:24:00.001-04:00

I'm very excited to be at the second annual Gather Atlanta on July 31st. The four editors of the avant guardian will be present for what promises to be a great evening of partnership building and networking.

GATHER ATLANTA is an annual networking event presented by MINT, BurnAway,
WonderRoot, and ThoughtMarker that seeks to

Unite and promote Atlanta's emerging galleries, alternative art spaces, and young creative collectives
Improve collaboration between Atlanta's disparate arts organizations
Embrace a community traditionally separated by Atlanta geography or differences in artistic identity
Provide a forum for creative discourse, fresh ideas, and for sharing resources

If you're in the Atlanta area, come on out to Trees Atlanta: this event is free and is designed to encourage involvement in the arts communities of the city. Come be the change you want to see.

Visit Gather Atlanta's site, here.

comments on spectacular agency

2010-07-03T19:26:00.003-04:00

My fellow avant guardian, Ari, asked a fine question in the comments to my popOp post this week and below is my response (it's the same response I've posted on the avant guardian):

This video embedded in my post got me thinking about what Hannah Arendt said, “There exists in our society a widespread fear that has nothing to do with the biblical ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged,’ and if this fear speaks in terms of ‘casting the first stone,’ it takes this word in vain. For behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done.” (emphasis mine)

And this is precisely the point of discussing spectacular agency.

If you noticed (I didn’t until the second go round) toward the end of the clip (around the 8th minute, I think) you can clearly see the cops have a guy standing on the other side of the human wall with a video camera.

Since Rodney King it’s been very clear to folks that want to rage against the machine that having video images of brutality will work in your favor as the spectacle of violence usually communicates something rapidly (usually it’s a moral claim akin to “we’re David and they’re Goliath, Help!”) Among military circles there’s been this discussion for about ten years that the Pentagon needs to learn the lessons of “public diplomacy” and usually they’ll point-out that Al Qaeda-like networks are successful at recruiting and sustaining fighting against the largest military of all human history because they have the ability to win moral arguments using simple strategies like showing people getting killed by the outsider. Public diplomats point out that these videos are damaging because they reduce the (U.S.) mission to simple images of Goliath smothering Davids. So, they say, the Pentagon should find ways to reduce their enemy combatants to images as well.

This is why the Toronto police are armed not only with massive military force, they are also armed with mass communications force. They are out there reducing their enemies to images. Then, were a trial to be called, the police would have their images fight the images brought forward by the protesters. Thus I talk about spectacular agency: what kind of agency do you have when you’re reduced to such?

Ultimately, I believe that the frustration I feel is not that the protesters were not thinking, I suspect they thought this was a legal, non-offensive, active in my democracy-type action. They ask the riot police where they should go, they plead with them, as human beings to communicate. These people want to be compliant with the physical demands of the police and the police don’t allow that. The police, probably acting on the orders from someone not able to see what is happening in the situation, respond with beatings and arrests and detention.

The trial of Johannes Mehserle (this cop stands accused of murdering Oscar Grant III, which he claims was an accident and only meant to use his Taser on Grant, even though he clearly uses the gun in the manner he’s been trained and is completely unlike the way one fires a Taser) raises a similar issue. The law is such that if a cop feels endangered, the cop can use lethal force at their discretion. Thus it’s legally very difficult to establish whether it is excessive to shoot in the back and kill a man who is prone on his stomach, hands under his body. Legally it’s tough to establish that.

But morally it’s clear that Mehserle was wrong to do that. Even if it was the case that he meant to use his Taser, Mehserle only establishes with that fact that he is guilty of manslaughter and criminal negligence. But legally it’s unclear. I say he should be judged.

Judging, like improvisation, as you brought up, is a risk that must be taken.

new post at the avant guardian

2010-07-03T13:27:00.001-04:00

this week's popOp installation continues the discussion of relational aesthetics.

if relational aesthetics, a mode of art production, can be understood to achieve political action it is only coherent if we explore what i am terming spectacular agency.

over the past six months i've been developing a discussion of spectaclism, a term that results from my reading of Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Agamben's essay What Is an Apparatus? i'm hoping that in these discussions we are palpating a mode of sovereignty that is noncoercive in its relations with power.

enjoy!

new post at the avant guardian

2010-06-25T17:34:00.003-04:00

in this week's popOp I discuss Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics and desubjectification (remember that one?)

pictures and videos and a link to a radio station... a cornucopia of media consumption can be yours if only you would click on this link, right here.

Missing Okinawa

2010-06-19T16:15:00.002-04:00

It's crazy hot out here in Atlanta. It's the summer; that's natural.

During the summer months in Okinawa it's much, much hotter. 虫暑い (mushi atsui, literally means even the bugs are sweating). It's hot, the ocean is like bath water, you put on your jimbe or your kariyushi wear (as part of the mainland's "cool biz" practices, kariyushi wear is supposed to be understood as professional/business summer attire).

