tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2515921571276722482024-03-16T11:52:43.373-07:00Videre SpectareJtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.comBlogger128125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-87881715787777932322014-07-24T15:09:00.000-07:002014-07-24T15:20:51.951-07:00From Hermeneutics to HeureticsI have often wondered where my idea of how I relate to a text emerged. I have vaguely spoken to people of the <i>claim </i>texts have on me. . .at least certain texts. I say that I want to <i>understand</i> texts (to stand-under them), to <i>encounter</i> them, to <i>endure</i> them, to <i>dwell</i> with them. This last verb betrays my affinity for Heidegger.<br />
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I tell my students that you should look for elements of the text you don't understand. Such moments then urge us to understand. I tell my teachers that there are very few texts nowadays that I feel are true encounters or events-- that is, texts that burst my previously held beliefs and thoughts. That is, texts that offer me more than just a series of academic positions in an assertive mode (to use Heideggerian language),but instead fundamentally alter my consciousness, to skew my schemas as if I had taken an experimental drug. I look for texts that present me with a new <i>style</i> of thought, a new rhetoric, a new poetics--not just new terminology or, even worse, "applied" terminology. </div>
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I'm beginning to believe that my specific attitude toward texts emerged from Heidegger's student, Hans Georg-Gadamer, and his seminal text, <i>Truth and Method. </i>In "Tragedy of Hermeneutical Experience," scholar Gerald Bruns writes that a common theme in the history of interpretation, </div>
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"is that the understanding of a text always requires, in some sense, a conversion to the text's way of thinking, and what this means is that we always end up having to reinterpret ourselves, and even change ourselves, in the light of the text. To understand a text is not only to grasp its meaning; it is to understand the claim it has on us. Most often this claim is critical in the strong sense, as when a text exposes to us our own prejudices, by which Gadamer means not only our private, subjective dispositions but, more important, the conceptual frameworks we inhabit and to which we appeal when we try to make sense of things. More is at stake in interpretation than interpretation. What would it be for a text to explode the conceptual world of the one seeks to interpret it?" ("Tragedy" 77). </div>
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The texts that most often achieve this task for me are works of poetry, some literature, and, most importantly, continental philosophy and theory . I have often spoken to my friends of the fundamental alteration to my mode of thinking by the text of Lacan, Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, and Serres. It is their <i>style</i> of thought and, sometimes, writing, that I strive to inhabit. </div>
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And yet, it is precisely these thinkers who do not advocate hermeneutical sense of "meaning" but rather the generation of endless texts (or other experiments in response) to be read and re-read, written and re-written. But I subject myself to these texts, which have a claim on me, and try to then ask what they are asking me to do-- not with them or to them but to <i>myself</i>. </div>
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Because these texts are so transformative, at times, I believe that I elevate them to a sacred level, believing that it is difficult for me, a lowly mortal, to touch the writing of powerful and knowledgeable divinities. But these writers are more often than not thinkers of <i>non-knowledge </i>(especially Lacan). In some ways, they say--don't believe you can "understand" --just create. The idea that I can do what they are doing never crosses my mind in the same way that I have always felt like I'm just "not a creative writer" --I don't write fiction or poetry. I am a mere critic, an interpreter, a humble servant to the multivalent meanings of other texts. These texts can change <i>me, </i>but the texts I write can only be second-hand commentaries, my words functioning merely as an implicit injunction to others: go read these great texts. </div>
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On the one hand, this hermeneutical orientation has allowed me to be extremely receptive to difficult work and given me an extraordinary ability to navigate various possibilities of meanings in a text. Furthermore, it has allowed me to understand various ways that others make meaning and interpret. It allows me to open myself up to the other in a way that goes beyond a kind of neo-liberal openness of tolerance. </div>
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However, it has made it <i>extremely</i> difficult to <i>write my own texts</i>. It has made it extremely difficult for me to believe that I can create texts that have this opening effect on others. One reason for this is that, in general, many academic texts do not question our own standing as subjects, but prefer to thematize the issues, endlessly pointing toward ways we can apply the insights of great philosophers to our disciplines. The philosophers are only there to provide us a way to speak of our "subject" and not us, as reader-writer-subjects (if you'll excuse the lazy designation). It is always about what text so and so enables us to do as a scholar within the community of scholars rather than transformation of ourselves. </div>
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But perhaps this is a false dichotomy. If what i say is true, then it seems like I am advocating the position of Rorty, where the difficult texts of these thinkers --private ironists -- can serve us only as individual readers rather than map new possibilities for a collective politics of well-being. </div>
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The problem lies, I think, in hermeneutics as an orientation toward <i>understanding</i> rather than an orientation toward <i>invention. </i>It appeals, like some other appropriations of phenomenological principles, to a kind of individual ethics of a constant undermining of our own knowledge positions when given new possibilities. Now, this ethical orientation, as I said above, has served me well as a human being in my relationships. Perhaps it was never the literature, poetry, or philosophy <i>per se</i> that was opening my horizons, but my openness to these texts and my willingness to change.<br />
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We can see that a certain strain of philosophical hermeneutics forces us to acknowledge the otherness of the Other, to expose ourselves to the other and recognize that that person (or that text) has a claim on us just as much as we can make claims <i>about</i> it -- but that every claim we make (assertions) will never capture the irreducible singularity of the text.<br />
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But what do we then <i>do</i> with this exposure?<br />
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Well, we strive to interpret it according to the complex intersection of our own time and being as well as when the text was made. However, I'd like to suggest that despite this method eventually <i>producing</i> a text, the interpretation of the text then becomes a kind of residue of the encounter of understanding. My dear friend and former professor once told me that an interpretation of a text tells us more about the interpreter than the text itself. I agree. The text is a record of what Gadamer might call "hermeneutical experience," an encounter which can never be reduced to what is written about it, as the person is transformed through the encounter with a text. Bruns, commenting on Gadamer's interpretation of Aristotelian catharsis, writes "tragic knowledge is closer to what Cavell calls acknowledgement and what Gadamer calls hermeneutical experience than it is to what we normally think of as knowledge, namely, knowledge as conceptual representation" ("Tragedy" 82). The problem with this is that this notion of hermeneutical experience believes that you can remove the veil of a false consciousness to see reality -- rather than, as Nietzsche says, that truth cannot be separated from its garment. The idea is that truth of the situation, of the world, of reality can be revealed, if only in a negative movement: "It is emancipation from false consciousness achieved not by methodological application or analysis but by hermeneutical experience, that is, by the encounter with the otherness of reality, or with that which refuses to be contained within--kept at bay by--our conceptual operations and results" (82).<br />
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Bruns' tragic hermeneutic anti-philosophy is criticized by Charles Altieri in his essay, "Hermeneutics and Rhetorical Theory." Arguing that Bruns' Levinasian inspired tragic view of philosophy is too abstract to confront reality, Altieri writes, "[f]or the rhetorician, the understanding of tragedy must give way to a tragic understanding of the limits of understanding, for understanding is simultaneously not effective enough to bridge our differences and so effective that it overcomplicates what might be resolved more simply, were we to negotiate without worrying about we think we know" (105). This sounds similar to what Bruns' is advocating, but there is a pragmatic dimension to Altieri's position that suggest that Bruns' thinking leaves no room for agency, especially, I would add, collective agency. I'm sympathetic to this position because in a world where we are all acknowledging the tragedy of the world and doing nothing about it, it is not enough to abstractly 'expose' ourselves in Cavellian "acknowledgement." Indeed, perhaps we need <i>more</i> recognition and identification, not in the sense that we should strive to understanding "the other" in either its abstract quasi-transcendent Levinasian dimension nor in the misguided idea that we can fully understand the experience of a concrete other, but rather explore the dimensions outside of "understanding" in more concrete, rhetorical contexts insofar as we can delimit them. </div>
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Perhaps Rorty is right that insofar as we encounter these texts as private experiences of personal transformation, some of these texts are only of use to us if we take them as "ironists." What if instead of the tragic view of hermeneutics (converting to a text's way of <i>thinking</i> in order to show the limits of our self-understanding and, simultaneously, the singularity of particularly powerful texts which make claims on us), we focus on what we can <i>do</i> with a text in a given situation through an articulation of <i>how the text thinks, </i>we have moved into what Greg Ulmer calls heuretics. Heuretics implies a mode of reading for "instructions" --what is the text telling us to do?<br />
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Heuretics contrasts with hermeneutics in that, although it does not discount the "past," in fact, the past is a choral (in the sense of Plato's <i>chora</i>) resource from which to invent rather than a context from which to interpret. For heuretics, we choose several texts that seem like they can be useful for inventing in the present toward a particular problem (or "target"); we can detect here Deleuze and Guattari's claim that philosophical concepts always address particular problems--the same can be said of a text. The point of heuretics is that we are not trying to understand the text as a whole -- we take for granted that the text exceeds any use we might make of it, but this is good. Ulmer has articulated a "machine" (if you will) for invention called the CATTt. The texts are inserted into each of these slots and it is the slot which determines (although, of course, its not like you choose which texts go into which slot willy-nilly) how the text functions within your work. We are not seeking the "truth" of the text in hermeneutical fashion, but what Lacan calls the "truth of the subject," the subject being something which emerges rather than a pre-constituted text or author.<br />
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Contrast<br />
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We must also note that the process of using the CATTt and any heuretic method is an <i>experiment</i>. In <i>Heuretics: The Logic of Invention</i>, Ulmer claims that inventive texts have a "CATTt" at their basis, from Augustine to Descartes to Derrida. Discovering the CATTt can help generate a poetics but the CATTt is a heuristic device -- the individual writer/composer must make many decisions about what to keep and what to throw out. The difficulty of heuretics is finding to what extent do you use your text as a "contrast"?<br />
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We can read Ulmer's project provisionally as a way to begin to invent and construct figures of wisdom which will help us make decisions, since the time of jurisprudence (a major element in Gadamer's hermeneutics) and careful application of law is useless under the dromosphere (as Virilio calls it). We have deconstructed the hell out of all our values -- now where is the Nietzschean transvaluation?<br />
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For Ulmer, rather than a tragic, Bruns-like, ethics of the radical other, we need to look at the aesthetic dimension of experience -- neither rareified reflections on philosophical aesthetics, nor necessarily examples of difficult digital poetry, but the aesthetic within everyday life. His project is inspired by avant-garde art of Marcel Duchamp and the Modernist poetry of Stevens, Pound, Eliot, Stein, etc. In an electrate world characterized by advertisement and the Entertainment institution, the skill needed will not be to interpret, but to invent, create, and produce media that will show us how we as a collective can strive for well-being. For Ulmer, we need to recognize ourselves in the world because are, as Lacan claims, in an extimate relation with it: the outside is the inside and the inside is the outside. We must "take the side of the object"(as Baudrillard puts it in <i>Fatal Strategies</i>) not to revel in its inexhaustibility, apart and alien from anything we might impose on it (see Ian Bogost's <i>Alien Phenomenology</i>), but to find how these objects correspond with the truth of the subject in the objet @ (as Ulmer writes it), the 'fetish.' We are not interested in objects "in and of themselves," but as they signify and found our myths and values in our society. This discovery will happen not through critique nor through speculation on substance, but through attention to individual and collective desire as it manifests in the world. </div>
Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-24048835232189893532014-02-11T08:19:00.003-08:002014-02-11T08:19:44.974-08:00Mignolo, Semiotics,Systems Theory, Derrida, Writing and the Animal Question<h4 style="color: #555555; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.666666984558105px; margin: 1em 0px 0px; padding: 0px;">
