Over at Poetix Dominic has an interesting post up responding to Pete’s recent discussion of normativity over at Speculative Heresy. Dominic writes:

The crux here seems to be that “man” is not in himself a normal animal: normative accounts of human being are best taken as descriptions of the commitments we make to ourselves and others as preconditions for various kinds of social being, and the capacity to bear such norms is rather haphazardly instantiated in our animal selfhood.

This split between the normed human being and the ab-normal human animal plays out in Badiou, for example, as a tension between the “de-subjectivising” pull of egoic self-interest and the possibility of constructing a political “subject” which affirms (or “verifies”) egalitarian norms. But there’s a problem here: egoic self-interest is arguably also a normed expression of human being – neo-liberalism explicitly affirms it as a norm, as a precondition for higher forms of social organisation (e.g. those based on competitive markets). The conflict between Badiou’s ethical “good” (tenacity in the construction of truths) and “evil” (de-subjectivation, the saggy victory of the flesh) can be seen as a conflict between rival normative commitments rather than between committed and uncommitted being as such. What Rowan Williams calls the “false anthropology” of neo-liberalism does not merely declare, in social Darwinist fashion, that human beings are intrinsically self-seeking creatures: it also goes to considerable lengths to modify the “soul” of society (its basic normative commitments and symbolic co-ordinates) so that individuals will perceive this to be their true nature and act accordingly.

There’s a good deal more in Dominic’s post, especially with respect to heteronormativity and discussions of heterosexuality coming out of the Christian Right, but I wanted to draw attention to this passage in particular as I think it represents something that is truncated or underdetermined within the framework of critiques of neo-liberal capitalism. While I do not disagree with Rowan William’s thesis that the picture of the human as an intrinsically self-seeking creature constitutes a false anthropology, I have noticed that there is a tendency to treat the core of neo-liberal capitalist ideology as consisting almost entirely of this false anthropology.

read on!

What is missing in this conception of neo-liberal ideology is the legal and normative framework that underlies this way of relating to the world and others. On the one hand, in order for neo-liberal capitalist ideology to get off the ground it requires what what might be called a “pure subject” or a “subject-without-qualities”, not unlike Descartes’ cogito or Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception. At the heart of neo-liberal capitalist ideology (NLCI) is not so much a subject pursuing self-interest, as a legal subject functioning as the substrate of property, commercial obligations and debts, and divorced from social context and conditions of production. If this subject must necessarily be a pure subject or subject without content or particularity of any form, then this is because NLCI must establish the equivalence or identity of all subjects populating the social field. In other words, for this social system to present itself as just– and I am not suggesting that this social system is just, far from it –it must be able to hold 1) that the lowest subject is equivalent to the most privileged and successful subject in both the eyes of the law and how the system functions (i.e., that the lowliness of the low is the result of her failure and is her responsibility), and 2) that distributions of wealth are not systematic effects of social structure and how it is organized, but rather is an effect of the individual industry of agents within the social field. These claims are dependent on the positing of a pure subject or subject-without-qualities as the essence of what social subjects are, ignoring any discourse about fields or milieus of individuation (in Deleuze and Simondon’s sense) out of which subjects emerge or are produced.

Second, for NLCI to function it is necessary that the law have a particular form that governs social relations among agents. While the self-interested or self-seeking nature of neo-liberal subjects is certainly one of the key notes of NLCI, this false anthropology is not, in and of itself, sufficient to establish the NLCI as a (dis)functioning system. Were the system composed only of agents pursuing their self-interest we would not have the NLCI, but rather the state of nature so vividly described by Hobbes and Spinoza. More fundamental than agents pursuing their own self-interest is the normative and legal system that mediates relations between agents in pursuing this self-interest. In its minimal form, this normative and legal system is one that revolves primarily around the attribution of duties and debts. That is, it is a normative and legal system that is particularly focused on the grounds under which contracts are maintained. Just as the subject-without-qualities of NLCI is a subject divorced from milieus of individuation, transcendentalized, and universalized in a false transcendental anthropology, the form of the law as the grounds of contractual obligation and debt is a normative system divorced from any milieu of individuation and premised on a subject-without-qualities whereby the equivalence of all subjects is guaranteed so that the law might effect itself despite the inequality inherent in the functioning of the law at the level of concrete social relations. Likewise, such a structure of legality also underlies the structure of private property. These two features, the form of the law and the subject-without-qualities, are, I believe, the fundamental notes of NLCI, not the picture of social relations defined by the pursuit of self-interest.

When Marx argues that Hegel must be turned on his head or describes Kant as a priest of the State, it is this which Marx is referring to. It was Kant, of course, who theorized the subject-without-content and who transcendentalized the structure of debt and obligation underlying contractual relations in the social field. If Kantian normativity and conceptions of the subject are priestly relations to the State, then this is because it ignores the manner in which these conceptions of normativity and the subject are themselves contingent products of certain modes of production, instead turning these forms of normativity and subjectivity into fetishes (in Marx’s sense) that have effaced their own milieu of individuation in order to effectuate themselves all the more forcefully, unjustly, and insidiously while undermining the possibility of any critique of these structures of normativity by transcendentalizing them and thereby treating them as universal and essential structures of all social relations. Likewise, if Hegel must be turned on his head, then this is because he treats these social relations as issuing from the domain of the ideal, the subject, thought, or spirit, rather than structures of production. In both cases effective modes of critique and engagement are undermined by virtue of these structures being detached in thought from their real conditions of production. This, I think, is part of the reason that a focus on ideology within political theory is such a danger for actual political praxis as it tends to obscure this material base and render it invisible to the theorist, creating the illusion that social organization is merely a matter of ideas, the ideal, or signifiers. It is also the reason I see great promise in something like Vitale’s “mediology” (what I would call onticology) and his networkology as at least these forms of analysis, focusing as they do on material mediations, have hope of getting at the base through which these ideal forms are individuated or come into being.

My friend and KCL colleague Nick Michelson has a paper in the new issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism:

Nicholas Michelson, ‘Addressing the Schizophrenia of Global Jihadism‘, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Vol.2, No.3 (December 2009), pp.453-471.

This paper deploys Deleuze and Guattari’s AntiOedipus to critique discourses on radicalisation that call for a ‘public diplomacy’ to challenge a Jihadi meta-narrative or core identity. It argues that the Global Jihad should be reconceptualised as schizophrenic inasmuch as it is made up of a multiplicity of groups, aims, values, rationales and identities. The paper seeks to develop the utility of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy for bridging critical and traditional terrorism studies by arguing that their schizoanalysis is a helpful aid to reassessing dominant identitarian conceptual frameworks for Jihad, and offers directions for reformulating our responses to radicalisation.

Coincidentally, I posted a piece at FREErad!cals yesterday that treads similar turf, although without such elegance or purpose. It also lacks the critical dimension Nick so usefully deploys here. Then again, that was just a blog post and Nick’s is a full-blown weighty academic paper. Go read.

O primeiro post deste maltrapilho blog traz um pedacinho de genialidade de Gilles Deleuze. O vídeo em questão foi feito na Universidade Vincennes em meados da década de 70 ( o título do vídeo fala em 1980, mas eu discordo).

Todo o dispositivo
se define, pois, pelo que detém em novidade e criatividade, o qual marca,
ao mesmo tempo, sua capacidade de se transformar ou se fissurar em
proveito de um dispositivo do futuro.