This is appropriate because kariyushi in Okinawan, or ウチナーグチUchinaguchi, means "harmony with nature." And it's very important to be appropriate in Okinawa because when the Ryukyu Kingdom 流球 still paid tribute to the Chinese dynasties the small islands were known as shurei no kuni (the Land of Propriety). This message was sent to the Ryukyuans on a tablet as a token of gratitude for the historic kindness the Ryukyuans have shown visitors as well as their commitment to Confucian education in Naha. The inscription was later added to the Shureimon Gate leading to Shuri Castle, the ancient home of the Ryukyu Kings.

Any how.

In the summer comes Obon, similar to Dia de los Muertos, where the living celebrate their ancestors. In Okinawa this is the best time to see and be a part of the eisa エイサ festivities. Eisa began as a more solemn Buddhist affair but over the last fifty years has become increasingly flashier and livelier.
Here's a short clip of the Uruma City traditional eisa dancers during the 2008 10000 Drummers event in Naha on kokusaidori in Naha (apologies for the quality of the recording):

The traditional eisa performances, I was told were (as was the playing of the sanshin 三線) supposed to be done to the rhythm of one's heart. Today it's much faster, less contemplative, and tends to encourage dancing. Here's a great performance from the 53rd 全島エイサ祭り(zento eisa matsuri All-Island Eisa Festival) in Okinawa City:

I had the great fortune to perform at this festival with the Okinawa City International Association's eisa team. At the end of the long hot day everyone was invited to join on the field and dance.

My wife and I loved visiting Ikeijima 伊計島 off the coast of Uruma うるま and Gushikawa 具志川. Sometimes we'd go running along the kaichu dori 海中道路 bridge that connects them to the honto 本島 (main island). One summer night we went running and when we got to Henza 平安座島 we heard the beating of those big eisa drums. It was a beautiful night; it was crazy hot, of course. But there was a nice enough breeze from the ocean every now and again. I remember the moon was out. It was beautiful to be in such a lovely place.

This song from BEGIN is very reminiscent of that night. Although this video isn't filmed at Katsuren 勝連城 (which is near Ikei and Henza), it was filmed at Nakagusuku 中城城 (the two castles fought against each other in the 15th century).

I just wanted to write about Okinawa a little.

new post at the avant guardian

2010-06-18T17:28:00.002-04:00

popOp's been noticing an awful lot of talk about ninjas lately.

and grown men being arrested in the mountains of Pakistan with 40-inch swords, hunting Osama bin Laden...

what's with that?

A Great Thanks for Great Heidegger-related Sites

2010-06-13T23:26:00.000-04:00

I'm most certainly very late to this fine party that Pete has been hosting over at both Enowning as well as Ereignis.

Both sites are exemplary in the dedication that Pete has shown for providing the English-reading blogosphere with tons of great scholarship and opinion on Heidegger and philosophy in the world.

Selfishly, I'm really glad to have his Heidegger and East Asian philosophies section on Ereignis. Also, self-aggrandizingly, I've had two items shared on Enowning and it's really great to know someone is out there noticing.

Thanks, Pete, for all sharing the good times!

New Post at the avant guardian

2010-06-11T18:26:00.001-04:00

This week on popOp we look at doctors performing experiments on the recipients of torture from the U.S. government (you're welcome, torture victims, I'm sure you find solace in knowing that future victims will have a more effective and efficient mode delivered to them). How would Hannah Arendt think about it, would it look anything like what Confucius taught?

Things that make you go hmmm.

popOp!

New Post at the avant guardian

2010-06-05T11:13:00.001-04:00

In this week's installment of popOp we drop that delicious album from Spiritualized and just before we nod out we consider the crucial role that "drugs" has had in structuring the Western imagination since the Ancient Greeks.

Go ahead, take a little read - it won't kill you and you won't get hooked. Promise.

Desubjectification

2010-06-02T23:40:00.001-04:00

My friend, Ryland, asked me a great question tonight:
"Every time you talk about desubjectification in yr popOp, I don't understand what you mean. What do you mean by desubjectification?"

In reponse:

I think a great place to look would be in Foucault as this is where Agamben (from whom I learned the term) gets it. He gives a fairly good account of it in an interview in 1978 with Le Bitoux (Mec, 1988, trans. Savran, 1992). The idea seems fairly similar to D&G's discussion of the BwO - a zone of intensity, no longer a representation of an ontic being.

Foucault states, in that interview:

[in the bath houses] you meet men who are like you, who are like what you are for them....You cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own past, in your own identity."
So desubjectification can be an affirmation of non-identity. A means by which to become a multiplicity, a communal being.

Immediately I don't feel much of a resonance with the idea of an emancipatory strategy in this sort of situation, it seems a bit too much plaisir and less jouissance. But then I read this article "Overcoming Masturbation" by Light Planet, a mormon proselytizing organ. Now I see why desubjectification as a strategy would be of use to someone.

I'm fairly surprised that 1) these people think there is something wrong with masturbation 2) the problem will be "cured" by not "admiring oneself" nor touching one's body, and 3) one strategy for overcoming the problem of enjoying oneself a-sexually is to eat a snack "even if you're not hungry" and finally 4) don't even pray about it.

