Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Dear empyreans, Thank you for the discussion. I have been in enjoying its queer turns and scaling effects, stretching out on the multiple planes of ontology, shrinking down to the nano. Drink this. Eat this. I can't get off this chair! I would like to add this text for its pertinence, less an intervention, than a distraction: http://squarewhiteworld.com/dear-visitor/ Best, Simon Taylor ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: But Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is about language, about semiotics. Like everything else has been, for so long. The fact that there are chairs, and there are photographs, and there are words—this is what interests me. The fact that conceptual artists can play pranks on the rich benefactors of museums and galleries is not very interesting to me. It's too bad, because when enacted, One and Three Chairs actually DOES begin to draw our attention to things in an appealing way. But not because the real is unsustainable. Rather, because the real is, well, real. I admit I've not read much about OOO and am yet to be convinced it is worth the effort. I've never been an early adopter - prefer to see the bugs ironed out of things, at least for one cycle, before buying the gizmo in question (and I'm mean with my money, so most often I never buy). Harman has been writing under the shingle object-oriented philosophy since 1999. His first systematic take, the book Tool-Being, was published in 2002. That's a decade ago. Countless other books and articles on and peripheral to OOO have been published in the intervening time. Like it or not, his work and that of others has had an impact on many fields, even if particularly in recent years. If you aren't interested, fine. If you don't want to do the work, fine. But own up to it. Otherwise, it is too tempting to conclude that you wish only to adopt the ideas that prove popular, that become fungible among the same communities for the same purposes. My initial apprehension of OOO is that it doesn't seek to address the ontology of things as things but their relationships with one another. This is precisely the opposite of the main contention of OOO, which holds that something is always left over in things, not used up in their relations. It also addresses, in various and sometimes conflicting ways among its proponents, how things can possibly relate given this basic fact. The downside of OOO though is that it doesn't seem very fuzzy. I like fuzzy things. They are soft. I also don't like black boxes - and OOO, by its nature, will create black boxes (which brings us back to Plato - damn!). OOO rejects the idealism of Plato (it's more like Aristotle, another tragically unpopular figure)—you won't find universal forms in OOO, nor even universal properties, or what Whitehead sometimes calls eternal objects. You're right though that OOO embraces the black box, just as Heidegger and Latour do, in different ways. In any case, I think we've really hit on what's really going on here. OOO is threatening to many popular theories of art, culture, identity, politics, and so forth because it holds that a toaster is not an octopus. Somehow, we got so turned around in the last half-century, that we decided that a toaster not being an octopus is oppressive and dangerous. This is a fascinating lesson for me and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I'll have to consider it further. Ian ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi---each entity (a thought, an amethyst geode, a bartender) emits spacetime just as Einstein argued . Graham's The Quadruple Object and my not yet out Realist Magic go into this. Each entity times in the way Heidegger reserves for Da-sein and Derrida reserves to the trace. Time and space are not neutral containers but are emergent properties of beings. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:15 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: You are right I should do more reading. I find the thoughts engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more information where I can. Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on relationality and time. You have all of these things that have to do with chairs, but only the chair is the chair. And there are these things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own right. But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop. Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object. Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our imagination. On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same as digital iterations. Less like a computer, we pull the modular concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones. I wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which are articulated and taken up into collective discourse and even still, a discursive thing gains a level of significance when it represents some empirical process. I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next. It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five. In other words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair. In my mind, weight might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability, its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its aesthetic elegance though none of these qualities are directly analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types of being. All these thoughts are a jumble I'll take your advice and do some reading. Davin On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention. There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your second paragraph below. NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical) chair primacy over the others. As for the same weight — well, that depends on what you mean by weight. What do you mean? I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress without reading some of this material in depth… Ian On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote: Ian and Tim, Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects? I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_and_Three_Chairs highlight the ways that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways. A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a sculpture is not necessarily a chair. yet, in some fundamental way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and recognition. Put all three things together, and you have a chair which occupies all three planes of existence simultaneously. On the other hand, they can occupy niches within conceptual frameworks (a chair within a game, for instance, can be very real to the other objects in the game). Each way of recognizing the chair (the picture, instructions, the chair as chair, chair as sculpture, three chairs as conceptual work, etc)
