That's what I've been doing today.
It all started with Žižek's review of Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood, here.
That got me to reading a review by Michael Deibert, here. Pretty informative, but not sure that Deibert was considering Hallward's thinking (he was considering Hallward's historicizing).
I wanted to read Hallward's reply, but had a hell of a time finding it (the Monthly Review wasn't very revealing).
So I read Deibert's reply to Hallward's reply, here, hoping that would be informative. Sorta.
Then, I finally found Hallward's reply to Deibert, here. This wasn't particularly informative.
But this was - Hallward's review of Dupuy's book about Aristide.
So, now I feel like I have a sense of some of the Aristide years. I remember as a kid hearing on CNN that burning tires were employed; so I got confused when the U.S. was once again going after Aristide in Haiti. Now I get why I was confused:
Aristide was elected in 1991, a popularly elected man that seemed to juice the poor. He was deposed in a coup in 1991 by the military (backed by the West). He was reelected in 2001 and deposed in a coup d'etat during 2004. Apparently he's still very popular among the people.
This points out an important feature of Haitian politics: there are two majorities - the qualitative (intellectuals and powered elite), and the quantitative (the poor).
Haiti became independent upon a slave rebellion. This terrified the U.S. (because the U.S. had millions of slaves) and so the U.S. did not recognize Haiti until 1864 (and the Civil War).
France insisted that Haiti had to pay compensation for all the freed slaves. The last payment was in 1947 and this was made possible by loans from the U.S. that are still being paid. Hmm. Don't worry, the U.S. (officially) occupied Haiti from 1915 until 1934.
Back to the Civil War.
The last surrender of the U.S. Civil War, by the way, was in 1865. In Britain.
The CSS Shenandoah had been cruising the Pacific Ocean and sinking Union whaling ships for about a year. The U.S. sued the British for their double-crossing us, this was called the Alabama Claims.
In these claims the U.S. requested damages of $2 billion, or surrendering Canada to the U.S.
The result of this arbitration was to establish a precedent for international arbitration and the codification of public international law.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Mourning and Loneliness Readings
I'm somewhat cheating here, I wrote this back in October in preparation for the Poncey-Highlands Reading Group. But, it's probably new to you. And, I am working on something for The Avant Guardian check there this Saturday for my new piece.We are reading two texts that are grappling with how we understand ourselves and how this self that is developed relates to absence. In Freud's "Mourning Melancholia" is discussed the effects of unintentional separation from our love objects; with Melanie Klein's "On the Sense of Loneliness" is asked the question, can we ever overcome our sense of loneliness that is the result of our separation.
(Pictured: Fritz Lang's Metropolis, an example of monumentality)
I've further also suggested reading Nancy Burke's "InVisible Worlds: On Women and Solitude" as well as Judith Butler's "Melancholy Gender - Refused Identification." Burke's essay briefly outlines some developments in contemporary (as of 1997) feminist thinking on the parameters of what it means to have solitude and gender, discussing Chodorow's suggestion that women experience solitude in a manner fundamentally different from men. The essay we've read by Freud has played a crucial role in the development of Judith Butler's thinking. In her 1995 essay she attempts to elaborate her discussions of gender performativity as first discussed in her career-making book Gender Trouble. These suggested readings by Burke and Butler I've put forward so as to enhance our insight into the Klein and Freud essays. But there is an obvious question: why read about mourning, melancholia, or any senses of loneliness? What are the benefits of discussing these topics in a group that has, at least initially, intimated a desire to discuss politics and economics in light of current events unfolding?
Louis Theroux of the BBC recently made a documentary The Most Hated Family in America which seeks to elaborate what is the Westboro Baptist Church and why they are traveling the U.S. protesting the funerals of soldiers that are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan with signs that state "God Hates Fags" and "Thank God for IEDs". If time permits we can view this documentary, as it's relatively short at 45 minutes. Suffice it to say, the members of Westboro Baptist have their rationalizations. According to the membership, it is Biblically-sound and necessary to do the work they do at these moments of public mourning.
In Freud's essay he develops a theory of mourning as well as makes speculations about a term he calls melancholia. The work of mourning, according to these theories, is to assist in the development of the ego character, which I take to be synonymous with a sense of self.
Last Night a DJ Saved my Life
Here's an oldy-maybe-goody. I found this while I was poking around for something else. I recently mentioned the pivotal role of the VCR in our shift from the kind of capitalism that Marx wrote about to the spectacular economy (spectaclism) that Guy Debord wrote about. Girl Talk's Night Ripper, while certainly not the announcement of this shift, has been the best example of this shift.
That album continues to be an inspiration. Some dance albums date themselves, get tossed out, then reappropriated by the kids twenty years later (please, please, please: not all of you hipsters should be wearing skinny acid wash jeans, this is the lesson that your twenties will instill in you). But some dance albums tap into something...more. Now, a few years earlier there had been the Avalanches' Since I Left You, which is also an amazing album, and also chock-full of samples. But having a bunch of samples, that's not so unique. De La Soul was having problems with this when I was a kid.
In his book, Rhythm Science, Paul D. Miller (you might also know him as DJ Spooky) states, “Rhythm Science uses an endless recontextualizing as a core compositional strategy….” A very significant distinction is made here by Miller about the nature of virtue. The DJ is the music presented and in so being is able to bypass “the notion of ‘critic’ as an ‘authority’ who controls narrative, and to create a new role that’s resonant….”
This is a call for a re-sounding (in the nautical sense, plumbing the depths) of the individual-as-performer, very much a Deleuzean rhizomatic self, where the constant unraveling of the layers of who we think we are reveals no core self, no kernel of me-ness, only a constellation of relations. If this attempt at bypassing control (or creation) of the narrative others experience is going to work Miller’s rhythm science requires the understanding that, “Music like hip-hop and electronica is theatre – it’s about how people live the sounds they hear.” This is the distinction between being an authority and being authoritative and it is this distinction which forced the American Congress to discuss just what to do about Girl Talk and how to control culture by extension.
What was really amazing about Night Ripper was that it collapsed all of the music of my life, Boston from when I was a kid, Nirvana from my adolescence, and all the snap and crunk from when I was working in a restaurant kitchen. Everything all together all at once. It was so intoxicating. It was around this time that I saw Graham Parkes present his video essay on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. This was my introduction to the flâneur.
Benjamin didn't originate the flâneur, he appropriated it form Baudelaire. I like that word, appropriate. Baudelaire's world wasn't Benjamin's world, and so Benjamin had to make flâneur appropriate to his context. Where Baudelaire's flâneur was beginning to sense that art had yet to understand the city, Benjamin's flâneur was much more like how we see the revolutionary avant-garde of the 20th century: his flâneur was not simply a botanist of the city sidewalk, Benjamin's flâneur was stirring the stew - very actively critiquing and experimenting with the aesthetic experience.
Baudelaire described the perfect flâneur as one “[who] is like a mirror as vast as the crowd itself, or a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with each one of its movements represents the multiplicity of life and the dynamic grace of all life’s elements.” As such, we experience through his film overlap and superimposition of all that has happened in this place, all at once. The effect is a delirium of being human in humanity. This is precisely the effect produced by Girl Talk’s album. Where the success of Benjamin's Arcades lies in its investigation of place-ness, Girl Talk’s album is successful by its investigation of time. Being a DJ, a rhythm scientist, is all about time-ing.
Nietzsche in his preface to The Birth of Tragedy, “This book should have sung.” This is what a good DJ is about – reading the crowd for the right tune to play next, the right context in which to insert another influence, and this is what a good philosopher does. The self-overcoming of nihilism may make the most sense in DJ culture, because a good DJ understands that playing the same track over and again, or simply going through what has been deemed au courant is equally as crushing to the party.
The DJ, to be the proper rhythm scientist, must be an authoritative performer rather than the authority figure. What kind of fun is the party if the person running the show is a cop? The DJ must learn something about overcoming the nihilism that comes with being 24 hour party people - to quote a recent Chemical Brothers song, "the pills won't save you now." Night Ripper is such a danceable album for the same reason that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra must dance: the self-overcoming of nihilism is best expressed in the affirmatory act of dance; that is, to will something eternally is to affirm all that has lead to this point, not simply to repeat ad infinitum. To successfully DJ one must note that distinction. The endless repetition of the same is the history of authoritarianism; the collapse of the history as only passing (the opening of today to those that are to come) is the way of the authoritative performer. Music is the ideal manner in which to transmit this truth.
The performance of this music is not only the performance of notes on a scale, but an opening to a discussion of what is worth transmitting in culture and this is made manifest by the virtuoso’s act (a virtuous action). Music performance bears a significant truth by being true to those that have come before and this musical truth continues to be truth-full if it is performed in a manner that can be trusted by those to come. This musical truth is the same truth of culture. The real absurdity of the current entertainment regime is their insistence that culture can be, like wind in a bag, controlled by their agents.
That album continues to be an inspiration. Some dance albums date themselves, get tossed out, then reappropriated by the kids twenty years later (please, please, please: not all of you hipsters should be wearing skinny acid wash jeans, this is the lesson that your twenties will instill in you). But some dance albums tap into something...more. Now, a few years earlier there had been the Avalanches' Since I Left You, which is also an amazing album, and also chock-full of samples. But having a bunch of samples, that's not so unique. De La Soul was having problems with this when I was a kid.
In his book, Rhythm Science, Paul D. Miller (you might also know him as DJ Spooky) states, “Rhythm Science uses an endless recontextualizing as a core compositional strategy….” A very significant distinction is made here by Miller about the nature of virtue. The DJ is the music presented and in so being is able to bypass “the notion of ‘critic’ as an ‘authority’ who controls narrative, and to create a new role that’s resonant….”
This is a call for a re-sounding (in the nautical sense, plumbing the depths) of the individual-as-performer, very much a Deleuzean rhizomatic self, where the constant unraveling of the layers of who we think we are reveals no core self, no kernel of me-ness, only a constellation of relations. If this attempt at bypassing control (or creation) of the narrative others experience is going to work Miller’s rhythm science requires the understanding that, “Music like hip-hop and electronica is theatre – it’s about how people live the sounds they hear.” This is the distinction between being an authority and being authoritative and it is this distinction which forced the American Congress to discuss just what to do about Girl Talk and how to control culture by extension.
