Il lavoro Aaron Koblin (la visualizzazione di una giornata intera di rotte aeree sugli Stati Uniti ) è la prova esaustiva di una [nuova] potente  estetica del tracciamento, dell’informazione, del dato puro.
Tanto puro da risultare privo di altro valore, che non sia quello visuale.

“Vertigine del dettaglio perpetuo sull’oggetto.
Ogni oggetto fotografato non è altro che la traccia lasciata dalla scomparsa di tutto il resto.
Tutto è racchiuso nell’arte della scomparsa.”
Jean Baudrillard – Patafisica e arte del vedere, 2006

” Where form follows data”

Da Miklos Gimes einen Film über Tom Kummer gedreht hat und der wohl bald zu sehen sein wird (»Kummer« wird er heißen) – darf man vielleicht noch einmal kurz auf Tom Kummers Interviews zurückkommen. Der Mann war Tennisprofi, dann in Berlin, als Berlin noch total krass war, also vor 1989, und Borderline-Journalist, hat auf Reportagen Drogen gekauft, war im Irak und so weiter – und dann in Hollywood. Als er, so beschreibt er es in seinem Buch Blow-Up, bei einem Pressjunket mit Pamela Anderson sass, konnte er mit seinen Fragen ein eine Reihe idiotischer Fragen anderer Journlisten anschließen, und das Masseninterview endete wie folgt:

Du musst doch zugeben, Pamela, die Grenzen zwischen Körper und Technologie, Realität und Fiktion sind ziemlich durchlässig geworden, oder? Eine tolle Frage, ich klopfe mir fast selbst auf die Schulter. Und Pamela sagt dann: »Die Frage verstehe ich nicht.« Und damit ist das Gespräch vorbei.

Als er dann an seinem Schreibtisch sass, wurde ihm klar: »So muss Pamela dann – die Welt erwartet das von mir – etwas so antworten:

Ich kapiere zwar nicht ganu, wovon du sprichst, aber eines weiß ich: Ich muss nicht unbedingt nach einem Sinn im Leben suchen, um glücklich zu sein. Sexsymbole zu hassen ist schick geworden, weil ja fast alle Mädchen neidisch snd und weil mich außer Tommy kein Mann bekommen kann.

Die Frage ist nun einfach: Ist das einfach ein Journalist, der auf die schiefe Bahn geraten ist, was namhafte Redaktionsleiter, unter anderem Roger Köppel, nicht bemerkt oder vielleicht doch bemerkt haben (aber nichts dagegen unternommen haben), und aus Bequemlichkeit Interviews zusammengeschrieben hat und zufällig den Effekt erzeugt, die Artifizialität von Stars und den medialen Inszenierungen von Stars überdeutlich zu machen – oder liegt da mehr vor? Sowas wie eine grundsätzliche Frage zum Verhältnis von Fiktion und Authentizität, zum Schreiben etc. (Ich tendiere eher zum ersten Ansatz: Da passiert nichts, was Baudrillard und Konsorten mit den Begrifflichkeiten Hyperrealität und Simulacrum nicht schon durchdacht hätten…)

Zurück aber zu den Interviews. Wie man sehen kann, besitze ich eine Kopie des Buches. Ich hatte es schon einmal in der ZB ausgeliehen, aber offenbar ist der Band dort verschwunden. Über AbeBooks, den besten Suchdienst für antiquarische Bücher, habe ich mir dieses Exemplar aus Los Angeles (wie treffend, ich bestelle einen dtv Band aus dem Ort, an dem Tom Kummer ihn geschrieben hat) kommen lassen:

Eigentlich sollte man es scannen und online verfügbar machen, aber eigentlich habe ich weder einen Scanner, der Bücher automatisch einscannen kann, noch die Musse, das zu tun, auch wenn ich es für richtig halten würde. Wer aber unbedingt eines der Interviews braucht, kann mich per Mail erreichen und ich kann ein pdf anfertigen.

Nun zu den besten Fragen Tom Kummers, also den Fragen, die man leider den Stars nicht stellen kann, aber gerne würde. Ein Auszug aus einem der Interviews hab ich auf dem Netz gefunden:

Stone: In archaischen und antiken Kulturen gab es nur die Verführung, keine Liebe, keine Gefühlsströmungen und auch keinen Bedarf an Psychoanalyse, die ja diesen stumpfsinnigen Mythos der Liebe lebendig hält. SZ-Magazin: Hat Verführung nicht auch immer etwas Kaltes, Berechnendes?
Stone: Ja, möglicherweise. Ich stelle den anderen Fallen, und dahinter verbirgt sich sicher ein böser Geist. Der ist aber im Kern aller leidenschaftlicher Regungen zu finden. SZ-Magazin:    ? Stone: Vielleicht die Illusion. Das Kino. Das ist die Steigerung der Verführung. Ich spreche jetzt von der List, Sehnsucht nach Idealen zu provozieren und gleichzeitig zu vereiteln. Das gilt auch für eine Partnerschaft. Gibt es etwas Besseres, als immer wieder von neuem anzufangen? Wir wissen doch alle, daß das ideale Objekt sowieso nur zum Ideal werden kann, wenn es tot ist.
SZ-Magazin: Können Siegerinnen wie Sie überhaupt lieben? Stone: Diese Frage unterstellt, daß ich als Verführerin ein oberflächliches Spiel betreibe. Die Liebe wird dabei immer so furchtbar romantisch gesehen, als besonders leidenschaftlich und wahrhaftig. Ich aber halte das Ritual der Verführung für viel wahrhaftiger und viel leidenschaftlicher. SZ-Magazin: Sex als Waffe setzen Sie also nur auf der Leinwand ein, nicht in den Machtkämpfen des wirklichen Lebens? Stone: Nie! Ich ziehe die duellartige Form der Verführung vor. SZ-Magazin: Warum bloß? Stone: Weil Liebe und Sexualität auch Metaphern für Niederlagen sind. Wer siegen will, darf nicht lieben. Miß Stone sagt: “Verführet einander!” [Quelle: Google Cache von http://www.hdbg.de/t96kauf.htm]

Weitere Fragen und Antworten, die ich mag:

[Sean Penn] Ich habe wegen Dingen rebelliert, die den meisten Menschen ziemlich egal sind. Zum Beispiel, wie man eine Zigarette absolut cool in der Hand hält.

[Sean Penn] Die politische Realität der Gegenwart interessiert mich nicht. Nur soviel: Die Waffe ist Teil der amerikanischen Kultur. Keine andere Gesellschaft ist grausamer als die amerikanische. Schauen Sie doch mal CNN. Die verzweifeln fast daran, dass in der Welt kein anständiger Krieg ausbricht.

[Pamela Anderson] Du sagst doch selber, deine Hobbys sind Tanzen und Sex? – Das stimmt nicht ganz. Ich schneide auch ab und zu die Sträucher in unserem Garten.

[Snoop Doggy Dogg] Mich interessiert nicht die Wahrheit, ich inszeniere meine Wahrheit.

[Snoop Doggy Dogg] KFC und Snoop sind das Beste, was Afro-Amerika seit der Erfindung des Kamms passiert ist. – Warum der Kamm? – Seit es den Kamm gibt, können wir unsere Haare glätten. – Und warum KFC? – Grute Kruste, sehr billig […]  – Hat aber einen äußerst geringen Nährwert… – Daran denken wir nicht, wenn wir die Knöchlein sauberlecken.

[Courtney Love] Tut mir Leid, ich fühle mich deprimiert, leer, blöd. Alle meine Gedichte brennen. Minotauren fressen die Genitalien des Mondes.

[Courtney Love] Ich war acht Jahre als, als mir mein Vater LSD gegeben hat. Das war seine größte erzieherische Leistung.

[Phil Collins] Aber die Wahrheit ist doch, dass es kein solches Ding namens Liebe gibt. oder sehen Sie das anders? – Mein Herz spürt die Liebe sofot, das ist bei mir kein langwieriger Prozess. Ich kann sofort erkennen, wer mich liebt. Und ich weiss, wie ich lieben muss. Da habe ich die totale Kontrolle.

[Nicolas Cage] Tarantino hat vom wahren Leben doch keine Ahnung. Seine besten Jahre verbrachte er in einer Videothek. – Das wahre Leben findet heute im Kopf statt.

[Quentin Tarantino] Sie gelten als Realist, weil Sie so unwirkliche Filme machen. Erklären Sie doch bitte mal diesen Widerspruch. – Wir leben in einer Welt, die uns verunsichert. Weil die Wirklichkeit abgeschafft ist.

     One way to read contemporary philosophy of religion and philosophical 
     theology is to view it as a series of attempts to determine how God
     became a problem in the West. . . .Their arguments already seem to be
     part of a high modernity which has been deconstructed by end-of-
     ontotheology arguments which claim that the only appropriate
     language for God in the postmodern context is no, not, never.**

Anthony Godzieba (Associate Professor, Villanova University) ought to be ashamed of himself!  