Seriously? You believe that prayer, the direct means of access to the Lord of all Creation (including masturbation, mind you!) is actually a bad thing when you're trying to overcome what God created us to do?

I'm with you, Foucault:

It is regrettable that such sites of erotic experience do not exist for heterosexuals. Wouldn't it be a marvelous state of affairs for them to be able to, at any hour of the day or night, enter into a place furnished with all the comforts and with all the possibilities they could imagine...?

I am writing this week's popOp about addictions (even masturbation, I guess) and the centrality of this concept to the very notion of how we think of the universe. I'm referencing, of course, Plato's Phaedrus and the discussion of pharmakon-pharmakeia-pharmakeus-(pharmakos); thanks, Derrida!

New Post at the avant guardian

2010-05-28T22:29:00.002-04:00

Musical guests? The Wu-Tang Clan (a la 36 Chambers) and Sigur Ros (performing "( )" in its entirety).

This week's popOp tries to understand the closing of Middlesex University's Philosophy department (home of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy), as well as the possibility of communicating that which resists being communicated.

Head on over for fun.

New Post at the avant guardian

2010-05-21T18:02:00.002-04:00

I've been rocking back and forth in a corner for the last couple of weeks as I consume the MSM news and now it's time to get off that trip and into something more real.

So, I share with you my thinking on the nature of the 24 hour news cycle, the need for a reconsideration of the difference between time and experience, how political agents become spectral (if Debord and Agamben are correct), and Rand Paul. I assume he goes by Rand (rather than Randal) because he really wants to drive home his libertarian views and these were sadly combined with that doofus Ayn Rand. Rand Paul: you're a jerk. Stop being such a weasel.

Enjoy popOp! it's the Real thing.

New Post at The Avant Guardian

2010-05-07T17:57:00.001-04:00

popOp is back and it's bad. no, that's not true. popOp's a good boy. who's a good boy? is it you? is it?

Addiction as Cultural Pathology?

2010-04-29T18:01:00.001-04:00

I use an addiction model to understand the nature of human relationships, I employ a comparative philosophical perspective to investigate this addiction model. Philosophy, at its best, is the tool for reconceptualizing how we understand the world. In my research, funded by NIDA and as a researcher for Kennesaw State University, I noticed that the addiction science literature tends to operate with a particular model of how humans can define themselves and so how they interact. This assumption tends to guide the research and experiments toward a certain range of responses and perhaps outcomes.

Culture is a recursive patterning of human behavior in relating to the world. Like a fractal, if we can get a sense of the overall pattern, we can begin to understand how the system works at a micro and macro level. Addiction, it seems to me, is above all a pathological recursive patterning of one's behavior. But addiction does not happen only in an individual, contrary to our primary methods for treating and “dealing with” addictions (prison, a strict pharmacological intervention). Because human beings are defined by this recursive patterning of behavior that we call culture, if we are to properly understand this phenomenon called addiction, we must examine the interactions between the person addicted (or with the problematic use of a substance) and their environments. The guiding question became for me, what insights might a focus on the relational dynamics of selfhood provide to understanding how methamphetamine practices are negotiated throughout the drug-use career?

There are two predominant strategies for the treatment of addiction – pharmacological interventions and psycho-social interventions and most commonly employed is the incorporation of both dimensions when treating those afflicted. Following Volkow and Li (2004), the term addiction is employed so as to distinguish between chemical dependence (defined by the DSM-IV) and the broader phenomenon encountered while documenting the respondents' meth-using practices which can be characterized as repeated drug use resulting in an intense desire for methamphetamine and an impaired ability to control their urges to use methamphetamine. My aim is not to conflate chemical dependence with addiction, nor do I use the term without an acute awareness of the historical and philosophical problems associated with it (Berringer, 1979; Buhler, 2005; Davies, 1998; Hammersly, 2002; May, 2001). The pharmacological interventions developed to date (methadone for opiates, disulfiram for alcohol, the TA-CD vaccine for cocaine and perhaps methamphetamine), as the developers themselves are quick to point out, are not preventative and cannot act as stand-alone treatments: the effectiveness of these interventions are attenuated if the patient simply begins taking larger doses of the drugs. Thus, the central problematic in addiction science right now is managing relapse, a phenomenon that seems to be intimately related to drug use initiation and reiteration. It is here argued that these are primarily social processes and as such require a properly social intervention.