What was really amazing about Night Ripper was that it collapsed all of the music of my life, Boston from when I was a kid, Nirvana from my adolescence, and all the snap and crunk from when I was working in a restaurant kitchen. Everything all together all at once. It was so intoxicating. It was around this time that I saw Graham Parkes present his video essay on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. This was my introduction to the flâneur.
Baudelaire described the perfect flâneur as one “[who] is like a mirror as vast as the crowd itself, or a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with each one of its movements represents the multiplicity of life and the dynamic grace of all life’s elements.” As such, we experience through his film overlap and superimposition of all that has happened in this place, all at once. The effect is a delirium of being human in humanity. This is precisely the effect produced by Girl Talk’s album. Where the success of Benjamin's Arcades lies in its investigation of place-ness, Girl Talk’s album is successful by its investigation of time. Being a DJ, a rhythm scientist, is all about time-ing.Nietzsche in his preface to The Birth of Tragedy, “This book should have sung.” This is what a good DJ is about – reading the crowd for the right tune to play next, the right context in which to insert another influence, and this is what a good philosopher does. The self-overcoming of nihilism may make the most sense in DJ culture, because a good DJ understands that playing the same track over and again, or simply going through what has been deemed au courant is equally as crushing to the party.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Responding to Paranoid Android...
As I mentioned over the weekend, I have a new post at The Avant Guardian. Look there weekly for my writing on relational aesthetics and be certain to also read the other talented folks there.
I am very fortunate to have already received some comments from folks and here I'd like to respond to one of the readers, Mike. You can read his comments, here.
And here is my response:
@Mike: Thanks for reading! We probably get more in this situation from Heidegger's thinking on technology than from Nietzsche. The abyss in the Nietzsche you're referencing is less illustrative of a relationship with technology and more the fundamental interrelatedness of reality. "Tat tvam asi" - thou art that - in the Upanishads.
Heidegger, similarly, states that our Dasein can be revealed in an attunement of profound boredom. Not that I am bored and from this discover my richest possibilities as a person, but that the universe itself is capable of being completely disinterested in my project because the universe itself is busy with its own project.
But, we should be really clear that Heidegger's thinking on technology was really, really critical to understanding his oeuvre. A primary concern for Heidegger was that modernity in Western Europe, and the Colonies, had facilitated conditions wherein how we related to one another and to the universe at large was completely alienated. We were not only alienated from the products of our labor, as Marx stated, we are alienated from each other to the extent that we don't even understand morality, as Nietzsche stated, but we are also fundamentally alien to ourselves, as Freud stated. Heidegger, as the inheritor of these thinkers, takes this in and says that among the attitudes driving these modes of alienation is also our societies' zealous absorption of efficiency-seeking technology.
If we pursue the most efficient path for too long, we find ourselves, the grossly inefficient things that we are, no longer fit to operate in that context.
Now, if you reread what I wrote you'll see that there is no need for a fetishized object to be alive (although I suspect Nietzsche and I are agreeance that everything is alive if we are just willing to extend ourselves toward it). A fetishized object is simply a relationship. We have relationships with everything thus the Abyss is able to stare back at us. Not anthropomorphized, but, uncannily, we see that Abyss that we've taken for granted and now we realize that it's ubiquitous presence and thrumming life has proceeded without my attention. It's like realizing one day that you've never noticed how many stairs are in your house, or that there has been a bit of graffiti on your bedroom closet wall for years and you never saw it. The Abyss staring back at us, in this moment from Nietzsche, reveals not only that the Abyss (all that empty, unexamined space in our lives) is actually full of life, but that this unexamined and intensely living space is integral to my being.
You're right to ask, why must it be sexualized? That's why I wrote that essay. My response to the question is to ask, generously, if, maybe, in the wake of the tragic loss of a friend Douglas Hines grasped at any and all straws to find a container for his deceased friend. That's what he said he was doing, at least. So, if Roxxxy is supposed to serve as a container, the next question must be, is it appropriate for me, as an outsider, to only see Roxxxy as a sexualized object - shouldn't I also consider Roxxxy as something more than that?
I mean, shouldn't all people, regardless of gender (and let's extend it to all reality), be thought of as more than sex objects - that's why I included the Cindy Sherman and Andrea Fraser photographs. I look at those "art objects" which, in any other context would be see as only sex objects, and I suddenly have something like that Abyss moment: the world has become much larger than I previously thought it was. The world is much more interesting than I previously suspected, and shame on me for having assumed I have the only proper measure of the world, thus reducing the world to it.
Never mind the thorny problems of consciousness and the moral calculus that you seem to suggest in insisting that whatever we might have sex with must meet this requirement of enjoying it as much as me. I'm not saying that sexual encounters shouldn't be enjoyable, but I am saying that if when I'm having sex I'm wondering if the other person is enjoying it as much as me then I am probably entertaining a fantasy.
That is the problem of sex, isn't it? It's supposed to be this moment of dissolution between two people, where we are obliterated in bliss, but sometimes you might find yourself, opening your eyes and saying, "My God, I look like an idiot, this is not sexy." Ridiculous, right? That even when we are engaged in the sex act we would still say that this is not sexy. I refer you to Žižek on this particular matter, here's another good place to start.
I am very fortunate to have already received some comments from folks and here I'd like to respond to one of the readers, Mike. You can read his comments, here.
And here is my response:
@Mike: Thanks for reading! We probably get more in this situation from Heidegger's thinking on technology than from Nietzsche. The abyss in the Nietzsche you're referencing is less illustrative of a relationship with technology and more the fundamental interrelatedness of reality. "Tat tvam asi" - thou art that - in the Upanishads.
Heidegger, similarly, states that our Dasein can be revealed in an attunement of profound boredom. Not that I am bored and from this discover my richest possibilities as a person, but that the universe itself is capable of being completely disinterested in my project because the universe itself is busy with its own project.
But, we should be really clear that Heidegger's thinking on technology was really, really critical to understanding his oeuvre. A primary concern for Heidegger was that modernity in Western Europe, and the Colonies, had facilitated conditions wherein how we related to one another and to the universe at large was completely alienated. We were not only alienated from the products of our labor, as Marx stated, we are alienated from each other to the extent that we don't even understand morality, as Nietzsche stated, but we are also fundamentally alien to ourselves, as Freud stated. Heidegger, as the inheritor of these thinkers, takes this in and says that among the attitudes driving these modes of alienation is also our societies' zealous absorption of efficiency-seeking technology.
If we pursue the most efficient path for too long, we find ourselves, the grossly inefficient things that we are, no longer fit to operate in that context.
Now, if you reread what I wrote you'll see that there is no need for a fetishized object to be alive (although I suspect Nietzsche and I are agreeance that everything is alive if we are just willing to extend ourselves toward it). A fetishized object is simply a relationship. We have relationships with everything thus the Abyss is able to stare back at us. Not anthropomorphized, but, uncannily, we see that Abyss that we've taken for granted and now we realize that it's ubiquitous presence and thrumming life has proceeded without my attention. It's like realizing one day that you've never noticed how many stairs are in your house, or that there has been a bit of graffiti on your bedroom closet wall for years and you never saw it. The Abyss staring back at us, in this moment from Nietzsche, reveals not only that the Abyss (all that empty, unexamined space in our lives) is actually full of life, but that this unexamined and intensely living space is integral to my being.
You're right to ask, why must it be sexualized? That's why I wrote that essay. My response to the question is to ask, generously, if, maybe, in the wake of the tragic loss of a friend Douglas Hines grasped at any and all straws to find a container for his deceased friend. That's what he said he was doing, at least. So, if Roxxxy is supposed to serve as a container, the next question must be, is it appropriate for me, as an outsider, to only see Roxxxy as a sexualized object - shouldn't I also consider Roxxxy as something more than that?
I mean, shouldn't all people, regardless of gender (and let's extend it to all reality), be thought of as more than sex objects - that's why I included the Cindy Sherman and Andrea Fraser photographs. I look at those "art objects" which, in any other context would be see as only sex objects, and I suddenly have something like that Abyss moment: the world has become much larger than I previously thought it was. The world is much more interesting than I previously suspected, and shame on me for having assumed I have the only proper measure of the world, thus reducing the world to it.
Never mind the thorny problems of consciousness and the moral calculus that you seem to suggest in insisting that whatever we might have sex with must meet this requirement of enjoying it as much as me. I'm not saying that sexual encounters shouldn't be enjoyable, but I am saying that if when I'm having sex I'm wondering if the other person is enjoying it as much as me then I am probably entertaining a fantasy.
That is the problem of sex, isn't it? It's supposed to be this moment of dissolution between two people, where we are obliterated in bliss, but sometimes you might find yourself, opening your eyes and saying, "My God, I look like an idiot, this is not sexy." Ridiculous, right? That even when we are engaged in the sex act we would still say that this is not sexy. I refer you to Žižek on this particular matter, here's another good place to start.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Exchange-Value in Marx's Capital, Vol. 1
Not feeling too well today and I'm not really able to think (which is an odd feeling). So, I'm posting something I started to write about in November. Just a quick note.
I'm watching and reading along with David Harvey's seminar on Karl Marx's Capital, vol. 1 and we've just come to page 127 (which is actually only at the beginning of the the book) where we are thinking through the exchange value of commodities. Harvey says something to the effect of the commodity is a bearer of value but value is not some kernel within the commodity that if we dissected the the commodity we would see why it has this value in exchange; in effect, we could keep exchanging and exchanging, and so on. This got me thinking about One Red Paperclip. Where a guy does, in fact, exchange a commodity over and over again until he gets himself a house (and a book deal).