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It might be difficult to say what "discipline" Mignolo belongs to. However, I think that "cultural semiotician" is not too far off. Mignolo is interested in <em>making meaning </em>and, like other work we've encountered this semester, subordinates "writing" to a general paradigm of <em>communicative </em>behavior. To use words like "sign carriers" is still to gesture towards a container model of writing, even if he tries to avoid this by thinking through the different kinds of sign carriers based on social roles rather than interpreting the "message" contained therein.<br />
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But I want to focus briefly on the ways Mignolo deploys semioticians that have served as precursors to systems theories of scholars such as Maturana and Varela an Niklas Luhmann. In the broad field known as Animal Studies, especially through the work of Cary Wolfe, there has been a significant attempt to question the very foundation of humanist thought: the distinction between "the" human and "the" animal. Jacques Derrida, a figure addressed by Mignolo, but deemed not relevant to his own work, has been a crucial voice (especially his <em>Animal that therefore I am</em>) in this discussion, arguing that we rid ourselves of the general category of "the animal" for a more complex and diverse set of infinite distinctions and differences. He identifies this distinction operating even in some of our most attentive continental philosophers, such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, and Descartes. Wolfe takes his cue from Derrida and NIklas Luhmann, synthesizing their thought brilliantly in chapter 1 of <em>What is Posthumanism</em>?<br />
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I give this background because I am fascinated by the operative distinction Mignolo makes between human and animal:<br />
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if speech and writing distinguishes the species <em>Homo sapiens</em> from other species, reading (from the Anglo-saxon <em>raede</em>, 'to discern') seems to be one aspect of the sphere of semiotic interactions shared by all animal species--although not every animal species uses its hands 'to write', all are certainly able 'to discern' (e.g. to read) the semiotic behavior of other animals as well as changes int eh cycle of nature [. . .] Writing (in the general sense of the use of hands and the extension of hands through a sharp instrument, brush, pen, fabric, or knotted strings, etc.) together with speech, distinguishes the network of semiotic interactions proper to humans from the more limited ones found in other animal species (260). </blockquote>
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Why is this so interesting? Because for Mignolo it is both writing <em>and speech</em> that distinguishes the network "proper to humans." In Western philosophy, the distinction between human and animal was made based on human being's capacity for language. While I recognize that the human/animal distinction is not the primary issue for Mignolo's work, I think that it has significant implications for his theorization of writing given that marginalized peoples were rhetorically framed in animalistic terms (and still are) and treated as such. This is why I don't think it's as easy to ignore the Derridean challenge.<br />
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Mignolo himself actually identifies the connection between biosemiotics (a precursor to more developed systems theories of Maturana and Varela) and Derrida's work: "Von Uexkull's notion of 'meaning' is perhaps not too far removed from Derrida's notion of archi-writing" (306). Mignolo then goes on to say that Von Uexkull's work<br />
"is relevant to the humanist and social scientist interested not only in transcending Western metaphysics by redefining writing, but also in transcending Derrida and moving beyond the speech-writing dichotomy as well as the trajectory of the letter from the southeast to the northwest Meditterranean--in other words, to move beyond Occidentalism as it manifests itself in the ideology of language subservient to colonial expansion" (306).<br />
This quote is crucial for two reasons:<br />
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1.) Von Uexkull's language in his <i>A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans</i> does seem to use "writing" language to describe semiotic signs ("marks"). There are limitations to Von Uexkull's work pointed out in the introduction to the text (notably, his assumption of a kind of holism rooted in German idealism), but I do think, like Cary Wolfe, that systems theory can contribute to Animal Studies.<br />
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2.) The rhetoric of "transcending" Derrida is problematic, given Mignolo's close critique of such language in the work of Enrique Dussel in his essay "Dussel's Philosophy of Liberation: Ethics and the Geopolitics of Knowledge," in the edited collection <em>Think from the Underside of History</em>. Mignolo points out this very problem I have with his own language in Dussel's treatment of Levinas: "I would suggest that instead of 'superseding' Levinas (a view that reproduces a linear progression of knowledge toward the ideal point of arrival, which is indeed embedded in totalitarian thinking), a spatial and regional conception of knowledge be enacted" (30). Dussel's own philosophy sugggests this principle (as does Mignolo). While "superseding" can be thought of as implying more linearity, both superseding and transcending imply a telos, the latter which is rooted in Western metaphysical discourse.<br />
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What does Mignolo want to "transcend" in Derrida?<br />
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"I would like to maintain the distinction which Derrida attempted to blur. The distinction is relevant because it allows us to understand the characterization of humanness based on speech has a different articulation from the characterization of humanness based on writing" (306). </blockquote>
The distinction seems to be twofold: One, the distinction must be maintained between speech and writing (as he writes) and this implies that there is no need to posit an "archi-writing," a "trace" structure. Mignolo argues that Derrida "invented" this notion to escape the narrow definition of writing, "conceptualized as a supplement to or representation of speech" (305). Mignolo answers: "If, instead of theorizing writing based on the Western tradition, one takes Mesoamerican and Andean examples as starting points, one comes up with a different notion of writing that allows for a rethinking of the relationship between speech and writing which does not make the second subservient to the first [. . .] [Hence] new articulations of the complicities between speech and writing are possible" (305). <br />
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I note here also that the common referent here is a conception of "humanness." Bernard Stiegler, too, has addressed this uniqueness of the human being. Our being is fundamentally tied to technics (and thus 'writing' or what he calls 'tertiary retentions) but in a completely accidental matter. That is, there is certainly something called "the human" but "the human" is not some essential characteristic/potentiality that it would contain in itself. Rather, the human is distinguished by epiphylogenesis: we 'evolve' by means other than biology. But the "who" that we are is constituted by the "what." That is, we transmit knowledge, we have access to an "already there" that was not lived by us (even if this access is always a process of selection and interpretation: that is, we never have "total" access). The process of interpretation and transmission allows us to collectively individuate ourselves in a more complex way than animal beings (here Stiegler draws extensively on the work of Gilbert Simondon). Mignolo says something similar, but always also referring to speech as a human marker:<br />
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"The development of speech and the extension of hands to scratch solid surfaces [. . .] have increased the complexity of semiotic behavior among the species <em>Homo Sapiens</em> and, together with speech, have contributed to the consolidation of features we recognize as human" (259).<br />
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Thus, it does not seem to me like Mignolo is careful to question his own philosophical assumptions. Even if his arguments hold that "ancient Mesoamerican writing systems are totally alien to the idea of writing as representation of speech" and that "the idea of writing in colonial situations is totally alien to the grammatological program founded in the regional history of the Western philosophy of writing, and finally that writing has to do with "control of the voice and the construction of territoriality," he still hangs onto a vague and undertheorized notion of "speech" distinguishing the human from the animal. "Speech" retains a kind of metaphysical significance. (I still have to look at this closer).<br />
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I can't help but think this has something to do with Mignolo's conception of "text." It's a quick sentence in the essay, but I think that it needs to be addressed: "It is culture specific if there is agreement that what a culture understands by 'book (e.g. Holy Book) transcends the object and becomes a text: the idea of the object on which graphic signs inscribed as conceived by the culture producing and using it" (260-61).<br />
I don't know what to do with this quotation, as the section ends and Mignolo begins to draw conclusions. I'd like to look back at this passage in class. Maybe I'm making too much of a big deal out of it and that its actually quite simple what he's saying here, but I can't shake a feeling.<br />
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<b>Decolonizing Posthumanism</b><br />
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Obviously, this book was written in 1995. Derrida's <em>Animal</em> wasn't translated and the concept of "animal studies" hadn't even really arrived on the scene yet. This might make my critique of Mignolo unfair. I look forward to the way he frames his semiotic project in <em>Darker Side of Western Modernity</em> (if indeed he still follows the close semiotic methodology he enacts in <i>"</i>Signs and their Transmission"). However, a brief look at the bibliography shows that Mignolo does not address Derrida in this recent text.<br />
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But Mignolo would surely find recent theoretical posthumanist texts to be massively de-contextualized and, for him, probably irrelevant for the period he focuses on (broadly conceived "the Renaissance") given the beliefs held in that time period. Still, I do not think the question of the animal should be elided.<br />
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Juanita Sundberg, in "Decolonizing Posthumanist Geography," argues that academic posthumanist discourses completely ignore indigenous knowledge constructions that *never* split nature/culture or human/nonhuman. Sundberg identifies Cary Wolfe's work as indicative of this universal assumption:<br />
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"Wolfe's analysis, however, enacts its own universalizing performances in that he does not explicitly identify the loci of enunciation of such dogmas" (Sundberg 36). </blockquote>
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Indeed, Wolfe's primary theoretical allies, Luhmann and Derrida, have both been criticized for the "abstractness" of their theories. Luhmann's theory has even been called a "super theory." Certainly Wolfe, Luhmann, and Derrida are trying to avoid the more "metaphysical" ontologies that characterize Sundberg's next target. Luhmann has been criticized by Levi Bryant for smuggling in an assumed ontology while trying to stay on an epistemological level.<br />
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Sundberg also criticizes Jane Bennett's book, <em>Vibrant Matter. </em>Bennett who is proponent of a kind of "new materialism" (although this label is reductive) talks about "thing power," but explicitly warns her reads against what she sees as naive vitalisms or superstitions (citing W.J.T. Mitchell): "Even as Bennett advocates attention to the power of things, she worries that taking such things seriously risks tainting the rationality of secular humans with the stain of pre-modern magic" (37). According to Sundberg, Bennett implies that although the Other is "capable of giving things their due as co-producers of daily life, they are <em>incapable</em> of producing knowledge relevant to theorizing materialism" (37-39).<br />
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I myself have had concerns about New Materialism, Object oriented ontology, etc. for simply setting up another conception of Aristotelian <em>substance </em>no better or worse than "naive" conceptions of the world -- unfortunately represented in our culture as "indigenous." Sundberg is correct to criticize Bennett for not thinking the very material connections between land/resources and their political ontologies.<br />
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What I find interesting is that the question of indigenous knowledge puts epistemological critique back on the table as a relevant question rather than, as Bryant and others (Harman) have argued, something which was some elaborate poststructuralist game in order to get away from the "real" objects in the world (see Harman's <em>Guerilla Metaphysics</em>).<br />
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"Critique" is another methodology recently attacked by scholars such as Bruno Latour and the others mentioned above. One can argue, as Aaron did at one point in the seminar, that the very gesture of critical thought is embedded in Western methodology, but I am not sure what alternatives we have? The alternatives seem to be something like a naive embrace of (or worse, a decontextualized, watered down appropriation of) "indigenous" knowledge. Do I, as a white, male, American, non-indigenous scholar have the right to "mine" indigenous knowledge for paradigms to elaborate and elucidate my own theoretical concepts? If I use them for my own purposes rather than seek a kind of thick description of its uses in the context of another way of life, have I simply colonized this knowledge?<br />
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Contra many of the thinkers mentioned above, S. Mallavarapu and A. Prasad argue in a recent article that Latour does not pay enough attention to power differentials (the problem with a "symmetrical" anthropology") in his analyses, essentially forgetting certain networks that are crucial to knowledge construction. Latour rarely questions the network that the "nonmodern anthropologist" is him or herself a part (195).<br />
