Re: [-empyre-] sample from today
--empyre- soft-skinned space--typographic t/error: "the neutral observer of vita contemplativa" On Nov 10, 2014, at 9:59 AM, Jon McKenzie 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 microco
Re: [-empyre-] sample from today
--empyre- soft-skinned space--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 e
Re: [-empyre-] concerning violence
--empyre- soft-skinned space--The diversity of voices and texts from so many sites and times of terror both troubles and consoles. Does sharing violence somehow console even as/if it amplifies? How to thread ourselves through so many events of violence, events erupting at different scales and speeds, as well as different with forms and degrees of animation and annihilation? It's good to that Reinhold Görling is here and to hear his question: “If there is a theatricality of violence: can we really be sure that theatre, art, film, literature does break with the repetition compulsion? “ Our situation/tempo is very complex and shifting and calls for juxtaposing perspectives. I’ve been grappling with terror, performance, and media through graphe, understood first through the Platonic oppositions of logos/graphe, speech/writing, origin/repetition, true/false, good/bad, unity/difference, order/violence, theory/theater. Today through Descartes and others, what’s graphic often threatens what’s human, what’s humane, that is, us humans, certain in our doubt. At the same time, the Frankfurt School and postwar French theorists revealed how humanism imposed itself with a vengeance—with its theory as well as its theater. As portrayed by the writing machine in Kafka’s “On the Penal Colony” and Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty,” modern institutions privilege the narrowest of graphe: the alphabet, ruled by the logos of human subjects. Armies and schools led the way. For better and worse, the displacement of logos releases hypergraphe and vice versa. Let us recall Bataille’s secret society, Acephale, the figure of the headless man. From hashassins and anarchist bombings to drone strikes and YouTube beheadings, modern terror develops within a global network of increasing density and resonance. Terror one sees “over there” suddenly is here, collapsing space and time and with them one’s points of reference. One morning preparing to teach at NYU, my mother called from Florida saying a plane had just hit the Trade Towers. I hung up and turned on the TV, transfixed for hours. Eventually I got up to our roof on 103rd and later downtown to the smoldering site. The air in the subway and streets was laced with a moist dust, an entire city terrorized, seized for days then weeks by anthrax attacks, a third plane going down on Long Island, and blaring, unending sirens. The terror slowly passed, the shock not. It waits. A friend—a major performance theorist who’ll go unnamed here—confessed seeing the first tower burning and thinking it was a film shoot. And if cliches, images, ghosts preceded the real… what violence would there be in that? In Of Grammatology, Derrida draws on Nietzsche to sketch a genealogy of violence, roughly: 1) violence against instituted law (eg, ISIS vs international laws, 2) violence of instituting law (eg, system of international laws tied to European colonialism), and 3) arche-violence, violence “prior” to the distinction of law/violation. Derrida later critiques Benjamin’s divine violence but his own notions of trace, differance, graphe carry the senses of path-breaking, spur, and explosive dissemination, and through pharmakon, the scents of perfume, poison, and parricide (of logos). To ask Reinhold’s question differently: How to navigate such genealogical strata while making performances that cite and grapple with violence and terror and graphe? It’s graphe vs graphe, and beyond Platonic logos lies modern graphe: graphic arts, photography, typography, cinematography, choreography… These are our means, but not the only ones. Jon On Nov 7, 2014, at 3:03 PM, Reinhold Görling wrote: > --empyre- soft-skinned space-- > Thanks for the question and the possibility to try to say it more precisely. > To ways to describe this come into my mind. The first follows Fanon and his > rewriting of the master-slave-dialectics in Hegel’s „Introduction“ to his > „Phenomenology". The master denies the recognition to the slave. But working > for the master the slave gets able to develop a consciousness of herself by > seeing herself producing things and changing the world. In the colonial > situation of continuously performed cruelty, in a world strictly separated > departed in two, the constant pain or negation prevents this possibility. > But I doubt that this this model of subjectivity is still useful. We no > longer can think of mediation mainly in the logic of production of things: > that the subject sees itself in the product, recognizes its abilities. > Mediation perhaps is always new and changing, it is becoming of the subject > itself. There is no subject before it emerges out of a scene, a > dramatization. But this is a continuous process. > When subjectivity is what emerges out of the indeterminacy of a play than it > is possible to destroy the subject exactly by destroying this room to play > (S
Re: [-empyre-] language, reporting the virtually true