The success of therapeutic group dynamics as found in Alcoholics Anonymous-style twelve step programs seem to be based on the insight that an individual who changes not only their individual behaviors but also their social context is more likely to abstain from problematic use of drugs. This process of recovering in groups such as AA is possible through the many interpersonal interactions of the members themselves (Kitchin, 2002). Adams (2008) has argued that addiction is the gradual foregrounding of the person's relationship to the substance of abuse and so he calls for an increase in the intimacy among individuals' relationships as a means to both attenuate the individual's susceptibility to addictions as well as a means to overcoming addictions. Where Adams' model assumes externalized relationality, I am suggesting the primacy of internalized relationality in identity formation, as Hughes, Valentine, & Kenten (2009) have stated, our identities are, “inevitably socially and historically, constituted...always embodied, material; and so subject to embodied social and material constraints.” (10)

Culture is a recursive patterning of interactions. How we understand ourselves is subject to a long process of identity creation and negotiation within a social milieu. The identity migration model (Hughes, 2007; Hughes, Valentine, & Kenten, 2009) is a three-step process that assumes that people are fundamentally developed and come to define themselves in their relationships to their environments and their social worlds. Central to understanding both how one creates an idea of oneself (identity creation) as well as understanding how one changes one's identity over time (identity migration) is recognizing the performative nature of social life. We seek to produce an identity within what our social contexts allow and, given this pallet from which to choose, we then evoke this sense of self as frequently as is possible. With frequent evocations of this constructed self we are able to say that we are “being true to ourselves.” Because repetition is central to how we understand “who we are” at the fundamental level, we can to discuss problematic usage of substances of abuse without already having to concede to the language of volition or chemical overdetermination. In this way the identity migration model presents an understanding of addictions that eschews the classical dilemmas that have been well-documented in the literature (Bailey, 2005; Berringer, 1979; Davies, 1998; Graham, 2008; Hammersley, 2002) enabling us to generate novel understandings of the initiation into problematic behaviors as well as routes to cessation by illuminating the fundamentally relational nature of problematic behavior. The identity migration model also bolsters a renewed vision of risk in the addiction literature, as Pilkington (2007) has demonstrated what is at risk in drug-use is not necessarily the assumed legal or health implications, but must be expanded to include the traumatic loss of one's identity-affirming position within a group.

There is neurophysiological evidence (Volkow and Li, 2004) to suggest that the brain itself, without the learned cues from external phenomena will function differently as it unlearns the methamphetamine habit. While Hughes (2007) prefers to eschew, “a positivistic preoccupation with causality,” as well as avoiding a, “clinical search for the 'mechanism' of addiction,” (674) I would suggest that employing this apprenticeship language succeeds in her goal of reorienting addiction as an object of social theory and also jibes well with what the neuroscience of learning seems to be indicating (Schultz, 1998, 2000; Tripp and Wickens, 2008). Addictive behavior seems to be the result of a hijacking of the brain's inherent reward system corrupting how the brain naturally processes salience (Robinson and Berridge, 2000; Everitt and Robbins, 2005). The identity migration model, understood in the manner I've described suggests that the reward of methamphetamine is not only found in the surge of dopamine that accompanies the metabolism of methamphetamine, but this model also fits within the model of learning as a process of the dopaminergic system. These modes of understanding addictions are extremely powerful in identifying pharmacological interventions that will facilitate the social interventions that are necessary to reinforce methamphetamine cessation.

My data demonstrates the identity migration model is a process with three distinct moments: 1) an apprenticeship to methamphetamine use in a meth-practicing community, 2) an archaeological “bottoming-out” that the performative utterance announces so that gains entry into a community of recovery and thus 3) one may perform recovery at given opportunities. Key to understanding this process is the fundamentally social nature of methamphetamine use. With this analytic we are provided a lens for reconciling both pharmacological and psycho-social addiction interventions. With future studies employing the analytic here described and with other substances of abuse it is hoped that the community will be able to shift our understanding of addiction from an individual's pathology to an understanding of the primacy of social relations in how we understand ourselves.

Heidegger's Profound Boredom and Addiction

2010-04-23T23:45:00.000-04:00

Today I presented the following paper calling for a reconceptualization of addiction in light of Martin Heidegger's theory of moods. The paper was presented at the Southern Sociological Society's Annual Meeting and I prefaced the remarks with two things:
1) Heidegger is very explicit in his 1929-30 lecture (later published as Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics) that he is not at all interested in kulturphilosophie (or sociology or anthropology) - nonetheless I think that we all can benefit from reconsidering modern living in light of what Heidegger has discussed -
2) specifically, I'm thinking that it's no accident that the concepts of addiction, modernity, and the study of modern society (sociology) all occurred within the same fifty year period.

Here are the slides to what I presented:

Heidegger's Profound Boredom and Addiction

Relationality and Methamphetamine

2010-04-22T23:07:00.000-04:00

Today I presented this talk at the Southern Sociological Society's Annual Meeting in a panel discussion concerned with qualitative research methods. This is a similar talk to the one I gave at the Society for Applied Anthropology in Mexico a couple of weeks ago.

Tomorrow I will be presenting another paper in a theory session: Heidegger's theory of profound boredom and insights that we might gain to understanding addiction in light of his theory of moods. Wish me luck!

Relationality and Methamphetamine Use

Spectacular Agency - A political theory for everyone and no one

2010-04-18T13:12:00.002-04:00

April has been a crazy month!

