Re: [-empyre-] Feminism Confronts Audio Technology
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi everyone, As far as I'm concerned, two awesome things happened in the 70s: --Irigaray started publishing things --Eliane Radigue started using ARPs Parallel, in my mind, with a third awesome thing (much maligned as essentialist): --American biocentric ecofeminism For some reason these events seem deeply connected to me. Radigue is my favorite composer and remains the only one to whom I've written a fan letter (she replied, awesomely). I've never heard a live performance but if you have okay speakers and turn them up quite loud, you will be swathed in very low frequency discords that produce shimmering interference patterns all the way up and beyond the human audio range. Irigaray is someone whose thought I realized I was channeling unconsciously so I decided to be much more explicit about her. Talking the aliens like that on Close Encounters (which deploys an ARP) would have been fantastic. There is a lot of very interesting work coming out of Mills these days as ever (where Radigue has taught) and in particular the work of Suzy Poling (Pod Blotz) and Holly Herndon stands out for me but there is so much else. Both of them are on SoundCloud and Herndon is on iTunes and everywhere. Hopefully we are doing a Dark Ecology album. I've been reading all these posts with pleasure. Thank you Doug Kahn for giving us a phrase, Earth magnitude, which I now use (greatly acknowledged) all the time. Marcus you were so spot on about the horror aspect of some speculative realism. I now introduce all that with a picture of McCulkin's Home Alone face! Yours, Tim Timothy Morton Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English Rice University http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 30, 2014, at 4:07 PM, Stephanie Strickland stephanie.strickl...@gm.slc.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- of interest, perhaps, to a future discussion, the poet Anne Carson's essay, The Gender of Sound, in her collection Glass, Irony and God Stephanie Stephanie Strickland 1175 York Avenue 16B New York NY 10065 212-759-5175 http://stephaniestrickland.com .. .. .. .. New from Ahsahta Press Dragon Logic New from SpringGun Press V : WaveTercets / Losing L'una http://dragon-logic.tumblr.com/readings.html On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 4:47 AM, Caroline Park carep...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- thank you, lyn, for bringing up the topic of space in these conversations. the study of specifically gendered spaces is new to me, and i greatly appreciate having my brain be nudged forward in this direction. i of course have no answers to the questions you bring up -- i'm sure i will continue to slowly gather my thoughts in this area. as for the idea / question of sound being seen as gendered, my initial thoughts were that yes, sound is perceived as gendered if it comes from a visible body in space, and/or if the source is known. but even if the source is known, and not seen in space, does the source carry gender; to what extent can or does gender carry from invisible to visible sound source in space? and in thinking about silence as sound or source, it seems with silence we begin to migrate into the sociocultural, as it feeds between and within gender, race, and sexuality. i also agree that the blank white box is not the best / only solution -- in this reality these blank white boxes exist perhaps exclusively in high-art institutions, and our reality as human beings is not abstract enough that we can strip away context (of space, of humans) entirely. very glad to now know of christina kubisch's consecutio temporum: how she explores these existing sites seems much transparent and true to its history / ecosystem. still so much to mull on regarding sound, space, and light, with regard to the last few questions that lyn has posed here ... i am excited to think about these for a good while. speaking of light, i might give a connecting nudge back to asha's bringing up of the minimum/abstract as more a form of feminist, cultural, and queer expression in another thread ... but the week is done! quick thank you to everyone -- much to think about, and the semi-real-time nature of the past week was too fast for my mind to process all that has been said. thank you monisola, rachel, lyn, and asha, for the conversation, and to renate and tim, for having us at -empyre-. i have no doubt these discussions will continue! thank you. On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 3:59 PM, Lyn Goeringer lyn.goerin...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I want to step back a bit and enter into the concept of space in this discussion. A lot of our focus so far has been on performance and instruments, but I'd like to consider the spaces and sites of sound art for a moment
Re: [-empyre-] Hurricane Sandy
Hi all, In answer to Cynthia, there are lots of reasons. During Katrina some people stayed to look after their pets, for instance. But in general, humans seem reluctant to admit the scope of the nonhuman forces they have unleashed since the late eighteenth century. I'd go not with facing down demons, but more in the direction of hunkering down in a minimal world, since world as such does not exist--evaporating since 1780 ish, as Sandy only underlines that fact. Yours, Tim Tim Morton Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English Rice University http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Oct 29, 2012, at 10:26 PM, Cynthia Beth Rubin c...