Pertencemos a certos dispositivos e neles agimos. A novidade de um
dispositivo em relação aos anteriores é o que chamamos sua atualidade,
nossa atualidade. O novo é o atual. O atual não é o que somos, mas aquilo
em que vamos nos tornando, o que chegamos a ser, quer dizer, o outro,
nossa diferente evolução. É necessário distinguir, em todo o dispositivo, o
que somos (o que não seremos mais), e aquilo que somos em devir: a
parte da história e a parte do atual. A história é o arquivo, é a configuração
do que somos e deixamos de ser, enquanto o atual é o esboço daquilo em
que vamos nos tornando. Sendo que a história e o arquivo são o que nos
separa ainda de nós próprios, e o atual é esse outro com o qual já
coincidimos.
…
Devemos separar em todo dispositivo as linhas do passado recente e as linhas do futuro
próximo; a parte do arquivo e a do atual, a parte da história e a do devir, a
parte da analítica e a do diagnóstico. …
Não se trata de predizer, mas estar atento ao desconhecido que
bate à nossa porta.
…
rompe o fio das teleologias transcendentais e aí onde
o pensamento antropológico interrogava o ser do
homem ou sua subjetividade, faz com que o outro e o
externo se manifestem com evidência. …
estabelece que somos diferença, que nossa razão é a
diferença dos discursos, nossa história a diferença
dos tempos, nosso eu a diferença das máscaras.
…
Se Foucault deu tanta importância às suas [performances públicas] até o fim
da vida, em França e mais ainda no estrangeiro, não foi pelo gosto da
entrevista, mas porque as linhas de atualização que traçava exigiam um
outro modo de expressão diferente daquele próprio dos grandes livros. As
[aparições] são [espécies de] diagnósticos.

#Deleuze + #Foucault

One common criticism of Deleuze and DeLanda is that their ontolog(ies) suffer from what might be called “virtualism”. It’s important that some might not consider this a failing and that there is, I believe, a way of interpreting these thinkers so that this problem largely disappears. Roughly, virtualism would consist in treating the virtual as the domain of the “really real” and reducing the actual to mere “epiphenomena” that have but an epiphenomenal “being”. In the language of Roy Bhaskar’s ontology, the virtual can roughly be equated with the domain of “generative mechanisms”, while the actual would consist of events take place as a result of these generative mechanisms. Virtualism would thus treat these generative mechanisms as what are properly real, while the actual events engendered by these generative mechanisms would have a subordinate and lesser status.

The problem with this sort of virtualism is that it fails to observe a particular property of groups known as “closure” as described by mathematical group theory. Roughly, closure is the property of a group such that for a group G, all operations carried out on elements of G– say a, b –are also in G. Thus, for example, if group B consists of the numbers 1 and 2, the conjunction of 1 and 2– 3 –is also a member of the group. This point can be illustrated for material systems with respect to fire. A flame requires all sorts of generative mechanisms involving chemical and atomic reactions that are conditions of fire at the level of the “virtual” with respect to the flame as an actuality or event. However, it does not follow from this that the flame is itself an epiphenomenon or lacking in reality. The flame has all sorts of powers, capacities, are “able-to’s” that cannot be found at the level of the generative mechanisms themselves. Put otherwise, a flame is itself a generative mechanism with respect to other relations.

read on!

It seems to be that the demotion of the actual produced out of the virtual or generative mechanisms is a variant of Bhaskar’s epistemic fallacy. Here issues of epistemology are being conflated with issues of ontology in a slippage that goes unnoticed. In A Realist Theory of Knowledge Bhaskar argues that reality is itself stratified. By this he means that phenomena at one level are themselves based on a lower level of generative mechanisms. However, the phenomena at each level are themselves autonomous domains with their own unique structural properties that, while dependent on the lower level and impossible without the lower level, cannot be deduced from the lower level. Organic life is dependent on chemistry and impossible without chemistry, but it has its own internal generative mechanisms or structures that diverge from those of chemistry and are irreducible to chemistry.

Part of inquiry consists in 1) the discovery of these structures, but also 2) discovering these deeper structures on which these higher order structures are based. Virtualism, however, conflates the aims of inquiry with the nature of being. Put otherwise, it confuses its search for deeper level structures and generative mechanisms with the “epiphenomenalization” of the structure to be accounted for at a higher level. However, the fact that something is dependent on a deeper level structure or set of generative mechanisms does not undermine the emergent reality and generative mechanisms based on these deeper level generative mechanisms. In this connection, the “virtual” should not be understood as a distinct ontological domain apart from the actual, but as a relative term with respect to a domain of the actual. What functions as a “virtuality” for one domain of actuality can, is, in turn, an actuality for another domain of virtuality or generative mechanisms.

Abstract. 3.0

Costuras Espacio-temporales. Trazas de inmanencia en el espacio urbano-arquitectónico.

Arq. Angel Rivero

“¿Qué pasa sobre el cuerpo de una sociedad? Flujos, siempre flujos, y una persona siempre es un corte de flujo. Una persona, es un punto de partida para una producción de flujos, un punto de llegada para una recepción de flujos, de flujos de todo tipo; o bien una intersección de muchos flujos.”

Gilles Deleuze. [1]

El enunciado: el movimiento.

Al hablar de ciudad y arquitectura como dos partes inseparables de un mismo enunciado –lo urbano-arquitectónico -, estamos dando por hecho que existe una interrelación entre ambas; una oscilación constante que nos habla, evidentemente, de un movimiento inmanente. Para alcanzar este enunciado, se requiere dejar de ver la arquitectura aislada de la ciudad, y al mismo tiempo, dejar de ver la ciudad como un estrato alejado de la arquitectura. Y es justamente concientes de este movimiento, que vemos el cuerpo de un sistema de relaciones urbano-arquitectónicas, como lugar de observación y estudio potencial para el desarrollo de esta tesis. No podemos ver el espacio de relaciones urbano-arquitectónicas o Costuras espacio-temporales, sin pensar en el movimiento.

¿Cómo es el movimiento en el espacio urbano-arquitectónico? El movimiento urbano-arquitectónico constituye una tríada de líneas de fuga en el campo de inmanencia de la ciudad. La primera de estas líneas, va en dirección al estrato de la locomoción como principal moldeador del espacio, que por medio del sistema de relaciones físicas constituyen diagramas de territorialidades [costuras espaciales]. La segunda, sucede como parte del sistema de relaciones, siendo la activación y sus fluctuaciones en el tiempo las que arman el potencial, reflejado en el espacio físico [costuras diagramáticas]; y una tercera, dirigida a un estrato más abstracto, pero no por ello irreal, que apunta a las relaciones entre la activación de un espacio heterocrónico construido y acumulado por el tiempo, recreando experiencias de viajes mentales y encontrando al mismo tiempo su expresión en el espacio físico [costuras temporales].

Costuras espaciales. Costuras diagramáticas.

El movimiento-muro. El ritornelo.

Diagramas urbano-arquitectónicos

Paradójicamente, mientras el sistema de movilidad y relaciones de las ciudades, construyen y fortalecien el macro-diagrama de flujos de la ciudad, [autopistas, calles, avenidas, ejes viales, sistemas de transporte masivo superficial y subterráneo], conectando estratos en una escala macro, la repetición cíclica de los diagramas de estas líneas de intensidades – igual a un ritornelo[2]-, van creando y delimitando territorios. Esta delimitación puede ser intencional-dirigida y/o emergente-capturada, entre tantas otras. Sistemas de ríos urbanos, que se convierten en límites, se materializan en el filum urbano. Un movimiento mecánico, marcando una cicatriz por medio de una estría. A este filum en los casos más brutales, lo llamaremos movimiento-muro, y al movimiento que atraviesa este muro lo llamaremos costura espacial.

La generación y captura de estos diagramas de movimiento [y su activación],  sobre estas estrías [físicas], constituyen un estrato, el estrato de movimiento. A través de ellos, se construyen costuras-diagramáticas, cuyo filum impacta al entorno, en una dirección. Y en el sentido contrario, el filum, genera y determina el diagrama. No se puede establecer cual de los dos es primero, en algunos casos, el diagrama surge como resultado de una singularidad, y en otros es el sistema mismo quien genera el filum, para permanecer.

Hipótesis 1.

