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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Post at the International Schopenhauer Association

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

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

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

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

Post at New American Paintings

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

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

Laura U. Marks Evening Lecture

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

The students are required to attend evening lectures given by the faculty each evening as part of our curriculum. Laura U. Marks was the fifth person to give an evening lecture during the August sessions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The universe only exists of God and atoms in accidents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Massumi Evening Lecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nonsensuous semblance has nothing to do with metaphor or allegory

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

Is the political in need of redefining?

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

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

[END OF TALK]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Twain has the best name ever.

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

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

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

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

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

A Great Thanks for Great Heidegger-related Sites

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

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

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

Thanks, Pete, for all sharing the good times!

Addiction as Cultural Pathology?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heidegger's Profound Boredom and Addiction

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

Here are the slides to what I presented:

Heidegger's Profound Boredom and Addiction

Spectacular Agency - A political theory for everyone and no one

April has been a crazy month!

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Post at The Avant Guardian

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

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

Checka out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awesome Quote

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

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

Anywho, I read this and I thought of school:

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

6.20:
The Master said, " To truly love it is better than just to understand it, and to enjoy it is better than to simply love it."

4.15:
The Master said, "Zeng, my friend! My way (dao ) is bound together with one continuous strand."
Master Zeng replied, "Indeed."
When the Master had left, the disciples asked, "What was he referring to?"
Master Zeng said, "The way of the Master is doing one's utmost and putting oneself in the other's place, nothing more."

1.16:
The Master said: "Don't worry about not being acknowledged by others; worry about failing to acknowledge them."

Thanks.

Announcing the 7th Annual North Georgia Student Philosophy Conference

I am very glad to see and share that the Philosophy Student Association of Kennesaw State University is holding their 7th Annual conference April 16 & 17.

I remember organizing the first conference was such an amazing experience. We worked for weeks to set the whole thing up. None of us had even been to a conference before, we had no idea how the show would go. We did have a couple of years of the Mike Ryan Lecture Series to somewhat inform us, and of course we had Dr. Jones guiding us.

For several years we would have vegetarian Chinese food from New Lucky China off of Shallowford Road to cater the event. We would design the flyers, the posters, the name tags, the program, we'd set up the rooms, the lunches, we were really hoping that we'd be good hosts.

We edited and published a selected proceedings, building off of the momentum of the monthly newsletters we also created, eventually this led to the establishment of an online journal, OtherWise (which just recently published its newest issue).

I joke some times that I didn't do well in my classes because they were always getting in the way of my real education that I cultivated with the PSA. Clearly I should have been a better student, but I would never take back those actions. The PSA is first and foremost a Nietzche-loving group and quick to dance and affirm; but also a group that is very seriously committed to developing excellence among themselves and promoting excellence in their community (probably something from Jones' lectures on Confucius and Daoism). What a cool group of people.

Congratulations to the PSA for the years of their hard work and here's to their continued successes.

Remembering a Friend

An old friend of mine (and TAG co-editor), Ari, has just lost a friend to sickness. He's shared a fine memorial to this passed friend and in solidarity I am linking to his eulogy.

I just read a fine interview with Cormac McCarthy where he put it pretty well:

In talking to older people who've had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, "The most significant thing in my life is that I've been extraordinarily lucky." And when you hear that you know you're hearing the truth. It doesn't diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.

Of course, I'm pretty young still, but already I get this eerie feeling that I'm not in as much control of my living as I'd like to believe (or as responsible for living as the notion of Law and causality would lead us to believe).

Why am I alive and not some really sweet and dear friends that died years ago? Some died in car accidents, some from lupus, some in random acts of violence... The list grows and will continue to; there's nothing I can do about that. I can be thankful that the list doesn't grow suddenly: that the people I meet all get to live long lives and I get to share the pleasure of their living.

There's nothing wrong with dying; it's a gift, as Derrida wrote. It's because we will all die that we have the opportunity to be ethical. It's against that backdrop that we perform our lives.

I'm living life these days largely without any metaphysical grounding. There is a great moment in the Analects that really informs me on this:

11.12 - Zilu asked how to serve the spirits and the gods. The Master (Confucius) replied, "Not yet being able to serve other people, how would you be able to serve the spirits?" Zilu said, "May I ask about death?" The Master replied, "Not yet understanding life, how could you understand death?"

The footnote to this passage is also really informative for me in reiterating the force of Confucius' teaching and also serves well for this post:

David Keightley (1990), in his reflections on the broader meaning and value of death in classical China, allows that death was perceived as "unproblematic." Of course, he is not claiming that the end of life was not approached with some trepidation. He means rather that death was not considered unnatural, perverse, or horrible. Chinese "natural" death is contrasted with the enormity of death in the Judeo-Christian tradition, where mortality is conceived as divine punishment meted out for human hubris and disobedience.

That said, it is a greater sadness, and unnatural, when a parent must bury their child. Children should expect to bury their parents, this is part of the child's obligation to their parents, but it is a tragedy for a parent to have to bury their child.

I am thankful to Andy for his friendship to my friend Ari - clearly Andy was a significant part of Ari's life and I am the beneficiary of their years together.

On Dogs

The always-awesome Robert Cheatham shared a fascinating article this week and I want to share with you. I've been marinating on some ideas about dogs and humanity for a while no: here, here, and here. In part this has been sparked by reading Coppinger's Dogs, but also from Jason Wirth's essay on Milan Kundera where he stated dogs, "are Nature's mute cipher." Great.

Anywho, here's the article about Moscow's subway-riding strays.