@cbrubin.net wrote: As long as we are talking about the hurricane, those of us in Connecticut just saw a very distressed Governor on television. Apparently there are a significant number of people who refused to leave their homes despite mandatory evacuations for those on the shoreline. The water now surrounds their homes. They cannot be easily reached, they no longer can leave, and the worst of the water surge is yet to come. In other words, they face serious danger. What makes people refuse to leave their home? Is there a deeper sense of belonging to place that defies logic? Or do they want to face down the hurricane like a demon? Cynthia ps - I live 1.5 miles uphill from the water - so fairly safe here On Oct 29, 2012, at 10:36 PM, Jon Lebkowsky wrote: Relieved that you're okay. Those sound files brought it home to us. On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 9:34 PM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: The roaring's from the wind rumbling over the tarps; we repaired the skylights with shower curtains, tarps, duct tape, gorilla tape, and bungee cords - and it's still holding. But we went out walking for a half hour, just got back, and it was like a JG Ballard novel, huge metal advertising signs crumpled and all over the avenue, moving everywhere in pieces at high speed, we had to be careful we didn't get hit. And the sound of clanging scraping metal everywhere. It was fantastic. Meanwhile elsewhere in the area, already deaths, flooding tunnels, etc. We've been lucky so far. - Alan On Mon, 29 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote: what is the roaring inside your building? you write as if from inside a sinking ship, as in Edgar Allen Poe's short story... On 10/29/12 8:04 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote: Everyone I know is documenting the storm and putting it up online. The reality as such is troubling; listening to the police radio gives an idea of the degree people are in trouble. At the moment the situatio is more severe, small explosions, more fires, flooding everywhere. So far we're okay but the roaring inside our place is almost 80 db consistently. Is this the Singularity come early? - Alan Hurricane Sandy some audio files - sounds from inside our place from the skylights; playing nepalese sarangi and sarangi with the sounds; police radio - note the stranded cars with water rising, fires, etc.; a few shots from our excursion out with Gary Wiebke holding the piece of wallboard that almost killed me, and a tree around the corner which has split and killed a smaller ginko next to it as well. The buoy videos fascinate me, taken from a Brooklyn waterfront pier yesterday as the storm approached. http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh1.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh2.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh3.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh4.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh5.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh6.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh07.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh08.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh09.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh10.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh11.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh12.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/buoy2.mp4 http://www.alansondheim.org/buoy1.mp4 ___ 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 == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rq.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Jon Lebkowsky (@jonl) Jon at Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Wikipedia Work: Polycot Associates: Advanced Internet Solutions Twitter | Facebook Blog: Weblogsky.com: Smart Thinking About Culture, Media, and the Internet Activism: EFF-Austin | Society of Participatory Medicine ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Re: [-empyre-] Screens and films and airlines
Hi All, I just finished an essay for the book Prismatic Ecologies on X-rays. (We are all taking a different wavelength of light and of course rather perversely I chose X-rays, some of which are gamma rays.) X-rays don't just show up on a (blank, medical) screen, but of course they use the body as a screen. The quanta are tiny enough to penetrate the resistance wells in the body all the way through to the bones--which become their screen, literally, as they bounce off. The epigraph is from Empire of the Sun, the movie version, where Jim describes Little Boy as like God taking a photograph--that moment known as the Great Acceleration in geology where humans deepen their intervention into geological time by depositing a layer of radioactive materials in Earth's crust. The bomb becomes an all too physical parody of a god and the entire Earth becomes a screen. And I had this incidental thought: It seems to me that OOO sees everything as a potential screen: stones, houses, larvae and human skeletons. The thing is, for us, there is no (blank) screen and screen is not simply something for humans. Yours, Tim On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 2:53 AM, Martin Rieser martin.rie...@gmail.comwrote: This is strange... writing asynchronously... and I think I am in danger of oversimplifying, because screens and screen languages dominate us still and their different meanings, modes of reception and influences all exist contemporaneously - as happens when one technology transmutes into another- and yes, Johannes, we use screens as much as notebooks, as extraordinary windows into the newly blended spaces of the pervasive world and like you my mental screens dominate and replay, but I think we have to look at the new technologies of augmentation differently and try to understand what this collapse of the virtual into the real might begin to mean. Martin On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 11:06 PM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: dear all interesting that a historical look back [Christian's fascinating reference to O.Winter's Ain't It Lifelike!, and the comments on the cinematograph and X-ray machines, and the borderlands of cinema and other screens] can allow us to reflect, in several ways, on the phenomena of screens and screening and reception (the acts of viewership), and whether or not the spectacle succeeds (in doing what?). I immediately wanted to ask Christian what exactly would be the advantage or success of the the X-ray -- The X-ray offered the far more humane element, the opportunity to break down topics and people into component pairs, and presumably that made it a potential heir to the higher arts. X-ray as entertainment, cinema as medical marvel[Christian] and how would we understand the function of the x-ray [or medical visualization, or other kinds of visualization or simulation or experimentation, if you think for a moment of the Higgs-boson discovery at CERN's Large Hadron Collider yesterday] in the context of the debate that Martin proposes: I feel that Martin wants us to look at the