[-empyre-] More on Bio/Nano Materialisms and Anti-techno-formalism
Thank you Ricardo, Elle and Heather for the introductions to your work. I'm very interested in developing this conversation more to try to consider the intersections of queer and bio/nano/materialisms. Do you think of your engagements with new media as queer? How so? Also, do you think of your engagements with bio/nano technologies as a materialist approach or something else? Could you provide some links to media that you're described so eloquently here? I'm interested in how materialism, in it's claims to a kind of reality based in matter, relate to a possible techno-formalism and how your works escape those. Pinar's work is an excellent example as well, as it seems to be more based in fantastical imagination of possibilities created as a simulacrum, as in her pieces SuperMammal and Neolabium: http://pinaryoldas.info/speculativeBiologies/supermammal/ http://pinaryoldas.info/speculativeBiologies/sample-page/ ...rather than in the techno-formalism often seen in bio-art where the artist engages at the level of actual biological production. Do you find new media discussions to often be centered around the technology working, in a kind of machismo where the best technology is equated with the best art? How do you move in your own work from the actual material or data you choose to start with and into a poetics or embodiment in performance? How do you respond to audience's or curator's concerns with the technical accomplishment in a work? Perhaps this is an element of a queer approach to new media, to step out of the logic of technical feats that serve as a spectacle to pacify or entertain an audience and step into a space that is perhaps more confusing, blurred, playful, fem[me/inine] (?), yet still intentional. gracias, micha -- micha cárdenas PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California Provost Fellow, University of Southern California New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, http://amzn.to/x8iJcY blog: http://transreal.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman / Kosuth
Hi Simon, As I'm sure you know, Kosuth's essay Art After Philosophy seemed to imply a platonic solution to that conundrum. His essay claims what's important about chairs (and art) is the unique idea conveyed to us by their varying manifestations, whether dictionary definition, photo, or wooden furniture. I had the opposite impression standing in front of One and Three Chairs. What struck me--and indeed seemed highlighted by the work's presentation--was how different each of the versions were, and how ludicrous it seemed to pretend details like the smell of wood, the pale black-and-white print, and the dictionary typeface were just incidental projections of the same higher concept into our reality. When I mentioned the disparity between what I saw in his work and what he wrote in Art After Philosophy, Kosuth told me to forgive the immature proclamations of a 23-year-old or something to that effect. Occasionally people view the variable media paradigm as similarly platonic--an approach to preservation that only applies to conceptual art. But just as One and Three Chairs is about the differences that inevitably emerge among difference instances of the same concept, so media and performative artworks are never the same from one viewing to another. I think Euro-ethnic culture needs more practice accepting difference. One of the few useful nuggets I've gleaned from Jacques Lacan (via Joline Blais) is his division of the world into theory (Lacan's symbolic), what we take for real (Lacan's imaginary), and what we don't realize we are leaving out (Lacan's real). I like to lob this self-damning formulation at philosophers who busy themselves nailing down ontologies in their head instead of nailing down shingles on an ecovillage home somewhere. OK, back to building my own ecovillage on the coast of Maine. jon http://MaineCohousing.org Simon wrote: Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi Ian Maybe I'm a little old, but 10 to 15 years seems, in terms of human thought, extremely recent. I have read some OOO texts though, during that short period of time. I've also had a little time to digest Kosuth's work, since it was made forty odd years ago. In retrospect his chairs might seem a simplistic reading of semiotics but I'd argue there is more to them than that. They're not just about signs and signifiers but also mediality, sociality and the performative. In the 1960's not many artists were addressing those issues. I'm not sure what you are trying to suggest about popularity, or the value of a lack of it. Seems to me that OOO is popular - even fashionable, like the new aesthetic. I can also see links in OOO to Latour, although more so to Heidegger. Perhaps it is a non-phenomenologist's take on Heidegger? Whatever, it isn't fuzzy. Are things that simple? Can we assume there is some kind of residual and irreducible thinginess in things? A toaster can be an octopus - and whatever it might be, from moment to moment, it is rarely a toaster. best Simon On 27 Jun 2012, at 00:34, Ian Bogost wrote: On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: But Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is about language, about semiotics. Like everything else has been, for so long. The fact that there are chairs, and there are photographs, and there are words—this is what interests me. The fact that conceptual artists can play pranks on the rich benefactors of museums and galleries is not very interesting to me. It's too bad, because when enacted, One and Three Chairs actually DOES begin to draw our attention to things in an appealing way. But not because the real is unsustainable. Rather, because the real is, well, real. I admit I've not read much about OOO and am yet to be convinced it is worth the effort. I've never been an early adopter - prefer to see the bugs ironed out of things, at least for one cycle, before buying the gizmo in question (and I'm mean with my money, so most often I never buy). Harman has been writing under the shingle object-oriented philosophy since 1999. His first systematic take, the book Tool-Being, was published in 2002. That's a decade ago. Countless other books and articles on and peripheral to OOO have been published in the intervening time. Like it or not, his work and