I'm watching and reading along with David Harvey's seminar on Karl Marx's Capital, vol. 1 and we've just come to page 127 (which is actually only at the beginning of the the book) where we are thinking through the exchange value of commodities. Harvey says something to the effect of the commodity is a bearer of value but value is not some kernel within the commodity that if we dissected the the commodity we would see why it has this value in exchange; in effect, we could keep exchanging and exchanging, and so on. This got me thinking about One Red Paperclip. Where a guy does, in fact, exchange a commodity over and over again until he gets himself a house (and a book deal).
Saturday, January 16, 2010
New Post at The Avant Guardian
I've just started writing with the awesome folks over at The Avant Guardian, many, many thanks to Tracey Duncan and Ari Gratch for the opportunity. I'll be writing a weekly bit about relational aesthetics for them.
This week's post, "Paranoid Android, or How I Learned to Love Life and Just-Let-Go" was somewhat touched upon earlier this week.
This week's post, "Paranoid Android, or How I Learned to Love Life and Just-Let-Go" was somewhat touched upon earlier this week.
Friday, January 15, 2010
martellpedro44 and Giving an Account of Oneself
How to read this?
here's what got me started. Back in December someone had posted this on Facebook.
I was reading Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself at the time and so this seemed like an amazing coincidence.
Here's an awful large block quote, but I feel like these two videos (above and below) are excellent proof-of-concept, if you will. Really fabulous illustration of what Butler seems to be trying to bring to our attention.
What follows are some annotations to the video with time signatures (Beginning - 0:16) and then the Butler text.
(Beginning - 0:17)
here's what got me started. Back in December someone had posted this on Facebook.
I was reading Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself at the time and so this seemed like an amazing coincidence.
Here's an awful large block quote, but I feel like these two videos (above and below) are excellent proof-of-concept, if you will. Really fabulous illustration of what Butler seems to be trying to bring to our attention.
I would suggest that the structure of address is not a feature of narrative, one of its many and variable attributes, but an interruption of narrative. The moment the story is addressed to someone, it assumes a rhetorical dimension that is not reducible to a narrative function. It presumes that someone, and it seeks to recruit and act upon that someone. Something is being done with language when the account that I give begins: it is invariably interlocutory, ghosted, laden, persuasive, and tactical. It may well seek to communicate a truth, but it can do this, if it can, only by exercising a relational dimension of language. [....] [T]he structure of address conditions the making of judgments about someone or his or her actions; that it is not reducible to the judgment; and that the judgment, unbeholden to the ethics implied by the structure of address, tends toward violence. [....] To hold a person accountable for his or her life in narrative form may even be to require a falsification of that life in order to satisfy the criterion of a certain kind of ethics, one that tends to break with relationality. (63)Here's Pedro Martell's exercise in giving an account of himself:
What follows are some annotations to the video with time signatures (Beginning - 0:16) and then the Butler text.
(Beginning - 0:17)
The moment the story is addressed to someone, it assumes a rhetorical dimension that is not reducible to a narrative function. It presumes that someone, and it seeks to recruit and act upon that someone. Something is being done with language when the account that I give begins: it is invariably interlocutory, ghosted, laden, persuasive, and tactical.(0:20-0:36) To paraphrase, "I've been trying to only show my face and now I want you to know that I have a birth defect."
Something is being done with language when the account that I give begins[....] It may well seek to communicate a truth, but it can do this, if it can, only by exercising a relational dimension of language.(0:36 - 1:00) Showing the body, giving an account of difference
[T]he structure of address conditions the making of judgments about someone or his or her actions; that it is not reducible to the judgment; and that the judgment, unbeholden to the ethics implied by the structure of address, tends toward violence.(1:00-1:30) We can relate, if you only understood why I am as I am
To hold a person accountable for his or her life in narrative form may even be to require a falsification of that life in order to satisfy the criterion of a certain kind of ethics, one that tends to break with relationality.Check it out. Marinate on it. AA-style, or 12-Step-type, groups always have you announce yourself in a new way: I am Paul and I am an internet/critical theory addict. Why? There's power in trying to take control of the narrative, the story, of who I am. But it's not as easy as simply telling stories about ourselves. These stories get hijacked, people get implicated in these stories. "Tell it to the Judge," is the dismissal we hear on the streets. But the unspoken truth is that even if we went before the Judge at the Courthouse, or Heaven, we'd still be there, judging ourselves. This is origin of Satan's name, "The Accuser." Know thyself.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
The Commodification of Memory or Learning the Appropriate Use of Appropriation
It's a fascinating question, what are the politics of touch in spectacular economic relations? A touch here seems to mean the use of photographs of people, when we edit the photograph (to, say, make it a profile picture on Facebook), are we committing some form of violence? The Department of Biological Flow asks in the final, "dear you, did i engage this particular politics of touch based on prior flesh relation?"
I have it on good authority that a certain Edward Cullen living in the Cascadia region stated that the human memory is like a sieve. So...yeah, prior flesh arrangements have to be invoked for this sort of kinetic extension.
This is probably because we've entered a new phase of economic development, something that Michael Hardt had mentioned at his evening lecture last summer. Marx saw a shift from renting (with serfs doing the bidding of the land owner), to broad ownership/entrepreneurialism (I am Capital, and So Can You!), and now a seeming hybrid of these two modes.
As evidence of this shifting mode, what Guy Debord called the spectaclist economy, consider the current Intellectual Property rights debacle. In part this cannot occur without the concomitant rise of multinational corporations. In order for these to promulgate there has to be the transmission of certain basic ground rules: this factory needs to be filled with employees, those employees need to use these machines with these techniques, etc. So this was a question of cultural pedagogy. You gotta teach the people that are getting there clocks cleaned how to operate within this context. To this end there has been a somewhat one-sided transmission of what is called entertainment.
That's why, when you go to the developing world, kids are wearing "Coke Is It!" t-shirts and can quote Ice-T songs, and have copies of Jungle Fever (but still on VHS). There seems to have been a slow ebbing of the hegemony of Hollywood, not to say that it's isn't still critically important in the world. But as further evidence, consider the soft power push of Japan. Over the past three decades Japan has become the second largest economy (but now China has overtaken them, last year) in the world and subsequently has the second largest entertainment industry in the world. Subsequently, Japanese entertainment has become de rigeur for the youth in a way that I think most did not anticipate in the U.S.
(By the way, the photo on the left here is from an article in Foreign Policy by Carolyn O'Hara and it's pretty amazing.)
The key moment for this "Turning Japanese" phase was the battle over VCRs. VCR technology was pioneered by the Japanese (Thomas P. Kasulis has a great story on how the Japanese engineers were able to accomplish what the U.S. could not). Broadcast television in the late 70s and early 80s did not want the VCR available to the U.S. public, (in no small part, I'm sure, enhanced with xenophobia and racism, but also) because then people would no longer be locked into leasing their attention to the tv at the times that TV advertisers have promised their sponsors. The VCR would be a serious abrogation of this power that broadcasters had (the control of the spectacular). Of course the VCR was allowed to develop in the media ecosystem, but not without being appropriated in such a way as to benefit TV as much as possible.
Today we must consider the Internet in the same manner. There is the faux-problem of piracy and similarly today we've got the faux-problem of the Great Fire Wall of China. The Olympics in Beijing in 2008 made it clear that the West was more than happy to include China in the Game (and what was that most popular trope from that most spectacular of the spectaclist economic relations that in the U.S. we call hip hop? oh yeah, "don't hate the player, hate the Game.") The real problem, as we see today with Google, was not access to information, but rather that the established Internet authorities needed to have the access to the market. It should be no surprise that at the same time when Baidu (the indigenous Google) signals the ability to overwhelm Google, the Internet is now going to be available in languages that are not based on the Roman alphabet. While there might be high-wire-type espionage involved in Google v. China; we have another example of the spectaclist economy in the acquisition of Friendster. Remember Friendster? Yeah, it's huge in Southeast Asia, apparently.
The commodification of your memory. This is the problem with piracy and with social media. As the spectaclist economy develops we will continue to delineate what is the appropriate use of appropriation. Perhaps we have a precursor in the French language and the practice of vergonha? While in France this led to near-linguicide, the same won't be true for digital piracy. The Internet requires this free transmission, not because "content is king" but because the Internet sine qua non, as Debord stated it, "The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification [....] it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness [....] the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation."
This is probably because we've entered a new phase of economic development, something that Michael Hardt had mentioned at his evening lecture last summer. Marx saw a shift from renting (with serfs doing the bidding of the land owner), to broad ownership/entrepreneurialism (I am Capital, and So Can You!), and now a seeming hybrid of these two modes.
As evidence of this shifting mode, what Guy Debord called the spectaclist economy, consider the current Intellectual Property rights debacle. In part this cannot occur without the concomitant rise of multinational corporations. In order for these to promulgate there has to be the transmission of certain basic ground rules: this factory needs to be filled with employees, those employees need to use these machines with these techniques, etc. So this was a question of cultural pedagogy. You gotta teach the people that are getting there clocks cleaned how to operate within this context. To this end there has been a somewhat one-sided transmission of what is called entertainment.
(By the way, the photo on the left here is from an article in Foreign Policy by Carolyn O'Hara and it's pretty amazing.)
The key moment for this "Turning Japanese" phase was the battle over VCRs. VCR technology was pioneered by the Japanese (Thomas P. Kasulis has a great story on how the Japanese engineers were able to accomplish what the U.S. could not). Broadcast television in the late 70s and early 80s did not want the VCR available to the U.S. public, (in no small part, I'm sure, enhanced with xenophobia and racism, but also) because then people would no longer be locked into leasing their attention to the tv at the times that TV advertisers have promised their sponsors. The VCR would be a serious abrogation of this power that broadcasters had (the control of the spectacular). Of course the VCR was allowed to develop in the media ecosystem, but not without being appropriated in such a way as to benefit TV as much as possible.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Coco UPDATED: 01/14
I'll be brief since I don't own a tv and I haven't watched any of these shows involved at any time in over a decade.
NBCs just rattling your cages to drum-up some ratings and hopefully secure an audience.
I understand that Andy Richter is back with Conan. That's great.
NBCs just rattling your cages to drum-up some ratings and hopefully secure an audience.
I understand that Andy Richter is back with Conan. That's great.