new screens and a paradigm shift, and yet i believe this paradigm shift can only be addressed if we sometimes go back to screens and the art of projection (of light) in the not so long history of photography and cinema; and furthermore, when I read Charlie's fine posting, on screens as partitions (and the Bartleby story), I couldn;t help thinking of sound and all the lovely stories i have read from sound artists/theorists on Pythagoras and acousmatics, the way in which Pythagoras hid from view when he was teaching so that his voice would reach the listeners (not the viewership', that is) unencumbered. now, what paradigm then? Martin schreibt: Given the growth of mobile and pervasive media forms, all dependent to some degree on screens, this changed condition really forms a new paradigm, variously described by researchers who now tend to regard the screen as a window into an extended “Hertzian” space, ‘hybrid space’, ‘augmented reality’, ‘mixed reality’, ‘pervasive space’; or from the user behaviour end as forming ‘trajectories’ (Benford) , and even as ‘sculpture’ ( Calderwood) . The primary role of the screen, as Simon points out, is now one that mediates or remediates the world in a growing number of ways (although the internet of things and NFS promise to make direct -and screenless-interaction more prevalent) not as another space like cinema , where fantasy is experienced through a locked and dreamlike suspension, but as a dynamic and changing condition of experience, where the user is interactive or pro-active in creating their own personalised experience. I am interested in the next week in examining this changing condition of reception as the key to the phenomenon [...] This raises some questions. Why is mobile communication dependent on screens (what screens, one must ask, once again, like some of you
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi Simon--it's De Man's argument. A certain aesthetic feature is turned into a metaphysical substrate of things, in this case, fuzziness. I think OOO would give you all the fuzzy you want, since everything is interconnected at the sensual level. That, and the fact that the rift between sensual and real is not locatable in ontically given space. Yours, Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 28, 2012, at 2:52 AM, Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk wrote: Aesthetics, ideology? I was thinking of Lotfi Zadeh's work when I mentioned that - not fur balls. best Simon On 27 Jun 2012, at 18:04, Timothy Morton wrote: 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 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
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi Rob, Since for OOO causality just is aesthetics, I'm afraid you're not right on that score. I'll send you this essay on it I just wrote for New Literary History if you'd like. There are some other pieces by me on that, online in Singularum and Continent. Yours, Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 28, 2012, at 12:30 PM, Rob Myers r...@robmyers.org wrote: On 06/28/2012 05:56 AM, Timothy Morton wrote: Lots of artists and musicians are now tuning into OOO. Yes Ian's book contains some interesting examples. The problem is that the defenses of OOO against charges of failing to illustrate Marxism indicate that OOO aesthetics is probably a category error as well. 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. It *wouldn't* cause them to? ;-) Back to the lab! http://www.famousmonstersoffilmland.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/sjff_01_img0077.jpg - Rob. ___ 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 / Kosuth
Hi Everyone, I just posted this on melancholia and objects on my blog, and since it's apropos I thought I'd share it. It's the essence of how as an OOO'er I see appearance or form. Tim melancholy doesn't imply anything about subjectivity. All you need for melancholy are various kinds of object. This is what makes it different, in traditional psychoanalytic theories, from other affects. Indeed, melancholy speaks a truth of all objects—recall that I here use the term “object” in a value-neutral way, implying any real entity whatsoever, not objectification or subject–object dualism. But melancholy doesn't require fully formed subjectivity. Indeed, subjectivity is a result of an abnegation of the melancholic abject (Kristeva). The melancholy coexistence of objects predates the existence of the ego. Egos presuppose ancient layers of beings, fossilized remains. On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Jon Ippolito jippol...@maine.edu wrote: 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 -- Ecology without Nature http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/ ___ 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
Hi--there is no doubt of that. Most climate scientists I talk with have said
that if we go, then most lifeforms on earth are wiped.
Tim
http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
On Jun 29, 2012, at 7:56 AM, Christina Spiesel christina.spie...@yale.edu
wrote:
I have been enjoying episodically lurking in this fine conversation. Just a
quick comment -- just because old hierarchies have to be abandoned (like
humans not being at the apex of some evolutionary pyramid) and have to learn
they live in ecologies and webs of relationships doesn't mean that human are
unimportant. We have the right to insist that our technologies serve good
human purposes and not just yield to technological imperatives that arise
from invisible hands.
CS
On 6/28/2012 11:42 AM, Clough, Patricia wrote:
Yes Grosz.Wonderful piece by her on why she no longer is a materialist
Very beautiful on matter and life. Patricia
From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of pinar yoldas
[p...@duke.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 9:36 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: 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-li
v
in
g 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
Re: [-empyre-] Week 4 - Bio/Nano/Materialisms - the transperversal aesthetic of Texas grasshoppers
Hi Patricia,
Is that piece from Becoming Undone? I'm writing an essay on ecocriticism and
materialism and would dearly love to read it, as I am not a materialist either
at this point, and it may be that there are some convergences.