I know how God became a problem in the West. 

God finally—after trying for millennia—became a problem in the West (dare I assume speaking  for myself is speaking for “the West?”) in a 1400-square-foot apartment on a street—lined with live oak trees so old they spread a canopy over the street for neighbors to walk their dogs, the Asian-American medical students’ families to meet and talk and the gay melting-pot Americans to meet to plan rendezvous—in Dallas, Texas, United States, North America, the West, Earth. 

A canopy of (graitude?)

“For health and strength and daily bread, we give you thanks, O Lord.” Two-part, incipit an ascending octave leap on the dominant, the melody descending through the scale omitting the seventh. (I can write in the technical jargon of my discipline.) I have no idea when I first sang this as a blessing before a meal. 

The simple round is the gist of the Thanksgiving Eve sermon by the Rector of a large, wealthy, Episcopal parish in Dallas about the nature and need for Thanksgiving, We are to be grateful for what we have been given (presumably by God). 

The service was deeply moving, the “Noise of Solemn Assemblies” *** at its finest. The organ music was delicious. The choir sang Maurice Green’s “Thou Visiteth the Earth.” We sang the Thanksgiving hymns one might expect. I am emotionally and spiritually (?) engaged in services at this church (until the Creed when I either choke in grief or am enraged, and unable to say the words).  

All but the Credo

God became a problem not when Nietzsche announced his death (Nietzsche was myopic—he killed off only the Western god). God became a problem not with Heidegger’s convolutions; not with Kierkegaard’s grief—although that was close; not with Foucault’s Religion and Culture; not with Niebuhr, Faigley, Frankl, or Lyotard. Perhaps God became a problem with Baudrillard. 

God became a problem (and becomes a problem) each time a person (and then another, and another) discovers that the “metanarrative” (words invented by people in the above list are a problem) we have learned to be true (or we have assumed from infancy) is not. Life is not civilization, or theology, or good works, sociology, politics, love, hate, education, the economy, automobiles, wars in Iraq, or health care reform. And life is not “God.” 

God has worked up to being a problem for millennia. God tries to garner attention. God will, in fact, allow peoples’ lives to come unhinged, to be disasters, miserable, or intolerable. Or God will allow people to be happy, joyous, and free, to be billionaires, to have the power of the Presidency, to celebrate Thanksgiving in style and ease, and luxury. God allows these things (don’t go criticizing my theology—I don’t give a fig about theology; I report the facts as I see them) in order, now and then, to get one person’s attention. Each one who comes to the understanding that God is a problem has to do so alone. 

Discovering that the metanarrative, whatever version of it one has come to believe, is not true is one’s discovery that God is a problem. I can claim to have discovered this for the “West” in my apartment because, for me, the discovery is universal—it shakes my universe, so it must shake THE universe. And once discovered, the problem is never undiscovered. 

Discovering God is a problem means everything else is a problem. “For health and strength and daily bread, we give you thanks, O Lord” is meaningless (or at least problematic). Why give thanks for something that does not exist. God is a problem for me because I for so long had all of my hope, my comfort, my understanding of reality bound up with God.  

My grateful admission that God is a problem does not mean I have concluded God does not exist. How would I know? It means simply that, this Thanksgiving Day I cannot trust the metanarrative, what Wikipedia (Hah! laugh at my scholarship) calls the “abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge.”  

I’m not throwing my lot in with Lyotard (although his work is clever) and the other “post-modernists.” They wrangle over metanarratives as surely as the ancient theologians who asked how many angels danced on the head of your hatpin. 

I don’t think about abstractions that explain history or knowledge. When my friends read philosophy in college and thought deep thoughts, I was learning organ music. I was drunk. I was trying to find sexual bliss. I read (and tried to write) novels. I can’t participate in discussions of Lyotard and Foucault (Foucault may have discovered that God is a problem). 

I grieve God as a problem. I am grateful for it. I assume that, if I live long enough (“what is life” is the first question one asks when one discovers that God is a problem), I may find some grace in the discovery. 

I do not want to over-emphasize the ways in which my body (mostly my brain) works differently than most human bodies. My twin disorders, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and Bipolar Disorder, are perhaps not disorders at all. Perhaps they are the true gifts for which I celebrate Thanksgiving. They have forced me to understand God is a problem. Nothing is what it seems. Nothing is real. If reality is impossible to define, nothing survives when our bodies no longer participate in life on Earth. I am ill (but isn’t everyone?). One of my “illnesses” consists in a misfiring of brain cells that causes me dissociation, the physical beginning of my intellectual understanding that God is [unreal] a problem. 

Lately, I have been comforted, when I am overwhelmed knowing God is a problem, by the writings of Arthur Frank which I discovered in an article by Cristina Rocha. 

In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank argues that people use illness narratives ‘to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she maybe going.’ He identifies three kinds of narratives—restitution, chaos, and quest. . . .Finally, in the quest narrative, ‘illness is the occasion of a journey that becomes a quest.’ The ill person has an active role in it, as s/he finds a sense of purpose in the illness, and uses it to undergo transformation. **** 

Thanksgiving Day is a day for me to remember my gratitude that God is a problem for me. I am grateful to be on a quest.

** Godzieba, Anthony J. ”Ontotheology to excess: imagining God without being. ” Theological Studies. 56.1 (March 1995): 3(18).  Associate Professor, Villanova University; Editor of Horizons, the journal of the College Theology Society.
*** Berger, Peter. The Noise of Solemn Assemblies; Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America. New York: Doubleday, 1961. “Mainline Protestantism has always been in a symbiotic relationship with the middle-class culture, which is to a large extent its own historical product (after all, it is this type of Protestantism that has been a crucially important factor in the formation of American bourgeois civilization) and that continues to be its social context [in which people do not know God is a problem].”
**** Rocha, Cristina. ”Seeking healing transnationally: Australians, John of God and Brazilian Spiritism. ” The Australian Journal of Anthropology  20.2 (August 2009): 229(18).  Cristina Rocha is a staff member at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney.

We Plow the Fields and Scatter

Buscan, Regístran.
No están identificados.
¿Es posible no ser
conspiranoico en el siglo veintiuno?
¿Es posible?
La madre espiritual del cordero.
Mierda kosmika. Si.
Buho observador. Iniciado. Registrado.
El conflicto plano de las convicciones rotas.
Las disputas son por el poder de los creyentes.
A falta de luz, se reproducen, se imitan y se buscan.

Desconectados,
ejecutan al detalle su lista de saludos rápidos.
La fecha de tu click. Gracias por tu muerte.
Entradas gratis para la Luna Nueva.
Haz el test y muere.
La mayoría de los datos ya fueron negados,
aportados por probabilidad.
Expuestos por un teólogo no científico.

Por eso hay que salir del azar.
Aunque un poco tarde es el inicio.
El último dia del mundo, empezó hace años.
El sistema operativo incomprensible de la máquina Dios.
Recuerdalo echando un vistazo a las cartas.
La idiotez no está reñida con el servicio.
Más lo esta la lucha por el algo intangible.
Lavar los pies a la tierra con la luz.
Existen totalidades con partes
intrínsecas integrantes no occidentales.
Se puede ver el intererés en desconocer
una intervención divina constante
en sentido contrario a las agujas del reloj.
Todos sus cambios tienden al desorden.
Suena azarosa la iteración demagógica de la máquina,
Un cierto caos incompatiblemente fractal.

El último intento de agarrarse
al último clavo científico.
Compatibilizar la teoría con el dato palmario.
La vida consiste en una cadena.

El recurso es válido:
el entorno estimula ese producto

a partir del cual, sin embargo,
no pueden componerse canciones superventa.
Una suerte de inconmensurabilidad 
ontológica
entre el todo y sus partes,
cuya significación dialéctica es nada. 

Se sigue hasta la parada divina.

Adiós, adiós. Que te vaya bien.

No es éste el espacio.

¿Y si el el azar proviene de la suerte en otro planeta?


La patata que alimenta el estómago
ha matado por azar la rosa.

Querer o no querer oler, comer, escuchar o amar
algo mal concertado por faltar al conjunto
desprovisto de órganos para la vida,
una pequeña radiación luminosa.
Nadie es perfecto de todos modos
en la medida de lo posible,

sin posibilidad de producir vida.

Por ahí va la voluntad
condicionada por el ambiente.
Una intervención de las enzimas.
Cuerpos menores similares.
Lo único que hay es luz, sonido y cartón piedra.
Ninguna inteligencia ordenadora.
La oposición frente a lo adivino
no justifica cerrar los ojos
como un maldito iluminado.

“The whole problem is on the outer fringes of the nothing, to materialise that nothing; on the outer fringes of the void, to trace out the mark of the void; on the outer fringes of indifference, to play by the mysterious rules of indifference.” Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

The outer fringes of indifference – this is where the elves play. We’re never quite sure whether they care, or whether they don’t; whether they have a stake in Middle Earth, or whether they don’t.