Si en la actualidad vivimos en el tiempo de la acumulación, la construcción y multiplicación de territorios y micro-territorios que encuentran su lugar en el entorno urbano-arquitectónico, conformando un sistema de multiplicidad de capas (usuarios, programas, espacios, y tiempos yuxtapuestos y superpuestos); la interrelación entre estas capas se hace por medio de costuras espacio-temporales, las cuales activan el entorno desde el momento y el lugar presente.

Hipótesis 2.

Entendiendo que el movimiento es el enunciado de nuestra época, las costuras espacio-temporales en el espacio urbano-arquitectónico, constituyen el entorno a partir del desplazamiento físico y al mismo tiempo generan relaciones de tiempo y memoria.

[2] El concepto del ritornelo es tomado de la meseta 1837. Del Ritornelo. Mil Mesetas. Deleuze-Guattari.

crossposted at Orbis Mediologicus

The combinatory is an idea whose time, once again, has come. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich argues that the database is one of the primary apparatus of the new media age. He cites Dziga Vertov’s use of this form to ‘digitize’ the visible world, in films such as Man with a Movie Camera (decades before the advent of the digital computer), as a key precursor of the mode of de/reconstructing the world in the age of computerized media. And yet we can go back further – Leibniz, widely considered one of the forefathers of the modern computer – was himself fascinated by dream of a ‘universal characteristic’, a combinatory which could translate human thought into a series of symbols which could avoid the ambiguities of human language. Combined with production of the first binary numeral system, as well as his attempt to produce a mechanical adding machine, Leibniz’s desire seems fulfilled in the contemporary form whereby inputs hit computers, are metabolized into numerical codes which are stored in database grids, then to be read and output in cybernetic loops with us, their human relay centers.

Manovich has argued that time itself changes in the digital age, it ceases to be the linear time of modernity (which for Vilem Flusser was prompted itself by the linearity of the sentence as promoted by the ‘Gutenberg revolution’), and rather is spatialized by the very form of the database grid. In database time, each cell in the grid contains a moment, retrievable at random, not necessarily placed in the order of temporal flow. Thus, you open one cell and the grid and see yourself as a child, in the one nextdoor, as a geriatric, and in between as split between ovum and sperm. Certain experimental films and books, particularly hypertext fictions, pursue a related notion of temporality which Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, calls crystalline time. In crystalline time, there is still a flow of present to past at the level of the observer, but this observer moves continually amongst a series of ‘cells’ of the past and future, thereby combining the linearity of modern temporal flow with the spatialized time of the computer database. A film such as Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 is an example given by Deleuze of the manner in which ‘time is out of joint’ in the post-war world, producing an interpenetration of memory and imagination, desire and anticipation, all in a multi-temporal present which explores time as one explores a house whose labyrinthine structure is crystlline, and whose rooms indicate moments of time. A film which takes this to the next level, for Deleuze, is Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, in which the protagonists explore a variety of virtual scenarios, what Leibniz would call ‘incompossible’ combinations of events, each of which present alternative futures and pasts, many of which could not exist at the same time. For Deleuze, Resnais’ film presents us with one of the most advanced images of the crystalline form of time appropriate to the postwar age.

Videogames present perhaps some of the most advanced forms of crystalline narration available today, in forms which go beyond the inherent linearity of time within film. Many contemporary videogames present the player with virtual worlds which are like Leibniz’s combinatory of possible worlds as presented in his Monadology (leading Ken Wark, in Gamer Theory, to refer to Leibniz’s God as a sort of cosmological video-game programer).. Key events lead to forking paths which separate the world of play into parallel realities, only one of which the player can follow at a time, but which by playing multiple times and making multiple choices, allow for an exploration of incompossible parallel realities. Such an approach uses a linear formation to explore the potential permutations of time as algorithm, as spatio-temporal crystal. What’s more, on the level of the code whereby the game itself operates, the form of the database generates this time-as-crystal via a mode of production whose form is analogous to its content. The crystal is in many senses the form of time, or as Mikhail Bakhtin would say, the ‘chronotope’ of our networked digital age.

What’s more, there seems to be something fundamental about this form of time in relation to contemporary quantum physics, which seems to increasingly lend support to the notion that quantum states are able to explore multiple spatiotemporal potentials before they actualize. Many physicists seem to feel that it is only our macroscopic time which works in linear fashion, and even then, physicists argue that this linearity likely breaks down at extreme conditions, where it returns to more ’spatial’ forms. Black holes and singularities destroy the distinction between macro and micro/quantum, dragging time and space back into a sort of pre-individuated (or as Whitehead would say, pre-’extended’) state. According to many contemporary theorists, were it not for the flow of energy (negentropy) in our universe, time might not in fact have an ‘arrow’ or direction at all. From such a perspective, ‘time’ is fundamentally multi-directional, it only takes on linearity in specific situations. Our contemporary cultural mileu may in many senses then be a return or resonant echo, if on a more macro level, of what exists as our quantum foundation. [For more info on all of this, see a text like Paul Davies' About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, or recent books by Huw Pryce or Julian Barbour].

All of which, surprisingly perhaps, brings us to Hegel. Few thinkers would seem, at first glance, more contrary to this form of networked, spatialized time than that of Hegel. The thinker of the dialectic, of the linear progress of time, Hegel seems the thinker of the linear flow of temporal par excellence. And yet I feel that Hegel has much to teach us about what it means to think the potentials of this seemingly ‘new’ type of temporal form.

Many miss the non-linear side of Hegel’s approach to temporality, his ‘database’ side, if you will, because they put the emphasis of their readings on the early parts of his texts at the expense of their ends. And this makes sense: Hegel’s books are beyond dense, long, and arduous – they are filled with abstruse digressions into outdated scientific topics which may or may not turn out to be essential to later parts of the argument. Reading Hegel is an exercise in frustration (with perhaps the Encyclopedia Logic being the quickest of the bunch, and that’s not saying much). But for those who do get to the end of one of his works, the fact that the temporal model outlined at the start of his works, one in which linearity prevails, is itself made by the end to seem overly simple, and in fact, is a key insight. While at the start of Hegel’s work, linearity prevails, by the end, not only does spatiality prevail, but it is shown to be that from which linearity emerges.

The implications of this might not only be useful in regard to furthering our understanding of what might be at stake with database forms of temporality, but in regard to contemporary theory. Slavoj Zizek’s highly influential reading of Hegel as a thinker of the radical split, of the fundamental dehiscience of the now, hinges upon a very particular reading of Hegel’s relation to time. My sense is that this ek-static, contemporary reading of Hegel is as one-sided as those which reduce him to simple linearity.

As I’ve argued in previous posts, Hegel’s works are written in performative fashion. What this means in regard to time is that time in fact operates, both as described and as deployed, in a different manner in all the three parts of any of his books. In the Logic (either version, Encyclopedia or Science of), Hegel emphasizes that the movement of time between the moments presented in his first section, on ‘Being’, is that of ‘passage’ between distinct and separated entities. In the second section, on ‘Essence,’ time is presented as a splitting of the present into the virtual experience of a part of the present which is past and one which is the future, both of which are contained within the present. This is the form of time privileged by Zizek, in which the past is always a nostalgic fantasy, and the future always an wishful illusion. The model of time operating within the final section of Hegel’s Logic is that of the ‘Concept’. This is for Hegel the more ultimate form of time, one which encompasses the other two in their disjunct unity. For the Hegel the Concept is that which gives rise to time: it is not only the splitting of the now into past/present, nor the passage of time between past, present, and future, but the unity and difference of these two approaches within a sort of ‘disjunct-unity’ which does not merely ‘move’ in time, or ’split’ itself in time, but is in fact all of these as unified and different at the same ‘time.’ The concept, for Hegel, presents us with an atemporal genesis of time itself.