UPDATE:
And here's the ever-emotive Hitler with his thoughts on the matter:Tuesday, January 12, 2010
A Little Lingua Trauma
This is the post where I get nailed to a tree: if I've learned nothing else it's that Lacanians will be certain to correct your reading of Lacan and they will be adamant in announcing the insufficiency of one's poor reading. But I gotta start some where and what's below is from the floor of the editing room of a piece I've recently submitted at another blog. That said, I apologize for the [egregiously] disjointed nature of what follows and also apologize for the glaring inaccuracies and superficial understandings that likely will be found below.
In his essay “Obscene Abject Traumatic.” October 78, Fall 1996, Hal Foster seeks to present an understanding of postmodernist art of the 1990s. He sees the tendency within contemporary art practices to unite both the imaginary and symbolic against reality. Foster sees this conflict as possible because of the wide-reception of Jacques Lacan's work.
Lacan, another early psychoanalyst and perhaps the first incarnation of the philosopher-as-rockstar (he was something of a national treasure in France before 1968 where he was even on TV). In Lacanian psychoanalysis the human psyche is vulnerable to impingement from the world (as we have read in Melanie Klein elsewhere), but for Lacan reality itself is a special kinda terrifying all its own. Somewhat similar to Freud's suggestion in his essay “The Uncanny” that which is most terrifying is what is most familiar but never quite seen.
As illustration to Freud's point: that moment in the film The Grudge when the woman, being pursued by the angry demon, runs into her apartment, locks the door, runs to her bedroom (SAFE!) and hides under her sheets. Is there nowhere more safe than your own bed? The real horror comes when the demon slithers its way up the bed, just under the sheets making that awful croaking sound.
It is a horrifying scene because the bedroom has ceased to be that familiar place of rest and now is revealed as a place that contains more than we thought it did. The bed prior to the demon had been only so big, and now the demon has revealed to us that it is much more than just what we thought.
But for Lacan this is not impressive – literally child's play – an attempt by children to mask the horror of the Real by covering reality with signs and symbols. The symbolic order, “Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning To Work” signs, the size of notebook paper, all that culture stuff – all of this is to mitigate the ever-present danger of the psyche being left vulnerable to the Real. If Lacan is correct, we never experience the Real because of the terror that the Real reality provokes in us.
Again, if Lacan is correct in explaining the symbolic order, then the artist is clearly implicated and perhaps has a unique responsibility to consider the question, “what is the nature of the Real and how might we come into contact with it?” This is the base assumption in Hal Foster's essay and he finds an excellent example in the photographs of Cindy Sherman. (Untitled Film Still no. 21. 1978. above right)
Foster finds effective illustration of the terrifying gaze of the Real and the subsequent investigations into the nature of the Real through abject imagery in the work of Cindy Sherman:
(Left: Untitled Film Still no. 92. 1982)
Perhaps the best representation of this lingua trauma can be found in Atom Egoyan's 2009 film Adoration. Egoyan's film explores this phenomenon, perhaps to point-out that trauma has become the new authenticity: one cannot be trusted without having publicly discussed and exposing one's traumatic experiences.
This is well presented with Simon watching as the passengers of a flight that had, not unlike the “underwear bomber” incident of December 25, 2009, been the target of a potential bombing. Those, now middle aged, passengers argue over the possibility that one can be traumatized by an event that did not occur, after all, no one was even aware of the potential attack until they had landed. Can we call this a new trauma? Is trauma not an impingement in this moment that we must then learn to contain? Or is the traumatic something that happens in our minds alone and expresses itself corporally as we recall and meditate upon the event now remembered as traumatizing.
(Right: Untitled 1531. 1981.)
In his essay “Obscene Abject Traumatic.” October 78, Fall 1996, Hal Foster seeks to present an understanding of postmodernist art of the 1990s. He sees the tendency within contemporary art practices to unite both the imaginary and symbolic against reality. Foster sees this conflict as possible because of the wide-reception of Jacques Lacan's work.
Lacan, another early psychoanalyst and perhaps the first incarnation of the philosopher-as-rockstar (he was something of a national treasure in France before 1968 where he was even on TV). In Lacanian psychoanalysis the human psyche is vulnerable to impingement from the world (as we have read in Melanie Klein elsewhere), but for Lacan reality itself is a special kinda terrifying all its own. Somewhat similar to Freud's suggestion in his essay “The Uncanny” that which is most terrifying is what is most familiar but never quite seen.
It is a horrifying scene because the bedroom has ceased to be that familiar place of rest and now is revealed as a place that contains more than we thought it did. The bed prior to the demon had been only so big, and now the demon has revealed to us that it is much more than just what we thought.
Again, if Lacan is correct in explaining the symbolic order, then the artist is clearly implicated and perhaps has a unique responsibility to consider the question, “what is the nature of the Real and how might we come into contact with it?” This is the base assumption in Hal Foster's essay and he finds an excellent example in the photographs of Cindy Sherman. (Untitled Film Still no. 21. 1978. above right)
Foster finds effective illustration of the terrifying gaze of the Real and the subsequent investigations into the nature of the Real through abject imagery in the work of Cindy Sherman:
[Sherman's] subjects see, of course, but they are much more seen, captured by the gaze. Often, in the film stills and the centerfolds, this gaze seems to come from another subject, with whom the viewer may be implicated [….] Sherman shows her female subjects as self surveyed, not in phenomenological reflexivity (I see myself seeing myself) but in psychological estrangement (I am not what I imagined myself to be). (110)As Foster points out in his exploration of themes in '90s art practices, “Today there is a general tendency to redefine experience, individual and historical, in terms of trauma: a lingua trauma is spoken in popular culture, academic discourse, and art and literary worlds.” (123)
Perhaps the best representation of this lingua trauma can be found in Atom Egoyan's 2009 film Adoration. Egoyan's film explores this phenomenon, perhaps to point-out that trauma has become the new authenticity: one cannot be trusted without having publicly discussed and exposing one's traumatic experiences.
This is well presented with Simon watching as the passengers of a flight that had, not unlike the “underwear bomber” incident of December 25, 2009, been the target of a potential bombing. Those, now middle aged, passengers argue over the possibility that one can be traumatized by an event that did not occur, after all, no one was even aware of the potential attack until they had landed. Can we call this a new trauma? Is trauma not an impingement in this moment that we must then learn to contain? Or is the traumatic something that happens in our minds alone and expresses itself corporally as we recall and meditate upon the event now remembered as traumatizing.
(Right: Untitled 1531. 1981.)
Monday, January 11, 2010
A Look at the New York Times
Tonight we had an excellent meeting of the Poncey-Highlands Readgin Group where we discussed our readings of Breton's first "Manifesto of Surrealism" as well as the first chapter of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.
We can see a moment from the Debord text played-out today in the New York Times' "Most Popular" section. In the article "Multicultural Critical Theory. At Business School?" we read that business students need
Also, I'd like to address something in another article in today's NYT, this time in another article "Race Riots Grip Italian Town, and Mafia Is Suspected."
In this article we learn that Africans are being illegally trafficked into Italy so as to work in the orchards, picking fruit. This is a job seen as beneath the average Italian today, according to the article. Apparently an undisclosable number of immigrants have been picked up by the Italian Authorities and sent to detention centers. The situation for these immigrants, according to human rights workers in Italy is not dissimilar from slavery and these Italian Authorities have been using bull dozers to raze the encampments where these "semi-slaves" lived.
The article breezily then reports, "It was not entirely clear if all the immigrants left willingly for the detention centers, or if some were forced to leave."
I can answer that for you: they were forced.
Anytime the phrase "semi-slavery" is used to describe the lives of those at the bottom of an economic system and bulldozers are employed to raze these semi-slaves' "encampments" - that means the entire society there is blatantly using coercive maneuvers to get what they want. Those Africans have the two forms of freedom Marx outlined in Capital, vol. 1: they are free to use their bodies' abilities to labor and so enter, freely, contracts to sell their labor-capacity; but, they are also free of control of the conditions under which they will labor.
Just sayin'.
We can see a moment from the Debord text played-out today in the New York Times' "Most Popular" section. In the article "Multicultural Critical Theory. At Business School?" we read that business students need
to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions. [...]Learning how to think critically — how to imaginatively frame questions and consider multiple perspectives — has historically been associated with a liberal arts education, not a business school curriculum, so this change represents something of a tectonic shift for business school leaders. Mr. Martin even describes his goal as a kind of “liberal arts M.B.A.”Reading I can't help but think of Debord's line in §25, "The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible. " And then further in §26, "The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the world." You might have an MBA, but you're still going to have your clock cleaned by those that exploit the rest of us.
Also, I'd like to address something in another article in today's NYT, this time in another article "Race Riots Grip Italian Town, and Mafia Is Suspected."
In this article we learn that Africans are being illegally trafficked into Italy so as to work in the orchards, picking fruit. This is a job seen as beneath the average Italian today, according to the article. Apparently an undisclosable number of immigrants have been picked up by the Italian Authorities and sent to detention centers. The situation for these immigrants, according to human rights workers in Italy is not dissimilar from slavery and these Italian Authorities have been using bull dozers to raze the encampments where these "semi-slaves" lived.
The article breezily then reports, "It was not entirely clear if all the immigrants left willingly for the detention centers, or if some were forced to leave."
I can answer that for you: they were forced.
Anytime the phrase "semi-slavery" is used to describe the lives of those at the bottom of an economic system and bulldozers are employed to raze these semi-slaves' "encampments" - that means the entire society there is blatantly using coercive maneuvers to get what they want. Those Africans have the two forms of freedom Marx outlined in Capital, vol. 1: they are free to use their bodies' abilities to labor and so enter, freely, contracts to sell their labor-capacity; but, they are also free of control of the conditions under which they will labor.
Just sayin'.
Place Holder Post
I've made a resolution this year to post something on the blog here everyday. So far so good.
Tonight, I'm a little compressed for time as I am also writing-up a piece for another blog, The Avant Guardian.
So, I will simply leave a little taste for you; a quote from Hal Foster's “Obscene Abject Traumatic.” October 78, Fall 1996.