They’re silent and yet  they shimmer with an outer edge of laughter and song. They’re invisible in the night, and yet they shimmer with an outer edge of moonlight.

These fringes, which mark out the edge of the void they represent, allow them to shimmer with the illusion of caring/not caring; being involved/being uninvolved.

And its in their absence, their unreality, their non-immediacy (paraphrasing Baudrillard), that the elves offer up the very image of enchantment and illusion.

It’s no surprise that they are signalled by laughter: the very sound of illusion, non-immediacy and the shimmering ebb-and-flow of presence.

The critique of the critique of critique, like the old man in the sphynx’s riddle, is left, in the end, with only one leg on which to stand. Still kritizierbar is this alone — the myth of a heroic beginnings, of grand gestures, of new vistas, new worlds of thought, that might appear (ah… Baltimore… 1966) in a conference paper, written in a mere 10 days.   Master thinkers, and their disciples. A playfulness that was serious.  Now our seriousness is stillborn in its seriousness.

Against the sweet insouciance of Friends, there is something terrifying about this sitcom, which is marketed in Korea under the title: “I love Friends.” As if Friends, and the friend, had already become the object of a pathetic longing. As if, even in this, we must resign ourselves to an Ersatz-friends. With a macabre instinct, someone recognized that the great joke of Seinfeld, the fake cast, had suddenly been recast as a real sitcom.  As if there were a third repetition in history, beyond tragedy and farce.

But this third brings us back to the first: the husband, an architect like Mr. Brady, tells his children how he met their mother.  The purest form of the tyranny of mythopoesis.  As if the children could, or should care.  As if the very idea that they should care, that the mystery of their birth could be reduced to an endless sequence of tawdry vignettes, were not the most terrible offence against childhood. As if the novelty of birth could be seamlessly folded into the life of the parents.

What did Oedipus and Antigone talk about during their long years of wandering?

All myth, every beginning, is perverse.  This silliest of sitcoms brings us to the brink of tragic, Dionysian knowledge. The parents who entertain their child with the story of their prehistoric misadventures demand that the child replicate their own desire for life — without having lived.  They seek nothing less than the confirmation of their own desire for life in the lifeless desire of their children.  This is the prosaic, everyday form of mythic incest. And the tyranny of desire is always this: the desire for obsolete forms of desire.

We who watch are like the children who listen.  We do not live, but we desire to live.  And we late-born theorists (we theorists after theory…) are, in this, not so different than the couch potato. (Hence the critique of television is not the least bit irrelevant for proto philosophia) We do not think, but we desire to think.  We desire the form that thinking once took in its still fresh, but wholly mythic past.  We cannot imagine happiness but in a form that is no longer possible for us. True happiness for us is whatever happiness we cannot have.

The genius of Tristram Shandy suddenly dawns on me:  the sobriety of prose begins with the parody of the myth of our own drunken birth.

I was born then, in 1966, and before this: in Weimar, in Vienna, in Berlin, in Prague, in Jena, in Paris, in Florence, in Rome, and Athens. And also in places far from the cities.  Why do I then feel so melancholy as I read this book by François Cusset:  am I nothing simply because I was not there to watch my birth. Is there greatness only in beginnings?   But hasn’t philosophy, which has created so much from a single matter, always been the next best thing.

If you live in the bay area, and you are at all interested in joining, or even contributing something to our little beaubourg – we invite you to leave a comment on our Beaubourg 268 blog (below). Beaubourg 268 is located on Saint Charles Avenue at the southern periphery of the San Francisco Peninsula. Adjacent to San Francisco State Universiity, the institution’s new home is a modest two story residential building that hopes to attract educators and students alike. The ground floor contains a small garden, sound studio, and outdoor planning areas; the second floor holds a small archive-library, along with lodging accommodations.

Most of the artists and thinkers in Steven Henry Madoff’s new big book, Art School suffer from one of two opposing superstitions: either art schools are the new business schools preparing designers and emerging artists for the real world, or art schools are the new pockets of resistance and reform informing social stakeholders for the real world challenges of global consumer capitalism. As a literary terrorist, one of whose concerns is the future of art school, I sometimes am asked: “Which theoretician should I know?” To their astonishment, I have yet to reply to them with the usual French names: Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, etc. Rather, I’ve tended to answer with one of two names: Gina Clark & Robert Hansen.

Gina Clark was born and raised in Southern California. Over the past decade she has worked across a variety of media including performance, film, photography, installation, and curating. Within these practices, the desert-based CalArts graduate has supported the preservation of the innovative and exploratory arts; always mindful of the fact that we are living in an age dominated by Domesticity & Artifice.  Robert Hansen is a sound artist, visual artist, writer and founder of the renowned group Mini Voyeur. From its initial formation, the group was exploring properties in speech, sound and acoustics; all the while, infusing humor in to the concepts of music, memory and logic. Robert has maintained an extended library of recorded audio and video documents created with the help of friends and family.

The newly established Beaubourg 268 will offer the public a series of classes, projects and improvisational “adventures” that remain more or less outside the existing coordinates of art schools such as Cal Arts and Goldsmiths. Under its co-founder Gina Clark, her weekly Carnal Knowledge workshops will stress the emancipatory potential of performance, as it relates to issues as varied as familial piety, animal welfare, and Czech cinema. Students, if they so desire, will have an opportunity to work with Clark’s nonprofit group, Unsichtbar Birnbaum Exploratory. Sound artist Robert Hansen will offer weekly workshops to appreciate the visual arts, through the lens of sound, music, or voice. I will offer bi-monthly ‘Reading’ Slavoj Zizek group seminars to provide theoretical supplement for those emerging artists who desire it. To the degree that art schools can play a “revolutionary” role today, I will attempt to open up a space in which isolated Japanese youths and North Korean defectors can be heard.

As the art teacher John Baldessari put it “[I]f you’re lecturing in a class and there’s a car crash outside, you better bring that car crash into what you’re saying or you’ve lost them.” It is from this perspective that the crucial first step, for us, is to foster an informal classroom environment that treats art as both a past-time and a means for exploration. To the degree that students may indeed require a postpostmodern vocabulary, Beaubourg 268 firmly believes that what students need most is the unconditional permission to use everything in the world, including their own naivete, fears, and desires.

Beaubourg 268 will be comprised with approximately fifteen students from the surrounding area who are diverse in terms of their backgrounds, ages, and aspirations. We invite every one – no matter what your age or artistic background – to participate in the fun. Ideally, we here at the beaubourg want to learn from you as much as you might learn from us. An informal meeting is set for Tuesday, 19 January 2010. The official opening is set for mid-February.

When, in the 90s, Baudrillard argued that ‘the Gulf War did not take place’,  he meant that it was a war for effect – a war with an outcome known in advance which simply went through the motions of traditional warfare.

The war for Gondor is, similarly, a war for ’show’. It cannot be won – but its soldiers go through the motions anyway. And their aim is to draw the Eye of Sauron to them, and away from the Ringbearer on his lonely quest.

‘His Eye is straining towards us, blind almost to all else that is moving. So we must keep it.’

Equally, in postmodern ‘virtual’ wars, the aim is to draw the Eye of the media to the action, keeping it there and preventing it from straying anywhere else.

But, in our world, is anything going on anywhere else? Maybe there are countless Ringbearers on lonely quests, ignored and unseen, while the Eye is diverted by fireworks going on elsewhere.

“Disneyland es un modelo perfecto de todos los órdenes de simulacros entremezclados. En principio es un juego de ilusiones y de fantasmas: los Piratas, la Frontera, el Mundo Futuro, etcétera. Suele creerse que este mundo imaginario es la causa del éxito de Disneyland, pero lo que atrae a las multitudes es, sin duda y sobre todo, el microcosmos social, el goce religioso, en miniatura, de la América real, la perfecta escenificación de los propios placeres y contrariedades. Uno aparca fuera, hace cola estando dentro y es completamente abandonado al salir. La única fantasmagoría en este mundo imaginario proviene de la ternura y calor que las masas emanan y del excesivo número de gadgets aptos para mantener el efecto multitudinario. El contraste con la soledad absoluta del parking -auténtico campo de concretación-, es total. O, mejor: dentro, todo un abanico de gadgets magnetiza a la multitud canalizándola en flujos dirigidos; fuera, la soledad, dirigida hacia un solo gadget, el “verdadero”, el automóvil.