Thinking About Creativity

It's going to seem kinda weird, but almost all of my formal training on the nature of creativity to this point in my life has come from studying Classical Chinese philosophies, Confucianism and Daoism.

The title of this blog comes from my thinking about a Classical Confucian text, the 中庸 (Zhongyong) and my reception of that text in light of contemporary Continental philosophers. I'm specifically interested in the works from Roger Ames and David Hall.

Although I recognize that theirs is a somewhat specific and at times controversial project, I can't shake the feeling that even were their translations wholly wrong (which no one seems to say), what they have to say about the nature of humanity, living, the universe, etc. is what needs to be promoted today.

Today we have this amazing capability, broadly distribute, to create through the appropriation of others' work (the mash-up, DJing, etc.) in a manner that just wasn't possible thirty years ago. To this Ames & Hall have already written:

One must be creative to take full advantage of appropriated culture, both in shaping it for his own place and time, and in using it as a structure through which to realize his own possibilities. He must labor assiduously to acquire the culture transmitted from ancient times but must be able to take it a step further in maximizing the possibilities of the prevailing conditions....Thinking Through Confucius (48)

Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) has written a bit about this appropriation activity in his book Rhythm Science where he states, "today, the voice you speak with may not be your own." An uncanny feeling, that I might not be who I state I am; to this Ames & Hall say:

The dynamic of becoming whole, construed aesthetically, is precisely what is meant by a creative process. It is thus that cheng (誠) is to be understood as creativity. Creativity involves both the realization of the focal self and of the field of events, the realization of both particular and context. Self-actualization is a focal process that draws upon an aggregate field of human experience. And the field and focus are reciprocally realized. Focusing the Familiar (32)

The problem of who I am and what is the nature of art are not so distant, it's been discussed and debated by Baudelaire, Breton, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, etc. The problem is this: if who we are is subject to capitalist economic relations, then everything we do, ultimately is a question of how to turn what we do into a commodity to be sold on the marketplace. Don't believe me? Then how do we account for the phrase, "I don't buy it," when we don't believe something? What aren't you buying? Is it that my sincerity is questioned?

The virtue of the term “sincerity” is that it describes a commitment to one's creative purposes, a solemn affirmation of one's self-actualization....Since all selves are constituted by relationships, integrity means being trustworthy and true in one's associations....integrity is the ground from which self and other arise together to maximize benefit. It is not what you are, but how well and how productively they are able to fare in their synergistic alliances. Focusing the Familiar (33)

The world changes and we must respond, but what is typically neglected in that response to change is the creativity necessary to change with the times.

Not only is change an integral characteristic of things, but real creativity is a condition of this continuing transformative process. That is, our immediate experience is composed of fluid, porous events that entail both persistence and the spontaneous emergence of novelty, both continuity and disjunction. In this evolving order, there is at once familiar rhythm to life, and the newness of each moment. Dao De Jing (16)

This cosmic unfolding is not “cyclical” in the sense of reversability and replication but is rather a continuing spiral that is always coming back upon itself and yet is ever new. Dao De Jing (28)

Who we are, fundamentally, is a creative event:  

Cheng (誠) [creativity], then, is the extending of the specifically human activity of actualizing genuine personhood from man himself to all constituents in the process of existence. Thinking Through Confucius (58)

Wolfgang Schirmacher calls this "artificial life."

History of the VCR

Thomas Kasulis from the Ohio State University (they insist on the the) is the man. No one can write the way he does. He has a way of communicating what on the surface seems too complicated to be explained or to be interesting and makes it very accessible. His books on Japanese philosophy are game changers: after reading his Intimacy or Integrity: the Philosophy of Cultural Difference, like Rilke said after viewing that bust of Apollo, “you must change.”

Kasulis has a great story about VCRs that illustrates something really important for understanding what is possible in forming an identity. He says that he's married to someone related to a big wig at RCA, or something, and one day at a get-together he got to talking about the VCR. “Why did the Japanese beat the Americans at developing this?” Kasulis asked.

The VCR was professionally available, they were large and expensive and so only television studios could justify the purchase. But they were just too large and complicated for the average American home. The quest became to reduce the size of the cartridges and thus make a smaller machine. The U.S. Strategy involved teams of engineers crunching numbers and based on these developing mock-ups.

The chief problem for the engineers was getting that strip of tape to run across the head. They did the numbers, considered the velocity, the structural needs of the cartridge in relation to the head...the engineers concluded that the tape would hit the head and bounce off in another direction; the tape just would travel in the direction they needed. For their calculations to work, they said, there would have to a drastic redesign.

Then, Sony did it. They made it work. What's interesting is how.

According to Kasulis' story: The Japanese engineers also did the numbers and saw there was a problem. But they also set up a team to explore ways of making it work.

This team would watch the tape go from one side to the other, as the tape moved it would hit the head and bounce off. They continued to do this. And watched it. Played with it.

Then one day it occurred to the team that the tape wanted to travel in a certain path, there needed to be a little something that would just slightly bump the tape and, voila! All it took was a little paperclip from off the desk.

It's an interesting illustration of a principle central to Kasulis's work, that there are basic cultural questions that reiterate like fractals and cause people to behave in different ways across cultures. In the West tradition the first question asked when encountering the unknown is "what is that?" But in China (according to Roger Ames) the question would be, "how do you cook it?" as in, how do I work with this?

In the U.S. the problem was addressed abstractly and with a mathematical kind of reasoning. In Japan the problem was addressed more as a personal relationship with a different kind of reasoning.

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.