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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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?
3. 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

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.

Emerging at Gather Atlanta

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

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

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!

Missing Okinawa

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.

A Great Thanks for Great Heidegger-related Sites

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

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

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.