Yours, Tim
http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
On Jun 28, 2012, at 10:42 AM, Clough, Patricia pclo...@gc.cuny.edu wrote:
Yes Grosz.Wonderful piece by her on why she no longer is a materialist
Very beautiful on matter and life. Patricia
From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of pinar yoldas
[p...@duke.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 9:36 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: 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-liv
in
g 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
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
) would suggest that each is a distinct object in some sense, which makes me wonder then, whether or not all other possible thoughts about a chair have being, or if we afford the material object of the chair primacy. In which case, does a digital rendering of the chair carry the same weight as an unexpressed idea about a chair, too. At some point, doesn't ontology lead into this thicket? Davin On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: There is no reason why holding that everything exists equally entails reducing all that can be known about a being to a simple recognition of being. Ian On Jun 24, 2012, at 5:44 AM, davin heckman wrote: I agree, this is a good starting point that all things that exist have being as their common condition of existence (that is, they are not not beings), which is a sort of foundational ontological similarity. But if the only significant ontological claim we can make about things is either yes or no, do they exist or not, then this means all things carry this single quality, which is to say that there is no difference between things. If we admit difference, then we must account for those differences in meaningful ways. For instance, waffle #1 differs from waffle #2 in a different way than waffle #1 differs from a toaster (or waffle #1 changes in the course of being eaten, it is still in one meaningful sense the same waffle after it has been bitten, but in another sense, it is a different waffle, too. While both toasters and waffles are different from something like an idea or a memory rendered in media (a waffle recipe or story about waffles) or a process habituated in muscle memory (the habit of making a waffle or eating one). My concern is that if we reduce all that can be known about being to a simple recognition of being, we commit to a kind of abstraction and alienation from being of the sort that happens when markets try to mediate everything through the common denominator of dollars. Davin On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Davin, We obviously treat different entities differently. But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically different. Yours, Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you Ian, for these thoughts. My initial encounter with this work came via a brief discussion of flat ontology, which I found somewhat offputting. I followed up by reading through the re:press book. What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating. Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with one of my favorite passages from Hegel. Pardon me for cannibalizing another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here: http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism). * In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process: The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. [1] Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic processes that comprise its totality. This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to fundamentally alter Hegel’s argument, I only mean to suggest that we see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have shaken up the pursuit of knowledge. * I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to embrace a kind of humanism, but one which cannot easily understand as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an ontology that is expressed in our metaphors. One grip I have with the use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines, interpersonal relationships, people
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-] 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
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi--OOO is the least abstract and generalizing of any ontology in the West since the Pre-Socratics. Everyone else pretty much reduces things to substance, fire, water, atoms, quantum fluctuations, ideas, etc. We don't--waffle maker a is irreducibly not b, and not simply because it looks different to me. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 24, 2012, at 4:44 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: I agree, this is a good starting point that all things that exist have being as their common condition of existence (that is, they are not not beings), which is a sort of foundational ontological similarity. But if the only significant ontological claim we can make about things is either yes or no, do they exist or not, then this means all things carry this single quality, which is to say that there is no difference between things. If we admit difference, then we must account for those differences in meaningful ways. For instance, waffle #1 differs from waffle #2 in a different way than waffle #1 differs from a toaster (or waffle #1 changes in the course of being eaten, it is still in one meaningful sense the same waffle after it has been bitten, but in another sense, it is a different waffle, too. While both toasters and waffles are different from something like an idea or a memory rendered in media (a waffle recipe or story about waffles) or a process habituated in muscle memory (the habit of making a waffle or eating one). My concern is that if we reduce all that can be known about being to a simple recognition of being, we commit to a kind of abstraction and alienation from being of the sort that happens when markets try to mediate everything through the common denominator of dollars. Davin On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Davin, We obviously treat different entities differently. But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically different. Yours, Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you Ian, for these thoughts. My initial encounter with this work came via a brief discussion of flat ontology, which I found somewhat offputting. I followed up by reading through the re:press book. What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating. Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with one of my favorite passages from Hegel. Pardon me for cannibalizing another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here: http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism). * In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process: The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. [1] Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic processes that comprise its totality. This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to fundamentally alter Hegel’s argument, I only mean to suggest that we see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have shaken up the pursuit of knowledge. * I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to embrace a kind of humanism, but one which cannot easily understand as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an ontology that is expressed in our metaphors. One grip I have with the use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines, interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same thing. When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer, while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of obligation to, rather than ownership over) child. If my bike decided to bite me.which it can't, even if it can hurt me I would not feel so simultaneously restrained in my response AND emotionally florid as I would if my 8 year old bit me for some crazy
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi Davin, We obviously treat different entities differently. But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically different. Yours, Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you Ian, for these thoughts. My initial encounter with this work came via a brief discussion of flat ontology, which I found somewhat offputting. I followed up by reading through the re:press book. What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating. Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with one of my favorite passages from Hegel. Pardon me for cannibalizing another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here: http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism). * In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process: The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. [1] Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic processes that comprise its totality. This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to fundamentally alter Hegel’s argument, I only mean to suggest that we see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have shaken up the pursuit of knowledge. * I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to embrace a kind of humanism, but one which cannot easily understand as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an ontology that is expressed in our metaphors. One grip I have with the use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines, interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same thing. When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer, while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of obligation to, rather than ownership over) child. If my bike decided to bite me.which it can't, even if it can hurt me I would not feel so simultaneously restrained in my response AND emotionally florid as I would if my 8 year old bit me for some crazy reason (but with my three year old, I he is only a missed nap away from engaging in something so obvious and horrible as biting someone). A bike, on the other hand, can hurt me a lot more than a bite from a toddler, and I suppose I am not above kicking a bike and yelling but I have very limited feelings about a bike malfunction or hitting my thumb with a hammer. On the other hand, a bike goes wherever I want it to go (except when there's an accident). a toddler, not so much an eight year old, he usually comes with a counter proposal (and it is a monstrous adult that would treat kids like a bike, insist that they only go where told, speak when it is demanded). A lot of really deep thinking about human subjectivty simply does not go this far and part of this has to do with a poor understanding of objects. What is worse is when this understanding infects interpersonal relationships in the context of a Randian sort of world where there is no such thing as society, only individuals (yet, bosses treat workers like bikes and bad boyfriends treat their partners like robots). I am very excited to read more. I feel like it is important to free our thinking from patterns and habits of the past. In particular, the culture of academic citation has gone from being about finding good ideas where they are to deriving authority from the aura of the great figure. I also have no problem with accumulations of wisdom that translate into an inherited perspective, but this can't close us off to thinking. So thank you for this! Davin On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: Davin, I'm about to disappear into a mess of meetings, but let me offer a brief response: What you're touching on here is what Levi Byrant sometimes calls the weird mereology of OOO. The song isn't
Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture
Hello Everyone, My first reaction to *Hotel* is that the first few seconds are as it were without people, like that chapter Time Passes in *To the Lighthouse*. The wet skin is also without a person, in particular, just the light of the bathroom reflected in the droplets of water. A conversation between a foot and a tap, some ripples. One could of course read the whole thing as metaphorical for or otherwise figurative for the human-human interactions going on. But the paradox is that the movie relies on allowing the nonhumans to float free of specific ties to human significance at every opportunity. The slightly threatening sense of sheer existence is there--we have no idea what is happening, along with a too-mundane all-too-familiar quality, coupled with a certain uncomfortable voyeurism. The idea perhaps that there should be something to see, giving rise to anxiety. The whole thing is like a massively exploded version of the plughole moment in *Psycho*, from the camerawork point of view. Many many interstitial shots--a doorway, some pillows, the back of the room service girl. These sorts of shots are usually to prepare for something such as an encounter between humans, but they seem delinked from that, as if the camera itself wanted to talk to the moving trolley, the curtain and the shadows. My Tibetan Buddhist teacher talks about mandala principle this way: you