----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
typographic t/error: "the neutral observer of vita contemplativa"
On Nov 10, 2014, at 9:59 AM, Jon McKenzie <jvmcken...@wisc.edu> wrote:
> I’m enjoying the engagement here, troubling as the topics have been. The
> posts by Alan, Johannes, Ana, Reinhold, John, Eric and others have been very
> provocative, and the different speeds and tenors of post-communication is
> breath-taking.
>
> I’ve tried to respond in a slow way, for I think/believe/feel that absolute
> terror is both unprecedented and yet everyday, as it connects to the slow
> terror of economic, environmental, and cultural progress-gone-awry.
>
> In You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk distinguishes vita performativa from
> both vita contemplativa and vita activa. His figure for Western theoretical
> man, the neutral observer of vita activa, is one of suspended animation, all
> head (capital) and no body (Diogenes). In the Art of Life, he traces
> modernism’s attempts to kill the Man of Logos.
>
> The most surprising thing I’ve discovered through our conversations is the
> uncanny resonance between videoed beheadings and Bataille’s Acephale. The
> significance of this reverb is as legible as a tarot card.
>
>
>
>
> Are pictographics permitted on this list?
>
> Like graphe, the term “performance” is polymorphic enough to stretch from
> acts of violence (those we call real, actual, unmediated, etc) to violence
> enacted within theatrical and artistic contexts (those we call artificial,
> representational, mediated etc.), while also opening up unsettling practices
> in-between. In "Prison Theatricality in the Romanian Gulag,” Ruxandra
> Cesereanu describes Cold War prison performances in which guards forced
> prisoners to reenact the torture of saints and other scenes of blasphemy in
> grotesque living tableaus. More mundane and profound is the realization that
> all techniques, performances, experiences are generated via practice,
> repetition, alternation, fine-tuning, etc. that is, are emergent via graphe.
>
> So by performances I mean actual and enacted acts and the blur from which
> this distinction emerges, for each act of terror, torture, rape is at once
> unique, singular, immediate and at same time multiple, citational, mediated
> by the material environments and symbolic contexts through which it unfolds,
> those of victim, perpetrator, witness, etc. This holds long before cameras,
> poets, and speculators arrive (assuming they’re not always on the scene:
> where I’m coming from techne operates in physis along the lines Deleuze and
> Guattari staked out as machinic phylum, graphe meets autopoesis).
>
> And once media technologies do arrive, they can’t be assumed as external to
> the performance of violence, merely exploiting the situation, repeating the
> event, etc. Images and cameras, audio and sound systems themselves carry
> force, both physical and performative force, to do things not only to
> witnesses but also to victims and perpetrators. At US prisons at Guantanamo,
> Bagram, and Abu Ghraib, cameras and images were part of the psychophysical
> interrogation regime, used to humiliate, intimidate, and psychologically
> torture detainees, as well as to document and produce “actionable”
> intelligence. Videos posted online by ISIS and its precursor organizations
> serve as warnings to other groups and populations, as provocations to the
> international community, and also as recruitment tools for seasoned and new
> jihadists. Electronic terror is built atop public electric utilities.
>
> To miss the tele-pathy (pathos, suffering, passion at a distance) of
> anachronistic (wars on) terror is to miss the most proximate of events and
> all the affective networks in-between, here, for instance, on this listserv.
> Triads of victim, perpetrators, and witnesses multiply, morph, recombine, and
> rotate over time and at different scales. Whether one misses the tele-pathy
> or not, it’s bound to reverb, if not return.
>
> “Homo sacre data body” is a term coined a decade ago to tune in the reverb by
> mashing up Giorgio Agamben and Critical Art Ensemble. If Agamben’s camp
> signals the democratization and generalization of homo sacre, CAE’s data body
> doubles the physical body with a virtual double composed of information
> stored in networked databases. Ideally, homo sacre data body is ubiquitous
> yet intimately customizable. Facebook meets Acephale. The intersection of
> homo sacre and data body can be a drone strike, a care package, or getting
> hauled away by border officials. Its thumbprints are your passport, ID cards,
> passwords, and cookies.