(…)

Por doquier, pues, en Disneylandia, se dibuja el perfil objetivo de América, incluso en la morfología de los individuos y de la multitud. Todos los valores son allí exaltados por la miniatura y el dibujo animado. Embalsamados y pacificados. De ahí la posibilidad de un análisis ideológico de Disneyland: núcleo del «american way of life», panegírico de los valores americanos, etc, trasposición idealizada, en fin, de una realidad contradictoria. Pero todo esto oculta otra cosa y tal trama «ideológica» no sirve más que como tapadera de una simulación de tercer orden: Disneyland existe para ocultar que es el país «real», toda la América «real», una disneyland (al modo que las prisiones existen para ocultar que s todo lo social, en su banal omnipresencia, lo que es carcelario). Disneyland es presentada como imaginaria con la finalidad de hacer creer que el resto es real, mientras que cuanto la rodea, Los Ángeles, América entera, no es ya real, sino perteneciente al orden de lo hiperreal y de la simulación. No se trata de una interpretación falsa de la realidad (la ideología), sino de ocultar que la realidad ya no es la realidad y, por tanto, de salvar el principio de realidad.

Lo imaginario de Disneylandia no es ni verdadero ni falso, es un mecanismo de disuasión puesto en funcionamiento para regenerar a contrapelo la ficción de lo real. Degeneración de lo imaginario que traduce su irrealidad infantil. Semejante mundo se pretende infantil para hacer creer que los adultos están más allá, en el mundo “real”, y para esconder que el verdadero infantilismo está en todas partes y es el infantilismo de los adultos que viene a jugar a ser niños para convertir en ilusión su infantilismo real.

(…)

Disneylandia muestra que lo real y lo imaginario perecen de la misma muerte. A una realidad diáfana responde una imaginación exangüe.”

“La precesión de los simulacros” en Cultura y simulacro, Jean Baudrillard.

I haven’t been much into mainstream music since my early twenties (not so long ago), but lately I’ve been totally intrigued with Lady GaGa, of all people. A pop star with the kind of name that would turn off anyone but the most girly of preteen girls or perhaps actual babies, she’s a former burlesque singer with a talent for songwriting, piano-playing, live performance, and video creation, a tall order for most pop stars in the last twenty years. At first glance, it’s easy to write her off as yet another vag-flashing, empty-headed teen diva, but her music is so catchy, her voice so deep and versatile, and her videos so interesting, not to mention her costumes, she at least deserves futhur consideration. After a brief obsession with her album, videos, and live performances on YouTube, I have formed the opinion that she’s everything that has built on pop stars and glam rockers before her to create the perfect embodiment of the genre.

To those of us who grew up with Madonna (and maybe even danced around the living room to Like a Prayer in a tutu), the basic genre is familiar–Super-sexed blonde who pushes the limits of hedonism with her dancy and emotional tunes.

The similarities between Madonna and Lady GaGa are obvious and were featured in an unfunny, and possibly flubbed, skit on SNL. But obviousness aside, Lady GaGa, with the help of her collaborators, the “Haus of Gaga,” is decidedly more modern, more electronic, and more costumed than any previous pop diva.

Pop seemed to experience a lull in the early nineties, only to reemerge in the late nineties younger, brighter, and less-clothed, possibly as a backlash from all those flannel shirts. Christina Aguilera amped up the ass-skin and could actually sing.

Unfortunately, she emerged in a time of teeny-popper oversaturation and was mostly lumped in with other less-talented female stars, who shall remain nameless.

Speaking of over-saturation, who feels like they’re living in the future they always feared when they were younger, and it’s awesome?!? Philosophers have identified this era as ‘Post-modern’ and have been philosophizing about it for at least a hundred years. Postmodernism is characterized by a rejection of the traditional, including the assumption that some ultimate truth exists, which we can discover by means of investigation. There is no “grand narrative” of the world. Reality, then, is constructed socially through contact with people we know and the world around us. Postmodernism generally emphasizes the media as the central means by which we construct social reality in our techno-society.

Bringing us to Baudrillard, my favorite Frenchie philosopher, who predicted that media images would become so prevalent, we wouldn’t know the difference between real life and media-created life, and it wouldn’t matter! “Images become more real than the real…in a kind of vertigo in which it does no more than resemble itself and escape in its own logic…” (from Baudrillard’s “Simulacra” p. 168).

Here’s a dose from everyone’s favorite information source: Wikipedia.
[brackets are my comments]

Baudrillard theorizes that the lack of distinctions between reality and simulacra [fancy-philosopher-speak for simulation, non-reality, imitations] originates in several phenomena:

1. Contemporary media including television, film, print and the Internet, which are responsible for blurring the line between goods that are needed and goods for which a need is created by commercial images. [Advertising makes us think we need stuff that we don't really need. Also, advertising creates that need within society, so that to be viewed in a certain way, we have to spend money to create that image.]
2. Exchange value, in which the value of goods is based on money rather than usefulness. [For example, diamonds are incredibly expensive, but not incredibly useful. The diamond's value was created by advertisers hired by De Beers in 1939.]
3. Multinational capitalism, which separates produced goods from the plants, minerals and other original materials and the processes used to create them. [Did you eat a banana today? Where did that banana come from? You don't know!]
4. Urbanization, which separates humans from the natural world.
5. Language and ideology, in which language is used to obscure rather than reveal reality when used by dominant, politically powerful groups. [Politicians, lobbyists, advertisers, and other entities use wording, images, and statistics crafted to reveal some ideas and disguise others, encouraging a specific belief.]

Baudrillard calls the reality created by the media hyperreality, and suggests that this hyperreality is the main governor of purpose and meaning in the postmodern world. Actual reality is overtaken by hyperrealism, and we are all consumed by the spectacle of the images we are presented with.

Back in pop-land, another ten years or so and a variety of less notably extravagant pop girlies come and go, and along comes Lady Gaga, who above all the others, really seems to get modern society and expoit it in a more dramatic, fantastical, extravagant, and live way than any before her. Lady Gaga, then, is the sign of the apocalypse! “…proliferation of an object world so completely out of control that it surpasses all attempts to understand, conceptualize and control it” - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The 80s, stereotyped as the height of hedonism in our modern age, are returning, but with more strength than before. We’re doomed to lose all sense of self in the swirling cacophony of modern media consumption!

But wait, Baudrillard has a solution! Fatal Strategies. We are to surrender to the indulgence, the extravagance of modern life! “…push the values of the system to the extreme in the hopes of collapse or reversal…”(SEP). Only then can we have any hope of defeating the Simulacra-monster, and reinventing meaning itself to assume a more pleasant and actualized reality (sort of).

In her album, “The Fame,” about how anyone can feel famous, Lady Gaga “deconstructs” celebrity, and demonstrates in non-monotonous variety of upbeat but dark songs, her own fascination with it, inviting her audience to share in her infatuation but maybe also to see it for what it is.

You can feel famous too! All you have to do is…

• Get wasted and party your ass off. – “Just Dance”
• Play games with people in your relationships. – “Lovegame”
• Spend stupid amounts of money making yourself beautiful and partying your ass off – “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich”
• Be fake and play games with people. – “Pokerface”
• Objectify everyone. – “Boys, Boys, Boys”
• And my favorite…Get a stalker. – “Paparazzi” (Check out her awesomely dramatic  live performance at the MTV VMAs if you haven’t already. )

And so on. Viewers can also note the ridiculously abundant real and fake product placement in her videos.

In all, Lady Gaga exhibits a silly sexiness that puts all previous sexiness (and seriousness) to shame, videos that remain entertaining eye candy by the tenth watch, live performances that continue to evolve and surprise, songs that you can actually dance your ass off too, a constantly growing slew of fabulous and fantastical costumes, all wrapped in a demure interview persona that hugs Ellen and loves the gays. She is the ultimate symbolic, hyperbolic, and fatal representation of modern pop culture, and possibly, our only hope for recreating our reality and a future in which we’re all…self-actualized…or something. Watch this video.

“This “post-critical” and “catastrophic” state of affairs render our previous conceptual world irrelevant, Baudrillard suggests, urging criticism to turn ironic and transform the demise of the real into an art form” (SEP).

(Here I work with the wiki on Jean Baudrillard . . .)

In his early books, such as The System of Objects (1968), The Consumer Society (1970), and, especially, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (trans. Charles Levin [1972; Telos, 1981]), Baudrillard focusses on consumerism—and how different kinds of objects are consumed in different ways. As against Marx, he argues that consumption, rather than production, is the main drive in capitalist society. He also rejects Marx’s naive concept of “use value”: that uses answer needs in a straightforward way. He argues that needs are constructed rather than innate—and that all consumption is fetishistic because of the social significance of commodities (“commodity fetishism”). Objects always ”say something” about their users.

Thus, the “ideological genesis of needs” precedes the production of goods to meet those needs (For a Critique . . . 63). (The implication is that whoever owns the means of consumption [Konsummittel] controls the factory. This is all commonsensical for us, but his taxonomy is more useful . . .)

According to For a Critique, there are four ways an object can acquire “value,” i.e., four logics of signification (66):

(We could replace that grammatocentric device, the pen, with a metagrammatic one, the cellphone, which is much more often to hand presently.)