that of others has had an impact on many fields, even if particularly in recent years. If you aren't interested, fine. If you don't want to do the work, fine. But own up to it. Otherwise, it is too tempting to conclude that you wish only to adopt the ideas that prove popular, that become fungible among the same communities for the same purposes. My initial apprehension of OOO is that it doesn't seek to address the ontology of things as things but their relationships with one another. This is precisely the opposite of the main contention of OOO, which holds that something is always left over in things, not used up in their relations. It also addresses, in various and sometimes conflicting ways among its proponents, how things can possibly relate given this basic fact. The downside of OOO though is that it doesn't seem very fuzzy. I like fuzzy things. They are soft. I also don't like black boxes - and OOO, by its nature, will create black boxes (which brings us back to Plato - damn!). OOO rejects the idealism of Plato (it's more like Aristotle, another tragically unpopular figure)—you won't find universal forms in OOO, nor even universal properties, or what Whitehead sometimes calls eternal objects. You're right though that OOO embraces the black box, just as Heidegger and Latour do, in different ways. In any case, I think we've really hit on what's really going on here. OOO is threatening to many popular theories of art, culture, identity, politics, and so forth because it holds that a toaster is not an octopus. Somehow, we got so turned around in the last half-century, that we decided that a toaster not being an octopus is oppressive and dangerous. This is a fascinating lesson for me and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I'll have to consider it further. Ian ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk s.bi...@ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
I have an article that I wrote about a year ago which discusses black boxes, poetics, and default settings: Inside Out of the Box: Default Settings and Electronic Poetics http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2010/heckman/heckman.htm It might be a nice complement to the conversation. I will take a look at Graham's quadruple object. Davin On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 12:12 AM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Hi---each entity (a thought, an amethyst geode, a bartender) emits spacetime just as Einstein argued . Graham's The Quadruple Object and my not yet out Realist Magic go into this. Each entity times in the way Heidegger reserves for Da-sein and Derrida reserves to the trace. Time and space are not neutral containers but are emergent properties of beings. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:15 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: You are right I should do more reading. I find the thoughts engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more information where I can. Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on relationality and time. You have all of these things that have to do with chairs, but only the chair is the chair. And there are these things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own right. But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop. Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object. Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our imagination. On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same as digital iterations. Less like a computer, we pull the modular concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones. I wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which are articulated and taken up into collective discourse and even still, a discursive thing gains a level of significance when it represents some empirical process. I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next. It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five. In other words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair. In my mind, weight might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability, its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its aesthetic elegance though none of these qualities are directly analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types of being. All these thoughts are a jumble I'll take your advice and do some reading. Davin On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention. There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your second paragraph below. NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical) chair primacy over the others. As for the same weight — well, that depends on what you mean by weight. What do you mean? I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress without reading some of this material in depth… Ian On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote: Ian and Tim, Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects? I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_and_Three_Chairs highlight the ways that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways. A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a sculpture is not necessarily a chair. yet, in some fundamental way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and recognition. Put all
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Thanks for this Rob. It makes a lot of senseWhat is coming with art after philosophy but again will be interesting. What do you think of the queer stuff we have been viewing and discussing int his regard? Patricia From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Robert Jackson [robertjackson3...