should be in life as in a hotel, because you enjoy it better that way. It's not yours, yeah it's a non-place, but not (even) necessarily in that scary Romantic way Augé talks about. We have no idea what happened in that room. Each shot becomes a metaphor for each other shot, so that finally it's undecidable whether this is really a story about a room service girl, or a girl eating scrambled eggs, or a story about scrambled eggs talking to a fork, or skin talking to a faucet. In the absence of a metaphysics of cause and effect (from Hume and Kant on), what we have are statistical correlations. The movie plunges us into the void of reason that Kant detects in the Humean destruction of causality (a destruction that just is the condition of modern science). That void of reason is the gap between my (human) mind and another thing. But there are other gaps: between a pile of scrambled eggs and a bowl; between a foot and the bathroom floor; between a trolley and the doorway; between an eye and another eye, one looking through a crack in a doorway, the other not. Only metaphor bridges these gaps, which is to say, metaphor just is how causality functions in a universe of entities that don't sum to one another. That is, if we're not living in a total blend-o-rama where the eggs are the fork and so on. The tension in the movie is precisely the tension between a myriad cracks in and between things. Btw: My OOO use of *withdrawal* means open secret, not hiding or shrinking, or excess. Something unspeakable and irreducibly untranslatable. Yours, Tim On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 1:50 PM, Clough, Patricia pclo...@gc.cuny.eduwrote: Yes I do think that this is a great question: are we in anyone else's moment? Never mind one's own While I do appreciate your point about the untranslatablility it is funny, Micha that you end on Deleuze. And I know much more is going on below than just Deleuze.But actually there are challenges to Deleuze right now that have implications for politics and even what can be made out of the experiences you describe below. Lauren might have been asking the same question what can we say about the many experiences we are sharing and failing to share with each other? From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [ empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of micha cárdenas [ mmcar...@usc.edu] Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2012 2:25 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] affect, low theory, and capture I absolutely agree that place persists as a major determinant of life possibilities, as much or more than class, despite the ongoing pounding of the rhetoric of digital globality and neoliberal plentitude. I find it hard to support any claim that there is a zeitgeist or taxonomy of the moment, unless we're talking about the moment in the US or in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California. When I used to go to UCSD and spend my time crossing the US/Mexico border regularly I was often reminded that even in Tijuana, with it's proximity to the US, most people don't speak english and there is almost no usage of the word queer, an untranslatable word. Also, throughout Latin America, as Diana Taylor describes, the word Performance is largely untranslatable and has a handful of poor substitutions, or substitutions with difference, perhaps a best one being lo performatico. Being someone who does queer performance with technology means that conversations about my work in Latin America have a very, very different valence. I was invited to speak a
Re: [-empyre-] uncapturing theory citations
Hi Johannes, It seems to me you are not missing anything. If a glass could speak, we would not understand what it was saying. Yes Zach I am a transcendence boy. Sometimes that frightens immanence people but I mean no harm. That's pretty accurate actually--for me, there are as many gaps in the real as there are things. Yours, Tim On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:00 PM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: hello all. intriguing discussions, which got off on a euphoric tone, then became more contentious noisy, as they probably should; and yet it seems our enthusiasm about queerreals and transitional objects remains unabated, working around the systems and inside them as well (possibly, as Amanda might argue, that is because engaging queerly with technology [etc/] is about tinkering, hacking, modding - working around the system to create our own circuits of meaning). so what happened to high theory and the urge to cite? and what do you do when you have never heard of ooo? I particularly loved, however, the less discourse-theory-heavy remarks that came the other night as I listed to music --i think it was Tim speculating on the opera singer making the glass explode, exploding glass into not-glass. The dead (as it were) glass is nowhere, there are just memories, including fragments of glass, which are new things. last weekend at London's Barbican, Pina Bausch's Ten Chi staged the scene in a slight variation: a dancer in a long white dress is lifted onto a chair, ready to sing, but in her hands she holds a large block ice. As she prepares so sing and drop the ice, another, dark-haired dancer enters with a red towel that has glass inside as we find out. She puts the towel on the floor and vigorously steps on it with her sharp heels. The glass breaks. She opens the towel and admires the dead glass, the fragments. The woman on the chair with the ice is upset, gets down and leaves muttering something about someone always wanting to steal her show. neither the glass, not the ice, can sing or break to us whether they have an idea of beauty or jouissance. why would they? what is it i am missing about objects and their thoughts? Zach scheibt: it seems that many theorists and writers who focus on technology, the nonhuman, and the new materialisms you have already mentioned engage affect through a deleuzian / spinozan approach. and they do so because it affords them a particular way to think technical / nonhuman materials. it seems like one of the critiques we could think about here is the one that jack has already brought up, which is on the use of high theory and a politics of citations. do you think its possible to explore this strand of affect through low theory? but, Zach, what if one were to produce or engage affect without a deleuzian /spinozian approach? or without the high or low? the story about the opera singer's voice breaking the glass does not need theory, and yet, hmm, in Tim's telling of it, it implies an aesthetics of transcendence. Münchhausen-Stockhausen, I believe, was so foolish to speculate on that, also. with regards Johannes Birringer ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Ecology without Nature http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Smelly Objects