1. the functional value of an object: its utility as an instrument (= the logic of practical operations). A pen writes.
2. the exchange value of an object: its market value as a commodity (= the logic of equivalence). One pen may be worth three pencils.
3. the symbolic value of an object: its value a subject assigns to an object in relation to another subject, i.e., as a gift (= the logic of ambivalence). A pen might symbolize a student’s graduation.
4. the sign value of an object: its value within a system of objects as a sign of status (= the logic of difference). A particular pen may, whilst having no functional benefit, signify prestige relative to another pen.

He argues that the first two values are disrupted by the third and, particularly, the fourth.

(I’d correlate these logics with phenomenology, political economy, structuralism and poststructuralism. Commensensical again—but what of the hand at the end of the pen/phone? The hermeneut, avatar of Thoth/Theuth?)

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Barak Obama does not exist, Tony Soprano does. Excursions into hyperreality

French thinker Jean Baudrillard (in)famously stated in 2001 “the gulf war did not take place”. He was of course notoriously misread because what he was alluding to was the war itself was so one sided as not to be a war at all. Also the war was constructed to be played out on television so the “reality” of the war was seemingly virtual. It was scripted, managed and sanitized with the end result being what William Merrin terms a semiotic event for the audience’s consumption rather than the flexing of geopolitical muscle. Here we see a certain Hollywood-izing of war coverage where traditional war reportage stands aside for a model that comes straight from the script factory which gave us prequels to the Gulf War in films such as Apocalypse Now.

In a similar sense the virtualization of political agendas using the small screens in our lives has become something so commonplace many are not only accepting the form of what is being placed onto these screens but the banal and meaningless content as well. The political “doorstop”, 15 seconds of pithy soundbite shapes a reality for which there is no original and often effectively says nothing. Yet we go on to vote for and defend these people and the media they are manipulating.

The model for these presentations can also take as their original television and cinema, not anything extracted from concrete events. For Baudrillard this is hyperreality. As a result political ideology is in danger of being replaced by a theatricality of the image which can overwhelm the discriminatory capacities of the viewer. We will prefer Schwarzenegger because he defeated Predator or vote for Barak Obama because we already have had an African American President on 24.

Using the radical thinking of Jean Baudrillard we suggest Barak Obama is indicative of the rise of the virtual politician, mouthing platitudes and homespun wisdom gleaned straight out of the multiplex. This hyperreal effect is indicative of the zeitgeist because not enough people are demanding reality anymore and instead are opting for reality-lite via the screens in their lives. (This assertion is exemplified by watching real today’s “Mafioso” who often are modeling their behavior on television gangsters, hence we have, in our own minds Tony Soprano being as real if not more real than Barak Obama. )

Sooooo

get that? its an interpretation of Hal Foster’s views on art, which I kinda agree with.

The (postmodern) artist becomes a manipulator of signs more than a producer ofart objects, and the viewer and active reader of messages rather than a passive contemplator of the aesthetic.

From that drawing I could go in a number of directions, which is why I went back to the smaller drawings.

I started combining disney and artworks, and artworks and other artworks to create art that was a culmination of efforts by me (the sign-manipulator) and the artists of yore.

Apologies for the photographs as I had already linked my camera to the computer and could not be bothered to unlink it so its done with photobooth.

From these I began to make different products:

With these drawings I’d taken a different step into both the commercialism of art, and the success of contemporary artists.

In the top one, “mickey koons” I morphed mickey into a work which although was a found-object piece before, had more symbolism to the Jeff Koons piece. Thus showing the power of contemporary painters compared to a great like walt disney whose company has become a major company of commercial success. Also brings back to the fact that artists are modern day heroes, in comparison with heroes I had when I was younger.

In the latter, “Minnie Hirst” I feel the success is even greater. Its all about success in this one. The famous business artist Hirst is draped over an unsuspecting Minnie Mouse. The tres chic polka dot dress is but one of Hirst’s most recognisable paintings. It is painted onto acetate in the same way my other cel objects where made. This represents the collector’s value of the artwork as well as the value of Hirst and Disney’s work. It raises questions of success and if the value of an art should be based entirely around its price-tag. I feel this second piece is more successful, mainly due to the simplicity and the cryptic nature. Even though the dots represent the over-success of Hirst, they can also be seen as what his work originally meant, faith in medicine (something that is completely unindulgent), and juxtaposed next to something that has become so much of an indulgence (disneyland) it becomes a battle for what is more important in life, indulgence of necessities. Tis also quite nice due to the fact that Minnie Mouse wears a polka dot dress already and its just a slight modification of a well-known image.

Am gonna start working with 3D things possibly next time, so stay tuned.

Till next time.

In order to determine what the presence of the ghost or spectre means for the present, in way of its effect on temporal linearity and our own understanding of history, one must first approach the cause of the apparition and its uncanny mobilization. To be sure, the ghost as we have discussed, is the rebirth and reiteration of a past historical moment, a hazy calling from beyond the grave; the ghost qua ghost is certainly always the result of a death. But, when speaking of the ghost as the result of death, we are inherently speaking of two deaths; both the demise of the individual who proceeds to haunt over us alongside (and always bound up in) the death of a moment, a time and a chronological ordering. However, if it is indeed the case that ghosts and therefore time can repeat themselves, then what is to be said of history? If it is to be thought that, through the ghost, history makes a comeback, then ultimately we are calling into question the very stability of time logic and our own perceptions of the past as a lost, irretrievable moment. If as Jameson stated, our own present can “under exceptional circumstances betray us” (Jameson, 2008,p.39), then what are these circumstances and how do they relate to a loss of our sense of history and thereby result in the conjuration of the spectre. Throughout this chapter I shall investigate the idea that in fact history itself has come to an end, the ultimate death, which has thereby resulted in both reported sightings of ghosts and the untimely revival of ghost hunting as a method of creating a (virtual) present that remains indebted to a lost history whereby a sense of temporal stability is created for its residents. The death of history is then, to be sure, a worthy cause for the return of the spectre and a return to spectrality as a tool of contemporary socio-cultural analysis. I shall examine three variants of the theorising that history has come to an end, beginning with that of Francis Fukuyama on the end of a political philosophy, moving to the loss of narrative and finally the modernist era.

Fukuyama first introduced the idea that political philosophy had reached its optimum status and thus resulted in the end of history in an article for the journal The National Interest in 1989, entitled “The End of History?”. Fukuyama’s article outlined the end of history as he saw it, claiming that “liberal democracy may constitute the ‘end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ and the ‘final form of human government’ and as such ‘constituted the end of history’.” (Fukuyama, 2006, xi), a concept inspired by the writings of the philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Fukuyama develops his ideas further in his The End of History and The Last Man (2006) whereby he works through both Hegel and Marx’s notions of the end of history being satisfied by a single dominating politics, Liberalism and Communism respectively. Fukuyama wades through Hegel’s take on Plato’s thymos, a deep rooted desire in man to be recognised, valued as himself. Hegel deduced that the desire to be recognised was the pivotal factor in man producing dictatorial leadership, therefore at the end of history, all men would see themselves as equal to all other men and liberalism would be the natural progression of man in reaching this point. For Marx, the finishing point of history meant an end to class and the bourgeoisie, resulting in, as with Hegel, all men being equal, this is seen by Marx as the point at which the state dealt with the problems of capital and attained Communist rule. Fukuyama claims that the end of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in the West, both the failing of communism and fascist politics, has given way to a plateau of democratic liberalism thus resulting in the equality of men, the degradation of class and in return brought about the end of political history. Through the synthesis of both Hegelian and Marxian conceptions of the end of history, Fukuyama develops a historical demise that is non-apocalyptic, a positive outlook for the future of mankind.

For Fukuyama then, history is, therefore, to be measured by politics and its philosophy; history has no goals only those sought out by man (thymos) and if as Fukuyama purports these goals have been engulfed in contemporary liberal democratic capitalism then, for sure, history only now exists as a measurement of the periodic past. With the end of historical political evolution man can return to a more animalistic way of life, existing to satisfy his own desires, but this perceived satisfaction surely comes with its own set of destabilising affects? If, as Fukuyama claims, liberal democracy has spelled the death knell for history and further political horizon then why does society as a whole remain dissonant in what is seemingly the height of socio-political development? It is apparent that with the end of history comes an uncertain future and where should one find stability if not but the past? If there are no great ideologies left to be realised then society has indeed reached its fullest potential. However, the question must be asked ‘what comes next?’ and there would appear to be a lack of answers. Perhaps this is the reason that the spectre has made its return, perhaps at the death of history comes the prophetic shadows of the past to provide stability to our uncertain present and future. The end of history leaves one feeling more than a little pessimistic about what is yet to come; Fukuyama claims that this gloomy outlook of our current and past century “stands in sharp contrast to the optimism of the previous one.” (2006, p.04), and yet the Victorians too felt the need to seek spirits for answers. Fukuyama states that the optimism felt in the nineteenth century was predominantly the result of two beliefs in what the future held;

The first was the belief that modern science would improve human life by conquering disease and poverty. Nature, long man’s adversary, would be mastered by modern technology and made to serve the end of human happiness. Second, free democratic governments would continue to spread to more and more countries around the world.