First I presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology's annual meeting in Merida, Mexico.
Then we headed off to Grenoble, France for our dear friends' wedding (felicitations!)
Next week I will be presenting two papers at the Southern Sociology Society's annual meeting.
Last week my best friend got hitched (congratulations, y'all!), and I presented this paper at the North Georgia Student Philosophy Conference.

Those of you that are reading my weekly popOp articles at the avant guardian will recognize some of these images. The popOp writings are my practice for preparing my thesis for The European Graduate School, and what's included here is the outline of my central hypothesis:

Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, stated that the spectacle, the idiomatic mode of human relatedness in late Western modernity, is presented as an instrument of unification, but, “the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.” This model of sociality, problematic in itself, troubles the possibility of sovereignty. Nonetheless, the works of Debord and the Situationist International have received much-deserved attention in the last decade precisely because investigating spectaclist economic relations provides an evocative analytic for palpating the contours of that new mode of agency required in the fruition of globalization. In this paper is discussed the commodification of memory by examining appropriation-based art practices (e.g. Girl Talk or Kutiman's “Thru You”) and appropriation-based activism (Anonymous) with an eye toward developing further the possibility of agency within these increasingly-isolating relations.

I am calling this mode of sovereignty "spectacular agency," and what follows are some considerations of the sites of this mode of sovereignty as well as a (brief) consideration of the possibility of political action within this mode.

Here's the slide show that went with the talk - apologies, but scribd doesn't share the animations that were present in the original so some of the comedic effect is lost.

Sites of Spectacular Agency: A political theory for everyone and no one

New Post at The Avant Guardian

2010-03-31T17:16:00.001-04:00

It's a magical time in the universe, again:

popOp springs eternal.

My Poem Over at W5RAn

2010-03-24T09:31:00.000-04:00

The fine folks at W5RAn have published one of my poems. You can read it here.

New Post at The Avant Guardian

2010-03-19T16:42:00.003-04:00

Another Friday, another popOp.

This week we're looking at the beef between Fahamu Pecou and Fabian "Occasional Superstar" Williams, and also the continuing palpating of spectaclist economics.

holla!

Dogs in the Media

2010-03-19T00:05:00.000-04:00

Wired's Science blog has a great article on the world's oldest trees (here).

Did you know know trees can live to be as old as 9,500? This one did (right).

This is Old Tjikko and lives in Sweden.

And it's named after the dead dog of the geologist that discovered it.

Who's a good boy?

New Post at The Avant Guardian

2010-03-12T16:59:00.001-05:00

I've just posted a new little ditty over at the avant guardian, this week's installment of popOp.

Something about Nietzsche vs. hyphy vs. snap vs. Bob Fosse (?)

Checka out.

It Costs More To Be Poor

2010-03-11T16:45:00.000-05:00

It's true: living costs poor people more than the not poor. I bring this up because I read this headline and the supporting report today:

"Study finds median wealth for single black women at $5"

(here's the report upon which the article is based)

Here's a report from the Washington Post that discusses this counter-intuitive truth "The High Cost of Poverty"

Also, here's a report from the Brookings Institutes, almost exactly a year before the WaPo article, discussing the financial costs of being poor, "Public Policies to Alter the Use of Alternative Financial Services among Low-Income Households"

The poor pay more to have access to their income:

for example -- if you cannot pass a Chex Systems report, then you likely cannot get a bank account, which means you will pay someone to cash your check. If you're not familiar with this concept, the poor will pay somebody money to give them access to the money they earned.

The poor have to pay in terms of housing:

if you are poor, you likely have a poor credit history, based on this you will not qualify for standard financing for your mortgage. You might be offered a subprime loan, and since about 2006 we've seen what that leads to: massive financial hemorrhaging that can only be stopped by giving the ultra wealthy of the world all the money they want.
Some might say, "don't buy a house if you can't get good financing." But, of course, paying rent (as everyone who tries to sell housing initiatives to the public typically brings up), means not building wealth and again, loosing that money.

The poor have to pay more for transportation:

Not unlike financing a home, if you are poor you will likely pay a more punitive interest rate for that car loan...
...Unless, of course, you don't buy a car and instead use public transportation. As a regular user of the bus and train services in Atlanta, I can assure you that although our system is very efficient (despite what most white people in the metro area suspect) - public transit's real cost must also include the time spent waiting for transfers and connecting service. This is really a drag now since it seems likely that half the bus routes in the city will be cut soon.

The poor have to pay more for health care:

The poor tend to work in industries that do not provide things like health care, but they may qualify for limited assistance from programs like Medicaid (maybe)
The leading reason people (62% of those who filed) filed bankruptcy in 2007 because of medical debts. 92% of those who listed this as their primary reason for filing had $5000 of medical debt or more, this representing more than 10% of their gross income (from the American Journal of Medicine)

But the real cost of being poor vis-a-vis health care is more subtle - because the Federal Poverty Rate as it is, being poor is likely also going to cause a life time of health problems such as diabetes and heart disease.