More importantly is Latour's binary distinction between the iconophile and the iconoclast. Latour himself considers himself an iconophile against the iconoclast and sees iconoclasm as allied with critical rather than constructive tools. Mallavarapu and Prasad admire Latour's project, but think that his defensiveness against critique makes it difficult for people to point out the limitations of the project. Malavarapu and Prasad argue instead that<br />
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If [Latour's methodology] intends to offer a proper democratic politics it has to find ways to deal with hierarchy and power differentials. This would require investigation of differing and unequal 'motivations', 'interests, and roles of different actants (196). </blockquote>
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In other words, the networks Latour traces leaves out other networks and this is because even though Latour seems to be interested how knowledge is <em>constructed, </em>his impulse is to flatten the elements on a horizontal rather than vertical (power, interested) scale.<br />
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The resurgence of non-human agency and the question of the animal leaves us with a lot of work to do when we consider the systematic de-legitimization of indigenous knowledge construction. How we are to approach this knowledge (and how they themselves conceive of "knowledge") remains an open question. </div>
Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-77077430955768023912013-12-06T12:47:00.001-08:002013-12-07T15:20:04.821-08:00Stiegler and Lacan on 'the Drive' (Trieb)<div>
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In the work of Bernard Stiegler, drives must be bound and sublimated in order to encourage long circuits of desire. Without sublimation processes, we are unable to form a collective desire. Stiegler argues that we must find a way to institute a desire for a future through what Winnicott called "transitional objects." In <i>What makes Life Worth Living, </i>instead of focusing on typical transitional objects such as a teddy bear, Stiegler claims that "theoretical objects are transitional" and these transitional objects do not ex-ist, but con-sist (33). "Theoretical objects" are something along the lines of <i>ideas, </i>but not in the Platonic sense. Stiegler writes,<br />
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"The ideal beings of ontology must be replaced by infinitive motives," infinite motives being taken in the Deleuzian sense (another word might be "tendencies"). Stiegler also links the infiitization of an object's motives to Husserl's intentionality, with a Freudian tone. He writes, "In other words, the intiutive experience of infinite objects of knowledge, that is, of consistences, is opened up by that projector of infinities that is the unconscious--and reason is as such above all a matter of desire" (47). So when Stiegler discusses this idea of "reason" he is not thinking of instrumental rationality, but rather a reason based in desire, the theory of the unconscious, and a certain transformation of intentionality via Winnicott. Indeed, Stiegler calls the point of departure for his new critique a "critique of the unconscious," which is hardly a dismissal of it. Rather, from this critique, "and as <i>practice</i> of the <i>pharmakon</i> as transitional object, a new critique of consciousness becomes possible, a new theory that can only be a <i>political economy of the spirit</i> as the formation of attention, itself conditioned by the play of primary and secondary retentions, a play of retentions that the <i>pharmakon</i>, as tertiary retention, authorizes" (23)<br />
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These "consistences" as transitional theoretical objects an be transmitted is through tertiary retention, or rather, objects that function as a memory object for the collective. So tertiary retentions help transmit our consistencies that we may infinitize. These "consistencies" may be understand as something like a composition of desire and memory that lead us to a trust and hope in a future. Consistencies are thus what Stiegler calls "knowledge" as opposed to "information." The worth of knowledge increases over time whereas the worth of information decreases. These are obviously relative terms so that we cannot make any sort of absolute declaration of what is knowledge and what is information. However, for simplicity's sake, let's contrast Aristotle's <i>Poetics </i>with up to date information on the weather. Tomorrow, that information is irrelevant, whereas Aristotle's <i>Poetics </i>still sur-vive in even the most contemporary texts, if only as a model to be refuted or transformed.<br />
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But what I want to get at is why Stiegler is so insistent on calling the bad consumerist society a society of <i>drive. </i>In interviews, Stiegler has promised that the fifth volume of <i>Technics and Time</i> (we haven't even the fourth volume in French or Engilsh yet--although we have the title -- Symbols and Diabols) will deal with Freud and Lacan ("Rational Theory of Miracles"). But so far it is Winnicott's theories that have taken center stage, despite the way in which we might think of Lacan's theory of the "lack" in terms of the Fault of Epimetheus (the de-fault). Stiegler remarks that "the logic that Lacan attempted to describe as 'lack'" is "<i>precisely not a mere lack</i>, but on the contrary <i>necessary</i>: the stoic quasi-cause" (24). In a footnote, Stiegler acknowledges that it was Gilles Deleuze that brought back the concept of the quasi-cause, but Deleuze "does not enable us tot hink the relation of desire and technics" (138). </div>
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Reading Lacan, one gets the sense that he thinks the drive has been vastly undertheorized. In <i>Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis</i>, the libido (the sexual drive) is "ungraspable" and "unreal."<br />
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Stiegler too refers to the libido, whose figure is Promethean fire, which is a symbol for desire and technics. The libido: "the subject par excellence of the pharmacology of the unconscious" (24).<br />
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For Stiegler, desire can regress to drives; whereas sublimated desire creates "long circuits," drives bypass sublimation and create short circuits:<br />
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"In other words, the <i>two tendencies </i>of the <i>pharmakon</i> are the <i>two tendencies of libidinal economy</i>: these are, pharmacologically, when on the one hand it produces long circuits through which it becomes care, entering into the service of the libido oriented through sublimation; and when on the other hand it produces short-circuits, short circuiting and bypassing sublimiation, that is, the binding of the drives. <b><i>Long circuits connect or bind the drives that are disconnected for unbound by short circuits.</i>" (25)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>For Stiegler, "drives," without their binding by some kind of technical prosthesis of sublimation (the libido?)), are inherently "destructive." Stiegler argues that the drive <i>consumes its object </i>(91). However, for Lacan, the consumption of the object directly will not satiate drives. Rather, the drive endlessly <i>circumvents</i> that object in a play that might be akin to the kind of "infinite motives" of the transitional theoretical object. The object for the Lacanian drive remains <i>objet petit a</i>. For Lacan, drive and desire are coupled in a more essential way than the <i>almost</i> binary (although he insists it is pharmacological) relation posited in <i>What Makes Life Worth Living</i>: "The third limit of capitalism [. . .] is the limit constituted by the drive to desire all objects in general through consumption, insofar as they have become objects of the drives rather than objects of desire and attention" (92).<br />
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<b>Libido</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Lacan defines the libido as "<i style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> </i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">pure life
instinct, that is to say, immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has
need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is
subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that is subject to the
cycle of sexed reproduction” (Lacan 198). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Thus, libido in some way is this pure force that is turned toward drive because of our condemnation to sexual reproduction. What I find so fascinating about this definition is that, in Stiegler, it is precisely because thought is impossible without the technical prosthesis that forces us to transmit, inherit, and adopt knowledge via tertiary retentions. The libido's fall into the cycle of sexed reproduction is also our fall into the necessity of <i>differance</i>, the trace, tertiary retention -- our default, our double lack. These tertiary retentions, if we care and pay attention to them in the way Stiegler suggests, are the sublimations of drives that makes civilization possible. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18px;">Lacan writes, "the libido is the essential organ in understanding the nature of the drive. This organ is unreal. Unreal is not imaginary. The unreal is defined by articulating itself on the real in a way that eludes us" (Lacan 205). Once again, this sounds as if the libido, essential to understanding the drive, <i>consists</i> rather than exists or subsists. But we only have a partial libido-- a partial drive--because, once again, as Lacan tells us the libido <i>QUA</i> pure life instinct/immortal life/life of no need of an organ is subtracted from us because of reproduction and because we are subjected to the differance/trace/the metonymic chain of signifers that constitute the subject. The libido is thus inevitably tied to the drive. The drive is a prosthesis of the libido that creates a circuit of desire which will never be able to overcome the gap of the unconscious nor the fall into reproduction (the lack). </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18px;">Why call the drive the 'organ' or the 'prosthesis' when Lacan calls libido the organ? Because Lacan writes that the organ has to be understood as "part of an organism" but also as an <i>instrument</i>. Furthermore, the way Lacan describes the drive is as a composed, organ-izational system consisting of parts. The drive is a <i>surrealist montage</i>. The drive is a technical work of art! The drive is composed and consists in four terms: </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18px;">1.) <i>Drang </i>(thrust)</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18px;">2.) <i>Quelle </i>(source)</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18px;">3.) <i>Objekt</i> (object)</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18px;">4.) <i>Ziel</i> (aim)</span></div>
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Perhaps the infinitization and intentionalization of motives in a theoretical/transitional object is akin the "circuit" of the drive described by Lacan. The drive is "short-circuited" if we imagine that we've reached a goal other than the return of the drive to its circuit. The long circuit of the drive's path is what makes a <i>subject </i>appear. If for Lacan the signifier is that which represents the subject to another signifier and it is through this circuit that new signifers are <i>generated</i> (and thus, a multitude of 'subjects' that are always already <i>fading</i>) than might we not understand this generation as the process of "transindividuation" as elucidated by Stiegler via Simondon? This "headless subjectification," a "subject-with-holes," would thus signify the potential for infinitization. Another way to say this is that it is through "subjectification" that we produce transitional theoretical objects of infinite motives. Like the transitional object, we can argue that the "subject" in Lacan does not ex-ist, but rather consists in the movement of the signifier representing the subject for another signifier.<br />
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On the other hand, one might also understand the drive impulse, if it always attains its goal (a peverse satisfaction in the dissatisfaction of desire) as that which inhibits an meaningful (trans)individuation. Lacan describes the drive as something which produces <i>homeostasis</i>. Perhaps we are satisfied through our "drives" by the dissatisfaction of our desire and rather than producing collective libidinal energy, we are merely circulating various objects, getting pleasure from whichever one comes our way.<br />
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But again, Lacan seems to point toward the idea that the repression of lidinal energy (through the drive?) is what allows for Stiegler's idea of 'attention':<br />
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"Somewhere Freud says quite categorically that it is the pressure of what, in sexuality, has to be repressed in order to maintain the pleasure principle--namely, the libido--that has made possible the progress of the mental apparatus itself, as such and, for example, the establishment in the mental apparatus of that possibility of investment that we call <i>Aufmerksamkeit, </i>the <b><i>possibility of attention</i>.</b>" (Lacan 184)<br />
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In other words, perhaps we need the drive as the apparatus of the libidinal organ to maintain homeostasis, and, in turn, make possible the desire for transitional objects? </div>
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Graph of the Drive</div>
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Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-91507308476049839382013-11-20T09:19:00.002-08:002013-11-20T09:19:37.443-08:00Writing and FailureBecause our thoughts are not merely transferred from our heads to the paper (or screen) and because we can never simply be both the writer and the audience at the very same time, writing is a 'process'. Writing is not a progressive process, with identifable and codifiable steps, but rather a process in which we have to repeatedly encounter our own failures to say what we want to say. This recognition of failure is sometimes called the revising or editing stage, where audience becomes primary. We have to be honest with ourselves when we read-over our work as an audience, confronting our short-comings the first go around. In order to write, then, and why it's so painful, is that we have to spend an enormous amount of time confronting our failure to say what we thought we were saying. We have to confront the difference between our enthusiastic desire to get something out and the unfortunate truth that in our frenzy of thought, the words do not have the same intensity and effect we desire on those encountering our text. <strike>Sometimes when I write initially it's as if I'm stammering. </strike> My first attempt is the print equivalent of stuttering or stammering (is that any better than the sentence I crossed out?). Often, I can surprise myself writing this way.<strike> A certain cadence created by a flow of words, usually just a sentence or two, may impact me (as a reader) more than I thought it would. A certain combination of words may hit myself in the role of the reader more than I anticipated. </strike>(Better, still not there). <div>