(Fukuyama, 2006, p.04)

If we have, as is suggested in The End of History and The Last Man (2006), seen the event horizon of political evolution and with it a collapse in political ideology then we are witnessing a time when only the past can be conjured to make sense of the future, where spectres that have remained dormant for years, raise their weary heads to nod us in the right direction. But, we have not just lost our way in terms of how the development of our society has come to a historical end in terms of how political praxis now fails to work towards a new order , but also in the way that we consider ourselves to pass periodically from one historical moment to the next, through the narrative, the great events that define one historical moment from the next. This is the death of something far more organic than politics and is symptomatic of what Lyotard defines as the ‘postmodern condition’.

For Lyotard, grand narratives are what provide societies with a history, they are the enforced universal accounts of a temporal period that are used to distinguish one great moment from the next (race, class, freedom). Narratives provide us with a universalised account of the past and indeed it can be said that one views all past historical moments as universals, carrying parcels of ideology, philosophy and politics particular to that time. Through the grand narrative we have always made sense of our present and our past, narratives are how we have defined ourselves in history since records began, but for Lyotard this causes problems. Lyotard no longer sees the world or history as running in grand narratives, he claims that postmodernism has provided us with more complex desires and a heterogeneous society, therefore he “opposes the very aspiration to domesticate the world by bringing it under the rubric of an explanation” (Browning, 2000, p.40). The death of the narrative therefore emancipates us from the histories of the past, in contrast to Fukuyama; Lyotard sees our present as floating independently through a time of perpetual flux that can no longer be summed up by a single ideology or politics. For Lyotard validation comes from technological and scientific advances, through the ongoing development of a society, “he sees their role in legitimating knowledge in the modern world as redundant in light of the advent of postmodernity” (Browning, 2000, p.01). Lyotard claims that “The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses” (Lyotard, 2001, p.37) and is therefore dead, broken down and out of use, according to Jameson, in an introduction to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (2001) they have become “buried master-narratives” (2001, xii). If this is so and taking into account Fukuyama’s claim that the horizon of political ideology has also been reached, where in our own conception of time do we sit? If the manner, in which we distinguish our time from others, both politically and through historic narration, has ended, it should be of no surprise that spectres haunt us.

Through ghost hunting and the conjuration of spectres I posit that we are digging up as it were, what Jameson refers to as “buried” narratives. The resurrection of the past grounds us in the present; history’s spectres, those that appear from the death of history itself, confirm our present through a distorted, bastardised version of the past that at the least presents us with what we are not. By this I mean to say that on encountering the ghost one can imagine that it is not him or herself that is ‘out of joint’, as the anachronism presents itself purely as an anachronism, something that has appeared incorrectly in the linearity of time, yet it confirms to its audience that there is a definite past and furthermore a definite future. Although the ghost itself is temporally disjointed, those who witness its apparition can be sure that they are not.

Certainly this exhumation of narrative is to be thought of as hauntological, the ghost making its return to finish its business, to set the future straight by temporarily bringing with it the disjoining of the past and present. Hauntology here describes, when mobilised through the spectre, the idea that history is capable of being repetitive and that perhaps through dialogue with the ghost, the occult enthusiast learns more about the passing of time and his own place within it than those that postulate over its demise. But the ghost and the death of history are by no means limited to the end or burying of narrative and politics; as the notion of postmodernity in regards to the loss of narrated legitimisation is integral to Lyotards reading of history, so too is it intrinsic to Jameson’s understanding of the complexities of our time.

Jameson maps history through periods of cultural change (i.e. Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modernity), and claims that the time in which we currently reside is that of the postmodern. Postmodernism is “the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement” (Jameson, 2008,p.01) and is characterised by “a new depthlessness” and “a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity” (Jameson, 2008,p.06). For Jameson high modernity has ended and with it all the originality of cultural production, indeed there is, in Jameson’s view, nothing new to come, no new memories to be created but purely the mechanical reproduction of the past, subsequently resulting in the death of history and the rise of spectrality; “The crisis of historicity now dictates a return”(Jameson,2008,p.25), a return of the spectre and a return of the past. Postmodernism as the historical successor to modernism brings about what Jameson describes as ‘the death of the subject’; as there is no forward motion to history in terms of cultural and social activity, a resulting death occurs of cultural history proper and so a perceived progression can only happen through the spectralisation of things. This a theory that is also prevalent in the work of Jean Baudrillard, Baudrillard endorses the idea that there is no longer an original and that we live in a world where everything is merely a copy of itself (the simulacrum), where “truth, reference and objective causes have ceased to exist.” (Baudrillard,1999, p.171). The subject dies as it no longer has an organic original to carry with it to the future, the subject is replaced by a replica, a copy, determining the dawn of the spectre and an intrinsically hauntological occurrence, as we shall see, it is through this process that “nostalgia assumes its full meaning.” (Baudrillard, 1999, p.170). The subject returns as a degraded copy of what it once was, the same can be said of the human subject: the ghost is the replication and reiteration of a past moment, a past body. We have reached this hauntological moment where the erasure of history has ultimately led to its conjuration from beyond the grave, through what Jameson succinctly describes as being;

the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social information have had, in one way or another, to preserve. (Jameson, 1999, p.20)

The obliteration of history and historical traditions alike give rise to temporal instability, nostalgia, discontent with the present and a longing for the past, this is why ghosts continue to proliferate through contemporary culture. History is dead; the evidence of its demise lies in a grave filled with proliferated liberalism, forgotten narratives and exhausted cultural practice. The ghost hunters are the ones that cry for the exhumation of these decaying remains of our cultural past. Through divination and necromancy, hopes of the resurrection of history are kept alive; spectres provide the proof that although history for us has been lost, it is not at rest and wishes to make its eerie presence known. But, the ghosts of the end of history are not only lurking in the backdrop of the present, to be sure, they haunt every aspect of modern day life, reliving through postmodern cultural practice as the regurgitation of the past. Postmodernity and late capitalism have fed on society’s yearn for the past, commodifying both her remains and the ghost proper alike.

Están lanzando lo que ellos llaman una onda de choque.
Otro meteorito desinformador contra la masa.
Una extensa mancha de noticias
ya confirmadas por fuentes oficiosas.
Es irrelevante evitar la propaganda.
Afirman de manera absurda que
el mundo no puede pensarse a sí mismo,
que un destructor óxido negro saltó
por encima del nosotros.
Adonde quiera que va, daña el mañana .
Incluye una versión corrupta de si mismo.
Impide imaginar los eventos por venir.
El hombre es un pedazo del Universo hecho mierda.
A pesar de la falta de la consciencia
planes adicionales para él están siendo revisados
como un punto pegajoso, como una fuerza oscura
misteriosamente afinada para sonar con el ADN.
Dos estados de vacíos iguales
pueden acabar como seres diferentes.
Incluso alguien inanimado como una piedra.
Un arquetipo arconte puede llorar.
Cosas que que todavía no están allí,
como en una melodía,
en un estado fantasmal cercano a la existencia.
Una vez que el estado se convierten en realidad,
retiene esa realidad para siempre.
Resuena.
Depende de cuantos universos
de distintos tipos vibran en el multiverso.
Depende de cuanta pauta podemos representar.
Día a día , minuto a minuto,
el pasado esta siendo actualizado.
Una pendiente resbaladiza de pintura.
Observadores afectan los sistemas que miden.
Depende de cuantos tipos habitan el cada lienzo
determinan las leyes de los detalles
que finalmente determinan
la colocación de estrellas y galaxias
en el cielo presente.
La probabilidad de observar
la inflación cósmica en tiempo real,
la reconocible fuerza que está acelerando
la expansión de la estupidez.

El libro “Dios no Existe”, con artículos de pensadores y escritores de todas las épocas, es otra acción militante contra la religión, fuente de violencia y sumisión para el recopilador británico Christopher Hitchens.

Polémica antología sobre ateísmo. Texto: Gustavo Varela. Revista Ñ. 07.10.2009

Dios ha muerto: así lo sentenció F. Nietzsche en su libro La gaya ciencia, en 1882, hace ya más de un siglo. Sin embargo las discusiones contemporáneas en torno al pensamiento religioso y a la presencia de dios en las prácticas humanas parecen contradecir aquella proclama e inaugurar el retorno de un problema filosófico que la modernidad, suponíamos, había despachado para siempre.