The Federal poverty rate is not determined by your income, the cost of your housing, the cost of transportation; it doesn't consider medical debt, nor student loan debt, and certainly not consumer debt (credit cards or pay day loans). The Federal poverty rate is a measure of how much it costs to get a certain number of calories (not nutrients, just calories). I've talked about this before, here.

To refresh you: the Federal poverty rate seeks to find the cheapest cost for the individual to get calories. This means that the individual is encouraged to consume the foods that would have the richest calorie pay-off - since you're only given a limited amount of money to spend, you'd better buy the most food at the cheapest cost.

This is why you will see in really poor neighborhoods signs at the (freaking) convenience stores and gas stations that state "Food Stamps Accepted Here."

What foods have the best pay-off? Foods that have been heavily-processed and contain high-fructose corn syrup. They are typically foods that also have really large amounts of fat and calories from fat.

Of course, poverty doesn't fall out of the sky and like lightning strike you: you're typically born into poverty or at the threshold of being lower-middle class. This likely means also that your recipe book (as it were) is filled with foods that made sense to eat two generations ago when your forebears were working the fields and mines - more likely to die from work injuries than live long enough to develop diabetes or heart disease.

Cynico-Anarchist

2010-03-09T15:31:00.001-05:00

Some of you may have noticed that I have a soft spot for dogs. To quote Jason Wirth, they are Nature's mute ciphers.

I named my dog Chino Zapata Moreno de Guevara about 12 years ago when I was really feeling the EZLN (and the deftones).

Some of you may be aware that Alexander the Great was a student of Aristotle. Did you know that Alexander also sought the teachings of Diogenes of Sinope? He was called Diogenes the Dog because he lived without concern for social decorum, choosing to sleep in a tub and sun bathing. If I heard correctly, Diogenes was sunbathing when approached by Alexander. Diogenes effectively told him, "You're standing in my Sun," and set him away.

It is from Diogenes that we have inherited the term cynical (related to the Greek word for dog). And really, the whole reason I'm even posting today is because my friend, Jay sent me this amazing link to what appears to be the same dog in a series of riots that have been rocking Athens over the last several years.

Behold! (The following images are from the 12oz. prophet site)

This is my favorite one, for sure.

New Post at The Avant Guardian

2010-03-05T23:16:00.002-05:00

I've written another installment of popOp for the avant guardian and it's available for your internet consumption, here.

Also, please consider becoming a fan of popOp on Facebook, if you're into FB and all that.

the fact that you're still calling

it that tells me you're not ready.

Some Subtle Changes

2010-03-03T11:39:00.000-05:00

I've added a couple of other sites to Kudzu Kongzi here, all in the spirit of solidarity as these sites are all written by friends and acquantances:

HTML Giant - "the internet literature blog magazine of the future" is an excellent source for your literary needs

Routine - "the coming internet theory" is written by Greg Ulmer and is based around Deleuze & Guattari's What Is Philosophy?

We-Space - "Assembling – Distraction – Unthereness – Interruption – Agon – Atonality" written by Patricia Reed, a classmate at the European Graduate School.

We both agree that the way we blog has changed since we started reading Sean Smith's excellent
sportsBabel - "disconnect in the sportocracy"

A Thousand Rhizomating Blossoms - "thoughts on theory, politics, life and the aporias and clefts in between" written by mi cumpañero, Nico Jenkins (also a classmate at the EGS)

I'm reading about addiction and neurobiology today because I'm preparing papers for the spring conference season. My first conference will be in a few weeks in Mérida, Mexico with the 70th Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology.

Maybe I'll try some sort of live blogging from there.

New Post at The Avant Guardian

2010-02-26T16:18:00.000-05:00

Hey ehrbody!

I apologize for the light amount of posting going on here. I'm preparing for a conference next month in Mexico (so you'll be getting some of that paper soon), and I've had my schedule thrown a little out of whack recently.

Anywho. Follow this link to read my new bit over at The Avant Guardian and please leave a comment.

You Are Not a Gadget vs. What Is an Apparatus?

2010-02-22T22:32:00.000-05:00

To be fair, I'm only discussing the second chapter of Jaron Lanier's manifesto so this may not be the best representation of his book. But, it seems the chapter helps introduce us to Giorgio Agamben's essay.

Lanier states that the purpose of the second chapter is to apply "metaphors from certain strains of computer science to people and the rest of reality." He calls this strategy cybernetic totalism and this chapter is the metaphoric treatment and pragmatic response to "an apocalypse of self-abdication" although I might suggest in the second edition that he reconsider self-abdication and go with self-abnegation instead.

I agree very strongly with Lanier when he states that the "Rapture and the Singularity share one thing in common: they can never be verified by the living." But, ultimately, this chapter seems somewhat flat and wanting of something more rigorous than statements like "Antihuman rhetoric is fascinating in the same way that self-destruction is fascinating: it offends us but we cannot look away." I get the gist, so I shouldn't put too much emphasis on these sorts of statements. Especially since overall I agree with the trajectory of what Lanier's putting out there: that people should not be designing software and gadgets to promote the accomplishment of the Singularity and we can finally slough off this mortal coil we call bodies and live only in our minds. That's a Hale Bopp cult way of thinking.