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I should re-write this paragraph. I'm sure that my initial drive to put these words on the page skewed my sense of effective communication. But I won't. I'll leave it here unfinished. Another failure I am unable to confront as an honest receptor. </div>
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Of course, I've only marked some of my changes. I've backspaced quite a few times in each of the sentences above while typing, no matter how unfinished and awkward they may read, realizing that a word here or there is better replaced. </div>
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To conjure a world out of words is a most difficult activity. . .</div>
Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-52696639133777968402013-10-18T14:05:00.004-07:002013-10-18T14:29:52.504-07:00Jacob's Ladder: On names, language, and writing<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jacob's Ladder</td></tr>
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Despite telling myself I'd stay away from theory this semester, I have been sucked back in, reading Michel de Certeau's <i>Practice of Everyday Life</i> and Helene Cixous' <i>Three Steps on the Ladder to Writing</i> in the space of a couple weeks as well as pieces of David Farell Krell's newest text on Derrida's <i>Beast and the Sovereign</i> Lectures. In this latter piece, Krell connects the future of thinking to our attentiveness to language(s). Krell writes,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I will only add the remark that if apophantic discourse seems inadequate to the task, it means that students who pursue this line of inquiry will have to develop their gifts for language. It may not be a matter of inventing a new language, even if Zarathustra com- mands us to 'fashion a new lyre' Yet it will surely be a matter of resist- ing that overwhelming trend in our own world, including the world of higher education, to diminish the importance of language and lan- guage teaching, to flatten and banalize our powers of expression, to accept as though it were an inevitability the waxing illiteracy of our time."</blockquote>
For those readers unfamiliar with the term "apophantic," is a term in Aristotle that refers to a particular judgment, a judgment of what is true and what is false. In Heidegger it refers to the possibility of the "as such." Derrida, especially in <i>Aporias</i>, has challenged the possibility of a true "as such." Thus, if Heidegger argues that the difference between humans and animals (as he has in his 29-30 text) is that human beings understand <i>beings as beings, </i>in their "truth," but we deny the possibility of apophantic discourse, this form of the distinction no longer holds fast. In fact, Krell suggests in his text that there is a certain non-apophantic strain of Heidegger in <i>Being and Time</i>. I also argued that Heidegger's fixation on the "as such" in <i>Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics</i> was a shift from <i>Being and Time</i><a href="http://jtriley.blogspot.com/2011/10/jacques-derrida-on-heidegger-on-animal.html"> here</a> and wonder why he seems so intent on keeping this concept in those lectures.<br />
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This may all seem besides the point, but its really not, because if we cannot say the truth in the way that Heidegger believes humans beings are capable of, then we must rely on the interminable and (im)possible process of translation and uniqueness of each material signifier; Heidegger ignores the fact of writing at his own peril. That is, we need to be able to be attentive to the language, and how that language is marked by the author, of a given philosophical or literary text (or any text!). If as Greg Ulmer advises we are to write the "choral word," that is, write with every meaning of the word, creating a kind of field that a word brings forth, then we also need to be able to think in different languages and in the specific idiom of a given thinker in these languages. The very possibility of thought turns on resisting the flattening and banalization of our "powers of expression," as Krell puts it. The same word refers to many things and means differently because of the contingent ways its been inscribed in texts throughout human history.<br />
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If students, especially graduate students in literature, cease to learn these languages, then they will become less attentive to this unconscious slippage of language and be content with reducing texts to "positions" or "stances." Places from which one stands and defends rather than conceiving the text as a weave of meaning and nonmeaning. We can already see this in the paucity of metaphors used by our politicians. Everything is conceived in terms of "war." A "war on women," a "war on christmas," a "war on Christianity" a "war on Freedom." I'm reminded of the Wilco song, "War on War." I don't want to declare a "war on war," because this defeats the point. Why must we see everything as an <i>agon? </i>Could we ever learn to see in terms of <i>illynx</i> (vertiginous play?). Positions, stances -- we speak from these places, isolated on islands of solitude. Even Michel de Certeau's metaphors are drawn from military terminology: <i>strategies</i> and <i>tactics</i>, but at the very least <i>tactics</i> are described as in-sin-uation. An implying, a suggestion, a slithering. It's to suggest to the powers that be: why don't you take a bite from the apple -- become mortal, limited, fragile, and capable of death. Respect what this wonderful place is offering rather than the Strategic Law from on high.<br />
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It's this <i>specificity and idiomatic</i> nature of texts, that of course is never confined to that single text (reaching out to other uses of the word in the entire archive) that we lose when we turn words into data or when we are satisfied with a meta-discursive, philosophical language that does not pay attention to the trace-structure of language. In academia we see a turn away from the "lingustic" turn toward the material world, affect, the "great outdoors," mathematical reality, etc. and philosophers have developed languages that they more less think correspond to (as well as participate in) the reality "out there." Many of them write in English and do not let the word reach out to its other manifestations, to allow it the freedom to mutate its meaning based on ALL of its uses and even the possible words buried in the terms morphemes. Many of them also seem to ignore the insights of psychoanalysis into the materiality of the signifier and its almost magic powers, signifiers that gather our lives around a (w)hole. We choose and do not choose these signifiers.<br />
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I am not explaining myself well here. . . Let me try and get at it another way.<br />
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In an insightful recent post on <a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/traumas-of-the-erasure-of-the-real/#more-7479">"Traumas of the [Erasure] of the Real"</a> Levi Bryant reflects on why he is dissatisfied with thinking "everything is a text." He writes,<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> Naturally the humanities academic sees everything as a text because a) when you deal with texts day in and day out you tend to see texts (signs/signifiers) everywhere (in Uexkull’s terms we could call text the </span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">umwelt</em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> of the academic), and b) because it’s </span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">narcissistically </em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">gratifying for the humanities academic to think that the entire world is composed of texts. If </span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">that’s</em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> true, if the world is composed of texts, signs, signifiers, beliefs, concepts, and norms, then </span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">we</em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> are the most important people in the world because we’re the ones that hold the skeleton key to the truth about “reality” (which, in this context, signifies the human </span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">umwelt</em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">.)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I'm not convinced that every Humanities academic does see <i>everything </i>as a text, but that there is something to be said for an <i>attentiveness to </i>the ways in which language has been inscribed in textual instances. This is because depending on which texts we are familiar with and how we respond to certain words, words mean different things for observers. Proper names, for instance, can invoke a mood or style of thought for those familiar with the name and the texts that name recalls. I say Derrida and all sorts of words come to mind. We all have our own Derrida based on the texts we can remember and recall when the name pops up. This is an effect of the trace structure of even proper names and how they come to signify and mean for us in a multitude of ways. But even more than proper names there are words such as "trace." When I hear the word "trace" I think of so many different ways its used and how I've heard it; for me, it is a powerful word with real rhetorical effects on my psyche. For others, for instance, my students, having not undergone the text of Derrida, it may mean very little. Or the French verb, "rechercher" -- for someone of a literary cast of mind, the word may recall Proust and everything associated with Proust. For an English speaker, we may never think of Proust (if we have never read Proust's title in French!). These works and the lines within them leave traces, mark, <i>burn</i>, and etch a new meaning, a new association into the language. This is reading the "unconscious" of the text in some ways, but not its "political" unconscious, but the unconsciousness of the signifier. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">This why reviving words like "substance" or "object" can be incredibly difficult tasks because of the ways in which these words have been used in the past, both in philosophical treatises and "ordinary" language. The point I was trying to make above is that a truly universal "ordinary" language is impossible. Of course the everyday usage of the term haunts a specialized disciplines use of the term and this is important. For instance, to say that the human is an "object among other objects" could be both estranging and profound, but because of the way in which we speak of "objectifying" people, and the horrible history of such objectifications, this haunts such philosophical recovery projects. "Subject," for instance, has throughout its usage been set off against object, one which has "agency" the other without agency, but we our also "subject to" and "subjects of." The verbal form of the word haunts its nominative. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 18px;">For philosophers, words like Idea (especially if capitalized), recalls Plato and a subsequent history of "idealism." The word for idea, <i>eidos, </i>is an ordinary Greek word meaning "shape" until Plato elevated that notion to a philosophical concept. Perhaps this phenomenon is what Michel de Certeau means when he writes: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">"We are subject to, but not identified with, ordinary language [. . .] In order to constitute themselves, scientific methods allow themselves to forget this fact and philosophers think they dominate it so that they can authorize themselves to deal with it" (<i>Practice </i>11)</span></blockquote>
<span style="line-height: 18px;">We are subject to the ordinary way words are used, but we can also make something mean differently. To borrow a Spinozist phrase, "we do not yet know what [words/language] can do" (and are not words another type of 'body' or at the very least always touch the body?). </span><br />
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But what we <i>cannot</i> do, in either philosophy or science, is to pretend that language can become a pure object of study "outside" of what language can say.<br />
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This why the attention to what language <i>can</i> say in multiple languages and other improper border crossings is so important to think a text at the textual level and within the rules (and transgressions of those rules) that occur in a given language. Even de Certeau's own analyses cannot be outside of ordinar (and non-ordinary langauge) for that matter. For instance, I kept noting that a key verb in de Certeau's text (at least according to the translation) is <i>insinuate</i>. Apart from the more popular distinctions usually gleaned from de Certeau's text such as "strategies" and "tactics" I could not help but notice the repetition of this signifer-- how crucial it was to describe the relation between phenomena in de Certeau's text. To "insinuate" in English means "to imply something" or to "worm your way in: to introduce yourself gradually and cunningly into a position, especially a place of confidence of favor." This verb then links (in)directly to de Certeau's description of "tactics" against "strategies." In fact, the verb is used in its definition: "a tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking over it entirely without being able to keep it at a distance" (xix). In fact, a tactic is this transgression and border crossing -- a way in which one subtly insinuates or "implies" a meaning through the use of a word in a particular context. It is to <i>suggest</i> a meaning (and I use suggest here to insinuate a hint of hypnosis).<br />
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I remember being struck and finally understanding why Freud's honing in on the "magic word" of the Rat man ("rat") and the associations he made between "rat" and other similar (but not visually the absolute same) words in the German language actually works. In German, one might associate "rat" with another word that contains the same morpheme and this may be an unconscious, poetic work done by the mind. I am trying to think of a good English example, but I can't at the moment. However, I know that I have felt myself speaking certain words, almost involuntarily, because of a text that was working on my mind. What I recall is a function of the texts that insinuate themselves into my lexicon (did you catch it?).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Helene Cixous<br />