But what exactly does this mean? For Hegel, each part of his work not only describes the aspect in question, such as ‘Being’, ‘Essence’, or ‘Concept’, but also the parts thereof – parts which are composed of the approaches to the world described in ‘earlier’ parts of the text. Thus, ‘Being’ is described three times – once in the section on Being, then seen through the lens of Essence, and then again both of these preceding approaches to Being are recast from the perspective of the Concept. Thus, not only does ‘Being’ change along the way, retroactively reworked, but it shows three different faces, so to speak, the final form of which contains the preceding two. The result is that Hegel’s books are like fractals, they are expansively ’self-similar’ up and down at multiple levels of scale. But if we are to understand them at the level which he considers the most fundamental, that of the concept, we need understand them as self-similar not only within each section, but between them as well. The result is that his books necessarily need to be read, and the model of time presented therein understood, as structured around a far more complex model of time than has generally been thought.

For in fact, if we read Hegel’s book as presenting simply three models of time – Being (progression), Essence (splitting), and Concept (atemporal genesis) – we in fact read the three sections merely under the mode of thought appropriate to the first section of the work, that is, the ‘lens’ of Being. We hypostatize the three forms, without considering them through the lenses of Essence or the Concept. If we then try to fix this by viewing the three approaches to time (Being, Essence, and Concept) through the lens of Essence, we get another three models of time – Being (progression as produced from an original scission which is its essence, thereby giving rise to all three models presented under the lens of Being – Zizek’s reading of Hegel, as it were), Essence (a scission of time into a progression and atemporal genesis, thereby giving rise to all three models presented under the lens of Being), and Concept (a scission which gives rise to progression, scission, and atemporal genesis, thereby giving rise to all the previous models . . .).

Taking this chain of logic to its final, hypercomplex conclusion, we need to be able to see how this all plays out form the perspective of the Concept – Being (a progression through all three models of time till we finally understand it as atemporal genesis, thereby giving rise to the previous models – the common caricature of how Hegel’s works function), Essence (a series of intertwining scissions leading up to the folding of atemporal genesis into itself, thereby giving rise to the previous models . . .), and finally, well, the most fundamental model of all, or the Concept of time as understood under the lens of the Concept itself. But what might this be?

The Concept of Time under the form of the Concept is in fact rather similar to what quantum physicists might describe as the varying modes of the disjunct-relation between micro and macroscopic levels of time. That is, the time of the Concept, understood ‘Conceptually’, is in fact all the other eight models just mentioned, all at once, both understood as unity (Being), giving rise to each other (Essence), and Concept (as all of these both in unity and difference).That is, we have yet another fractal threefold division of what previously seemed to be the final category.

In the first of these (or the Concept of time under the form of Being), we see what in fact corresponds to what we have discussed in the first part of this post, namely, time as combinatory – database time. But what in fact might lie beyond this? This is where Hegel may be useful to help us think beyond the time of the database. Continuing this line of logic, the second approach to the time of the Concept (this time viewed under the scission of Essence), views time as giving rise to itself from the atemporal. That is, this approach concerns how time comes to be by means of the splitting of itself from the atemporal from which it emerges and will return. This is precisely what quantum physicists describe when the discuss transitions from quantum multi-temporality to and from macroscopic linearity. But what is the last, keystone approach to the notion of time, that is, the Concept of time, viewed Conceptually? It is all of these, all at once. It is as if one could be like a quantum particle, in many places at once, all of these approaches incompossible yet folded into each other, but then also be like a macroscopic entity as well, differentiated in each of the preceding forms. At once temporal and atemporal, both within the database and outside it, flowing yet spatialized, this notion of time is more than just the combinatory, but a combinatory which thinks itself and is the knowing of itself at every level of scale, in all its unities and differences.

And this in fact helps us understand precisely what is at stake with the Hegelian notion of what it means to ‘know’. The word in German for ‘the Concept’ (often unfortunately translated as ‘Notion’) is Begriff. Derived from the verb greifen (to grasp), a literal translation of a ‘the Concept’ is as a ‘grasping’. Any introductory reading of Hegel presents this basic translational quirk which is difficult to render in everyday English. But as some scholars have argued, this grasping can also be translated as ‘the knowing’. And in fact, that is precisely what Hegel aims to produce with his works. Knowing is more than a thing, or process, or even a database. It is rather the interplay, intertwining, and interpenetration of all these levels. Hegel’s model of time is thus much more than a simple combinatory, going beyond this to what might best be described as a sort of hyper-complex, video-game-like ‘crystal’ of time in the process of ‘playing’ itself – even as it is ‘writing’ itself – and all at the same time and separately, and all the states in between. And here we see precisely why Hegel’s texts are necessarily performative, because language itself begins to break down in any attempt to simply describe such a supra-linear, and hence supra-linguistic, concept of time.

Many contemporary post-structuralist approaches to time, which are much more limited than that presented by Hegel, can perhaps learn much from such an approach. And this in fact seems where a thinker like Deleuze, who in most of his works presents time as a Bergsonian flow of duration, may be going in his later works, with his notions of time as crystal or network of Leibnizian worlds. From such a perspective, the Bergsonian and Zizekian approaches, as well as many others, including that of the databse, are included as elements/moments (whatever such terms might mean within the model of temporal/atemporal knowing presented by Hegel). And perhaps this truly provides us with, to use a much maligned word, a ‘post-modern’ approach to the issue of time, one which no longer asks which form of time is true, but which, in a given situation, works.

And is this not the situation we see in contemporary videogames, in which chronotopes of various sorts expand and contract, putting us at one ‘moment’ in the mode of collecting coins while a clock ticks down, another moment frozen into a section of cinematic interaction while watching ourselves linearly unfurl from a distance, another moment exploring the multiple pathways of a game as so many incompossible futures, even as pulling back into special screens to modify our parameters as time is paused? Hegel’s time is video-game time, and increasingly, perhaps, it is the time we live.

Welcome to the chronotope of the digital age.

Two days ago I got an email from Stephanie Frasco who is working on a project for the History Channel.  They are searching for lead investigators to host a tv series documentary on the topic of American symbology/iconography. It is called Decoded. She asked me to post this link in case anyone reading this blog post is interested to participate. They are looking for a real life Robert Langdon. If you are compatible with Dan Brown, you should contact them. As for myself, I am just a Deleuzian minded guy who attempts to circumscribe the overcoding of the signifying regime (the Dan Brown kind of iconographical analyzes). My decoding is of another sort than they are looking for. I attempt to show that there is no master signifier whereas Langdon is all about finding the master signifier.

Isabella Rosselini’s recent series of shorts on insect sex for the Sundance Film Festival may have been entitled ‘Green Porno’ (an interview with her can be seen over at Matthias Merkel Hess’ Eco Art Blog), but the films, all of which star Rosselini, prove little more than Tim Burton-esque fairytale and could not in any sense be considered as of a piece with the very literal variety of ‘Eco-porn’ emergent in the wake of Web 2.0.

The term had always seemed sportive to my mind, a sardonic and thus more or less healthy response to the contemporary ‘Green wash’ phenomenon. Evoking an overly benign and grossly over-determined ‘nature’ (or Nature as subject), ‘Eco-Pornography’ suggested that which had come to appear captured by delimiting centre-spreads in lavishly produced (and often Photoshopped) pages of expensive wildlife magazines, or served up as soft-focus, reified consumables in television documentaries for ‘eco’-hungry consumer markets.

As the extremely literal act of ‘fucking for the forest’, however, Eco-Porn emerges as an ostensibly ‘radical’ expression of Green ’sex activism’ (or ‘porn aid’). Taking its part in the necessary de-romanticisation of nature, the phenomenon might, then, be seen to summon forth the sort of ‘Dark Ecology’ prescribed by Morton and Žižek, albeit not unproblematically. Rather than supplying images or footage of their own production, however, the hosts of the Fuck For Forest website work to encourage active participation in their particularly ardent brand of eco-politics, intending FFF to facilitate as a non-profit node for those inspired by such activism, and who might wish to submit their own material in order to propagate further ‘environmental’ awareness. Holding submitted footage under consent, the website subsequently makes this available to subscribers who effectively donate towards sympathetic projects and actions.