Tonight, I'm a little compressed for time as I am also writing-up a piece for another blog, The Avant Guardian.
So, I will simply leave a little taste for you; a quote from Hal Foster's “Obscene Abject Traumatic.” October 78, Fall 1996.
In a sense Breton and Bataille were both right, at least about each other. Often Breton and company did act like juvenile victims who provoked the paternal law as if to ensure that it was still there-at best in a neurotic plea for punishment, at worst in a paranoid demand for order. And this Icarian pose is again assumed by contemporary artists who are almost too eager to talk dirty in the museum, almost too ready to be tweaked by Hilton Kramer or spanked by Jesse Helms. On the other hand, the Bataillean ideal-to opt for the smelly shoe over the beautiful picture, to be fixed in perversion or stuck in abjection-is also adopted by contemporary artists discontent not only with the refinements of sublimation but with the displacements of desire. Is this, then, the option that abject art offers us-Oedipal naughtiness or infantile perversion? To act dirty with the secret wish to be spanked, or to wallow in shit with the secret faith that the most defiled might reverse into the most sacred, the most perverse into the most potent? (118)This seems to fit-in nicely with this week's consideration of the first "Manifesto of Surrealism" and Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Society of the Spectacle: Toward the Postmodern
My long-time buddy, Ryland Johnson, was kind enough to respond to my recent posting on Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 1 and what follows here is a reply to him.
Kudzu Kongzi is primarily a space for me to germinate my thinking. So I greatly benefit from your input on what is written as I am not an authority on any of it. Below is my reply to Ryland
Thanks for reading, Ryland.
There are some great things in your response, thanks. I'll only just briefly address only a few, not because I disagree with you, but only to kind of elaborate a little more on why I said some of these things here.
First, the blog's really just an off-the-cuff response to what I read today. The blog here serves in some capacity as a place holder for my thinking; but when folks, such as yourself, supplement this with your thinking I get greatly enriched. So thanks, again!
As for invocation of Dasein above: yes. I said it up there, only for the most superficial associative reason - because Dasein is an historic dasein and Debord seems to want to include some of Heidegger's thinking in §11. I agree with you, I think, that Debord, if he writes any more like this later in the book (I'm only reading Chapter 1 here), he's going to have a problem talking about Dasein in a proper way.
This should be said also, about Debord: in reading his works and what I've read about him as a person, I don't get the sense that he's a thorough scholar nor is he particularly interested in giving credit where credit is due.
As for Žižek: yes. I'm sure that there are many other people between 1967 and the rock star Žižek of the past decade, that have written about this advertisement stuff. The obvious place to start, since both Žižek and Debord are very open about their affinity for him is Lacan. I've not climbed the Mt. Doom of Lacan as yet.
At this point, with the minimal exposure to the other SI texts, and largely based on Lefebvre's account in that interview I've linked to here (from the journal October (79), Winter 1997) I'm not sure that the Situationists really had a good idea about the situations they wanted to achieve. In many ways the movement sounds like a collection of very creative, interesting, and angry people. The anger probably fueled their kinetic behavior, but it also probably contributed to the brevity of their moment.
One avenue I'd like to explore more thoroughly would be to better understand something that Ranciére was telling us this past summer: that there is a disconnect between Lyotard and (probably have to include Hal Foster, Bois, et al.) Baudrillard's account of the postmodern and the avant-garde of the early 20th century.
Ranciére seemed to be suggesting that the claims to postmodernity in Lyotard and Baudrillard are problematic in that they fail to account for the work that had been done in montage, surrealism, perhaps futurism, and so on.
So, part of my motivation to read Bréton with Debord is to consider the latter's inheritance from the former and to ask whether Debord has offered something more innovative in light of that inheritance. And also, to some extent, I want to apply what I'm learning in that Harvey lecture course on Capital. This last item is really not remarkable since nearly everyone worth reading from France during the 20th century was a (Neo)Marxist, so there is no surprise to see whole chunks of Marx inserted in sections and just presupposed as true. Were I better read in Marx I might argue some of the finer points of how Capital gets used, but I'm not an authority at all.
A place that I really should develop is at the end there, in talking about the current economic crisis. It's really too simplistic to accept the often-invoked, and largely class-war inspired, trope that it's because too many people were flipping properties that global capitalism started stuttering. That's just not true. What's seems to me more true is that most people on Wall Street don't understand what Value is.
But, beyond this intuition that Debord might be able to help us understand the moment, I'm not sure I've got more than a tenuous gleam. I'd say 30% of me suspects Debord might, but 70% of me thinks that Debord was a bad student and a loudmouth. Here's to learning that I'm wrong.
Kudzu Kongzi is primarily a space for me to germinate my thinking. So I greatly benefit from your input on what is written as I am not an authority on any of it. Below is my reply to Ryland
Thanks for reading, Ryland.
There are some great things in your response, thanks. I'll only just briefly address only a few, not because I disagree with you, but only to kind of elaborate a little more on why I said some of these things here.
First, the blog's really just an off-the-cuff response to what I read today. The blog here serves in some capacity as a place holder for my thinking; but when folks, such as yourself, supplement this with your thinking I get greatly enriched. So thanks, again!
As for invocation of Dasein above: yes. I said it up there, only for the most superficial associative reason - because Dasein is an historic dasein and Debord seems to want to include some of Heidegger's thinking in §11. I agree with you, I think, that Debord, if he writes any more like this later in the book (I'm only reading Chapter 1 here), he's going to have a problem talking about Dasein in a proper way.
This should be said also, about Debord: in reading his works and what I've read about him as a person, I don't get the sense that he's a thorough scholar nor is he particularly interested in giving credit where credit is due.
As for Žižek: yes. I'm sure that there are many other people between 1967 and the rock star Žižek of the past decade, that have written about this advertisement stuff. The obvious place to start, since both Žižek and Debord are very open about their affinity for him is Lacan. I've not climbed the Mt. Doom of Lacan as yet.
At this point, with the minimal exposure to the other SI texts, and largely based on Lefebvre's account in that interview I've linked to here (from the journal October (79), Winter 1997) I'm not sure that the Situationists really had a good idea about the situations they wanted to achieve. In many ways the movement sounds like a collection of very creative, interesting, and angry people. The anger probably fueled their kinetic behavior, but it also probably contributed to the brevity of their moment.
One avenue I'd like to explore more thoroughly would be to better understand something that Ranciére was telling us this past summer: that there is a disconnect between Lyotard and (probably have to include Hal Foster, Bois, et al.) Baudrillard's account of the postmodern and the avant-garde of the early 20th century.
Ranciére seemed to be suggesting that the claims to postmodernity in Lyotard and Baudrillard are problematic in that they fail to account for the work that had been done in montage, surrealism, perhaps futurism, and so on.
So, part of my motivation to read Bréton with Debord is to consider the latter's inheritance from the former and to ask whether Debord has offered something more innovative in light of that inheritance. And also, to some extent, I want to apply what I'm learning in that Harvey lecture course on Capital. This last item is really not remarkable since nearly everyone worth reading from France during the 20th century was a (Neo)Marxist, so there is no surprise to see whole chunks of Marx inserted in sections and just presupposed as true. Were I better read in Marx I might argue some of the finer points of how Capital gets used, but I'm not an authority at all.
A place that I really should develop is at the end there, in talking about the current economic crisis. It's really too simplistic to accept the often-invoked, and largely class-war inspired, trope that it's because too many people were flipping properties that global capitalism started stuttering. That's just not true. What's seems to me more true is that most people on Wall Street don't understand what Value is.
But, beyond this intuition that Debord might be able to help us understand the moment, I'm not sure I've got more than a tenuous gleam. I'd say 30% of me suspects Debord might, but 70% of me thinks that Debord was a bad student and a loudmouth. Here's to learning that I'm wrong.
Friday, January 8, 2010
(Economic) Notes on Society of the Spectacle
So let's finish-up the first chapter, ね？
We got to §21 the other day. But I'd like to assert some things that I did not in that previous posting: Chapter 1 of Society of the Spectacle is an economic text.
In §7 we are reminded of the fundamental alienation that accompanies the mass production which capitalism requires.
With §11 we sense that Debord is attempting to unite Marx with Heidegger's Dasein, "the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught."[itals original] Or perhaps thrown?
This is a text that attempts to describe the fundamental nature of all human interactions in the late capitalist period, as such this text must discuss economics. Whereas Marx sought to explain the dialectical nature of commodity generation and defines capitalism as the movement of commodities as capitalism, Debord's spectacle (qualified in §1 by the statement, "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.") is the, "autonomous movement of the non-living" (§2). What is the spectacle? "It is no more than the economy developing for itself." (§16) It is, "the main production of present-day society." (§15) Marx saw the commodification of the proletariat's labor and the commodification of money itself; Debord attempts something similar, "The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist."
Debord gives us a brief genealogy of how we came to be in the spectaclist economy, and he does this by sketching a shift in social ontology:
I think that Žižek has spoken about this in several places, this injunction to, Enjoy!" Debord puts it this way in §25, "The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible." This echoes a theme in §6 where the we are told that the spectacle is "the affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corrolary consumption." For an elaboration on this affirmation of the choice already made, consider George Ritzer's McDonaldization of Society. Here's a great site for all your McDonaldization needs.
§26 provides a summation and reiteration of the alienation principle from Marx, but Debord extends this alienation, as nothing can escape this process, "The success of the economic system of separation is the proletariatization of the world."
For this proletariatization to be possible, the consummation of the process of rationalization must occur. Once every task had been made automated and efficiency achieved, the worker would be liberated from the workplace, free from toiling in exploitative environments. With no employees to exploit, the managers would be liberated as well. Lefebvre, in an excellent interview discussing the origins of the Situationists, states that his Critique of Everyday Life was inspired by a science-fiction story wherein all the humans have killed themselves because they have nothing to do after the robots took over their work, leaving dogs to exploit the robots. Debord finds this liberation from work suspect:
We got to §21 the other day. But I'd like to assert some things that I did not in that previous posting: Chapter 1 of Society of the Spectacle is an economic text.