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Where the power of the signifier really gets interesting is when we begin to deconstruct at the level of the word. Helene Cixous, in her three lectures <i>Three Steps on the Ladder to Writing, </i>suggests that aside from the School of the Dead and the School of Dreams, there is the school of <i>roots</i>. "Roots" here mean many things, but Cixous suggests that roots signifies both plant roots into the earth (because in order to get to the 'truth' you have to do the difficult work of <i>descending</i> the ladder rather than ascending) but also it seems the "roots" of words. I might add also, although she doesn't play on this as much, the "routes" we take when we tra-verse borders (of languages, of particular marks, of meanings, of oral and literate modes of understanding). We have to "go" to these schools, but, as she writes, the power of the text is<i> </i>that we are trans-ported immediately into the text, without a <i>passport, </i>just as we slip into dreams.<br />
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In the "third" school, we learn how to, among other things, invent from our own proper name. Jean Genet and Claire Lispector (the latter of which plays a significant role throughout the entire text) are both taken as exemplars. Cixous' own discourse, with its metaphors of light and night reflects Lispector's own text. Indeed, Cixous' brilliance is partly to use the language of the text she reads, subtly suggesting, insinuating, whispering possible ways of understanding (but even "understanding" is still too coated with conscious thought). Rather than focus on the "natural light" of the understanding of Descartes, Cixous appropriates and transforms the image of the light reflecting off an axe, an axe that could potentially fall on any one of us.<br />
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I do not have this text with me at this very moment, so I cannot <i>read </i>with the kind of exactness that Cixous does with the texts she dearly loves. One thing I note about the lectures/seminars of both Cixous and Derrida is their willingness to <i>read</i> and to read again and again the same passages -- sometimes reading a latter passage first and then going back and reading the beginning of the passage. When I say this, I do not mean reading as an abstract activity that Frederic Jameson has argued is a mystification in the texts of Paul de Man, but I mean simply <i>reading the damn text aloud. </i>Reading for the way the language insinuates itself into our minds. There is <i>no substitute</i> for reading the text in these lectures. We can interpret and paraphrase and we can in-corp-orate (incarnate) the other's language into our own reading of it, but to read the text itself, aloud, to repeat it, is like hypnosis -- it makes the suggestions and implications we make in our interpretation (or better, our "reading with") more forceful and probable. Some may say this is a bad way to read, an "improper" way to read, a reading that is not an <i>argument, </i>a lazy reading in the place of a true <i>interpretation, </i>but I defy you to deny the power of Cixous reading-with Claire Lispector or Jean Genet. Th<i>e </i>drive to <i>interpret</i> dreams is what Cixous can't stand in Freud's <i>Interpretation of Dreams</i>. She says she used to "read it with pleasure," but finally decided that it was better if dreams were not "interpreted." At first I was taken aback by this, but in some ways, Cixous may be suggesting here that its when Freud interprets in order to cure -- as if there was a cure for the special kind of wound a dream makes -- that he makes a mistake. Cixous seems to argue that the dream should be let-be (with a Heideggerian inflection).<br />
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Genet's name suggests Genet, which is in biology, "a colony of plants, fungi, or bacteria that come from a single genetic source" (wikipedia). <i>Flowers</i> are for Genet one of the most important signifiers, and he plays with both his name and words for flowers in some of his passages. Cixous reads these moments brilliantly and I only wish I had the text here with me to (re)cite.<br />
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But in lieu of that possibility, I have decided to invent from my own name. In her text, Cixous notes the importance not only of human beings, but the animal, the vegetable, and the supernatural. Animals prevalent are "dogs," which Cixous said are terrifying to us because we cannot bear their pure love, since human beings are always a mixture of love and hate. The vegetable is represented by flowers and the supernatural is present in angels, hell, and the dead (ancestors) that haunt us. I decided to try and figure out if I could use my name as a heuretic for understanding myself. Name is not destiny, but perhaps through playing with my name I may glean some wisdom about myself in the same way that horoscope or Tarot might show us something we may not have thought. The fact is that this process is a construction -- not fate, but a chance association that might allow me to gather parts of my life, to interpret signifiers that could be close to me, to help me make meaning via trope and image rather than a coherent narrative. My name gathers together all varieties of beings in its spoken and written form.<br />
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But first, the "origin" of my name, Jacob.<br />
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Like many of us in the Judeo-Christian world, my name derives from the Hebrew Bible.<br />
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Jacob
means the “supplanter,” which recalls to me both “planter” and “supplement” as
well as its major meaning of “taking the place of” or “being in the place
of.” Jacob came out of the womb grasping
at Esau’s heel, as if trying to pull him back into the womb, so he could be the
firstborn, foreshadowing the destiny of his trickery that led to his receiving
of the blessing. </span></span><br />
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When I was young and found out about the story of Jacob and Esau, I was a bit furious that my namesake was such a deceiver! But perhaps there is a reason I am obsessed with "supplementary logic" of Derrida and the French thinkers. I am "in the place of" -- in the place of <i>what or who?</i> By association,I am an essential supplement.<br />
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So many are named Jacob, we wrestlers of Angels, we "god contended," we supplanters, we deceivers, we sophists, we rhetoricians, we blessed, but not everyone is named Jacob Riley (although of course there are many of these as well).<br />
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"Riley." I've always disliked my last name for some odd reason. It's so scottish. I've also tried my hand how it combines with many of the names of the girls I've loved and it frequently sounds odd, too trite, and silly. An ex of mine: Sadie. Sadie Riley -- ugh, what disgusting assonance! Not even sing songy, just too much.<br />
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But despite the oral unpleasantness to Riley, there is an unexpected connection between my first name as "supplanter" and one blessed by God and my last name, Riley. "Living the life of Riley" is a phrase, turned radio show turned tv show, that suggests "an ideal contented life, possibly living on someone else's time, money, work or work" but rather than suggesting a freeloader, "it implies that someone is kept or advantaged" (wikipedia).<br />
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I indeed <i>am</i> living on someone else's money (the state's, the university's) and I do not feel like a lazy freeloader, but that I <i>am</i> blessed or kept. I live a "charmed life" I've said to many a friend and colleague.<br />
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"This is stupid, self-indulgent, narcissistic, and selfish" I hear you readers cry -- and indeed, maybe it is, but so is reading and writing itself. Reading and writing is associated with leisure and indeed is impossible without leisure. Reading and writing blurs the boundary between work and play. Writing, as a kind of dying to oneself, is jouissance, <i>le petit mort</i>.<br />
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Before getting to the inter-species potential of my name, I want to mention my middle name, Thomas. It was in college I think that I came up with a significance to my middle known unbeknownst consciously to my mother and father: My name contains the doubt of "doubting" Thomas who asked to put his hand in the wound of Christ and the belief of Thomas Aquinas, that wonderful synthesizer of Aristotle and Christianity. Between Thomas Aquinas and Thomas the doubter, lies Jacob Riley.<br />
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<b> Jacob in Pieces</b><br />
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Ja! -- Yes! (<i>auf Deutsch</i>). I like when people call me ya-cub, my name pronounced in German. The first morpheme of my proper name in German, which is part of my ethnic background, is affirmation! Perhaps this is what unconsciously touches me so much to that last word in <i>Ulyssses</i>: Yes. Perhaps this is why I am entranced by Derrida's reading of double affirmation, the "yes, yes." A call of my name harbors inside it already an affirmation -- my name already replies and turns toward the other when called before I even acknowledge them. Hearing my name is already to take responsibility for a turning toward the other.<br />
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yay -- A Spanish woman I know who meant a great deal to me used to pronounce my name "yake," because a "j" in Spanish sounds like a 'y' and so I could not help but think that within the German Ja! is also the English expression of joy, "yay!" "YAY!" "yay" is an expression of excitement which probably derives from "yeah," or some other affirmation. The first part of my name is filled with joy and affirmation. How lucky I am to be blessed with it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlF1cloZS67Azsv_ivXPR26pRryCOiBAIKOgD4SwK2373Fkjz4PYi0R4IyW64_5yiYnvNEqBJH5mVfAaI16JF6eYcQKuEnXSJsXI4Cg7k28n2EhgXxCtRX0iwyl9TAZCg_Xa0dV7YVQ6I2/s1600/bluejay.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlF1cloZS67Azsv_ivXPR26pRryCOiBAIKOgD4SwK2373Fkjz4PYi0R4IyW64_5yiYnvNEqBJH5mVfAaI16JF6eYcQKuEnXSJsXI4Cg7k28n2EhgXxCtRX0iwyl9TAZCg_Xa0dV7YVQ6I2/s1600/bluejay.jpg" /></a>Jay -- Blue Jay -- Returning to the sound of my name in English, we hear "jay." This is the animal perched on the left side of my name. The blue jay is named for its "noisy, garrulous nature." I love noise and sound -- give me feedback any day. I am also somewhat of a "jaybird" which is a slang term for "a talkative person, a chatterer" or "a fop or dandy." I would like to believe that I avoid idle chatter whenever possible, but perhaps what is significant thought for me comes off as idle chatter to the next person. I do not know, perhaps this animal does not suit me. Perhaps this is the limit of improper invention<br />
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Cob -- (corn?) -- My vegetative nomen is cob (although the name is pronounced "cub" it is written "cob," here we have another improper crossing between pronunciation and written signifier). A Cob is also an adult male swan, and a small horse (our names contain so many animal companions). The cob of a piece of corn can be hollowed out to make a smoking pipe. Although my pipes are made of briar, I'm gonna go ahead an make this connection (why not?).<br />
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My nickname is "jake." I've always liked this nickname because of its association with the shitter--a shitter without any plumbing. I love the grotesque, the unclean, and the scatological. Swift, Rabelais, Voltaire -- the more potty humor the better! To debase is to also raise up. Bakhtin's work on carnival and the grotesque will always stay close to my nether regions (rather than my heart).<br />
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The atoms of our names contain the world and can be just one way to orient ourselves and to understand ourselves. By doing this we make our name improper and cross multiple borders. Here I can go back to Krell's initial point. It is through this play of language that we can invent so much meaning in our lives. To restrict the signifier to one language or think about a text or argument in isolation is to cut off the pleasure of the text, of writing, and of death. If the Humanities is concerned with <i>writing </i>and <i>reading, </i>then perhaps our unique place is entirely other to the sciences and the social sciences and we should stop seeking to appropriate their methodologies and their passion to discover "reality" at the expense of fiction.Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-83457984311938279762013-10-09T13:54:00.001-07:002013-10-09T21:21:28.791-07:00Data Materialization, Experimental Art, and "Carpentry"(reposted from TRACE blogspot)<br />
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In this post, I hope to think through how TEMPL (or whatever our lab will be called) might go about using computers and objects in order to practice media ecology by making. In order to do this, I will draw on, but also distinguish my position from, Ian Bogost's <i>Alien Phenomenology</i>.<br />
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First, a word about "data materialization." This term arose as a few of us outside of class met to discuss what the lab would "do." Since we were interested in both the screen and software, hardware, and the e-waste, we decided that to argue for data "visualization" would be too limiting. Aaron, who will go into more detail on this idea at a later date, mentioned a 3-d printing of an ecology of relations. Each iteration was different and revealed different things about the data ecology. From this idea, we came up with the idea of "materialization" to refer not only to the physical object, but also to nod toward the move toward re-materializing information. As N. Katherine Hayles points out in <i>How We Became Posthuman, </i>information has seemed to have "lost its body." However, information is always in-formed by its material existence. "Materialization" then does not just refer to 3-d printed objects,but also to the 'materialization' of data in a program, game, or academic essays. </div>
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In <i>Alien Phenomenology</i>, Ian Bogost laments that "philosophy" is only enacted in written form: "writing, always writing" (Bogost 88). He argues that since academics are not even good writers and that our writing typically takes the form of nit-picky critique, perhaps "a metaphysician ought to be someone who practices ontology" (91). Bogost shifts back and forth between the idea of academic scholarship as written scholarship and "philosophy," confusing the two. Instead of philosophical treatises, Bogost calls for, following Graham Harman, "carpentry."</div>
