"Interventions" Symposium at the Autonomous School in Zürich

"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 the International Schopenhauer Association

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.

Laura U. Marks Evening Lecture

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. Laura U. Marks was the fifth person to give an evening lecture during the August sessions.

"Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art"

Does the perceptible give rise to the infinite?
Finn Brunton's site Manners of Unfolding

The algorithmic art of our time, prior to our perception; arts of latency....

New Media Art points us to this world, an immanence.

Several modes of historiography were employed, genealogy included, here we will tease-out some of the Western absorption of Islamic aesthetics.

9th century CE, Iraq
Minimal parts doctrine -- the world is composed of discrete particles and there is no need to explore the nature of reality any further because the whole of the universe is underwritten by Divine Grace.

• 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

Brian Massumi Evening Lecture

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

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. Erin Manning was the third person to give an evening lecture during the August sessions.

This talk comes from the last chapter of her forthcoming book Ethics of Language in the Making and is built from quotes from autists and those with characterized as having low-functioning autism.

The talk is particularly inspired by the work of Amanda Baggs and her amazing video, In My Language:

Mindblindness - an inability to understand what is in the mind of another. Autists don't necessarily only remain attuned to humans, but to everything else in the "theater of individuation."

What is sidestepped in the clinical model of autism is the presupposition that object relations are typical or are normative and naturally interhuman, not that they are socially-prescribed.

Metaphor as a mobility of relationality, not of representation -- they move across strata of intelligibility.

Let's also look at Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay

The milieu of individuation should not mean that which is not multiple. We are multiple. The challenge is exacerbated for autists because there is this issue of translating the lived experience into language.

Pure experience doesn't exist without thought, rather language seems to privilege a modality of time and the autist's experience of time is difficult to put into our language - verbal and nonverbal in expression.

Many voices from the neurotypical communities discuss a "descent into autism" such that the trope hovers around ideas of subhuman, retarded, and a simple (false) dichotomy of human relating and ignores the possibility that neurodiversity and radical difference might inform our own lived experiences.

Language activates fields of relation; it is eminently relational and a collective individuation of sense: between words, with the words. Language acts presuppose collective activity.

Ethics are the immanent expression of the infinite potentiality in the limits of the emergent.

Language-making is the bringing-into-the-act.

[NOTE TO SELF: Psychasthenia still presupposes an essentialism that misleads us in our thinking about relationality. This talk has me rethinking. There is this problem of understanding the co-generative nature of language to communicate our loss of self]

Could the real problem be in the deliberating in order to find consensual terms; might it be that our task is to increase the attempts at communicating?

The neurotypical communities tend to underestimate the rich contributions that the autistic community can contribute to our understanding ourselves.

[END OF TALK]

Manning/Massumi Day 3

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.

"Choreographic Objects"
William Forsythe from Synchronous Objects Media Site

"Propositions for the Verge - William Forsythe's Choreographic Objects"
Erin Manning (2008) Inflexions, Vol. 2

Even within the same discipline there are different technicities, styles of thought that can be employed to approach a problem.

Forsythe starts with propositions and the effect achieved is similar to the ways in which algorithms operate - these are iterative, randomized algorithms incorporate some element of chance and so they become evolutionary. They are generative acts.

For example, consider Forsythe's "Counterpoint algorithm" from Eidos:Telos, part 3 (1995):

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

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. Chris Fynsk was the second person to give an evening lecture during the August sessions.

Here Fynsk presents a preface to reading Blanchot's The Instant of My Death. The story isn't very long and so he read it in its entirety.

There is a sentence in this text which is already this "step not beyond" (9). We have here, then, a compassionate Blanchot.

This is an account of Blanchot's escape from a Nazi firing squad and for reasons unknown.

I asked Fynsk the following in light of the heady discussions we'd been having in the Manning/Massumi classes for the last couple of days.

"This fictive self, can it only be completed in the telling?"

The phrase "peut-être" comes up a couple of times at a key moment in the text:

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)

Giorgio Agamben Evening Lecture, 2010

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

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

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. Victor Burgin was the first person to give such a talk during the August sessions.

He is a professor emeritus in the History of Consciousness program at UCSC and taught at Goldsmiths in London.

Burgin prefaced his remarks by clarifying that he'd be giving an artist's talk and then would discuss the specificity of the genre in which he is working tonight.

How is it possible that we can remember, involuntarily, moments from films - even films that we don't like? But not the films as such. This isn't isolated to only the film medium, it happens with all sorts of media. It's in excess of the movie theater, isn't it? We feel like we know a film even when we haven't seen that film.

When I start work on/in a city I learn its history. I try to find parts of a city that remind me of a film as well.
We watch the last 7 minutes of Antonioni's L'Eclisse (Eclipse):

The film is chronologically linear at first but then it ends with no clear narrative structure. Antonioni described it as leaving only objects. The world of objects is shown as contingently, indifferently, arranged. Traces of modern life; footnotes to our social order.

To make Burgin's film that would be shown in Milan and Venice he looked back to L'Eclisse and made Solito Posto (still from the film):

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)

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]