“FFF is a non-profit erotic ecological project. FFF wishes to normalize sex and nudity to protect nature and liberate life. We collect money for ecology while exploring the power of sexuality.”

Despite how amusing initial contact with FFF might prove, the movement nevertheless poses broader challenges to what we take sexual politics to be; pornography, it seems, remains difficult to reclaim for social justice concerns, unless of course it is sufficiently de- and re-territorialised. Take the post-feminist ‘art sleaze’ of Suicide Girls for example, an enterprise that would seem owned and operated for the most part by women who would deploy the site towards a creative celebration of female sexuality over and against the androcentric passifications of such male-oriented publications as Playboy or Hustler.

If pornography remains corrupting today, then it would seem to remain not so much morally (in any caricatural sense) as pragmatically in terms of the impact its endorsement might have upon such inviolable late capitalist institutions as the paranoically-maintained ’self’, which is to say, upon the personal image (or ‘avatar’) so essential to the furtherance of career and the maintenance of appropriate social standing. Unless mediated in some fashion, the consumption of pornography would appear to run wholly counter to the sort of ‘bookish’ middle-class social values that have come to seem so desirable (particularly in Britain, it seems) as guarantor against the ‘unrefined’ thrill-seeking of the (‘uneducated’) working-classes. Succinctly formulated by Alain de Botton in terms of ’status anxiety’, this symptom calls for the phantasmatic support of ‘clean lines’ (the ethico-aesthetic of anodynised living) and, to my mind at least, is suggestive of a number of diagnostic or symptomnal readings of the ethics of pornography, particularly where ‘clean’ living is (and was always) the moral expression of insustainable living.

If the FFF phenomenon appears an inevitable symptom of web-based media centralisation, of the inevitable (perhaps inadvertent) cut-up of eco-political material, high capitalist film-making and unavoidable sex ‘hook up’ sites, does this not itself warrant further investigation in terms of ‘eco-justice’? Whilst close-quarter shots of day-glo, dread-locked poster hippies indulging in oral and anal sex acts might prove little more than ‘entertaining’, what of the millions of web users who regularly use internet pornography as a masturbatory aid and ostensibly as part of a ‘normal’ late capitalist lifestyle? Consider, if you will, the ignominious fate of a billion Kleenex tissues sourced from the unchecked clear-cutting of arboreal Canadian forests.

From a transcendental empiricist perspective, however, several things appear to be happening in the FFF phenomenon. In Logique du Sens, the sexual surfaces of the libido are restricted, blocked, and reduced; such flows are repressed “in order to contain them in the narrow cells of the type ‘couple,’ ‘family,’ ‘person,’ ‘objects’”. In Proust, Deleuze discerns how “a molecular sexuality bubbles away beneath the surface of the integrated sexes”. The notion of sexuality, then, not so much as instinct but as creation, not so much as a transcendent mode of organization but as a revolutionary machine, becomes one that might be experimented with noologically; sexuality is linked closely to the possibility of immanence and thinking, to the all important event of thought, to the transformation of the dogmatic images that would constrain healthy experimentation. We might, then, consider how if true thought is possible only when liberated from the notion of castration as transcendent law, then castration needs to be thought of, instead, as a crack, a fracture that does not produce a lack but a surface of thought, “projecting the entire corporeal surface of sexuality over the metaphysical surface of thought.” If the transcendent law of castration results in a blockage of thought, it also results in the mastering and moulding of the sexual body into the molar notion of two sexes rather than the (pregenital) Harlequin’s cloak to which Deleuze compares it.

For ecological discussion, the sexual body might be seen to retain a revolutionary potential and sexuality a significant source of becoming; there is immense power in the ‘thousand tiny sexes’ of desiring-machines, in sexuality beyond the “all too human” idea of castration as absence, and in the multiplicity of surfaces that are opened up in its place. Striving to recognise the potential of sexuality when liberated from genitality as well as anthropomorphic presuppositions, recent Deleuzian scholarship has sought to explore sexuality and the machinic, sexuality and surfaces, and sexuality and animality (a forthcoming volume in the Edinburgh Deleuze Connections series promises useful material in this regard).

The FFF phenomenon might thus be conceived of after the ontology of sex and how we can begin to know of it when it is no longer captive to molar representations. Investigating the strengths and potentials but also the weaknesses and dangers that sexuality opens for thinking, bodies, and becomings, we open onto the ethico-aesthetic, the (eco)political, a noological force that enables change. Whilst the Fuck For Forest poster portrays heterosexual sex acts, the website itself contains images that run largely against hetero-normative practices, suggestive (albeit in something of a caricatural way) of activities that whilst crudely hitched to a ‘radical’ eco-politics, surely suggest ‘healthier’ alternatives to the sort of domesticated privations that remain enthralled to humdrum Oedipal coordinates.

After schizoanalysis, we might detect a purview that would usefully exceed not only the jejune institution of sex as a commodified aspect of ‘contemporary living’, but moreover, challenge new age Gaian-ism with its problematic Oedipalisation of indifferent, resolutely inhuman processes. Whilst the FFF website draws on a measure of ‘mother earth’ symbolism, surely the very concept of sex activism is one that suggests a wealth of post-Oedipal relations? The organisers of the FFF movement appear to uphold the orientation as a ‘healthy’ response (ostensibly for its ‘punk’ savvy) to the harrowing realities of internet pornography and the non-participatory ineffectualities of orthodox Green lobbying. By virtue of its unapologetically-explicit nature, or its de-romanticisations of both ‘loving’ sex and a neutered nature made safe for contemporary domestic needs, even the lingering ‘flower child’ sentiment appears displaced somewhat by the unsentimental emphasis on ‘fucking’, supplanting the image of the ‘tree-hugging’ flower-child with that of the ardent eco-nymph or satyr.

Of course, we remain entitled to think such sex activism ’silly’. But for those who (at the very least) have perhaps never had sex out of doors, or more significantly, have never considered their ‘private’ sexual practices as anything other than the carnal expression of ‘love’ for another human being, well, we might ask, is the home you love not also the extent of your desire?

Thanks for the resume! it is good to know that the book is worth to be referenced as an illustrative complement. I am keen to read the book without expecting more thanwhat is meant to be expected of a biography, despite all the winks i may find of in respect with certain anecdotical topics.

Comentado por Naxos en:

Some Deleuze anecdotes

Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 10:11 pm

Just a quick post to acknowledge an inspiring (if somewhat scandalous) comment on a thread over at Kvond’s always interesting Frames / Sing. The comment highlights Kvond’s criticisms of what he views as ‘Object Oriented’ philosopher Graham Harman’s tendency towards ‘orientalism’. Whilst I’d like very much to write a fully-fledged post on this fascinating observation, I am only just beginning to pick up on the threads of Object Oriented Philosophy/Ontology (OOP/O) and the Speculative Realism(s) (SR) of Harman, Brassier, Grant and Meillassoux et al, writers who have become principal to a philosophical quasi-’movement’ that can be traced and indulged in over at Speculative Heresy, Larval Subjects, Fractal Ontology and Steve Shaviro’s The Pinocchio Theory.

The influence of Deleuze upon the principal OOO and SR writers appears marked, and a fuller post in this connection will follow. But in the meantime I want to add a word on what might be going overlooked in the rush to celebrate a (‘novel’) post-Deleuzian philosophy. Largely a blogospheric phenomenon, to suggest that the SR ‘movement’ conceals a sort of problematic Orientalism, and moreover, might amount to an exotic re-packaging of other object-oriented philosophies (something that many would still accuse Deleuzism of) seems somewhat churlish, particularly given how exciting much of this thinking appears to be and how deeply amenable such materialisms are to ecocriticism, ecosophy or ecophilosophy. But these are thought-provoking and deeply ‘political’ criticisms nevertheless.