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"Carpentry" is an interesting metaphor for many reasons. For one, it allows Bogost to make problematic claims concerning "materiality." While he admits that "written matter is subject to material constraints," he argues that with few exceptions "philosophical works generally do not perpetrate their philosophical positions through their form as books" (93). "Carpentry," however, "must contend with the material resistance of his or her chosen form, making the object itself become the philosophy" (93). This position denies the <i>materiality</i> and inhuman resistance of language. In an unfortunate reduction of language, Bogost writes: "Language is one tool we can use to describe this relationship, but it is <i>only</i> one tool" (100). Thus, language, unlike objects, is an instrumental tool deployed by humans to philosophize. In addition, the form of a book (and the genre of that book and its audience) does indeed place material constraints on the author and contributes just as much as any other medium to philosophy. Regard, for instance, Hegel's extensive reflection on "the preface" and Derrida's subsequent reading of it. </div>
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Bogost justifies carpentry as a metaphor in a questionable manner: "it extends the ordinary sense of woodcraft to any material whatsoever--to do carpentry is to make anything, but to make it in earnest, with one's hands, like a cabinet maker" (93). "Carpentry" then reinforces this notion that it is the sovereign human subject, with his non-prosthetic hand, crafting a raw material rather than the kind of non-human turn Bogost and OOO seems to be want to reach. </div>
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Harman rarely mentions contemporary technology, preferring objects like hammers, but Bogost at least tries to address computer technology. Bogost asks how computers, cameras, and other objects "see" the world. While we can obviously can never no exactly how a thing experience the world, Bogost suggests that we create interfaces with human beings to try and grasp how the material technology changes the way an object sees the world. He writes, </div>
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"The experience of things can be characterized only by tracing the exhaust of their effects on the surrounding world and speculating about the coupling between black noise and the experiences internal to an object" (100). </blockquote>
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Ignoring Harman's language of "black noise" here, I think that the idea that we trace the "exhaust of their effects" is an interesting way to try and track and then create an interface between humans and other objects. I am actually in favor of this as I think it reflects the ecological imperative of "tracing" the marks left by non-human beings. </div>
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However, Bogost's second point -- that we should for "experiences internal to the object" -- I think shows the baggage of subjective-phenomenology. Bogost writes, </div>
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However appealing and familiar the usual means of doing philosophy might be, another possible method involves a more hands-on approach, manipulating or vivsecting the objects to be analyzed, mad-scientist like, in the hopes of discovering their secrets (103)</blockquote>
This notion of "secret" or "core" or "withdrawness" in objects is the reinscription of a metaphysical "inside" of an object that recalls Kant's "in-itself." Everything we do to an object or every attempt to represent the object is a "caricature" of it's withdrawn essence.<br />
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For Bogost and for Harman, objects are withdrawn into themselves that any access an object has to any other is "metaphorical." While I agree with Bogost that we should create artistic projects as interfaces with technologies and other non-human artifacts, I think that his emphasis on the internal workings of technologies short-changes the ecologies of these artifacts.<br />
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But although these projects are informed by philosophy, I would hesitate to say that they enact philosophy in the same way. These projects are <i>art</i> performed with philosophy in mind. We want to find a way to artistically present data. Instead of thinking how a particular technology perceives, it may be useful to make things that shows how different ecologies perceive data differently.<br />
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In contrast, Bogost seems to want to induce "wonder" at these artworks and thus produce wonder at the technologies they seek to metaphorically represent to human beings. It seems to me that rather than taking the pieces apart to understand, the goal would be to enchant and mystify the technologies, creating "allure."<br />
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For example, after embedding his teaching of the Atari system in a media archaeological context, Bogost writes:<br />
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But what's lost in this rhetorical process? The 6502 microprocessor and TIA graphics chip are ontologically de-emphasized, allowed only a relational role as thing in a larger network; the evolution of computing, low-level systems programming, pedagogies of the practice of fundamentals, professional skill development regimens, and so forth. Yet the 6502 is just as wondrous as the cake and the quark. Not for what it <i>does</i> but for what it <i>is</i>. (128)</blockquote>
I would argue, however, that our laboratory and other artistic practices of data <i>materialization </i>should be precisely to think about what it <i>does</i> rather than what it "is." How can represent and materialize the different functions of a given technology or data set. Ecologies are less concerned with something "is" and more concerned with what something <i>does </i>--and more importantly -- what it <i>can do</i>.<br />
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Bogost's conception of philosophy as art (or art as philosophy -- "carpentry") is nothing more in some sense than an anthropomorphization and subject-ifying objects with a focus on perception rather than function and the impact of the traces. Tracing the "exhaust" must be taken in its environmental context as something that effects the atmosphere, exhaust which disappears from view but which haunts the environment in its impact. We cannot simply gaze in wonder.<br />
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It is only if artistic practices take into account both the internal and external functions/effects of objects and material in complex ecologies of interpenetrating discursive and non-discursive realms that art will not become a commodity/object fetishism. Our artistic production should not strive to invoke wonder, but to irritate our perception so much that we are moved to engagement and inquiry. If art evokes wonder and awe, such awe and wonder should not lead to a contemplation of the being of an object, but orient us toward response.Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-29456829725372660232013-10-01T10:10:00.000-07:002013-10-09T21:20:54.835-07:00Technological Determinism, Control, and Education: Neil Postman and Bernard Stiegler<br />
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Upon re-reading Neil Postman's <i>Technopology: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, </i>I found many parallels to calls from Bernard Stiegler. I am still unsure whether this should trouble me. Stiegler's detailed philosophical reading of Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida is surely not for nought. However, it may be worthwhile to look at the difference between Postman and Stiegler.<br />
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The issue here is one of control. The question concerning technology either revolves around technology's "good" or "badness" or "neutrality," or, alternately, our ability to <i>control</i> it. I would like to argue here that Stiegler's "politics of memory" does not imply that we can control <i>technology</i> or that we can slow the process down (such as Virilio, who Stiegler uses generously in <i>TT2), </i>but that we can engage with it. Postman, in contrast, seems to suggest that we <i>can</i> control technology, even though he offers many examples of how technology's effects cannot be controlled or sometimes even predicted.<br />
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For Postman, the question of any new technology, is to ask what it may <i>undo</i> rather than what it can do (Postman 5). This already sets up his narrative as one characterized by nostalgia, as Sid Dobrin pointed out to me yesterday. Still, Postman recognizes, as does Stiegler that technology is never "neutral" because there is no technology "in itself." Instead, technology always enters into a particular situation and as such is <i>pharmacological</i>.<br />
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Postman misses this pharmacological aspect of technology; instead, he frames it as if technology has a <i>telos</i>: "once a technology is admitted; it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do" (Postman 7). He seems to see the technology as <i>entering</i> society as if from an alien force. That is, at one point, for Postman, technologies did not "attack" "the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced" (23). Postman seems unaware that (at least this is Stiegler's argument) that technics came first, and constituted the very possibility of culture in the first place. But once again, it is hard to disagree with statements such as the following:<br />
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embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another. (Postman 13). </blockquote>
Both Postman and Stiegler are concerned with how technologies alter education. Postman's main concern seems to be the television, a technology important to Stiegler as well ("Telecracy against Democracy"), but also the computer. Postman's views of the possibilities inherent in the computer are dated, as he argues that computers carry a banner of "private learning," "individual problem-solving." In his defense, Postman's book is pre-social network. Thus, later in this book, he characterizes computers as mainly calculating devices in the service of "Technopoly."<br />
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For Postman, the ideal time to live was not what he calls "tool using cultures" nor our contemporary moment, but what he calls a "technocracy," which emerged in the 19th century with the industrial revolution: Following Marx, he acknowledges alienation and poor work conditions, but he seems to think that back then we were more conscious of them as evil things that must be eradicated. This is why one can call his orientation rather nostalgic compared to Stiegler (although Stiegler might be nostalgic for something else: the family? I need to read <i>Taking Care</i>). Postman writes,<br />
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And though it is true that technocratic capitalism created slums and alienation, it is also true that such conditions were perceived as an evil that could and should be eradicated [. . .] The nineteenth century saw the extension of public education, laid the foundation for the modern labor union, and led to the rapid diffusion of literacy. (44)</blockquote>
Technocracy also gave us "political and religious freedom," the idea of "progress." Postman thus concludes that "technocracy will not overwhelm us" (44-45). Technocracy does not render religion, for instance, totally ineffectual: "there still existed holy men and the concept of sin" (45).<br />
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This seems about as far away from Stiegler as one can possibly get. However, Stiegler too uses the word "spirit" as a positive term. The difference, one might argue, is that for Stiegler "spirit" must also be tied to a Freudian libidinal economy and the concept of mass affect. We get the sense that Stiegler does not long for a time when religion told us what to do; rather, much like Greg Ulmer, aesthetics and art -- various <i>compositions</i> -- should become an integrative paradigm. More on this later.<br />
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Returning to Postman, he sees an insidious transition between his beloved technocracy and Technopoloy. Technopology is "totalitarian technocracy" (48). Postman defines Technopoly's "thought world" via Taylor's <i>Principles of Scientific Management</i>:<br />
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The beliefs that the primary, if not the only goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that inf act human jdugment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.(51)</blockquote>
From here, Postman laments the proliferation of information without any guiding structure (for instance, the schools). I do not think that Stiegler necessarily would disagree with this diagnosis. Indeed, this is not a far cry from Stiegler's claim in <i>Decadence of Industrial Democracies</i>:<br />
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the <i>reduction</i> of trust (and of time, that is, of belief in the future) to pure calculation, which would be capable of therefore eliminating anything incalculable, is <i>what radically destroys all trust</i>, because it destroys all possibility of believing: all the possibility of believing in the indetermination of the future, of the future as indeterminate and in this indetermination as <i>chance, </i>an opening to the future as to its improbability, that is, to the future as irreducibly singular. (45) </blockquote>
Ironically, for all of his laments against calculability, if we are to believe Postman, the goal is to try and <i>predict</i> the future (to calculate it) and we do this by paying attention to the "telos" of technology. Ignoring Derrida's important argument that the condition for the possibility of the incalculable is also calculation, the machinic, repetition, etc. Postman condemns calculation tout-court, seeing in the concept of calculation "numerical measurement." This is the type of calculation, indeed, that Derrida or Deleuze (or maybe Stiegler) might call a "bad repetition." The repetition that does not repeat in a singular way.<br />
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Still, its notable that the gist of both thinkers map onto one another. Stiegler, like Postman, even points back toward religion as the force that once maintained those "consistencies" (infinitized tendencies that do not strictly exist -- for more on this, see Stiegler's new book, <i>What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology</i>).<br />
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Postman increasingly fears the autonomy of technology and technique. He seems to believe that technology can once again be subject to our control. The problem, he argues, is that we have surrendered that control to "management" and to an autonomy of techniques that have become naturalized in the belief that these technical solutions can solve our problems for us. Once again, I do not think that Stiegler is in disagreement. However, his major point is not that "we" as human beings should take back control from the autonomous machines, but that we must <i>participate</i> in the constitution of culture through technical objects. Without this political-cultural-economic participation, the consumer remains alienated. Furthermore, Stiegler knows there is no unified "we" as a starting point, but, following Simondon, that it is through this participation that "we" emerges.<br />