Again, I agree, overall, with the sentiment that Lanier is putting out there: (some) people (might)are promoting the advent of an artificial intelligence so as to sell apocalypse 2.0. I like statements like,

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate risks before making bad loans (news flash: they still do). We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. [...] Whenever a computer is imagined to be intelligent, what is really happening is that humans have abandoned aspects of the subject at hand in order to remove from consideration whatever the computer is blind to.

Preach on! I say. But, again, at least in this chapter, Lanier's flat. His worry that "we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process" just limps along in this chapter (although maybe it picks up later, I dunno). And the reason why Lanier's jabs and right hooks can't connect is because they lack what Agamben's essay's got.

The essay begins by suggesting that Foucault employs a term "apparatus" (dispositif in French) to accomplish three things in his body of work:

the apparatus is the network itself between discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on
the apparatus is always located in a power relation and has a concrete strategic function (which means that it is not a gesture)
given these, the apparatus is found at the intersection of knowledge relations and power relations.

Agamben, after discussing where Foucault might have developed this idea (Hyppolite's discussion of Hegel), tells us that apparatus is developed by Foucault so that he can "take a position with respect to a decisive problem: the relation between individuals as living beings and the historical element," which he defines as the institutions and processes of subjectification present in society. So we can see that we are making inroads to what Lanier is going on about when he's making ad hominem attacks against certain technologists, "The digital hive is growing at the expense of individuality." Being a concerned Confucian I am troubled by Lanier's call to individuality (even when he makes contradictory statements about interdependence of all living things but then rails against the appropriation of music from the 60s as somehow a lesser form of creativity).

Indeed, Lanier's manifesto (or at a minimum the second chapter of it) would benefit from an investigation into the definition of apparatus (French, dispositif) which has these three meanings:

the enacting clause of a law, thus the section of a judicial opinion that decides
the way in which the parts of a machine are arranged
the set of means arranged in conformity with military plans

As Agamben mentioned this summer, he has recently put the wraps on a project investigating the theological origins of secular law in the West. In these researches he's found that the Greek term oikonomia came to play the most crucial role in the development of the Western church and by extension modernity itself. The term oikonomia (from which we get economy, ecology, etc.) refers to the management of the household and related affairs. The term was crucial in helping to explain the apparent disharmony in the Trinity (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost). Trying to avoid any sort of pagan pantheism (of course, native to all the regions that the newly formed Church were trying to overcome), the Fathers of the Church argued something like this:

"God, insofar as his being and substance is concerned, is certainly one; but as to his oikonomia - that is to say the way in which he administers his home, his life, and the world he has created - he is rather triple. Just as a good father can entrust to his son the execution of certain functions and duties without in so doing losing his power and his unity, so God entrusts to Christ the 'economy,' the administration and government of human history."

Thus oikonomia became the apparatus that introduced Trinitarian dogma and the divine providential governance of the world into the Christian faith. The downside of this introduction, as Agamben points out, is that God is seperated in His being from His action. This is also the problem of subjectivity in the modern era - how can I be a human being and not a human doing? "Action (economy, but also politics) has no foundation in being: this is the schizophrenia that the theological doctrine of oikonomia left as its legacy to Western culture."

Apparatus designates the way in which and through which we might actualize an activity of governance, but it is devoid of any ontological foundation and this is why the apparatus is said to produce its own subjects.

Agamben recognizes in his essay that to fully accomplish what he must in the interpretation of Foucault's term "apparatus" he must begin to establish his own thinking about the term. "I wish to propose [...] a [...] partitioning of beings into two large groups or classes: on the one hand, living beings (or substances), and on the other, apparatuses in which living beings are increasingly captured." In doing this we are able to return to the theological discussion above and see that we have the ontology of creatures but also the oikonomia of apparatuses that seek to govern and guide these beings.

He defines apparatuses as anything that "has the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings." So an apparatus is just about any thing and certainly any technology.

He defines subjects as "that which results from the relation and [...] from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses." And so here we see the first volley against Lanier.

Where Lanier sees the, "digital hive is growing at the expense of individuality," and so suggesting there is a better way to use apparatuses, Agamben states his set-up might, "produce the impression that in our time, the category of subjectivity is wavering and losing consistency," but what needs to happen is not getting rid of technology nor overcoming it but to amplify the ridiculousness of this masquerading of subjectivity that technologists believe in.

Taking a similar tack as Foucault, Agamben points out that "apparatuses aim to create - through a series of practices, discourses, and bodies of knowledge - docile, yet free, bodies that assume their identity and their 'freedom' as subjects in the very process of desubjectification." To illustrate this seeming paradox, that an apparatus creates subjects by desubjectifying them, Agamben points out the apparatus called penance. In performing penance the I that sinned is absolved and thus is created a new I that is capable of entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

This is the same apparatus in addiction "recovery" this is the recovering over.