Whilst a fuller distinction between relational and object-oriented philosophies will have to remain forthcoming, I’d nevertheless agree wholeheartedly with Kvond that there’s a sort of “blogged responsibility” to comment on such insights/objections, “if only to triangulate and encourage more to post themselves”. Whilst the full post can be seen here, I reproduce Kvond’s comment below in the hope of drawing a little further comment to our particular region of the blogosphere. So please, don’t be shy.

On November 15, 2009 at 10:43 pm kvond Said:

I should add to your:

“Maybe—beyond this practical element—Harman himself envisions his depoliticized ontological universe of withdrawn objects as just another “pretty canvas.” ”

This resonates with his very odd response to my claim that his ontology Orientalizes the mediating other. His claim was of course I love orientializing, I love the exotic, there is nothing wrong with Orientalizing things, people, etc. (to sum the gist of it). I was a bit taken aback and had to try to point out that it is exactly through our exotic portrayal of others, or projections of erotic qualities, that a shadow follows along, and politically, a very destructive shadow.

At this point I believe he stopped responding, and I couldn’t tell if he was not aware of this rather obvious point (as an American in Egypt) or simply decided to ignore it. But the political consequences of his “ontology”, his painted picture of a Vicarious World really were of no interest to him. As far as he was concerned Orientalize away. It was then that I decided to make a general comparison between his writing about the Exotic, and Flaubert’s (a writer he considered the worst of the worst, from a socio-political standpoint). This was the end of all our communications.

Volume 2 of the Collapse journal is perhaps the single best introduction to OOP/O and Speculative Realism, but also such texts as Harman’s Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (2002), Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (2005) and Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (2009). Also Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007) and Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2008).

Despite broken links to Harman’s own blog and to those papers of his that were made available for a time at Speculative Heresy, a number of extremely useful PDFs can nevertheless be had here.

For the Society for Social and Political Philosopy’s meetings to be held in conjunction with:

SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) in 2010.

The SSPP invites papers for two conference panels. We are seeking papers that address issues pertaining to:

Politics and Ontology

We seek to explore and challenge the hypothesis that all political theory presupposes an ontology. From the presumption of universal rationality, to the potency of class consciousness, to the privileges shaped by the social existence of race, gender and sexuality, political order always is or implies an ontological order. In many respects, the ontological question is the political question. Struggles for political change are as much about the expansion (or contraction) of shared ontological categories as they are about the rewriting of legislation or the redistribution of power and resources . The traditional allocation of rights, for instance, has been determined almost entirely on the basis of who, or what, one is presumed to be. While ontology and politics share a long, interconnected history, for much of modern history the connection between them has been downplayed or denied, since liberalism is premised on bracketing such supposedly insoluble and inherently conflictual metaphysical questions. In recent decades, however, this has changed. The explicit investigation of political ontology has taken center stage and, as a consequence, what we understand to be political or ontological has changed as well. Politics is no longer limited to the state, but permeates all of social existence to include the terrain of imagination, emotions, and representation. Ontology is no longer an ultimate foundation, but is constituted through relations of power and affects. In the works of such authors as Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz, Giorgio Agamben, William Connolly, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, and many others, the subject of political ontology has surfaced in an array of new formulations. For this panel, we invite papers that extend this investigation or that challenge this resurgence, both within the context of work that has already been done and in anticipation of work yet to be conceived.

Complete papers of 3000-5000 words (that can be summarized and presented in 20-30 minutes) should be submitted for consideration for the 2010 meeting (deadline: March 1, 2010). The SPEP Conference is scheduled for October 2010, in Montreal, Canada.

Authors should include their name(s) and contact information on the cover page ONLY.

Papers should be emailed as attachments in Word or RTF format to: papers@sspp.us

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.

di Simona Maggiorelli

In the mood for love di Wong Kar Wai

L’ Atlante delle emozioni,  con cui Giuliana Bruno ha vinto nel 2004 il premio internazionale Kraszna-Krausz come migliore libro sulle immagini in movimento, è davvero uno dei saggi più sorprendenti degli ultimi anni per chi si occupa di arte contemporanea e di estetica. Non solo per l’affascinante cartografia di percorsi e di nessi che tesse viaggiando fra architettura, arti visive e cinema. Ma anche per il linguaggio con cui  queste cinquecento pagine sono scritte.  Fondendo discorso accademico e racconto, teoresi e linguaggio rapsodico, «con il piacere – annota l’autrice stessa – di selezionare e organizzare il discorso in forma di travelogue visivo».
Laureata all’Orientale di Napoli e dal 1990 professore di Visual and enviromental studies a Harvard con il suo monumentale Atlante delle emozioni e con libri come Pubbliche intimità, anch’esso uscito in Italia per Bruno Mondadori, Giuliana Bruno ha “imposto” una voce radicalmente diversa nel rigido panorama internazionale della critica dominato da scelte razionaliste, gelidamente concettuali, astratte.

Ci è riuscita “partendo da sé,” dal proprio sentire, rifiutando uno sguardo oggettivante e recuperando alla scrittura immagini e affetti. «E’ vero – ammette la studiosa che in questi giorni è a Roma per la due giorni di studi che ha inaugurato il MAXXI  ( e che ha visto la presenza di Aaron Betsky- e della stessa Hadid) ho cercato un modo di guardare differente, uno sguardo nuovo, per così dire “tattile”. La maniera classica di guardare ci ha insegnato una fredda distanza fra noi e le persone che guardiamo.