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Postman uses stronger language: "And so it is necessary to understand where our techniques come from and what they are good for; we must <i>make them visible so that they may be restored to our sovereignty</i>" (143). The "our" he is referring to, I think, is citizens as opposed to so called "experts."<br />
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Who are these experts? Scientists. Yes, indeed, apropos of recent debates between Stephone Pinker and Leon Wielselter, Postman is concerned with what he calls "scientism." Scientism is characterized by three principles:<br />
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1.) Methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior<br />
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2.) Social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize humanity on a rational and humane basis.<br />
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3.) The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality<br />
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(Postman 147)<br />
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Scientism, in other words, is the belief that "science" can guide our moral and ethical belief in humanity. Scientism, as Postman suggests and as Nietzsche taught us long ago<i>, </i>is Science as God.<br />
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As I've pointed out before, "science" itself is an abstraction. Postman is less concerned with "science" and more with "social sciences" such as psychology and sociology - precisely the kind of "science" practiced by Pinker and co. The problem with Postman's analysis is not that he reveals the quite obvious humanities point about social science (social science tells morality narratives too), but that he seems to think that the "hard" sciences are an autonomous realm of discovery, a la Galileo (science teaches us how the heavens go, not how to go to heaven). But this refuses to acknowledge that the hard sciences, too, are now "technosciences" (and have always been technoscience). Postman writes, "unlike science, social research never discovers anything" (157). To this I say, science does not merely "discover" anything. In <i>Technics and Time 3</i>, Stiegler writes,<br />
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Contrary to the ideal of pure, classical scientific constativity, the essence of technology, is in fact always performative. Far from describing <i>what is</i> i.e., <i>the real</i>, technoscientific invention (whose <i>adoption</i> is called 'invention' insofar as it brings to light a novelty that transforms being) is the inscription of a possible that always remains excessive to being, which means <i>to the description of the reality of being</i>. (203-204)</blockquote>
That is, even the narratives and inventions of science are always an instantiation of the <i>possible</i> rather than a discovery of the real. This also should tell us that even though Postman may be correct that the moral directives we discover in "social science" research can also be discerned and invented by the humanities, that the humanities does not have some sort of monopoly on meaning -- just that we don't do all the bullshit that gets us to such obvious conclusions (that make the conclusions more "factual" or "scientific").<br />
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What Stiegler is really calling for is for <i>politics. </i>Hard science, natural science -- neither is isolated from politics, as Bruno Latour shows so convincingly throughout his entire career.<br />
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<b>The Great Symbol Drain and The Loving Resistance Fighter: What is to be done?</b><br />
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Postman argues that our symbols are being drained of their meaning, mostly through their overuse and abuse. In a forthcoming article on M.T. Anderson's <i>Feed, </i>the genesis of which can be found <a href="http://jtriley.blogspot.com/2012/12/memory-technology-and-biology-in-mt.html">here</a>, I argue that this society is so cut off from history that marketing has re-appropriated narratives and symbols almost to no effect. How could the society even understand the reference made to the bible in one of the advertisements if all of their information comes from a constant feed of new <i>information</i> rather than <i>knowledge </i>(a distinction made by Stiegler in his important article "<a href="http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis">Anamnesis and Hypomnesis"</a>). Furthermore, Stiegler's forthcoming book, <i>Technics and Time 4</i> is subtitled "Symbols and diabols." It does seem like both Stiegler and Postman are both concerned with the "draining" of the power of certain symbols -- a metaphor that recalls the sapping of the vital bodily fluid, the potency, of any given symbol. My guess is that Stiegler's analysis will be more rigorous than Postman's and at least attempt to take into account Derrida's essays on metaphor. Whereas Postman wishes these symbols still retained their potency, Stiegler's question is which symbols should be selected.<br />
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Postman laments advertising and marketing, rather than reading marketing theory in order to gain insight into marketing's function. In this way, he does not practice what he preaches: he does not inquire into the <i>production</i> of marketing ideology, simply asserting that it destroyed our most powerful guiding symbols. Rather than using advertising as a way to make <i>new symbols </i>(as I think Greg Ulmer is arguing for), he decries its irrationality and dishonesty. Although he mentions that marketing is linked to "depth psychology," the intricate history between Freud's nephew, Ed Bernays, and the advertising industry is in no way noted. For that history, we have to turn to Adam Curtis's documentary, <i>Century of the Self</i>.<br />
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Where Stiegler speaks of our collection of tertiary retentions, our collective memory inscribed in technical objects, Postman refers to a rather conservative notion of "tradition." He appeals to tradition, against advertising, claiming that advertising has no right to adopt traditional symbols. At his most polemic, he uses an unfortunate metaphor in our contemporary times: "The constraints are so few that we may call this a form of cultural rape, sanctioned by an ideology that gives boundless supremacy to technological progress and is indifferent to the unraveling of tradition" (170). Postman is adamant that we must maintain a distinction between the sacred and profane -- a distinction whose implications for politics has been analyzed throughout the work of Giorgio Agamben.<br />
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Furthermore, Postman relies on the concept of "narrative" in a way that completely ignores the postmodern critique of a meta-narrative. Stiegler's "politics of memory" is hardly meant to suggest a <i>unified</i> narrative of history and understanding. Yes, it is an attempt at escaping cultural relativism that emerged from poor readings of postmodern philosophy, but Postman seems unconcerned with idiomatic difference.<br />
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We can sense Postman's impending conservatism when he mentions E.D. Hirsch and Alan Bloom. Postman critiques Hirsch's inane idea of "cultural literacy" of an "educated person," but reads Bloom in a favorable light! Postman also writes that we need a "national" (read: American) narrative rather than a transnational narrative. This is again in contrast to Stiegler, who argues for a <i>transnational</i> intellectual community which would be based on criteria. It is this latter aspect (criteria) that something like "facebook" does not allow us to do. Facebook does not allow the <i>users</i> to constantly interrogate and adjust the criteria of their organization. Instead, the changes in facebook are imposed from without. How many of us have said at one point or another, "Oh, look what Zuckerberg did to my facebook? A timeline? Oh, that's cute. A newsfeed? Oh shit, this is gonna suck." Facebook has evolved, but not through the participation and recommendations of its users who are barred from knowing the reasons for the interfaces transformations.<br />
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Despite Postman's more blatant conservatism and rhetoric -- and the lack of nuance in his argument-- both Postman and Stiegler arrive at similar educational imperatives. This begins with both arguing that central to our future is the future of our educational institutions<i>. </i>Both ask: What are our educational institutions <i>for?</i><br />
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In an interview with Marcel O'Gorman, Stiegler says,<br />
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It's very important to study how maps are created. This is not taught in school, because we only teach the end results. We don't teach the process of the production of knowledge. It's a mistake. [. . .] We believe its necessary to revist the history of the construction of occidental knowledge, integrating these new technologies not just as a means of transmitting knowledge, as both objects to be explored and instruments for exploration. (470)</blockquote>
In <i>Technopoly, </i>Postman explains that we should hold<br />
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to the idea that to become educated means to become aware of the origins and growth of knowledge and knowledge systems; to be familiar with the intellectual and creative processes by which the best that has been thought and said has been produced; to learn how to <i>participate</i>, even if as a listener. (188)<br />
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But the problem, and the crucial difference, between Postman and Stiegler is that the former believes "the structure of the subject-matter curriculum that exists in most schools at present is entirely usable" (188). For Postman, its a question of making these subjects coherent, "a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness" of what they learn. This course of action, I think, describes the ideal of something like my own public liberal arts institution's goal. For Postman it's about understanding the past; for Stiegler, its a question of constantly (re)making the past and present in preparation for the indeterminate future.<br />
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Stiegler is making new institutions whereas Postman wants reform. Postman also clearly prefers "classical" art to our mere entertainment. He writes, "the schools must make available the products of classical art forms precisely because they are not so available and because they demand a different order of sensibility and response" (197).<br />
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This is suspicious and indicates Postman's implicit iconoclasm. Against "images," he presents us with "ideas" and classical art that demand a different sensibility. These artworks, however, do not demand a different sensibility "in themselves," but because they were from a different time period. I am not against teaching art from the past; however, art history and education cannot simply be, as Jack Stenner says referring to one of his students, "pictures of jesus." Its not the art of the past, but the art of the present --including the mass media -- that may be useful to bring students into the importance of symbols and what makes life worth living. This is Greg Ulmer's project and, I would like to believe, Stiegler is following suit.<br />
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But aside from the many problems with Postman's analysis, I generally agree with him that our education should be more focused on <i>the humanities</i> and that "technopoly" has sacrificed some of what makes our life meaning for the sake of efficiency and meaningless calculation and information. However, whereas Postman makes this an almost moral crusade, I prefer to frame the problem in terms of an intergenerational "politics of memory" and the processes of collective individuation via Stiegler and Simondon. Postman's "we" is an ideal we, a static we that does not attend to tendencies and desire.<br />
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For Stiegler, we may not be able to predict and control technologies, to weild it as sovereign subjects, but we can <i>respond</i> to it and hopefully <i>invent </i>not only new ways of "using" it, but inventing new technologies that can herald a new apparatus. Ulmer calls our current apparatus: electracy.<br />
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Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-22268013936333590512013-10-01T09:12:00.002-07:002013-10-09T21:19:19.757-07:00Responding to Richard Beardsworth's Response to Bernard Stiegler<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In his article, "Technology and Politics: A Response to Bernard Stiegler," Richard Beardsworth (author of Derrida and the Political) argues that Stiegler's work suffers from a 'technological determinism." While he praises Stiegler's political engagement and his brilliant re-reading of Husserl through Derrida, he argues that Stiegler does not take into account the many "non-technological" details and distinctions in our current economic. This leads Stiegler to a too bleak view of the possibilities inherent in capitalism and levels the multitude of affects available in contemporary society.<br />
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I find Beardsworth's critique to be very odd, since it seems that in his most recent work, Stiegler is, if not optimistic, at least offers contemporary technologies (produced by capitalism) as a way out of what Stiegler calls a "generalized proletarianism." Beardsworth point out that Stiegler has shifted Marx's alienation from the "producer" to the "consumer." While he doesn't quite say that this move is "illegitimate" he approaches it when he calls Stiegler's conception of our contemporary condition as "too Greek." Here, Beardsworth is referring to Stiegler's return to Plato's concern with the play of hypomnesis and anamnesis.<br />
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Surprisingly, Beardsworth relies on a "classical" reading of the modern economy, implicitly accepting the narrative that the the economy is divorced from social whole. He accepts as a matter of course that the economy, via modernization, is separate from the social, which is not the case in Greek society. For Beardsworth, there is <i>no escape</i> from capital as our governing logic. The best we can do, then, is to find "the right strategies to tame the excesses of global capitalism" (188). He puts it succinctly on the next page:<br />