Gianni Vattimo, Richard Rorty, Juergen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Hans Gadamer, entre otros, escriben, discuten, se reúnen en mesas redondas o en conversaciones teóricas para hablar de religión y entonces Dios, la Biblia, lo sagrado, la trinidad, Moisés o la fe vuelven a formar parte de una batería conceptual filosófica que creíamos perimida. ¿Por qué? ¿Cuál es la necesidad de este retorno? ¿No era claro que el pensamiento crítico exige el fin de las religiones o de cualquier otra forma de clausura trascendente? ¿No alcanza con la ciencia para la verdad, con el acuerdo para la moral, con la democracia para la política o con el psicoanálisis para la angustia existencial? Después de Nietzsche, de Freud y de Marx, ¿es necesario volver a pensar en Dios o en la religión o en una fuerza divina para edificar nuestro pensamiento humano? A lo largo de la modernidad, y en particular en el siglo XX, aprendimos a pensar sin dios: la antropología, la política, la sociología, el psicoanálisis, la pedagogía, en fin, todas las formas contemporáneas del pensar excluyen a dios de su cuadrícula de explicaciones. ¿Cuáles son las razones de este retorno de lo religioso en la reflexión teórica?

No hay dudas que habitamos el fin de una época. La crisis del pensamiento moderno, anunciada en miles de páginas bajo el prefijo pos (posmodernidad, poshumanismo, posindustrial, etc.) implica un giro y una metamorfosis en los conceptos y valores sobre los que se había edificado el sentido de las prácticas humanas desde el siglo XVII en adelante. Después de la muerte teórica de Dios, asistimos al fin de la Verdad, de los grandes relatos, de la objetividad, de la historia, de las ideologías, de la ética humanista. El pensamiento contemporáneo parece referir a la caída como un modo de afirmar la incertidumbre a la que está expuesto cuando pierde el andamiaje que le brindó la razón por más de trescientos años. La demolición del edificio moderno deja escombros: culpas, ausencias, reconstrucciones, críticas, obsesiones, abandono, reordenamientos. El fin de la metafísica y el nihilismo que le sigue, anunciado por Nietzsche y luego por Heidegger, es uno de sus efectos. La necesidad de una nueva ontología es otro. Deleuze, Badiou, Sloterdijk, Negri, Baudrillard, entre tantos autores, se hacen cargo de la devastación moderna y, sin la necesidad de Dios, elaboran toda una siderurgia teórica para fraguar los cimientos filosóficos en un nuevo suelo.

Es en esta perspectiva de reconocimiento del fin de la metafísica en la que se ubica el filósofo italiano Gianni Vattimo. Pero, lejos de aquellos teóricos que prescinden de Dios, Vattimo vuelve sobre el pensamiento religioso y afirma que el nihilismo posmoderno, el “pensamiento débil” tal como él lo llama, es la “verdad actual del cristianismo”. Esto, lejos de tener una mirada crítica sobre la época contemporánea, es una afirmación positiva en tanto supone la caída de los grandes relatos, el derrumbe de la verdad objetiva de la ciencia, y con ello, la posibilidad de la interpretación y la emergencia de la diferencia.

Si la verdad es una “experiencia de participación en una comunidad”, la diferencia en las distintas interpretaciones es posible gracias a la verdad del amor, la caridad. El suponer una verdad objetiva, es decir trascendente a la historia, es la fuente de los fundamentalismos; la hermenéutica, como posibilidad de interpretación, es la experiencia de una existencia histórica, no sólo de la verdad, sino también de los hombres. Por ello, para Vattimo, la encarnación de Dios en Cristo, es “la renuncia a su propia trascendencia”, es decir, el despliegue de un cristianismo antimetafísico, donde Dios es mundano, está rebajado y fuera del cielo, y lejos de ser una verdad objetiva que debe imponerse como único fundamento, es un mensaje histórico de salvación, es decir, de interpretación. Desde esta perspectiva, la muerte de Dios anunciada por Nietzsche, puede ser vista como “la muerte de Cristo en la Cruz narrada por los Evangelios”. El nihilismo es el fin de la metafísica y el imperio de la diferencia, sólo posible a través del amor. Es decir, frente a la intolerancia de los fundamentalismos, Vattimo propone a la caridad cristiana como el único valor que nos permite aceptar las diferencias y reducir la violencia. La religión retorna, en el pensamiento del filósofo italiano, como “no-religión”, es decir, no como un dogma ni como institución indiscutible.

Frente a posiciones como la de Vattimo, donde lo religioso es visto y recuperado a partir del fin de la modernidad, otras lecturas insisten en llevar a juicio a Dios y someterlo al tribunal de la razón. El motivo principal de estas interpretaciones de corte iluminista es el de enfrentar a los totalitarismos políticos de base religiosa, donde el fundamento divino trasciende necesariamente las fronteras de la religión y se hace violencia terrorista, atentado y muerte.

La caída de las Torres Gemelas en septiembre de 2001, además de una reflexión sobre sus derivaciones en la política de Occidente, abrió nuevamente el debate sobre la existencia de Dios y los efectos que producen las creencias religiosas en la vida de los hombres. Lejos de abandonar los postulados de la modernidad, aquí se afirma el poder de la razón y la verdad de la ciencia como un principio que permite desarticular el oscurantismo religioso y demostrar la falsedad de todos sus enunciados. Es decir, “aumentar las luces”, como afirma el filósofo Michel Onfray en su Tratado de ateología (Anagrama, 2006), insistir con el iluminismo moderno, llevarlo al extremo, con el fin de liberar a los hombres de la barbarie y la ignorancia. Se trata, de alguna manera, de seguir manteniendo la vocación higiénica que la modernidad manifiesta respecto de las creencias religiosas, mediante la claridad argumentativa y la verdad luminosa que la razón nos ofrece. Si el fanatismo del creyente produce guerras, atentados, y muerte; si bajo el nombre de Dios se llevan adelante sacrificios, mutilaciones o abusos; si los argumentos religiosos se oponen a los argumentos de científicos, no se trata entonces de incorporar a Dios de un modo más pacífico y privado, sino de demostrar una y otra vez la falsedad de su existencia; de comprender que todas las religiones no son más que supersticiones inventadas por los hombres con el fin de seguir sosteniendo una forma de dominio cruel sobre sus semejantes.

Esta es la perspectiva que sostiene el libro Dios no existe. Lecturas esenciales para el no creyente del escritor y periodista inglés Christopher Hitchens (Debate, 2009). Este ensayo, de reciente aparición, es una extensa antología de textos que van desde Lucrecio, poeta y filósofo romano del siglo I a. C., hasta autores del siglo XXI, donde todas las reflexiones elegidas comparten un pensamiento crítico y en muchos casos devastador en contra de la existencia de Dios. En la introducción, Hitchens afirma de inmediato su mirada sobre la religión y la preocupación que lo lleva a publicar su libro: la creencia en Dios es una peste (el texto comienza con una referencia a la novela de Albert Camus) y “esta antología pretende identificar y asilar esos bacilos con mayor precisión”. Con la misma urgencia, refiere a los atentados con coches bomba del año 2007 en Londres (su ciudad natal), donde en nombre de la religión “el odio y la violencia están envenenando todas las vidas”.

Es decir, el libro se presenta no sólo como una defensa del ateísmo militante que el autor sostiene, sino como una necesidad de tomar conciencia de los efectos terroríficos que produce la religión en la vida contemporánea. Este libro es, en cierta forma, la continuación de un libro anterior de Hitchens (Dios no es bueno. Alegato contra la religión, Debate, 2008) donde el autor, luego de un análisis crítico de la religión y sus efectos –”La religión mata”, “La religión como pecado original”, “¿Es la religión una modalidad de abuso de menores?”, son algunos de sus capítulos – hace un llamado a la resistencia de la razón y a la necesidad de una nueva Ilustración que sostenga como único objeto de estudio, no a Dios o sus mesías o a sus libros sagrados, sino al hombre y la mujer. Sin embargo, y a pesar de la claridad que brinda la ciencia actual, Hitchens cree que es “necesario también conocer al enemigo [dios]… y disponerse a combatirlo”.

Es en esta batalla ilustrada que se inscribe Dios no existe, ya no como un alegato sino como una genealogía del ateísmo que incluye a autores de las diversas ramas del pensamiento y de los distintos períodos históricos de la cultura occidental. Desde la prosa de los Rubáiyat, de Omar Jayam, de fines del año mil a la voz de Darwin en su Autobiografía; filósofos como David Hume o Karl Marx; escritores como Joseph Conrad, George Orwell o John Updike; S. Freud, Carl Sagan, Anatole France, Einstein, Lovecraft o Mark Twain, en una extensa y muy completa reconstrucción cronológica de pensamientos que, de un modo u otro, criticaron la idea de Dios o directamente afirmaron su inexistencia. La antología finaliza con la escritora de origen islámico Ayaan Hirsi Ali quien actualmente vive oculta y amenazada de muerte por la yihad por su defensa de los derechos de las mujeres musulmanas. Su artículo “Cómo (y por qué) me hice infiel” es un pequeño ensayo autobiográfico que describe el camino que la condujo de la sumisión religiosa musulmana al ateísmo que hoy sostiene. No es sólo un pensamiento sino la descripción de una práctica concreta de abandono de la idea de Dios, una emancipación que tuvo a la razón como guía y el respeto a sí misma como “brújula moral”. Una experiencia de infidelidad que Christopher Hitchens elige para cerrar su libro, acaso como una forma de decir que no sólo es posible vivir sin Dios, sino que, tratándose del “enemigo más antiguo de la humanidad”, es vital y necesario.