- Debord here is announcing this new term he calls "the spectacle." This is important to keep in mind because the temptation is there to misconstrue the term. Thus we would read this text as Debord as making value judgements, something to the effect of him saying contemporary society is simply being spectacular and indulgent. What he seems to be doing in this first chapter is defining terms. Thus, when he states, in §21, "The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion." he is not describing either religion as illusory in a pejorative sense nor that the process that has led to this contemporary social arrangement that he earlier defined as "the spectacle" (in §4, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. Or also in §24, "the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of 'mass media' which are its most glaring superficial manifestation....")
- Debord seems to be building from the presupposition that the reader has also read Marx's Capital, vol. 1 at a minimum. Over and over again we get definitions and phrases lifted from Capital.
In §7 we are reminded of the fundamental alienation that accompanies the mass production which capitalism requires.
With §11 we sense that Debord is attempting to unite Marx with Heidegger's Dasein, "the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught."[itals original] Or perhaps thrown?
This is a text that attempts to describe the fundamental nature of all human interactions in the late capitalist period, as such this text must discuss economics. Whereas Marx sought to explain the dialectical nature of commodity generation and defines capitalism as the movement of commodities as capitalism, Debord's spectacle (qualified in §1 by the statement, "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.") is the, "autonomous movement of the non-living" (§2). What is the spectacle? "It is no more than the economy developing for itself." (§16) It is, "the main production of present-day society." (§15) Marx saw the commodification of the proletariat's labor and the commodification of money itself; Debord attempts something similar, "The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist."
Debord gives us a brief genealogy of how we came to be in the spectaclist economy, and he does this by sketching a shift in social ontology:
The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual "having" must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. (§17)What are the symptoms of this new arrangement of social relations? Not simply advertisements for the commodities of capitalism, but advertisements as something more than suggestions. Advertisements as rules:
§26 provides a summation and reiteration of the alienation principle from Marx, but Debord extends this alienation, as nothing can escape this process, "The success of the economic system of separation is the proletariatization of the world."
[T]his inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself a product of its rationality. [...] Thus the present "liberation from§s29-34 reiterate, once more, the alienation inherent in capitalist production. But where Marx saw it as perverse, this freeing of the serfs to enter contracts, but free from the ability to control the means of production; Debord repeatedly emphasizes that today nobody is free from the spectaclist economy:
labor," the increase of leisure, is in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result. §27
The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of "lonely crowds." The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely. §26Further still, "The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion is mainly the expansion of this specific industrial production." §32 The chapter ends with simple statement, "The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image." §34
(remember this show on A&E? Oh, yeah there was that show on Discovery also)
Is this how we arrived at the current economic crisis? One of the principle causes of the current meltdown of global capital is that the American real estate market tanked. This, then meant that all that value that Wall Street had created in the last few years immediately evaporated. How? Value, as Marx stated in Capital (1867), is manifested socially-necessary labor-time. You get enough of these suburbanites buying these properties and mistaking the menu for the meal, and, poof....
Thursday, January 7, 2010
The Surrealists Won Their Revolution, and We Slept Right Through It
The difficulty with reading the “Manifesto of Surrealism” is in remembering that to write in this way, to think these things was to verge on revolution. In 1924. Surrealism in the popular imagination conjures images of Dali maybe, perhaps a Duchamp readymade (probably not), but it's an art movement when it's remembered. Not political action, that's not really what surrealism was about, right?
But, y'know, you read the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” full of gusto, vim and vigor, and the calling-out of soft-ass-bustas. That's what Breton's “Manifesto” did – he called Dostoevsky a chump. He quotes Crime and Punishment and sets it up with,
'Cause the surrealists won, their revolution was a stunning success.
The pioneering of automatic writing that Breton lionized, it's everywhere. This glossolalia that Breton induced in 1924 was the ground conditions for the Internet to occur. Breton's first surrealist manifesto begins with the assessment that the conditions of living in Modern times has become stultifying and a stupid proof of Marx's alienation of humanity (which is the result of the capitalist mode of production).
Breton sees the problem as a profound lack of imagination in the everyday dealings of human interaction. Perhaps, if, when we arrived at work in the factory, we halted the assembly line (composed of one routine movement codified and reiterated ad infinitum, thus and ossified - the nightmare of the Eternal Return), and instead of doing our preassigned tasks (over and over and over again), what if instead of cars being assembled with steering wheels they were instead given a fish? Imagine what the downstream effects would be if people had to re-imagine their relationships to the world, all the time!?
Breton's surrealist project is to align what he hopes Freud will find in psychoanalyzing dreams with the transformation of society in Marx and communism;
Here's some wild speculation on my part. Breton makes four reflections in his manifesto. First, his theory that dreams are continuous. Second, dreams are just as reliable (as in real) as lucidity. In the third he seems to be describing Evercrack, World of Warcraft, or Second Life, or...(you name it), the MMORPG ecosystem:
"You are nameless."
"The ease of everything is priceless."
The Pirate Bay, although perhaps the imprisonment of its founders may spell the end of this site, they are the avant-garde of the copy left movement. Wildly popular, the Pirate Party now has two seats in the European Union's Parliament.
Of course, were the Pirate Bay to cease to be, there has nonetheless been a cultural shift, at least in terms of the music industry. It's historically been the case that the music industry has not been kind to its musicians. Consider Little Richard, the father of rock n' roll, who received half a penny for every album he sold. Better still, read how Steve Albini (the man) broke it down for us in his excellent, "The Problem With Music" over at negativland (also awesome).
The "Manifesto of Surrealism", Nadja, these surrealist texts are hard to read today, in large part, because their written in such a familiar style: it's like wandering into livejournal in 2002. All that stream of conscience stuff, all that free association, makes me scream for a reasonable copy editor.
But, y'know, you read the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” full of gusto, vim and vigor, and the calling-out of soft-ass-bustas. That's what Breton's “Manifesto” did – he called Dostoevsky a chump. He quotes Crime and Punishment and sets it up with,
[T]he purely informative style....[T]he descriptions! There is nothing to which their vacuity can be compared...he tries to make me agree with him about cliches....(7)But you know, read Nadja, read “Manifesto of Surrealism.” It's tediocrity. Why?
'Cause the surrealists won, their revolution was a stunning success.
The pioneering of automatic writing that Breton lionized, it's everywhere. This glossolalia that Breton induced in 1924 was the ground conditions for the Internet to occur. Breton's first surrealist manifesto begins with the assessment that the conditions of living in Modern times has become stultifying and a stupid proof of Marx's alienation of humanity (which is the result of the capitalist mode of production).
Breton sees the problem as a profound lack of imagination in the everyday dealings of human interaction. Perhaps, if, when we arrived at work in the factory, we halted the assembly line (composed of one routine movement codified and reiterated ad infinitum, thus and ossified - the nightmare of the Eternal Return), and instead of doing our preassigned tasks (over and over and over again), what if instead of cars being assembled with steering wheels they were instead given a fish? Imagine what the downstream effects would be if people had to re-imagine their relationships to the world, all the time!?
Breton's surrealist project is to align what he hopes Freud will find in psychoanalyzing dreams with the transformation of society in Marx and communism;
When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers? […] Can't the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life? […] From the moment when it is subjected to a methodical examination, when, by means yet to be determined, we succeed in recording the contents of dreams in their entirety (and that presupposes a discipline of memory spanning generations [….] I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going....(12-4)The other day I pointed out that Guy Debord, in his Society of the Spectacle, puts Breton and the surrealists squarely in his cross hairs for this faith in the saving powers of sleep.
Here's some wild speculation on my part. Breton makes four reflections in his manifesto. First, his theory that dreams are continuous. Second, dreams are just as reliable (as in real) as lucidity. In the third he seems to be describing Evercrack, World of Warcraft, or Second Life, or...(you name it), the MMORPG ecosystem:
The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill, fly faster, love to your heart's content. And if you should die, are you not certain of reawaking among the dead? Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference.Perhaps even more interestingly, the Surrealist revolution's victory is indicated with 4chan and the Pirate Bay, "You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless." (14)
"You are nameless."Here is a photo of the group Anonymous, apparently taken during their battle with the Church of Scientology (see their video declaration of war below).
4chan, some call it the asshole of the internet, is also responsible for most of the memes that preoccupy netizens, such as Lolcatz and the ever-fun Rickrolling (see the Encyclopedia Dramatica for more on that).
The Pirate Bay, although perhaps the imprisonment of its founders may spell the end of this site, they are the avant-garde of the copy left movement. Wildly popular, the Pirate Party now has two seats in the European Union's Parliament.
Of course, were the Pirate Bay to cease to be, there has nonetheless been a cultural shift, at least in terms of the music industry. It's historically been the case that the music industry has not been kind to its musicians. Consider Little Richard, the father of rock n' roll, who received half a penny for every album he sold. Better still, read how Steve Albini (the man) broke it down for us in his excellent, "The Problem With Music" over at negativland (also awesome).
The "Manifesto of Surrealism", Nadja, these surrealist texts are hard to read today, in large part, because their written in such a familiar style: it's like wandering into livejournal in 2002. All that stream of conscience stuff, all that free association, makes me scream for a reasonable copy editor.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
R.I.P. 山口 彊 (Tsutomu Yamaguchi) - Double Atomic Bomb Survivor
山口様 (Honorable Mr. Yamaguchi) has crossed to the other side, according to the AP, succumbing to stomach cancer.
Can you imagine it? He was walking to his work when the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In
What?
It's an amazing story, Parry tells it well.
Hiroshima City University offers an amazing Peace Studies Summer Course for undergraduates as well as graduate students. The tuition is nearly negligible, about US$200, and includes a home stay.