A me sembra, invece, che ci sia un modo un po’ più carezzevole di avvicinarsi e di essere toccati dalle immagini. In modo che l’occhio non sia di un voyeur ma di un voyager, per me declinato al femminile, come voyageuse. Insomma mi interessava una modalità più fluida di entrare e di guardare attraverso le cose e di rapportarsi agli ambienti che attraversiamo, a quei luoghi che raccolgono le nostre emozioni, le nostre memorie. Niente è neutro, tanto meno gli spazi della rappresentazione.
Possiamo leggerlo come un recupero delle emozioni ostracizzate dai filosofi?
Le emozioni non hanno nulla a che fare con il sentimentalismo. Sono una forma di conoscenza. E l’immagine ha un contenuto, un sostrato. Al di là di quello che mostra di per sé. Le immagini emotive si muovono nel tempo e non solo nello spazio.
Mentre lei scriveva il suo Atlante delle emozioni, il filosofo Remo Bodei sceglieva per il proprio lavoro  un titolo spinoziano come Geometria delle passioni, due diverse modalità?
Ho incontrato più volte Remo Bodei, è una persona straordinaria, sensibile. Però sul piano intellettuale, innegabilmente, esprime una forma di geometria, mentre, per dirla con Deleuze, il mio pensiero ha molte pieghe.
A proposito di cultura francese, lei prende le distanze dal discorso che Julia Kristeva ha fatto sull’«apparato cinematico». Perché?
Semiologia e  psicoanalisi si sono occupate dello sguardo filmico e lo hanno trattato non solo come testo ma come apparato di una forma di visione. Ho letto molto ma mi sembrava che mancasse qualcosa di fondamentale in quegli scritti. Ovvero che il modello applicato a questo apparato filmico fosse una sorta di trappola lacaniana da cui non si riusciva a uscire. La soggettività veniva rinchiusa in una forma di rappresentazione duplice e spaccata di fronte allo specchio. A mio modo di vedere lo schermo cinematografico è più di uno specchio o di una finestra.  E non mi corrispondeva lo sguardo trascendentale e incorporeo,  questo io-ego come grande occhio, che emergeva da questa lettura lacaniana del cinema che è stata a lungo dominante nella cultura francese.
Così si è rivolta al filosofo Hugo Münsterberg, collaboratore di William James. Un curioso personaggio che riconosceva forza psichica alla rappresentazione cinematografica. Come l’ha scoperto?
Mentre cercavo di mettere a punto un mio diverso approccio al cinema scrivendo l’Atlante delle emozioni mi sono ricordata di avere un libriccino di questo filosofo ebreo tedesco che avevo letto molti anni prima. Münsterberg faceva ricerca agli inizi del XX secolo, in un periodo molto fertile, quando nasceva la psicologia sperimentale. E aveva dato vita a suo laboratorio filosofico sulle immagini.  Nel 1916, dunque molto presto, Münsterberg scoprì il cinema e scrisse  un libro assai interessante. All’epoca nessun filosofo si occupava  di cinema. Né tanto meno si pensava che fosse un’arte. Avendo lavorato molto sulla psiche, invece, Münsterberg riconosceva al cinema non solo la possibilità di rappresentare delle cose ma anche di rappresentare come pensiamo. Parlare di forza psichica del cinema per lui significava riconoscerne la forza emotiva, ma anche cognitiva. Naturalmente lui non andava oltre. Si trattava, invece, di leggere le forme di immaginazione e di rappresentazione cinematografica. Ma il suo pensiero mi è parso comunque importante. Tanto da dedicargli una monografia che sta per uscire negli Usa.
«L’indubbio progenitore del cinema è l’architettura», scriveva Ejzenštejn. è stato per lei una fonte?
Sono tornata a Ejzenštejn proprio per il rapporto che vedeva fra montaggio e architettura. Di  lui, ovviamente, si è scritto molto, ma  un suo saggio degli anni Trenta mi ha spinta a continuare una ricerca trasversale  che associa il cinema alla produzione di spazio in tutti i sensi, non solo  fisico. Come l’architettura anche il cinema è una maniera di “spaziare” in molti sensi. Il primo film, diceva Ejzenštejn,  è l’Acropoli di Atene. Non la caverna di Platone. Proponendo così un modello metaforico molto diverso. Il  cinema  richiama l’attraversamento di luoghi  in una città con una serie di visioni, di immagini in movimento. Lo spettatore non è più intrappolato nella caverna platonica. Ma l’accostamento fra l’architettura e il cinema funziona anche se si pensa al  solo fatto che l’architettura non si contempla. Si recepisce con il corpo, con la sensazioni.
Nel suo lavoro il cinema di Antonioni occupa un posto importante. Come regista capace di creare «uno spazio mentale» e di raccontare per immagini il mondo interiore dei  personaggi. Ci sono registi oggi ai quali riconosce una ricerca analoga?
Sì amo molto Antonioni, con il suo modo di filmare quasi minimalista riesce a tracciare personaggi a tutto tondo, non meri caratteri. Antonioni non parlava del personaggio attraverso l’azione, ma con l’introspezione che traspare dalle sue inquadrature. Talvolta anche di bellissime architetture vuote. Basta questo per restituirci il mondo interiore di un personaggio, il modo in cui sente e vive. Una cosa che ritrovo per esempio in Wong Kar Wai, regista di In the mood for love. Anche se  con un’estetica diversa, ritrovo nel suo cinema un certo modo di guardare il rapporto fra uomo e donna, lo spazio psichico, lo spazio della memoria, lo spazio dell’immaginazione, il tempo. Si ha la sensazione che questo spazio contenga una durata che non riguarda la  “velocità”. Questo sguardo differente torna anche in molte installazioni di arte. Lo trovo non di rado espresso nelle immagini in movimento che oggi si vedono nelle gallerie d’arte.
La videoarte, integrando più linguaggi d’arte, apre nuove possibilità espressive?
In Pubbliche intimità ho insistito molto su questo cambiamento che a me pare molto interessante. Non è la morte del cinema ma un’estensione dello sguardo filmico che entra nelle gallerie e nei musei proponendo un modo diverso di relazionarsi con le immagini. Non è più la contemplazione della pittura come immagine fissa, ma comprende il movimento dell’immagine, il movimento dello spettatore e il movimento di un tempo che direi interiore. Nella concitazione della vita metropolitana alcune opere di videoarte e installazioni offrono un modo di riappropriarsi del tempo,  dell’interiorità.  In un certo senso queste nuove forme di arte ci invitano a guardare le immagini guardandoci dentro e a guardarsi dentro per vedere meglio fuori e, spero, per cambiare.
Nel tempo breve, ellittico, di un’opera di videoarte le immagini talora ,possono arrivare ad avere un “calore” speciale, una deformazione quasi onirica, poetica.
E’ una dimensione che riguarda il “tenore” delle immagini ma non solo. Penso, per esempio, a certe opere sonore di Janet Cardiff: seguendo la sua voce si entra in uno spazio. Altre volte c’è una piccola videocamera che ti permette di percepire la forma di relazione che l’artista ha con il mondo. è come se ti facesse entrare nella sua mente, nella sua maniera di sentire. In una sua installazione realizzata dopo l’11 settembre, ricordo, aveva collocato delle casse in un luogo molto grande. Gli spettatori potevano muoversi e ascoltare dagli amplificatori oppure mettersi dove  volevano. L’atmosfera che si veniva a creare era molto particolare, intensa, partecipata. Ognuno in silenzio seguiva il filo delle proprie immagini interiori, ma al tempo stesso era vicino agli altri. In un momento molto duro per New York, in un museo, stranamente si aveva la sensazione di poter attraversare questo trauma in maniera anche pubblica, sociale. è un aspetto del cinema che mi ha sempre molto affascinato e che qui trovavo allo zenit. L’installazione di Cardiff permetteva di essere al contempo molto dentro di sé e insieme di condividere con altre persone  emozioni, sensazioni, pensieri, forme di discorso. Di nuovo a Berlino qualche mese fa ho incontrato una sua installazione. Ho notato che i più giovani avevano spento tutto, telefonini, iPhone e quant’altro e ascoltavano a occhi chiusi. La dimensione in cui si era trasportati non aveva nulla di nostalgico, niente di religioso. Era come se l’artista ci invitasse a fermarci un momento. Per non essere sempre spezzati tra le cose, per trovare un modo, anche solo per un istante, di connettersi con gli altri e con il nostro mondo interiore.

da left avvenimenti del 13 febbraio 2009-

Here are a few important, I think, Deleuze quotations for upcoming projects.
All are from A Thousand Plateaus:
“consistency concerns the manner in which the components of a territorial assemblage hold together. But it also concerns the manner in which different assemblages hold together, with components of passage and relay” 327

“Stating the distinction in the most general
way, we could say that it is between stratified systems or systems of stratification on the one hand, and consistent, self-consistent aggregates on the other. But the point is that consistency, far from being restricted to complex life forms, fully pertains even to the most elementary atoms and particles. There is a coded system of stratification whenever, horizontally, there are linear causalities between elements; and, vertically, hierarchies of order between groupings; and, holding it all together in depth, a succession of framing forms, each of which informs a substance and in turn serves as a substance for another form. These causalities, hierarchies, and framings constitute a stratum, as well as the passage from one stratum to another, and the stratified combinations of the molecular and molar. On the other hand, we may speak of aggregates of consistency when instead of a regulated succession of forms-substances we are presented with consolidations of very heterogeneous elements, orders that have been short-circuited or even reverse causalities, and captures between materials and forces of a different nature: as if a machinic phylum, a destratifying transversality, moved through elements, orders, forms and substances, the molar and the molecular, freeing a matter and tapping forces.” 335

“Whenever a territorial assemblage is taken up by a movement that deterritorializes it (whether under so-called natural or artificial conditions), we say that a machine is released. That in fact is the distinction we would like to propose between machine and assemblage: a machine is like a set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing deterritorialization, and draw variations and mutations of it. For there are no mechanical effects; effects are always machinic, in other words, depend on a machine that is plugged into an assemblage and has been freed through deterritorialization. What we call machinic statements are machine effects that define consistency or enter matters of expression. Effects of this kind can be very diverse but are never symbolic or imaginary; they always have a real value of passage or relay.” 333