Para sostener la religión o para devastar definitivamente el poder de dios, lo cierto es que la filosofía del siglo XXI sigue administrando las consecuencias del fin de la modernidad y el ingreso a una nueva época para la que aún no tenemos un pensamiento. El resurgimiento de ciertos problemas es un signo de la devastación teórica con la que nos enfrentamos. Mientras tanto la razón y la fe siguen intercambiando sus cartas y acusándose mutuamente de los monstruos que producen.

Ficha del Libro: Editorial Debate.

I’ll admit it, I was not impressed with Baudrillard’s Simulations and Simulacra initially. But after another read through, a more organic reading, I was more amenable to where he began. The hyperreal, characterizing the inability of differentiating the real from the non-real (fantasy), has a base in the way we re/present the world to ourselves… in words or images/aesthetics. B. writes: “[Simulation] is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.” In this description, simulation (and the hyperreal) finds a similar concept in Foucault’s “heterotopia” – a single place that includes various places, or the difference between a mirror image and the actual image. However, the claim that B. makes about not having access to real still bothers me. Not because the claim assumes that we do not know what is real, but because I can still walk into a wall and real(ly) feel pain after. We do have access to the real in a corporeal sense and to real knowledge – President Bush did begin the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In relation to image and new media, however, the point that reverberates in the work on comics that I have been researching and in the work that Ulmer discusses in “The Object of Post-Criticism” – as a starting place.

Similarly, if we look closely at B.’s work, we are not in the traditional logic that has come up from the Greeks: “We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons. Simulation is characterised by a precession of the model, of all models around the merest fact – the models come first, and their orbital (like the bomb) circulation constitutes the genuine magnetic field of events. Fact no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection of the models; a single fact may even be engendered by all the models at once” (31-32). By taking what has already been created, by what we may (un)know, and doing something new with those (arti)facts, we begin a new trajectory. It is not ‘true.’ It is not ‘false.’ It is, in the Heideggerian sense of the transitive verb. In other words, we are constantly in transition when in the logic of simulation(s), never fixed in place – Jean-Luc Nancy’s discussion of the image in Chater 3 of The Ground of the Image seems to be analogous here. When B. speaks about film (maybe the second-order simulacra that he talks about earlier: law), this simulation-logic attempts to present a code to be coded. But if we take Ulmer’s call to work post-critically, this code can be reordered and interrupt the laws of film, and new media by extension (B. critiques McLuhan here; 119-120). This is the test (“Every image, every media message, but also any functional environmental object, is a test”; 120) that B. speaks of – the selection that produces a message about the ‘real.’ This would be the perpetual ‘examination of the code’ (120).

That, I think, is much more useful for scholarship today – closer to culture than it is separated.

Una cultura de pago no es tu amiga,
es un conjunto de novedades tontamente hermosas.
Un híbrido que retoma con fuerza la vanalidad.
Un “compra compra” lo que no puedes imaginar.
Algo así como una cultura de ideas y valores
privativa de los mensajes provenientes del suelo
y de aplastamiento de discursos inteligentes y claros.
Sólo por la fama y el dinero.

No hay que ir muy lejos.
le llegó la hora en diciembre
dándose a sí misma dentelladas
con objetos y seres a adorar nuevos,
con las vísceras al aire por las galerías.
Adolescentes de marfil.
Por la ciudad pasean mujeres afiladas.
Los ángeles asoman diseños basados en metal
bajo sus alas

¿Te parece que esto es raro?

La misma curadora con rostro de Jesús
y cara de sesión sado.
Sufriente cuelga una cartera
en pleno centro del ya mítico espacio inamovible.
La crisis prefabricada que oculta la mentira.
Los márgenes son el lugar donde nada es definitivo,
una aglomeración caótica desconsignada por el olvido.
Ubicada en ancianos con el pelo índigo.
Extraña forma de suicidio por la postmodernidad.
Un fuego de zafiro.
Una forma para capturar la imposibilidad.

Se acabó la decencia.
Somos una cultura global profunda.
Los pobres adoran a los ricos y los ricos
asesinan a quien no produce su riqueza.
Sin embargo, al menos
es el momento del cambio de polos.
El lugar de encuentro de los seres sencillos.
La Destrucción de los Tiranos
que con dinero cortan el aire y lanzan
imágenes del ser que estan prohibidas.
Basura reciclada en nombre de una proyección
en círculos sobre el suelo.
Viajando como un tren junto a él
no encuentran resistencia.
Alguien quiere vender lo que falta
por comprar de sus vidas:
un molde con rasgos femeninos de nada diabólico.

Aquellos que no son psicópatas son inducidos.
Una detallada investigación de la Nueva Era
hace un acercamiento a esa distorsión de los nudillos.
Discordia y miedo por el milagro del arte
seguirán existiendo.
La imagen no hace nada raro.
La llegaron a tener en diferentes sitios
para convertirla en algo nuevo.
Una nueva forma cuando tienes
las manos juntas sobre los ojos.
Nada afecta en mucho a los humanos,
no pueden ver excepto la forma de la luz,
al menos de este lado del mundo,
películas viejas, lagartos de goma.
Un tobogán de luz para llegar a Dios.
Mientras una oveja pasea por el público.
Maldita maravilla inconfrontable.

"... that coincided with it point for point."

Jorge Luis Borges: “On Exactitude in Science”

…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

Jean Baudrillard.

Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory. It is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map…

"The map that precedes the territory..."

Us recordem la propera reunió del seminari.

Dissabte, 21 de novembre de 2009
Jean Baudrillard (PDF 130 kB)

Selecció http://www.gep21.org/tpk/baudrillard-selec.pdf

Encara no tenim volontaris per fer la presentació del text triat! Cal tenir en compte que els coordinadors us acompanyaràn a la lectura i us podràn resoldre les dficultats. Podeu demanar més informació sobre aquest tema o qualsevol altre a marcel-duchamp@hotmail.com

For those of you who don’t know the finer points of internet abbreviation, the title means “What the Hell is WYSIWYG.”  WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get,” as in WYSIWYG software.  You may not think you know what WYSIWYG software is, but in fact you use it all the time.  Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and Dreamweaver are all examples of WYSIWYG.

The idea behind WYSIWYG is that it gives you, the creator, and idea of what your audience will see in the final product of your creation.  It also is design to make the creative process easier for you.  For instance, when using Dreamweaver to create a website, instead of having to type in all these laborious programming codes, you simply get a palette of windows with various options telling you what your options are and giving you a rough idea of what your design looks like.

The same can also be said of this blog.  Here’s a screenshot of what I see even while I type this sentence:

As you can see, the user interface is neatly broken up into a writing window, a publishing window, a tag window, and a category window, along with the dashboard stuff to the left.  All is designed for ease of use and convenience.

All is also based on previous media.  Although the internet may be this newfangled thingamajig, our representations of it aren’t.  The text window?  Looks and operates a lot like a Word document, which in turn was based on typewriting.  Also, I can’t “publish” a blog.  It sounds fancy, but in reality it’s not going into print and circulating so that the academic world may benefit from my wealth of knowledge (don’t I wish!).  Categories and tags are metatext organizational tools for the information I submit, but there is no physical tag being placed on this blog.  We’re using old metaphors to describe new technology.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing.  We have to be able to transfer all of this information somehow, and the majority of the population does not understand HTML (or even know what it is).  This appropriation of older models helps us understand the technology.  But it also shapes our world view as well.

In his essay Dreamweaver and the Procession of Simulations, Collin Gifford Brooke uses the theories of a very wordy individual named Baudrillard to discuss something similar in Dreamweaver.  Brooke says,

[T]he users of the interface believe that how they design a page using Dreamweaver is how the page will actually appear, and as Baudrillard would argue, this is an example of confusing the real with the model (17).  But as Baudrillard would also argue, we have no choice in the age of simulation but to let the model stand for the real and, in turn, become the real itself” (p.59)

Trust me when I say that Brooke’s summary is easier than actually trying to read any of Baudrillard’s work.

So what am I trying to get at here?  Well basically I’m saying that we have taken these old terminologies and ideas and used them to the point where we forget to separate the real from the unreal or hyperreal.  A dashboard is no longer a place to throw your sunglasses; now it’s an organizational tool from which you control the way information is presented. We don’t look through windows, we look at windows (and Windows).

Baudrillard might argue that all these extra layers of reality are a bad thing, but he’s a little bit of a technophobe so we’ll just ignore him.  This multi-layered reality is the world that we live in, and I think it’s actually more exciting than just an ordinary one.  If we use old methods to explain new things, it’s just because we need a way of understanding and using them.  I’m not going to confuse this window with the window behind my head.  They’re separate.  But one lets me see a fence, while the other lets me view the world.