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 6:07 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman Hi All, It's worth noting that Kosuth was a conceptual artist who explicitly followed in the lineage of Duchamp and the 'demonstration' of idea: that is to say, the conceptual delivery of art as information and the separation of 'art' from 'aesthetics' - (his famous Art Forum essay 'art after philosophy' says as much). Hardly any of these elements chime with the privileging of the discrete object in OOO. As Ian mentioned - The fact the OOO is threatening a lot of 40 - 50 year old structuralist-poststructuralist assumptions doesn't stop at philosophy or cultural theory. In the arts - pretty soon we'll start seeing bigger conflicts between proponents of the Duchamp lineage and whatever manifestation OOO and art happen to collide in. IMO Duchamp has a lot to answer for, especially in the dross of conceptual creative malaise which contemporary art can't get out of. Duchamp is now no longer avantgarde - but what Greenberg accurately described as 'avant gardist'. It's consists not of sincerity but of demonstration - and its expiration date is nigh. Besides the inevitable disagreements/agreements on what objects are, or how they relate, I think OOO has brought depth back into the heart of discrete entities, with a realist equivalent twist. best Rob On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 5:12 AM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.commailto:timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Hi---each entity (a thought, an amethyst geode, a bartender) emits spacetime just as Einstein argued . Graham's The Quadruple Object and my not yet out Realist Magic go into this. Each entity times in the way Heidegger reserves for Da-sein and Derrida reserves to the trace. Time and space are not neutral containers but are emergent properties of beings. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.comhttp://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/ On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:15 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.commailto:davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: You are right I should do more reading. I find the thoughts engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more information where I can. Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on relationality and time. You have all of these things that have to do with chairs, but only the chair is the chair. And there are these things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own right. But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop. Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object. Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our imagination. On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same as digital iterations. Less like a computer, we pull the modular concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones. I wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which are articulated and taken up into collective discourse and even still, a discursive thing gains a level of significance when it represents some empirical process. I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next. It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five. In other words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair. In my mind, weight might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability, its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its aesthetic elegance though none of these qualities are directly analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types of being. All these thoughts are a jumble I'll take your advice and do some reading. Davin On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edumailto:ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have something to do
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Simon, this conversation is a fool's bargain and I refuse to continue it. You suggest that what is worth doing—but not even doing, just reading, even—only *will have been* worthwhile after enough time has passed that it can be judged on the historical scale. This gambit amounts to a rationalist economics for intellectual work at best, and a terrorism against it at worst. As for OOO, you'd see the links to Latour and Heidegger even more clearly if and when you choose read the works that make those connections very explicitly. The same is true for its take on toasters. I won't hold my breath. Good luck with your conceptual art. Ian On Jun 27, 2012, at 3:59 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: Hi Ian Maybe I'm a little old, but 10 to 15 years seems, in terms of human thought, extremely recent. I have read some OOO texts though, during that short period of time. I've also had a little time to digest Kosuth's work, since it was made forty odd years ago. In retrospect his chairs might seem a simplistic reading of semiotics but I'd argue there is more to them than that. They're not just about signs and signifiers but also mediality, sociality and the performative. In the 1960's not many artists were addressing those issues. I'm not sure what you are trying to suggest about popularity, or the value of a lack of it. Seems to me that OOO is popular - even fashionable, like the new aesthetic. I can also see links in OOO to Latour, although more so to Heidegger. Perhaps it is a non-phenomenologist's take on Heidegger? Whatever, it isn't fuzzy. Are things that simple? Can we assume there is some kind of residual and irreducible thinginess in things? A toaster can be an octopus - and whatever it might be, from moment to moment, it is rarely a toaster. best Simon On 27 Jun 2012, at 00:34, Ian Bogost wrote: On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: But Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is about language, about semiotics. Like everything else has been, for so long. The fact that there are chairs, and there are photographs, and there are words—this is what interests me. The fact that conceptual artists can play pranks on the rich benefactors of museums and galleries is not very interesting to me. It's too bad, because when enacted, One and Three Chairs actually DOES begin to draw our attention to things in an appealing way. But not because the real is unsustainable. Rather, because the real is, well, real. I admit I've not read much about OOO and am yet to be convinced it is worth the effort. I've never been an early adopter - prefer to see the bugs ironed out of things, at least for one cycle, before buying the gizmo in question (and I'm mean with my money, so most often I never buy). Harman has been writing under the shingle object-oriented philosophy since 1999. His first systematic take, the book Tool-Being, was published in 2002. That's a decade ago. Countless other books and articles on and peripheral to OOO have been published in the intervening time. Like it or not, his work and that of others has had an impact on many fields, even if particularly in recent years. If you aren't interested, fine. If you don't want to do the work, fine. But own up to it. Otherwise, it is too tempting to conclude that you wish only to adopt the ideas that prove popular, that become fungible among the same communities for the same purposes. My initial apprehension of OOO is that it doesn't seek to address the ontology of things as things but their relationships with one another. This is precisely the opposite of the main