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks for an engaging discussion. I feel that we’re not only witnessing a vast image of terror but also sensing shock waves from a tortuous infrastructure that runs right through us. The cultural accession—and culture as cultivation, settling, development of people, places, and things—has indeed entailed legacies of appropriation and violence connected to what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence,” environmental and economic violence whose toll over generations dwarfs that of contemporary terror and wars on terror. With the best of intentions, governments, museums, and universities have contributed to this slow terror, which provides the backdrop for the fast and furious terror of ISIS, Boko Karam, Abu Ghraib, Taliban, and Latin American death squads. To paraphrase Benjamin: There is no institution of civilization which is not at the same time an institution of barbarism. What to make of this? If the closure of humanist, disciplinary societies opens slowly and suddenly on to modes of global performativity, then the political assassinations and protests of the 1960s can be read as rehearsing the society of the spectacle of the scaffold, the contemporary mash-up of media technologies and graphic social violence whose brutality channels practices ancient and modern. Opposed in life, Foucault and Debord are now both right: the spectacle is dead, long live the spectacle, with beheadings and mutilations and “torture lite” techniques of psychological degradation and electrical shock all on display. As Alfred McCoy, Darius Rejali, and others help show, 20th-c Western democracies resolved the double bind of simultaneously promoting national security and human rights by developing brutal “no touch” interrogation techniques. Abu Ghraib helped expose this cruel knot, which remains uncut today. Human rights are fraying, while democratic torture practices are being bootlegged and remixed in the global theater of cruelty. Infrastructurally, alongside the democratization of media technologies unfolds the democratization of reservoirs of violence, violence stored and reanimated from bodily repertoires, historical archives, and digital databases. The vast image comes from a vast infrastructure, and it would be a mistake to assume that we don't pass through the projection booth. Blanchot wrote, “Learn to think with pain.” Perhaps we also face thinking (with) the graphic violence of being human(e). Jon Jon McKenzie Director • DesignLab • designlab.wisc.edu Professor • Department of English • english.wisc.edu Affiliate • Digital Studies • digitalstudies.wisc.edu 6143 Helen C. White Hall • 600 N. Park St. • Madison, WI 53706 USA University of Wisconsin-Madison • jvmcken...@wisc.edu • labster8.net See smart media at the Digital Salon: go.wisc.edu/digitalsalon On Nov 4, 2014, at 5:34 PM, John Hopkins wrote: > --empyre- soft-skinned space-- > On 04/Nov/14 15:47, Daniel O'Donnell wrote: >> --empyre- soft-skinned space-- >> You know, I've been wondering about this: since the Taliban blew up the >> Buddhas >> and then with the destruction of the domed mosques and manuscripts in Mali >> and >> environs, and now this. > > It was painful to watch the video of the Buddha sculptures, especially > knowing why it happened. It's always painful to see what we might consider > unchanging reality suddenly lose its persistent form and ... change. It acts > as a bitter reminder of mortality. > > But isn't it such that cultural accession over time is doing essentially > similar things all the time, over the vast reaches of history. And our > contemporary focus on, literally, digging up the past and preserving it has > limits. (We probably only do so because we have such a glut of energy flowing > around our 'developed' world, because re-organizing the past in any form > (from library to archive to buildings) definitely takes energy!). > > While the Buddhas were obliterated rapidly, using modern weapons > (explosives), time via entropy continually devolves the detritus of the > yesterday, and it is only the socio-cultural context (or even 'fashion') that > dictates what is saved and what is allowed to slip away into chaos. Contexts > change, and what was important in one context becomes passé in another. > >> I wonder if there shouldn't be an emergency scanning fund that would help pay >> for capture of threatened built heritage. Maybe some kind of Unesco thing. > > This is where the question of choice of what to preserve and what to let go > surfaces. We are witnessing the procession of history and it seems we are in > the moment as powerless as others in the past, watching accepted heritage be > groun
Re: [-empyre-] Introductory post (Alan Sondheim)
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Among the tragic-prop scenes I hope to entertain in the daze ahead— the society of the spectacle of the scaffold hypergraphé across jagged scales homo sacre data bodies global feeling pictografs Jon ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu On Nov 3, 2014, at 9:01 AM, James Barrett wrote: > So how does one fight this vast image of terror? That is a question I would > like to see dealt with, among others, in the month ahead on empyre. How does > one comprehend such pitiless acts of barbarism as public decapitation when > they are combined with the amatuer YouTube asethetic and a resounding chorus > of theocratic manipulation as audio and editing and are available online 24/7 > from pole to pole? ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