Dear Lauren, This is a very resonant phrase IMO: as a process that works against being known, and therefore against death. In my theory of causality death is precisely when an entity is fully known, that is, successfully mistranslated. The thing becomes sheer appearance-for others. Say an opera singer matches the resonant frequency of a glass. The glass ripples and explodes into not-glass. The dead (as it were) glass is nowhere, there are just memories, including fragments of glass, which are new things. I believe that at the moment when the sound envelopes the glass perfectly, if the glass could speak, it would say it was experiencing beauty, in the Kantian sense, of an object-like entity that is not-me yet intimately me. In this sense beauty is death. Maintaining the unknown, resisting consistency, is resisting death. What is called life is a small region of an undead, uncanny space where the rifts between things and appearances coexist. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 18, 2012, at 11:00 PM, lauren.berl...@gmail.com lberl...@aol.com wrote: as a process that works against being known, and therefore against death. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P
. This rethinking of technoscience including digital technologies has in part raised interest in OOO/SR and that is the case for me. But I am not sure that the elective affinity between digital technologies, the growth of computational studies and al gorithm studies etc. and OOO/SR yet has been well stated. I do not think that all OOO/SR thinkers find this to be central while some do. Debates around OOO/SR with which Steven Shaviro is involved usually speak to digital technology (and Bogost of course) All this to say that the 'affect' that I have most written about is the Spinoza Deleuze Whitehead Masssumi Parisi version (although I want to talk more about feelings and emotions this week). The Spinoza Deleuze Whitehead Masssumi Parisi version of affect I believe has always required an ontological shift (which is central to the Affective Turn volume). That ontological shift has everything to do with the way affect is experienced through a technological intensification since it is otherwise preconscious if not nonconscious and a-social While language generally is an intensifier I have been more interested in intensifications that did not necessarily raise to consciousness but simply intensified experienc e inciting resonances rhythmicities oscillations etc. and which then could be about bodies other than human ones or organic ones--queering body. This seemed to require an ontological shift, one involving matter. I have been arguing for some time that matter is affective or informational (well maybe we should just say energy) and this led me to OOO/SR. But before checking out OOO/SR I was much indebted to Deleuze and the others and since studying OOO/SR I feel the noteworthy tension between Deleuzians and OOO/SR (although there are those trying to negotiate the tension as I am). During the next week I want to offer some thoughts (and can't wait for response and interventions) about this tension in relationship to affect. I hope we can discussion more the recent focus on aesthetics which has enabled me to think in the tension rather than against it and find a way as well to dwell in rather than simply put an end to the aporia between ontology and e p istemology that affect and non-human perception produces. I think aesthetics and the turn to Whitehead's rereading of Kant points to a way to engage the liveliness of what Eugene Thacker calls a world without us or not for us. Finally, during the first week I much enjoyed all the sites to which I was sent and all the efforts to make stuff, queer stuff, with digital technology as well as with other technologies. This doing along with thinking (crude way of putting it) seems important to a critical engagement with what we once would have called knowledge production.Looking forward to ongoing conversation(s) Patricia From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Michael O'Rourke [tranquilised_i...@yahoo.com] Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2012 7:40 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P Hi Tim! Cheers for your thoughts. Take a look at Christina's work here: http://www.christinamcphee.net/ I think it resonates in many ways with yours. M. --- On Sat, 16/6/12, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: From: Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [-empyre-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Saturday, 16 June, 2012, 23:25 Hi Everyone, This is my first (or possibly second if the other got through) message to the list, and I'm responding to a brief discussion of the notion of flat ontology initiated by Michael O'Rourke (hi Michael!) and Frederic Neyrat. OOO comes in various flavors and is not necessarily flat. Mine and Graham Harman's has two levels. Levi Bryant's and Ian Bogost's have one, but differ in how that one level works. Other forms of realism such as Manuel De Landa's are flat, or flatter, than OOO. Frederic I'm a Derridean and the idea of the singularity is my idea of the strange stranger, which is Derrida's arrivant. Just apply this notion of arrivant to non-life and you get the OOO object. You can have all the singularities you want in a non-all and by definition non-hierarchical set, which is the OOO universe. Yours, Tim -- Ecology without Naturehttp://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/ -Inline Attachment Follows- ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/mc/compose?to=empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Subject: Re: Meillassoux / Harman