Agamben states that what defines the apparatuses confronting us in this current phase of capitalism (perhaps spectaclism) is this process of desubjectification inherent to them. It is here that Agamben and Lanier are on the same page. Lanier states, "there is nothing special about the place of humans in this scheme [....] Information is alienated experience." Thus, Lanier states, information doesn't deserve to be free contra the Whole Earth Catalog.

But, ultimately, Agamben and Lanier do differ in so far as Agamben finds it impossible to achieve what Lanier seems to be putting forward in chapter 2 of his manifesto:

Here lies the vanity of the well-meaning discourse on technology, which asserts that the problem with apparatuses can be reduced to the question of their correct use. Those who make such claims ignore a simple fact: If a certain process of subjectification (or in this case desubjectification) corresponds to every apparatus, then it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it "in the right way."

Agamben's essay finishes in a supremely satisfying consummation of all the parts this far invoked and (maybe because it's later or because I'm lazy) I want to simply reproduce here:

Rather than the proclaimed end of history, we are, in fact, witnessing the incessant though aimless motion of this machine, which, in a sort of colossal parody of theological oikonomia, has assumed the legacy of providential governance of the world; yet instead of redeeming our world, this machine (true to the original eschatological vocation of Providence) is leading us to catastrophe.

Agamben suggests that we must make profane (the bringing back to the human what was elevated to the realm of the sacred) apparatuses. This rings very nicely with Heidegger's gelassenheit.

An Elective Affinities Walk

2010-02-22T00:12:00.000-05:00

I just came across this delightful video:

How To Live - Goethe's Elective Affinities Walking Group @ Hay-on-Wye from Super Mega Action Plus on Vimeo.

I was following a link to read what Simon Critchely's getting on about and so I also discovered the blog How To Live. We learn that How To Live is

a project dedicated to producing essays, images and arguments for a practical philosophy for life. How to Live provides philosophical resources for those interested in asking vital questions about love, sex, art, literature, ethics, politics, friendship, war, violence, architecture, religion, walking, gardening, crying and laughing.

Anywho. I walk a good bit with my dog, Chino here in Atlanta and maybe we can start up an urban walk like the above?

New Post at The Avant Guardian

2010-02-19T08:52:00.000-05:00

popOP continues its mission here.

Awesome Quote

2010-02-17T17:05:00.000-05:00

I've been revisiting the Analects of Confucius this week and I just came across something really excellent (no surprise).

I attend the European Graduate School, where I have the great fortune to study with luminaries such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt, Jacques Rancière, Avital Ronell, Slavoj Žižek and many others. I've been also equally impressed by the students at EGS who are all such interesting people with fascinating ideas and works.

Anywho, I read this and I thought of school:

7.28:
The Master said, "There are probably those who can initiate new paths while still not understanding them, but I am not one of them. I learn much, select out of it what works well, and then follow it. I observe much, and remember it. This is a lower level of wisdom."

6.20:
The Master said, " To truly love it is better than just to understand it, and to enjoy it is better than to simply love it."

4.15:
The Master said, "Zeng, my friend! My way (dao ) is bound together with one continuous strand."
Master Zeng replied, "Indeed."
When the Master had left, the disciples asked, "What was he referring to?"
Master Zeng said, "The way of the Master is doing one's utmost and putting oneself in the other's place, nothing more."

1.16:
The Master said: "Don't worry about not being acknowledged by others; worry about failing to acknowledge them."

Thanks.

My Poem Over at W5RAn

2010-02-17T07:33:00.000-05:00

My poem was accepted over at W5RAn and so you can go to their site and read it.

Here.

Announcing the 7th Annual North Georgia Student Philosophy Conference

2010-02-16T21:49:00.001-05:00

I am very glad to see and share that the Philosophy Student Association of Kennesaw State University is holding their 7th Annual conference April 16 & 17.

I remember organizing the first conference was such an amazing experience. We worked for weeks to set the whole thing up. None of us had even been to a conference before, we had no idea how the show would go. We did have a couple of years of the Mike Ryan Lecture Series to somewhat inform us, and of course we had Dr. Jones guiding us.

For several years we would have vegetarian Chinese food from New Lucky China off of Shallowford Road to cater the event. We would design the flyers, the posters, the name tags, the program, we'd set up the rooms, the lunches, we were really hoping that we'd be good hosts.

We edited and published a selected proceedings, building off of the momentum of the monthly newsletters we also created, eventually this led to the establishment of an online journal, OtherWise (which just recently published its newest issue).

I joke some times that I didn't do well in my classes because they were always getting in the way of my real education that I cultivated with the PSA. Clearly I should have been a better student, but I would never take back those actions. The PSA is first and foremost a Nietzche-loving group and quick to dance and affirm; but also a group that is very seriously committed to developing excellence among themselves and promoting excellence in their community (probably something from Jones' lectures on Confucius and Daoism). What a cool group of people.

Congratulations to the PSA for the years of their hard work and here's to their continued successes.