Can you imagine it? He was walking to his work when the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In
"When the noise and the blast had subsided I saw a huge mushroom-shaped pillar of fire rising up high into the sky. It was like a tornado, although it didn't move, but it rose and spread out horizontally at the top. There was prismatic light, which was changing in a complicated rhythm, like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. The first thing I did was to check that I still had my legs and whether I could move them. I thought, 'If I stay here, I'll die.' Two hundred yards ahead, there was a dug-out bomb shelter, and when I climbed in there were two young students sitting there. They said, 'You've been badly cut, you're seriously injured.' And it was then I realised I had a bad burn on half my face, and that my arms were burnt."He and his two colleagues were from Nagasaki, but had been sent to Hiroshima for several months to complete a project in the shipyards. Yamaguchi had forgotten his 印鑑 (inkan) and had to run back to get it before saying goodbye to his Hiroshima colleagues. Just as he starts to walking, the above explosion. He and his two Nagasaki colleagues set-out to find survivors:
The three took a motor launch to try to find a way back into the city and to their lodgings. "From the boat we could see the city burning," said Mr Yamaguchi. "Every branch of the delta was burning. The sky was dark, so you could clearly see these pillars of flame. I thought that all of Hiroshima was finished." But it was only after they began the walk to their lodgings that they understood what this new kind of bomb had done. These are the scenes that every survivor remembers, the images that crawl through their dreams. To Mr Yamaguchi, there seemed to be children everywhere, some running, many limping along the side of the road. "They didn't cry," he said. "I saw no tears at all. Their hair was burnt, and they were completely naked. I saw so many of these children. Behind them, big fires burnt. Miyuki Bridge, next to our dormitory, was still standing, but all over it there were burnt people, children as well as adults, some of them dead, some of them on the verge of death. They were the ones who couldn't walk any more, who had just lain down. None of them spoke, none of them had the strength to say a word. It's funny that during that time, I didn't hear human speech, or shouts, just the sound of the city burning. Under the bridge there were many more bodies, bobbing in the water like blocks of wood."The three of them returned to Nagasaki. Yamaguchi reported to work after having received some treatment for his burns. As he is telling his boss what has happened in Hiroshima, another.atomic.bomb.explodes.
What?
It's an amazing story, Parry tells it well.
Hiroshima City University offers an amazing Peace Studies Summer Course for undergraduates as well as graduate students. The tuition is nearly negligible, about US$200, and includes a home stay.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Reading Society of the Spectacle
I'm preparing for next Monday, when the Poncey-Highland(s) Reading Group is meeting to discuss Andre Breton's (First) "Manifesto of Surrealism" (1924) as well as Chapter 1 from Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967).
In my reading I am coming across some ideas that I want to put out to the internetz as well as keep me in the practice of daily writing:
In Debord's watershed treatise we read, "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles."(§1) Okay, so keep in mind that modern conditions of production must prevail in order for spectacles to exist. First and foremost we read this and have to recognize that Marx and Weber have offered authoritative analyses of the capitalist mode of production, which is the dominant mode of production over the past 400-500 years. The worker in the factory is doubly alienated: first, because the worker is no longer a craftsman (building an entire cabinet, say) but one worker on an assembly line and so makes only one section of a product - the worker is alienated from the very thing that is made all day at the factory; second, in order for the factory to operate it must attract workers from far away to come work there and so there is a rise in urban living (where, contrary to Cheers, nobody knows your name) rather than the previous mode of living in small towns where everyone knows everybody else. As Marx points out in Capital, vol.1, (Ben Fowkes translation, Penguin Classics, 280) the worker is doubly free as well: 1) he freely owns his body and so can enter labor contracts, and 2) he is free of control of the means of producing. He is free to slave-away at that factory.
Debord goes on to say, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." (§4) He further clarifies in the next section that the spectacle is a Weltanschauung, a comprehensive world view(ing). Leo Apostel has said that a world view should have seven elements (thanks, wikipedia!):
This leads him to say that "Separation is itself part of the unity of the world..." (§7) Which is not too controversial a hypothesis today to say about the State since we've got Althusser discussing it at the same time as Debord in his "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", but shortly after Philip Abrams, in his essay "Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State" states it so:
We've come to see these last 10-20 years as an age of irony, but perhaps the real irony has escaped us, as Debord states, "This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society." Thus, no matter how skeezy we might think the people on these shows are, we are complicit in maintaining and facilitating these conditions that produce these shows. "The spectacle presents itself as something... indisputable and inaccessible. [...] The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply..." (§12) And then further still, "all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it." (§17)
This spectacular production that society has become is, again, all encompassing, including the overcoding of the religious. "The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base." While this may not serve as proof of his theorizing, we certainly can't help but nod when reading the science-fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law of Prediction, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Now imagine having an iPhone 40 years ago ans ask yourself if it wouldn't seem to be, effectively, magic.
Now here's what really got me writing today:
"To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep." (§21) This section has two items that got me excited: first is the phrasing of social necessity (because this is a key phrase in Marx's Capital, vol.1) and, second because this seems to be a critique of Breton's "Manifesto of Surrealism":
In my reading I am coming across some ideas that I want to put out to the internetz as well as keep me in the practice of daily writing:
In Debord's watershed treatise we read, "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles."(§1) Okay, so keep in mind that modern conditions of production must prevail in order for spectacles to exist. First and foremost we read this and have to recognize that Marx and Weber have offered authoritative analyses of the capitalist mode of production, which is the dominant mode of production over the past 400-500 years. The worker in the factory is doubly alienated: first, because the worker is no longer a craftsman (building an entire cabinet, say) but one worker on an assembly line and so makes only one section of a product - the worker is alienated from the very thing that is made all day at the factory; second, in order for the factory to operate it must attract workers from far away to come work there and so there is a rise in urban living (where, contrary to Cheers, nobody knows your name) rather than the previous mode of living in small towns where everyone knows everybody else. As Marx points out in Capital, vol.1, (Ben Fowkes translation, Penguin Classics, 280) the worker is doubly free as well: 1) he freely owns his body and so can enter labor contracts, and 2) he is free of control of the means of producing. He is free to slave-away at that factory.
Debord goes on to say, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." (§4) He further clarifies in the next section that the spectacle is a Weltanschauung, a comprehensive world view(ing). Leo Apostel has said that a world view should have seven elements (thanks, wikipedia!):
- ontology - a descriptive model of the world
- an explanation of the world
- a futurology - answering the question, "where are we going?"
- Values, answers to ethical quetions
- A theory of action, answering the question, "How do we attain our goals?"
- An epistemology - what is true/false
- An etiology - the building blocks that then answer the question, "What are our origins?"
This leads him to say that "Separation is itself part of the unity of the world..." (§7) Which is not too controversial a hypothesis today to say about the State since we've got Althusser discussing it at the same time as Debord in his "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", but shortly after Philip Abrams, in his essay "Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State" states it so:
It is first and foremost an exercise in legitimation - and what is being legitimated is, we may assume, something which if seen directly and as itself would be illegitimate, an unacceptable domination. Why else all the legitimation-work? The state, in sum, is a bid to elicit support for or tolerance of the insupportable and intolerable by presenting them as something other than themselves, namely, legitimate, disinterested domination. (1988) Journal of Historical Sociology. (1)1. 76.It would seem fair to paraphrase Debord here such, "the spectacle is an ideological activity in the same sense that the State is." But of course Debord is talking about something bigger than just the State and politics, he's trying to put his hands around the whole magilla. "Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides." (§8) This is exactly how reality tv works, isn't it? The people on the show are fully aware that they are being recorded, we are fully aware that they are aware.
We've come to see these last 10-20 years as an age of irony, but perhaps the real irony has escaped us, as Debord states, "This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society." Thus, no matter how skeezy we might think the people on these shows are, we are complicit in maintaining and facilitating these conditions that produce these shows. "The spectacle presents itself as something... indisputable and inaccessible. [...] The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply..." (§12) And then further still, "all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it." (§17)
This spectacular production that society has become is, again, all encompassing, including the overcoding of the religious. "The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base." While this may not serve as proof of his theorizing, we certainly can't help but nod when reading the science-fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law of Prediction, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Now imagine having an iPhone 40 years ago ans ask yourself if it wouldn't seem to be, effectively, magic.
Now here's what really got me writing today:
"To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep." (§21) This section has two items that got me excited: first is the phrasing of social necessity (because this is a key phrase in Marx's Capital, vol.1) and, second because this seems to be a critique of Breton's "Manifesto of Surrealism":
[D]reams give every evidence of being continuous and show signs of organization. Memory alone arrogates to itself the right to excerpt from dreams, to ignore the transitions, and to depict for us rather a series of dreams than the dream itself. [...] When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers? I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers[....] Can't the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life? (4)Is Debord pointing-out that what Breton failed to appreciate in his revolutionary writing was a proper economic understanding? I've fixated on this social necessity phrasing because Marx claims that Value is the coming together of use-value and exchange-value in the form of socially-necessary labor time. It is in this way that commodities are at all possible. Without this socially-decided necessity commodities are only products, and without commodities there is no capitalism.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Levinas and Winnicott on Nuclear Bombs
明けましておめでとうございます！
今年も宜しくお願いします。
Happy New Year and please continue to privilege me with your kindnesses in 2010.
I'm catching-up on some Levinas and rereading his essay "Peace and Proximity" ('Paix et Proximité', Les Cahiers de la nuit surveillée, No. 3, 1984) translated by Michael B. Smith (1999). I'd written (which I reread today with great embarrassment) about this essay a few years back and I'm glad to return to this essay. Today I'm reading and I feel a much-expanded understanding of what Levinas is getting at.
Anywho, for my own enjoyment, I am presenting some quotes from Levinas and Winnicott about the result of nuclear arms development and proliferation.