Hi all, It's Tim Morton of Rice University here. I'm going to take Jack's suggestion and paste this post I wrote here. I am an OOO person who writes on ecology and philosophy. Tim OOO, Gender, Sexuality I can't sleep. I was up grading so by rights I should be knackered. But I've also been up having the best conversation ever, with the best ever, and elements of it are beeping away in my head. So I double checked my Internet and noticed Judith Halberstam, Ian Bogost, Michael O'Rourke, Rob Jackson and others were having a detailed discussion on empyre. Now I don't belong to it and I'm too busy to get with it right now--also these thoughts are fizzing in me. So I hope some kind person(s) will paste this or the link to the discussion list? Okay. I've written essays on queer theory and ecology and on OOO and feminism (that last one is forthcoming). I am and have been considered a deconstructor, and my most recent talk (soon essay) was on OOO and race. Of the 6 Ph.D. students of mine explicitly doing OOO (out of about 15), three are women, one of whom is working on gender and sexuality. Two are men, both gay, working on performativity. If you think about it, OOO provides a very beautiful way to think gender and sexuality issues at the ontological level--Levi Bryant has done some of the heavy lifting there, as well as Michael O'Rourke. Withdrawal--no object is subsumed by its use-by any (other) entity--surely accounts for gender switching, non-genital sexuality, BDSM and queerness (for want of a better word) at a deep level. Now my next remarks are addressed to those scholars who like Judith Halberstam (did I meet you when I was at USC last year?) are concerned about OOO. I use y'all, for some weird reason. I'm actually English but was recently kidnapped by Rice! Y'all are a bit scared of ontology because it was the province of the metaphysics of presence and all that it entails. Correct. But OOO is explicitly designed to account for a reality without this presence, yet without evaporating everything into (anthropocentric) powder. Although I did just write on Karen Barad, etc etc., we look like we are sidestepping some recent theory because we believe that it contains some weird code that goes all the way back to Heidegger, weird unnecessary code that affected Lacan, and through him Barthes, Derrida and Foucault--and on up to now. The bug is why Derrida was so leery of ontology as such, for instance. That's why Harman went back to Heidegger. He dismantles the code from that point. That's why he's so important. This is a big deal. We are not ignoring you. We are going back to the Heidegger U-Boat and debugging it from the inside. Y'all are floating around above a gigantic coral reef of beautiful things we call objects, including you (look it's you down there!). But you can't see it cos this Heidegger bug has got your windshield all fogged up. In no way does OOO try to yank you back up to the surface of prepackaged ideologemes of race, class and gender. We are simply asking you to look down. http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi All, If this already went in, sorry. Ignore. I'm pasting a post I wrote here, because Jack Halberstam kindly suggested I do. Just to introduce myself, I'm Tim Morton of Rice University and I'm an OOO-er. Yours, Tim OOO, Gender, Sexuality I can't sleep. I was up grading so by rights I should be knackered. But I've also been up having the best conversation ever, with the best ever, and elements of it are beeping away in my head. So I double checked my Internet and noticed Judith Halberstam, Ian Bogost, Michael O'Rourke, Rob Jackson and others were having a detailed discussion on empyre. Now I don't belong to it and I'm too busy to get with it right now--also these thoughts are fizzing in me. So I hope some kind person(s) will paste this or the link to the discussion list? Okay. I've written essays on queer theory and ecology and on OOO and feminism (that last one is forthcoming). I am and have been considered a deconstructor, and my most recent talk (soon essay) was on OOO and race. Of the 6 Ph.D. students of mine explicitly doing OOO (out of about 15), three are women, one of whom is working on gender and sexuality. Two are men, both gay, working on performativity. If you think about it, OOO provides a very beautiful way to think gender and sexuality issues at the ontological level--Levi Bryant has done some of the heavy lifting there, as well as Michael O'Rourke. Withdrawal--no object is subsumed by its use-by any (other) entity--surely accounts for gender switching, non-genital sexuality, BDSM and queerness (for want of a better word) at a deep level. Now my next remarks are addressed to those scholars who like Judith Halberstam (did I meet you when I was at USC last year?) are concerned about OOO. I use y'all, for some weird reason. I'm actually English but was recently kidnapped by Rice! Y'all are a bit scared of ontology because it was the province of the metaphysics of presence and all that it entails. Correct. But OOO is explicitly designed to account for a reality without this presence, yet without evaporating everything into (anthropocentric) powder. Although I did just write on Karen Barad, etc etc., we look like we are sidestepping some recent theory because we believe that it contains some weird code that goes all the way back to Heidegger, weird unnecessary code that affected Lacan, and through him Barthes, Derrida and Foucault--and on up to now. The bug is why Derrida was so leery of ontology as such, for instance. That's why Harman went back to Heidegger. He dismantles the code from that point. That's why he's so important. This is a big deal. We are not ignoring you. We are going back to the Heidegger U-Boat and debugging it from the inside. Y'all are floating around above a gigantic coral reef of beautiful things we call objects, including you (look it's you down there!). But you can't see it cos this Heidegger bug has got your windshield all fogged up. In no way does OOO try to yank you back up to the surface of prepackaged ideologemes of race, class and gender. We are simply asking you to look down. I should have more conversations like that. -- Ecology without Nature http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P
Hi Everyone, This is my first (or possibly second if the other got through) message to the list, and I'm responding to a brief discussion of the notion of flat ontology initiated by Michael O'Rourke (hi Michael!) and Frederic Neyrat. OOO comes in various flavors and is not necessarily flat. Mine and Graham Harman's has two levels. Levi Bryant's and Ian Bogost's have one, but differ in how that one level works. Other forms of realism such as Manuel De Landa's are flat, or flatter, than OOO. Frederic I'm a Derridean and the idea of the singularity is my idea of the strange stranger, which is Derrida's arrivant. Just apply this notion of arrivant to non-life and you get the OOO object. You can have all the singularities you want in a non-all and by definition non-hierarchical set, which is the OOO universe. Yours, Tim -- Ecology without Nature http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