contention of OOO, which holds that something is always left over in things, not used up in their relations. It also addresses, in various and sometimes conflicting ways among its proponents, how things can possibly relate given this basic fact. The downside of OOO though is that it doesn't seem very fuzzy. I like fuzzy things. They are soft. I also don't like black boxes - and OOO, by its nature, will create black boxes (which brings us back to Plato - damn!). OOO rejects the idealism of Plato (it's more like Aristotle, another tragically unpopular figure)—you won't find universal forms in OOO, nor even universal properties, or what Whitehead sometimes calls eternal objects. You're right though that OOO embraces the black box, just as Heidegger and Latour do, in different ways. In any case, I think we've really hit on what's really going on here. OOO is threatening to many popular theories of art, culture, identity, politics, and so forth because it holds that a toaster is not an octopus. Somehow, we got so turned around in the last
[-empyre-] Meta-question about the list
I apologize in advance for posting this. But is there a reason this email list withholds messages for many hours and then distributes them all in a burst? Is every message being moderated? If so why? If not, what's going on? No other mailing list to which I subscribe operates in this manner. Ian ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Dear Simon, OOO objects are far more fuzzy than your metaphysically present fuzz. They are ontologically fuzzy. To say fuzzy things are better than smooth things--this is just aesthetic ideology run mad. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 26, 2012, at 6:34 PM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: But Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is about language, about semiotics. Like everything else has been, for so long. The fact that there are chairs, and there are photographs, and there are words—this is what interests me. The fact that conceptual artists can play pranks on the rich benefactors of museums and galleries is not very interesting to me. It's too bad, because when enacted, One and Three Chairs actually DOES begin to draw our attention to things in an appealing way. But not because the real is unsustainable. Rather, because the real is, well, real. I admit I've not read much about OOO and am yet to be convinced it is worth the effort. I've never been an early adopter - prefer to see the bugs ironed out of things, at least for one cycle, before buying the gizmo in question (and I'm mean with my money, so most often I never buy). Harman has been writing under the shingle object-oriented philosophy since 1999. His first systematic take, the book Tool-Being, was published in 2002. That's a decade ago. Countless other books and articles on and peripheral to OOO have been published in the intervening time. Like it or not, his work and that of others has had an impact on many fields, even if particularly in recent years. If you aren't interested, fine. If you don't want to do the work, fine. But own up to it. Otherwise, it is too tempting to conclude that you wish only to adopt the ideas that prove popular, that become fungible among the same communities for the same purposes. My initial apprehension of OOO is that it doesn't seek to address the ontology of things as things but their relationships with one another. This is precisely the opposite of the main contention of OOO, which holds that something is always left over in things, not used up in their relations. It also addresses, in various and sometimes conflicting ways among its proponents, how things can possibly relate given this basic fact. The downside of OOO though is that it doesn't seem very fuzzy. I like fuzzy things. They are soft. I also don't like black boxes - and OOO, by its nature, will create black boxes (which brings us back to Plato - damn!). OOO rejects the idealism of Plato (it's more like Aristotle, another tragically unpopular figure)—you won't find universal forms in OOO, nor even universal properties, or what Whitehead sometimes calls eternal objects. You're right though that OOO embraces the black box, just as Heidegger and Latour do, in different ways. In any case, I think we've really hit on what's really going on here. OOO is threatening to many popular theories of art, culture, identity, politics, and so forth because it holds that a toaster is not an octopus. Somehow, we got so turned around in the last half-century, that we decided that a toaster not being an octopus is oppressive and dangerous. This is a fascinating lesson for me and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I'll have to consider it further. Ian ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Thanks for this Davin. I have it queued up. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 27, 2012, at 3:53 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: I have an article that I wrote about a year ago which discusses black boxes, poetics, and default settings: Inside Out of the Box: Default Settings and Electronic Poetics http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2010/heckman/heckman.htm It might be a nice complement to the conversation. I will take a look at Graham's quadruple object. Davin On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 12:12 AM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Hi---each entity (a thought, an amethyst geode, a bartender) emits spacetime just as Einstein argued . Graham's The Quadruple Object and my not yet out Realist Magic go into this. Each entity times in the way Heidegger reserves for Da-sein and Derrida reserves to the trace. Time and space are not neutral containers but are emergent properties of beings. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:15 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: You are right I should do more reading. I find the thoughts engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more information where I can. Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on relationality and time. You have all of these things that have to do with chairs, but only the chair is the chair. And there are these things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own right. But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop. Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object. Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our imagination. On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same as digital iterations. Less like a computer, we pull the modular concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones. I wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which are articulated and taken up into collective discourse and even still, a discursive thing gains a level of significance when it represents some empirical process. I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next. It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five. In other words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair. In my mind, weight might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability, its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its aesthetic elegance though none of these qualities are directly analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types of being. All these thoughts are a jumble I'll take your advice and do some reading. Davin On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention. There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your second paragraph below. NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical) chair primacy over the others. As for the same weight — well, that depends on what you mean by weight. What do you mean? I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress without reading some of this material in depth… Ian On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote: Ian and Tim, Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects? I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_and_Three_Chairs highlight the ways that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways. A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a chair,
Re: [-empyre-] Meta-question about the list
Yes, every message is moderated to facilitate dialog and filter out announcements, etc. On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 9:02 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: I apologize in advance for posting this. But is there a reason this email list withholds messages for many hours and then distributes them all in a burst? Is every message being moderated? If so why? If not, what's going on? No other mailing list to which I subscribe operates in this manner. Ian ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- micha cárdenas PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California Provost Fellow, University of Southern California New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, http://amzn.to/x8iJcY blog: http://transreal.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] More on Bio/Nano Materialisms and Anti-techno-formalism
Thank you to pinar for your post too! Sorry I didn't see it until today! I hope you all can chime in about these questions before the week/month ends. cheers, micha On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 2:00 AM, micha cárdenas mmcar...@usc.edu wrote: Thank you Ricardo, Elle and Heather for the introductions to your work. I'm very interested in developing this conversation more to try to consider the intersections of queer and bio/nano/materialisms. Do you think of your engagements with new media as queer? How so? Also, do you think of your engagements with bio/nano technologies as a materialist approach or something else? Could you provide some links to media that you're described so eloquently here? I'm interested in how materialism, in it's claims to a kind of reality based in matter, relate to a possible techno-formalism and how your works escape those. Pinar's work is an excellent example as well, as it seems to be more based in fantastical imagination of possibilities created as a simulacrum, as in her pieces SuperMammal and Neolabium: http://pinaryoldas.info/speculativeBiologies/supermammal/ http://pinaryoldas.info/speculativeBiologies/sample-page/ ...rather than in the techno-formalism often seen in bio-art where the artist engages at the level of actual biological production. Do you find new media discussions to often be centered around the technology working, in a kind of machismo where the best technology is equated with the best art? How do you move in your own work from the actual material or data you choose to start with and into a poetics or embodiment in performance? How do you respond to audience's or curator's concerns with the technical accomplishment in a work? Perhaps this is an element of a queer approach to new media, to step out of the logic of technical feats that serve as a spectacle to pacify or entertain an audience and step into a space that is perhaps more confusing, blurred, playful, fem[me/inine] (?), yet still intentional. gracias, micha -- micha cárdenas PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California Provost Fellow, University of Southern California New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, http://amzn.to/x8iJcY blog: http://transreal.org -- micha cárdenas PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California Provost Fellow, University of Southern California New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, http://amzn.to/x8iJcY blog: http://transreal.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
On 06/27/2012 11:07 AM, Robert Jackson wrote: Hi All, It's worth noting that Kosuth was a conceptual artist who explicitly followed in the lineage of Duchamp and the 'demonstration' of idea: that is to say, the conceptual delivery of art as information and the separation of 'art' from 'aesthetics' - (his famous Art Forum essay 'art after philosophy' says as much). Hardly any of these elements chime with the privileging of the discrete object in OOO. The object in itself being accessible as simply the sum of its unique (fnarr) aesthetic properties valenced in terms of their efficacy at reflecting the ego of the gentlemanly spectator is a vision of OOO that would cause its proponents to clop furiously. As Ian mentioned - The fact the OOO is threatening a lot of 40 - 50 year old structuralist-poststructuralist assumptions doesn't stop at philosophy or cultural theory. In the arts - pretty soon we'll start Having been at art school in the early nineties I have very little time for PS but I'm constantly surprised at how different OOO apparently believes its dryly authoritarian poetics are from PS. seeing bigger conflicts between proponents of the Duchamp lineage and whatever manifestation OOO and art happen to collide in. IMO Duchamp has a lot to answer for, especially in the dross of conceptual creative malaise which contemporary art can't get out of. Duchamp is now no Neoconceptualism (80s...) and relationalism (90s...) are in no small part about the pastoral ventriloquization of objects (...commodities or