"Peace and Proximity" Emmanuel Levinas:
The explosion of the earth itself by an energy that the search for truth - having become modern science - released from being. Here we have truth threatening being itself. Here truth threatens, so to speak, being qua being and disqualifies Europe, which discovered - and left uncovered - these forces. But doubtless that very way of disqualifying and accusing already proceeds from a vocation of the spirit whose powers of love are neither translated nor exhausted by the love of wisdom. (133-4)
There is the anguish of committing crimes even where concepts are in agreement. There is the anguish of the responsibility incumbent upon each one of us in the death or suffering of the other. The fear of each for himself in the mortality of each does not succeed in absorbing the gravity of the murder committed and the scandal of indifference to the other's suffering. (135)
...[W]e may wonder whether peace must not respond to a call more urgent than that of truth and initially distinct from the call of truth. [...] But peace in this case will no longer be reducible to a simple confirmation of human identity in its substantiality, anchored in itself, in its identity of I. It will no longer be a question of the bourgeois peace of the man who is at home behind closed doors, rejecting that which, being exterior, negates him. (136)
"Struggling Through the Doldrums" (1963) from Deprivation and Delinquency (1984) D.W. Winnicott:
The atom bomb affects the relationship between adult society and the adolescent tide which seems to be for ever coming in. It is not so much that his new bomb symbolizes a maniacal episode, a moment of infantile incontinence expressed in terms of fantasy that has come true - rage that has turned into actual destruction. Gunpowder already symbolized all this and the deeper aspects of madness, and the world was long ago altered by the invention of gunpowder which gave reality to magic. The more general result of the threat of nuclear war is that in effect it means that there is not going to be another war. It can be argued that there might be a war any minute in some place or other in the world, but because of the new bomb we know we can no longer solve a social problem by organizing for a new war. (150)
If it makes no sense any longer to deal with our difficult adolescents by preparing them to fight for their king and country, we have lost something that we have been in the habit of using, and so we are thrown back on this problem, there is adolescence, a thing in itself, with which society must learn to live. (150)
When we think of the occasional atrocities of modern youth we must weigh them against the deaths that belong to the war that is no more to take place, and against all the cruelty that belongs to the war that is not going to be, and against all the free sexuality which belongs to every war that has ever been but is not going to be again. So adolescence has come to stay, and along with it the violence and sex that is inherent in it. (151)
今年も宜しくお願いします。
Happy New Year and please continue to privilege me with your kindnesses in 2010.
I'm catching-up on some Levinas and rereading his essay "Peace and Proximity" ('Paix et Proximité', Les Cahiers de la nuit surveillée, No. 3, 1984) translated by Michael B. Smith (1999). I'd written (which I reread today with great embarrassment) about this essay a few years back and I'm glad to return to this essay. Today I'm reading and I feel a much-expanded understanding of what Levinas is getting at.
Anywho, for my own enjoyment, I am presenting some quotes from Levinas and Winnicott about the result of nuclear arms development and proliferation.
"Peace and Proximity" Emmanuel Levinas:
The explosion of the earth itself by an energy that the search for truth - having become modern science - released from being. Here we have truth threatening being itself. Here truth threatens, so to speak, being qua being and disqualifies Europe, which discovered - and left uncovered - these forces. But doubtless that very way of disqualifying and accusing already proceeds from a vocation of the spirit whose powers of love are neither translated nor exhausted by the love of wisdom. (133-4)
There is the anguish of committing crimes even where concepts are in agreement. There is the anguish of the responsibility incumbent upon each one of us in the death or suffering of the other. The fear of each for himself in the mortality of each does not succeed in absorbing the gravity of the murder committed and the scandal of indifference to the other's suffering. (135)
...[W]e may wonder whether peace must not respond to a call more urgent than that of truth and initially distinct from the call of truth. [...] But peace in this case will no longer be reducible to a simple confirmation of human identity in its substantiality, anchored in itself, in its identity of I. It will no longer be a question of the bourgeois peace of the man who is at home behind closed doors, rejecting that which, being exterior, negates him. (136)
"Struggling Through the Doldrums" (1963) from Deprivation and Delinquency (1984) D.W. Winnicott:
The atom bomb affects the relationship between adult society and the adolescent tide which seems to be for ever coming in. It is not so much that his new bomb symbolizes a maniacal episode, a moment of infantile incontinence expressed in terms of fantasy that has come true - rage that has turned into actual destruction. Gunpowder already symbolized all this and the deeper aspects of madness, and the world was long ago altered by the invention of gunpowder which gave reality to magic. The more general result of the threat of nuclear war is that in effect it means that there is not going to be another war. It can be argued that there might be a war any minute in some place or other in the world, but because of the new bomb we know we can no longer solve a social problem by organizing for a new war. (150)
If it makes no sense any longer to deal with our difficult adolescents by preparing them to fight for their king and country, we have lost something that we have been in the habit of using, and so we are thrown back on this problem, there is adolescence, a thing in itself, with which society must learn to live. (150)
When we think of the occasional atrocities of modern youth we must weigh them against the deaths that belong to the war that is no more to take place, and against all the cruelty that belongs to the war that is not going to be, and against all the free sexuality which belongs to every war that has ever been but is not going to be again. So adolescence has come to stay, and along with it the violence and sex that is inherent in it. (151)
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Jacques Rancière Day 6
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Jacques Rancière taught a class entitled: POLITICS OF AESTHETICS wherein we discuss the relationship between what is allowed to be seen and the dominant political regime.
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.
How the aesthetic revolution is transformed and ultimately canceled-out. It's not so much what Brecht, Baudrillard, or Lyotard said as much as how they construct the relationship between art and politics. The issue of post-modernism is one of re-framing Modernity. Not a new concept, but a re-framing of art and politics. The way in which they will say farewell to Modernity has led to a reconfiguration of Modernity.
"The Ecstasy of Communication" Baudrillard; published in Hal Foster's Anti-Aesthetics.
Attempts to punctuate a turning point of art, is also a turning point in the sensory experience. These texts are dealing with experience; they also recapitulate what Modernity means, a reinterpretation of the aesthetics of Modernism. The way in which they set the stage for this task is interesting.
Now is the reign of hyper-reality. What has been lost with the digital is, on one hand, the spectacle of the world, and the sacred secret of the inner world. Everything is communicable and there is no separation of the inner and the outer. The specificity of artistic experimentation is lost due to digital reproduction.
If the progress of scientific apparatus is responsible for the end of Modernity, it is also responsible for the inception of Modernity. The birth of photography doesn't mean the task of image-making has been perfected but that painting is impacted and Classical pictures depended upon a certain monarchical perspective on the world.
Photography isn't only the possibility of exact reproduction, but also means the end of Kantian aesthetics of the beautiful. §16 is based on adherent beauty vs. free beauty; this was determined by freedom from concepts and perfection of the reproduction in technique.
Jacques Rancière taught a class entitled: POLITICS OF AESTHETICS wherein we discuss the relationship between what is allowed to be seen and the dominant political regime.
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.
How the aesthetic revolution is transformed and ultimately canceled-out. It's not so much what Brecht, Baudrillard, or Lyotard said as much as how they construct the relationship between art and politics. The issue of post-modernism is one of re-framing Modernity. Not a new concept, but a re-framing of art and politics. The way in which they will say farewell to Modernity has led to a reconfiguration of Modernity.
"The Ecstasy of Communication" Baudrillard; published in Hal Foster's Anti-Aesthetics.
Attempts to punctuate a turning point of art, is also a turning point in the sensory experience. These texts are dealing with experience; they also recapitulate what Modernity means, a reinterpretation of the aesthetics of Modernism. The way in which they set the stage for this task is interesting.
- Diagnosis of loss or something that is about to be lost: the loss of separation, no longer borders.
- Tow ideas of the sensory: heterogeneity and homogeneity.
- For Baudrillard it's the loss of subject and object, we have lost alienation. This should be a good thing, in Marxist terms, but the issue is trickier.
Now is the reign of hyper-reality. What has been lost with the digital is, on one hand, the spectacle of the world, and the sacred secret of the inner world. Everything is communicable and there is no separation of the inner and the outer. The specificity of artistic experimentation is lost due to digital reproduction.
If the progress of scientific apparatus is responsible for the end of Modernity, it is also responsible for the inception of Modernity. The birth of photography doesn't mean the task of image-making has been perfected but that painting is impacted and Classical pictures depended upon a certain monarchical perspective on the world.
Photography isn't only the possibility of exact reproduction, but also means the end of Kantian aesthetics of the beautiful. §16 is based on adherent beauty vs. free beauty; this was determined by freedom from concepts and perfection of the reproduction in technique.
Jacques Rancière Evening Lecture
As part of our curriculum at the European Graduate School we must attend evening lectures from the faculty. This evening Jacques Rancière spoke to us.
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.
In a sense, it will deal with negation [as was the case with Alain Badiou's the other night]; but less broad in scope.
I am here concerned with the process of unfolding and dissipation of images. What kind of logic is present in images and their processional narrative? Hitchcock's Vertigo is an example of the perfection of the deployment of image in narrative form.
The logic of the film is apparent as soon as the credits. The dispositif of the images from hereon are _____(?)
Deleuze states that Hitchcock is the peak of the image-movement system, but he is also the symptom of the crisis of narrative action.
(2 forms of passivity) Scottie's Acrophobia, 2 fascinations with Death
Let's also consider Vertov's Man with Camera (1929):
The camera has the radical equality of all movement, the Communism of the equal exchange of all images.
The means of fascination used by Hollywood are the remains of a lost cinematic utopia according to Goddard.
An art is never only an art but also the proposition of a possible world and its techniques and elements employed are often the remains of a previously proposed utopia.
Reconfront the suppositions of movement and the look.
[END OF LECTURE]
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.
In a sense, it will deal with negation [as was the case with Alain Badiou's the other night]; but less broad in scope.
I am here concerned with the process of unfolding and dissipation of images. What kind of logic is present in images and their processional narrative? Hitchcock's Vertigo is an example of the perfection of the deployment of image in narrative form.
The logic of the film is apparent as soon as the credits. The dispositif of the images from hereon are _____(?)
Deleuze states that Hitchcock is the peak of the image-movement system, but he is also the symptom of the crisis of narrative action.
(2 forms of passivity) Scottie's Acrophobia, 2 fascinations with Death
Let's also consider Vertov's Man with Camera (1929):
The camera has the radical equality of all movement, the Communism of the equal exchange of all images.
The means of fascination used by Hollywood are the remains of a lost cinematic utopia according to Goddard.
An art is never only an art but also the proposition of a possible world and its techniques and elements employed are often the remains of a previously proposed utopia.
Reconfront the suppositions of movement and the look.
[END OF LECTURE]
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