“What holds all the components together are transversals, and the transversal itself is only a component that has taken upon itself the specialized vector of deterritorialization. In effect, what holds an assemblage together is not the play of framing forms or linear causalities but, actually or potentially, its most deterritorialized component, a cutting edge of deterritorialization.” 336

“Stating the distinction in the most general way, we could say that it is between stratified systems or systems of stratification on the one hand, and consistent, self-consistent aggregates on the other. But the point is that consistency, far from being restricted to complex life forms, fully pertains even to the most elementary atoms and particles. There is a coded system of stratification whenever, horizontally, there are linear causalities between elements; and, vertically, hierarchies of order between groupings; and, holding it all together in depth, a succession of framing forms, each of which informs a substance and in turn serves as a substance for another form. These causalities, hierarchies, and framings constitute a stratum, as well as the passage from one stratum to another, and the stratified combinations of the molecular and molar. On the other hand, we may speak of aggregates of consistency when instead of a regulated succession of forms-substances we are presented with consolidations of very heterogeneous elements, orders that have been short-circuited or even reverse causalities, and captures between materials and forces of a different nature: as if a machinic phylum, a destratifying transversality, moved through elements, orders, forms and substances, the molar and the molecular, freeing a matter and tapping forces.” 336

Levi has an interesting post about quantum mechanics and Speculative Realism. A whole slew of issues arises surrounding epistemological versus ontological realism particularly in regards to the issue of observation and the uncertainty principle. As the Dailykos post he references makes clear, decoherence does not assert that everything depends on observation, but that at some point quantum phenomenon appears as macroscopic reality.  While decoherence does not explain this transition it does not justify, as Gabriel Catren makes clear in his contribution to Collapse V, a mathematized transcendental couplet comprised of observer and experience (or correlationism).

Catren describes physics as a theory of objects made of a formalism (mechanics) and many kinds of objects (such as fields, particles, systems and so forth). The bulk of the essay is dedicated to showing how QM demonstrates objects and qualities as self synthesizing without the need to appeal to a transcendental subject. Objects are then defined as “a set of invariant objective properties that manifests itself through a phenomenological multiplicity of phases.”

But the source of objective or invariant components becomes problematic if objects only ever become other objects ad infinitum. Catren’s response to this is the utilization of universal operators which he likens to Whitehead’s eternal objects also refering to them as universal ideas.  These ideas which make ingressions into nature are discussed in terms of mathematics – any given object is an expression of certain universal measurements or other physical properties.

What I cant grasp is how the universal ideas (if they are to avoid anthrocentrism) can be separated from being a thinkable potentiality such as Deluze’s category of the virtual. Steven Shaviro made this connection some time ago here. It seems that there can be no guarantee as to the contours of conceptualization (via Brassier) or of transformation (against Meillassoux’s logical access to chaos).  This is the crucial importance of identity in the Laruelleian sense. Yet even in Laruelle there is the tension between the object and the point (the object being the zero-point of being).

The issue remains that the object (at least as it is used by Harman and Bryant) is a relocation and shrinkage of being (or ground in the Schellingnian sense) whereas the point (functioning in place of the object) is a formalization of an epistemological limit regarding becoming. For OOO/OOP it seems that being becomes de-humanized (flattened) whereas for tm/neo-vitalism it is the ignorance surrounding the absolute which is flattened or annihilated. The function of thinking in the former remains an enigma.

Also, see Michael’s excellent post here.

While our leaders missfunction each other and cram themselves down into fishy niches;  while they disorient their preoperatives and negate their misinterpretations….why not have some fun with the “not that?”  We’ve been working with some ideas that we haven’t had yet….something about the modest squares….

In case you wonder why I am not posting much now, it is because I am trying to come up with an interesting idea for my next project and the workshop next week. I can tell you right now that it will have to do with defacement of portraits in Maya art and architecture. This project will work along these theoretical lines:

Defaced people on a ballcourt panel from Cancuen

The human subject emerges from relations of exteriority and from parts to whole. In the empiricist philosophy of David Hume, Deleuze (1991) finds an alternative to the linguisticality of experience that has been part of the Kantian and Hegelian traditions. Based on Deleuze’s reading of Hume, DeLanda argues that subjective experience is formed from distinct and separable sense impressions. Ideas derived from these impressions are direct replicas of the impressions without any representational link (as a contrast to Kant’s faculties of representation). The ideas only have a lower intensity than the impressions (cf. Bergson 2004). Therefore, each kind of impression (visual, aural, passion) has a singular individuality and existence. They are heterogeneous and cannot be reduced to one another (DeLanda 2006, 48-50). Emotions and senses like sight and hearing are depicted in the expressive record in the Maya area (Houston et al. 2006). This data can be used to understand how these impressions were understood from the ideas formed by the impressions.

The subject pursues a goal through the principle of utility and establishes relations among ideas through the principle of association. The association of ideas gives the singular impressions and ideas a unity, an assemblage. Our habits of grouping ideas and comparing them transform a population of individual ideas into an emergent whole (DeLanda 2006). Habitual repetition creates a stable identity for the assemblage and habits sustain the association of ideas (cf. Turner 1994). The human being is habitual and creative at the same time.

On the personal scale, the main effect of language is to form beliefs. To believe in the ideas brings them closer to the impressions. However, it is often the intensity of a belief that drives social action, rather than its linguistic proposition and semantic content (DeLanda 2006, 48-52). Thus, human agents did not study, analyze and contemplate the monumental iconography into the cosmological and symbolic details described by various Mayanists (cf. Normark 2008a). Monumental iconography rather worked like Gell’s (1998) sense of index that directly affected the viewer. It was the intensity of the beliefs associated with the impressions of viewing the iconography that created an intense ritual arena. The iconography was also a way for a signifying regime to direct the ideas into a homogeneous form, and these ideas would then affect their components (the impressions) as well.  

The subject emerges from subpersonal components and it interacts with other subjects through short-lived assemblages called encounters, which consists of the co-presence of human bodies and materialities (DeLanda 2006, 52-53). Sartre’s (1991) concept of serial action, of how people form temporary series in relation to materialities, is a complementary perspective in the study of social encounters (Fahlander 2003; Normark 2007). Locations where series of people formed and encounters occurred can be found in abundance in the archaeological record: house lots, causeways, plazas, rooms, water reservoirs, sinkholes, caves, quarries, etc. (Normark 2006a). Encounters can also be seen in the iconography (Reents-Budet 2001), detected through the epigraphic record mentioning nobility visiting or interacting with other nobility (Schele and Mathews 1991; Stuart 1999), and the location where this occurred (Stuart and Houston 1994).

An encounter is territorialized by behaviors that define the borders, such as grinding corn in a house lot (Hutson 2004), quarrying stone (Abrams 1994), and the meeting between nobles from different sites (Martin and Grube 2000). Embarrassment and dishonor can be seen as deterritorializing processes in an encounter. We have examples of this in the iconography of defeated captives (Houston 2001; Martin 2001; Schele and Freidel 1990; Schele and Miller 1986). The same event is also a territorializing process for the victorious ruler and the organization of which the ruler was part. Such lethal encounters were eventful and allowed the participants an expressive possibility to display character, such as courage and integrity (DeLanda 2006, 55; Normark 2007). Defacement is an effect of similar encounters.

In D&G’s A Thousand Plateaus’ chapter Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal… the writers pick up the theme of the sourcerer as a model of cultural propogation. Likening the act of the sourcerer as memory-master (creation of/from the past) through contagion, a category in relation to that of filiation. Bodies, groups work become through these segments of genetic affiliation, through familial lineage and through contagion, through the penetration from a nominal culture grounded within the larger cultural group. For instance, the werewolf is part of the larger Kingdom Animalia, yet the thing itself is the product of Homo Sapien Sapien infected by a viral strain which represents characteristics of Canis Lupus. Datamoshing works through contagion.