resources, obviously including human resources...). OOO poses no threat to this order, flat ontology is as market friendly (with apologies to everyone who has a sad at the trivial fact of OOO's literal and metaphoric market congruity, which it shares with Theory's identity politics) as suspension of judgement was. It is a managerial Hameau de la Reine. The error of Duchamp's reception by the art (market|world) is to assume that the ontological blasphemy of the creative act is repeatable. Badiou is useful here, or at least fun. longer avantgarde - but what Greenberg accurately described as 'avant gardist'. It's consists not of sincerity but of demonstration - and its expiration date is nigh. Duchamp is exquisitely ironic, introducing negative valences into aesthetics and negative space into the ontology of art. But he was reclaimed by the art market by the 1960s with the editions of his lost readymades. http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6261 Besides the inevitable disagreements/agreements on what objects are, or how they relate, I think OOO has brought depth back into the heart of discrete entities, with a realist equivalent twist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container - Rob. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Week 4 - Bio/Nano/Materialisms - the transperversal aesthetic of Texas grasshoppers
The no-future future is definitely something that lays heavy on me, as a person and as a thinker, especially as it relates to what you call the 'nanocaust' with its differential racial/class distributions over this earth. it seems precisely at the level of the nano that these struggles are being played out, within and outside of our own bodies, other living organisms, the surface of the earth and the composition of water. what i have been struggling with for a while is a desire to avoid the kind of nihilism that would lead to a relishing in the terminal capitalism/empire moment we seem to be finding ourselves in. beauty in pure destruction is at once a driver of social change and its expiration. This tendency, seen within certain strands of SR (I am thinking of Nick Land/Reza Negarestani) has an incredible appeal in its heightening of (nano) intensities, in maintaining destruction as an important political concept, but seems to also slide towards messianic end-of-the-world christian narratives of destruction and perfection. is it possible or desirable to think with this material moment, think with the dying cows, rapidly extinguishing species, without giving over to the pure pleasure of annihilation? how do we think of the collective as necessarily reaching beyond the human, its transversal ontogenesis that encompasses the object revenge that you speak of (especially in relation to non-living objects, such as chemicals, minerals, polymers, etc.) without falling into a kind of christian rapture of the end times. perhaps this is for me where art and theory provide a kind of breaking point/ambiguity that would enable a different kind of movement. in other words, the anti-anti-utopian position of art (through it's multiple negatives that leaves us where exactly?) provides this kind of useful ambiguity that pushes in the direction of new organisms (such as pinar's or ricardo's poetic nano-interventions) operate as a magical object, that is, the object that wards off the devil by becoming the devil. I really love Pinar's categorization of 'post-natural ecosystems' and Elle's ethno-dysphoric cloning in this regard because this categorization offers a way to acknowledge the destruction of capitalism while refusing the scenario of apocalypse that gives too much weight to figures of origins and certainty. thank you for these interventions. heather. On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 5:57 AM, rrdominguez2 rrdoming...@ucsd.edu wrote: Hola Heather and all, The trans*per*versal movement(s) that *particle group* attempts to trace via bio/nano scale(s) gestures may indeed call forth a kind of material corollary of affect/effect. Elle's capturing the EEG of ethno-dysphoric cloning or Pinar's new organ/ism pass and are passing between the utopian synthetics of particle capitalism(s) and the nanocaust (or the revenge of the object) - an apocalyptic materiality. The bio/nano aesthetic in the above work moves within and around a critical anti-anti-utopian condition of making these engines of imperceptibility visible - trans*per*versal or a type of queering movement. But one does not have to look very far into the no-future future or the freeze dried past to see what grey ecology of bio/nano is manifesting via pre-set accidents or trans-effects at the bio/nano scale: * Genetically modified grass linked to cattle deaths** http://wtvr.com/2012/06/24/genetically-modified-grass-linked-to-cattle-deaths/ * Indeed a new materialism transmuting feed grass into poison which now only Texas grasshoppers are enjoying (the trans*per*versal moment). As artists we are all Texas grasshoppers - but for how long? Very best, Ricardo On 6/24/12 5:27 PM, Heather Davis wrote: Hi all, Apologies for my tardy arrival. I am so excited to be a part of this conversation with each of you, and find myself stunned by the quality of thought and engagement of my brilliant interlocutors here. Thank you for your contributions so for and to Zach and Micha for initiating and curating this conversation. I am curious about the way in which the nano, in each of your work, becomes a kind of significant imperceptibility. I am thinking about how, in a previous discussion this month, the idea of 'queer is everywhere' was broached. My initial reaction to this was a kind of doubt, not trusting the utopic overtones, nor the amorphous quality of the statement that lacked the dissensus that characterizes politics. What I appreciate about the nano, in each of your works, Pinar, Ricardo, and Elle, is the way in which this kind of utopic moment of the viral meets with an politics of imperceptibility not as simply an aversion or counter-move to surveillant systems (of sex, the state, neoliberal corporate models, etc.) but as an imperceptibility that moves through the body to make significant changes. It makes me wonder about the nano as being a kind of material corollary of affect - that which carries a force, but is seen through
Re: [-empyre-] Week 4 - Bio/Nano/Materialisms - the transperversal aesthetic of Texas grasshoppers
Thank you Heather,
Your question how do we think of the human reaching beyond the human? is of
great importance to me.
I want to quote Elizabeth Grosz here , who is a big influence for me and my
project .