>
> Homo sacre data body emerges as a microcosm of hypergraphe, the metasisizing
> of graphic violence and graphic media, producing the vast intermittent images
> of contemporary terror. The society of spectacle of scaffold is as much
> temporal as spatial, as much rhythm and break as stage and spectacle. Theater
> and spectacle hook up with visualizations, algorithms, and 24/7
> dataveillance. Coming and going, mobile biometrics are the happy form of tiny
> terror.
>
> To think and act on links between absolute terror and the globality of
> economic, cultural environmental devastation is to grapple with the emergence
> and dissolution of individuals and lifeworlds near and far and to struggle
> with one’s own performances as victim, perp, and witness.
>
> In puppet theory form, today’s installation of global performance might be
> called “The deaths of God and Man are trying the patience of Gaia.”
>
> Jon
>
> On Nov 10, 2014, at 9:08 AM, Alan Sondheim <sondh...@panix.com> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>>
>> I want to thank Johannes for all the work he's done here, and all the guests
>> current and future; it's an amazing and intense month.
>>
>> and from my current Google newsfeed (space and time displacements) -
>>
>> Suicide bombing at Nigerian school kills 47Sydney Morning Herald
>> Military Plans 'Operation No Mercy' Against Boko HaramAllAfrica.com
>> Palestinian stabbed Israel soldier in attack near Tel Aviv train station,
>> police say
>> :Palestinians break through West Bank barrier to mark Berlin Wall
>> anniversary RT
>> Egypt jihadists vow loyalty to ISIS In this Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2014 photo,
>> smoke rises from explosions demolishing houses on the Egyptian side of the
>> border town of Rafah as seen from the Palestinian side of Rafah in the
>> southern Gaza Strip.
>> Cyberespionage group targets traveling execs through hotel networks
>> Russia Says Sanctions Hurting as Bank Moves to Defend Ruble
>> Russian Military Encounters With West at Cold War Levels: Report
>> Suicide bomber kills 47 boys in Nigeria school massacre
>> Daily Mail - 1 hour ago
>> Suicide bomber kills 48 at school assembly in Nigeria
>> IBNLive - 1 hour ago
>> UPDATE 3-Suicide bomber kills dozens at school assembly in Nigeria
>> Reuters - 45 minutes ago
>> ... * Suicide bomber dressed as student kills 48, injures 79. * Detonates
>> device during school's morning assembly. * Angry locals block access to
>> school buildings, hospital.
>> Leaders of China and Japan hold first face-to-face talks amid tensions CNN
>> Trending on Google+:Palestinians break through West Bank barrier to mark
>> Berlin Wall anniversaryRT
>> Opinion:Terror attack in Tel Aviv: Palestinian stabs, critically wounds IDF
>> soldierJerusalem Post
>> From Nigeria:Scores Of Insurgents Killed In Mubi By SoldiersNAIJ.COM
>> Clashes with Israel Police settle down in Arab locales
>> ISIS gaining followers but losing leaders?
>> CBS News - 52 minutes ago
>> CAIRO -- Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, a jihadi organization based in the Sinai
>> Peninsula that has carried out several attacks targeting Egyptian security
>> forces, has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
>> African nations counter Ebola's tourism damageTimes of Malta
>> Mali due to declare 108 Ebola-free after quarantineeNCA
>> China's president praises Hong Kong chief's handling of democracy protests
>> Los Angeles Times - 1 hour ago
>> In a high-profile meeting, Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed his
>> support for the Hong Kong government's handling of the ongoing pro-democracy
>> demonstrations even as student protest leaders seek to schedule direct talks
>> with central government ...
>> Opinion:Russian Forces Provoked West 40 TimesDaily Beast
>> In Depth:Russia's 'close military encounters' with Europe documentedBBC News
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>
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