What is distinctively human in the humanities if man is again, in the light of
Darwin's rearrangement of the universe, placed in the context of animals and
animal-becomings?
What would the humanities, a knowledge of the posthuman, be like far in the
future, after mankind has evolved beyond man?
What kind of new understanding of the humanities would it take to adequately
map this decentering that places man back within the animal, within nature, and
within a space and time that man does not regulate, understand, or control?
What new kinds of science does this entail? And what new kinds of art?
( Grosz, Becoming Undone, p12)
Grosz emphasizes Darwin's contribution in decentering of the human by placing
the animal right next to the human , not above, not below. The nihilism Heather
has pointed out is unavoidable at the moment of no-future future and nanocaust.
Yet Grosz' approach fills my lungs with fresh , uncontaminated air, and a
genetically modified desire to create rather than annihilate.
If human is not at the center anymore we can look at future as a pool of animal
possibilities. I personally strongly believe that the bio-nano realism
surrounding us can at least pave the way to post-human ecosystems where the
residues or 'cruft' of capitalism gives birth to new species , species beyond
capitalism, beyond military and maybe perhaps hopefully beyond religion.
Pinar Yoldas
---
{artist, designer, neuroenthusiast}
---
PhD Student
Art , Art History and Visual Studies
Duke University
---
{http://pinaryoldas.info}
On Jun 27, 2012, at 7:24 PM, Heather Davis wrote:
The no-future future is definitely something that lays heavy on me, as a
person and as a thinker, especially as it relates to what you call the
'nanocaust' with its differential racial/class distributions over this earth.
it seems precisely at the level of the nano that these struggles are being
played out, within and outside of our own bodies, other living organisms, the
surface of the earth and the composition of water.
what i have been struggling with for a while is a desire to avoid the kind of
nihilism that would lead to a relishing in the terminal capitalism/empire
moment we seem to be finding ourselves in. beauty in pure destruction is at
once a driver of social change and its expiration. This tendency, seen within
certain strands of SR (I am thinking of Nick Land/Reza Negarestani) has an
incredible appeal in its heightening of (nano) intensities, in maintaining
destruction as an important political concept, but seems to also slide
towards messianic end-of-the-world christian narratives of destruction and
perfection. is it possible or desirable to think with this material moment,
think with the dying cows, rapidly extinguishing species, without giving over
to the pure pleasure of annihilation? how do we think of the collective as
necessarily reaching beyond the human, its transversal ontogenesis that
encompasses the object revenge that you speak of (especially in relation to
non-living objects, such as chemicals, minerals, polymers, etc.) without
falling into a kind of christian rapture of the end times. perhaps this is
for me where art and theory provide a kind of breaking point/ambiguity that
would enable a different kind of movement. in other words, the
anti-anti-utopian position of art (through it's multiple negatives that
leaves us where exactly?) provides this kind of useful ambiguity that pushes
in the direction of new organisms (such as pinar's or ricardo's poetic
nano-interventions) operate as a magical object, that is, the object that
wards off the devil by becoming the devil.
I really love Pinar's categorization of 'post-natural ecosystems' and Elle's
ethno-dysphoric cloning in this regard because this categorization offers a
way to acknowledge the destruction of capitalism while refusing the scenario
of apocalypse that gives too much weight to figures of origins and certainty.
thank you for these interventions.
heather.
On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 5:57 AM, rrdominguez2 rrdoming...@ucsd.edu wrote:
Hola Heather and all,
The transperversal movement(s) that *particle group* attempts to trace via
bio/nano scale(s) gestures may indeed call forth a kind of material
corollary of affect/effect. Elle's capturing the EEG of ethno-dysphoric
cloning or Pinar's new organ/ism pass and are passing between the utopian
synthetics of particle capitalism(s) and the nanocaust (or the revenge of the
object) - an apocalyptic materiality. The bio/nano aesthetic in the above
work moves within and
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi Rob, Lots of artists and musicians are now tuning into OOO. You wrote: The object in itself being accessible as simply the sum of its unique (fnarr) aesthetic properties valenced in terms of their efficacy at reflecting the ego of the gentlemanly spectator is a vision of OOO that would cause its proponents to clop furiously. That's almost the opposite I'm afraid. Back to the lab! Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 27, 2012, at 4:15 PM, Rob Myers r...@robmyers.org wrote: The object in itself being accessible as simply the sum of its unique (fnarr) aesthetic properties valenced in terms of their efficacy at reflecting the ego of the gentlemanly spectator is a vision of OOO that would cause its proponents to clop furiously. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