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"Since there is no systemic alternative to capitalism at this moment in history, the question of <i>political</i> economy is one of whether effective regulation of capitalism is possible or not for the world as a whole" (189). </blockquote>
To be fair, Beardsworth makes a good point that capital is <i>global, </i>and Stiegler does seem to suggest at times that, for instance, Europe might lead the way in this new "politics of memory." However, in a recent talk, Stiegler argues that we need a global network of intellectuals committed to research. Whether this includes economists, strictly dealing with the global economy of capital, is an open question, but one may speculate that this must be the case. It's also questionable if the goal for Stiegler is the eradication of or an <i>alternative</i> to capitalism. Surely, if it is an "alternative" to capitalism, it is one that comes through capitalism and the technological affordances made possible by its system.<br />
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But for Beardsworth, it is global capitalism as a system, one that needs to be analyzed on a particular and empirical level, that alienates us from forming a "we" rather than the problem of collective knowledge. I really don't know how to argue against this point, except that Beardsworth only really seems to suggest that in addition to Stiegler's call for a pharmacological politics of memory, political-economic critique should go on as usual. His example, for instance, is the regulation of offshore capital.<br />
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But then, ironically, is not Beardsworth offering a "technical" solution to a very "cultural" problem , one that is constituted by our originary technicity? That is, doesn't Beardsworth suggest here that it is not a philosophical problem of the "waning of affect," but that we should simply "regulate" and try and control, to reign in the effects of capitalism (c.f. Jameson on affect)? While this "devils in the details" approach certainly allows us to move forward "progressively" is this enough? Furthermore, what would the role of the academy, the arts, and the Humanities be for such a solution? Is Beardsworth really suggesting that humanities scholars have little to contribute except "empirical" critiques of global capital, which will ultimately read to anyone outside English and philosophy departments as silly and insufficiently knowledgable?<br />
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Stiegler's attentiveness to "psychopower" and the ways in which particular technologies (for instance, marketing, which we will return to when we get to Postman) are used to control us indicates that far from making "generalized" claims without "empirical" evidence, Stiegler is very interested in using the insights of scientific research to his benefit. The point remains though: Stiegler does not speak of the <i>specificity</i> of the economic system (if indeed it <i>is</i> autonomous from 'the social').<br />
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Following the narrative of Beardsworth's article, I turn now to Stiegler's transformation of Freud. Acknowledging that Stiegler's reading of Freud is imaginative and "dynamic," Beardsworth essentially argues that this "technological" reading of the libidinal economy denies "the specific <i>autonomy" </i>of the domain under question. This domain? The autonomy of the depth-psychological.<br />
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This is a strange turn -- the <i>autonomy</i> of the depth psychological? Stiegler's point, following many recent scholars, is the that "brain" or even the conscious/unconscious is not merely located in our heads, but distributed in our environment, as it always has been, through hypomnesis. How, one might ask, can we talk about the <i>autonomy</i> of the depth psychological? Beardsworth here seems to accept the idea that neuroscience is the final word on what he calls the "mind-body" complex. What we are seeing now, however, is that some neuroscientists are saying, essentially, Spinoza was right! (Damasio). Beardsworth clearly doesn't accept the radical re-reading of technics, as he calls technology a mere "background condition" for the whole "psychic apparatus" (is not the 'psychic apparatus' itself a distributed technology?). Instead of a close reading of Stiegler's adoption of Freudian concepts, Beardsworth returns to Freud's concepts in order to, essentially, make the same point as Stiegler will have made:<br />
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One must, however, wait to see what <i>new forms</i> <i>of parenthood</i> adopt the hyperindustrial support and what <i>new forms of sublimation</i> will come to structure the coming generations' sense of conscience. These new forms may be weaker than either traditional or modern forms of close social bond [. . .] I am arguing that we cannot know at this very early stage of our hyperindustrial age, although Stiegler is nevertheless right to call for critical synthesis. The political adoption of the hyperindustrial support will take time--as did monotheism to adopt non-orthographic writing and the social contract to adopt the alphabetical word. (195) </blockquote>
I do not think Stiegler thinks that such adoption comes automatically or that it won't take time. As he says in another place, the <i>pharmakon</i> always enters as a poison, not a cure. However, the poison is the <i>condition for the possibility of the cure, </i>as it is only by poisoning (the operation of deconstruction) that the possibility of the 'new' arrives. So I have to disagree with Beardsworth that for Stiegler the <i>pharmakon</i> represents an "ambivalence" rather than an "aporia" (as it does in Derrida) because its not that its either/or, but that the <i>pharmakon </i>is both/and -- and this is necessary for the operation of pharmacology. Thus, although Beardsworth is right that Stiegler probably shows a little too conservative when he speaks of generations "losing" their superego, as if there once was one, in <i>Taking Care, </i>I do not think they are that far apart in their position regarding the libidinal economy.<br />
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****side note**** -- Although in a recent interview Stiegler has promised us a more thorough engagement with Freud and Lacan in volume 5 of Technics and Time, it is worth noting how little Lacanians have attempted a critique/reading of Stiegler. Is it possible that this "superego" is something very close to the ego-ideal, or would it be more akin to Lacan's "Name of the Father" (the symbolic)?<br />
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Furthermore, Beardsworth seems unaware (and perhaps these articles were not published at the time of writing) that Stiegler sees a lot of potential in internet technologies, especially since we now have the possibility of producing meta-data as individual citizens. Beardsworth writes, "the internet is already creative politically. Education must certainly help to supplement this emerging creativity with the art of judgment" (195).<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1T8CKvyxEmNDyoxr-t6cT4adxEZuqlaoyFp1XyCLKilZ65B7Ds1ce6478WS-VwYxFcuN6RXXOtRV3fUn6Yu0BJVqUT5V14lbYeqSopC3IGPuCdj2lFUXM33grm7ew5yybZG20OiZySodT/s1600/Jake+lecturing+on+Stiegler.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1T8CKvyxEmNDyoxr-t6cT4adxEZuqlaoyFp1XyCLKilZ65B7Ds1ce6478WS-VwYxFcuN6RXXOtRV3fUn6Yu0BJVqUT5V14lbYeqSopC3IGPuCdj2lFUXM33grm7ew5yybZG20OiZySodT/s320/Jake+lecturing+on+Stiegler.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Me lecturing on Stiegler. Photo courtesy of Juan Griego</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-8042510618701840232013-09-16T07:10:00.002-07:002013-09-16T07:17:57.041-07:00Ecology and the Environmental Humanities @ Rice University -- A reflectionComing soon!Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-68136590146027813692013-09-16T07:04:00.004-07:002013-09-16T07:08:48.473-07:00Anthropomorphism revisited: Ulmer, Bennett, and Bogost<div style="color: #333333; font-family: Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
What follows is once again an attempt to put New Materialism and OOO in conversation with Greg Ulmer's work. It may be of only slight interest to the class. For those of you interested in his work and our current project in his class, check out <a data-mce-href="routine.electracy.com" href="http://thenonhumanturn.wordpress.com/wp-admin/routine.electracy.com" style="color: #3c2bb6;" title="Routine">routine.electracy.com</a></div>
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Bennett writes toward the end of <em>Vibrant Matter</em>, "if a green materialism requires of us a more refined sensitivity to the outside-that-is-inside too, then maybe a bit of anthropomorphizing will prove valuable" (120). To anthropomorphize is to assign human characteristics to nonhuman entities (animals, objects, etc.). Bogost follows up on her claim by claiming that anthropomorphism allows us to see that any object encounter is a caricature of the object (whether animal, human, or object). Both Bogost and Bennett claim that anthropomorphism can also help us understand the agency of nonhumans -- their vital materiality, to use Benett's terms. Bennett figures her work in terms of a (meta)physics/ontology and Bogost as a "tiny ontology," which accompanies "alien phenomenology."</div>
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In class yesterday, Laurie asked us if Bennett's work and other New Materialisms resonates with Ulmer's work. On the one hand, yes, because we do need to pay attention to the forces of nonhuman entities (accidents). On the other hand, Ulmer believes that the metaphysical logic has already been created: what we need is a rhetoric. For ontology, he relies heavily on the work of Heidegger and Lacan as well as post-structuralist philosophers (who understood and further theorized the logic of electracy inherited from the Paris avant-garde) The rhetoric he seeks is an "image-rhetoric" performed in the age of "electracy" (which is analogous to the apparatus of "literacy" and "orality") through vernacular practices such as taking pictures with smart phones. The technological apparatus calls for the institutionalization of new practices that will help to cultivate an electrate identity formation, which is not the "self" formed under the literate paradigm.</div>
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Ulmer argues that the Greek grammatical "middle voice" is the mode in which we experience electracy. The middle voice refers to an action in which the subject is neither exclusively the actor or patient, but may include both. We could read this as another way to talk about "actants" in Latour's terms. But Ulmer understands the middle voice more as a reflexive function, in which the actor's actions affects the actor rather than something else (a direct object).</div>
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Objects, for Ulmer, are not totally other and do not have "perceptions" of their own in some sort of animistic sense. However, they do affect human beings; not only in the sense that they are forces in the world that make things happen in a physical world, but that the world and objects in it are given to us and already have meaning for us. They already have meaning for us because they are never simply "outside" of us, but, I think, that our agency has been distributed through the world, through what we have made and that this distribution all leads back to our embodied experience. That is, for Ulmer, we need to figure out what need/desire of our body is then externalized to the environment.</div>
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I do not think Ulmer would argue against Bennett and others that nonhuman objects have "agency" or potential in their own right. However, because Ulmer is interested in a rhetoric that could potentially burst out of a rareified academic setting, he believes that what is important for us to recognize in this world is not the agencies of objects, but <em>our</em> agency. For Ulmer, we have lost our sense of agency in the world. The "aesthetic attitude" advocated by Ulmer is not to get at the reality of other beings, but to recognize that our inventions all serve our embodiment. In the MIddle Ages, argues Ulmer, people knew where they fit in the macrocosm; our job is to try and reconnect our individual, affective experiences back to that macrocosm, so as to recognize our agency in the world, which would, ideally, get us to act (or at the very least, understand that our actions result in certain sacrifices on behalf of a value; Ulmer elaborates on this point extensively in <em>Electronic Monuments</em>).</div>
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Once again, though, we come to the question of anthropomorphism. Instead of anthropomorphism, Ulmer argues that we should recognize our own agency, desire, and limit of our embodiment in the world. We should tie ourselves to contingent being not in order to pretend to understand them outside of the human-world relation, but rather in order to understand how we connect (if only poetically, through the use of tropes) to what we see in the world.</div>
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Again, its not that humans are the sole actants in the world, but that Ulmer is less interested in developing a new metaphysics, because the metaphysics has already been invented and the practices associated with it have just begun (in comparison to orality and literacy). OOO and perhaps new materialism to a certain extent still rely on a "literate" concept of being -- trying to define being (definition is already a literate construction). Ulmer focuses on "affect" in the sense of mood, state of mind (befindlichkeit -- Heidegger). The external (or, to be more precise, the extimate, world) can help us understand our attitude toward the world and this is our "EPS" -- existential positioning system to correspond to our "GPS."</div>
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"Anthropomorphism," then, is not quite the term I'd use for Ulmer's method. Instead, the world is filled with "triggers" that set off affective states and memories in an analogous way to the various spots which we can access via smartphones. The key for Ulmer is to be able to think with the vernacular practice of image making with a smartphone; for this to happen, it must be institutionalized. His literate scholarship is not an end in itself, but always trying to point toward an electrate way of being.</div>
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WIthin his literate work (i.e. his books), Ulmer does draw on rich ancient traditions of the gods; most recently, the idea of the "avatar," not in the sense of a gaming avatar, but more as a guide that tells us our limit, such as Krishna's advice to Arjuna: "Dude, you are a warrior -- you can't not fight!" (to quickly paraphrase the advice of the <em>Bhagavad Gita</em>). In the Western Tradition, this function is the "guardian angel" in the Greek tradition, this is "daimon" which is our experience of limit. What we call an "accident" in the world (indeed, in my last seminar we spoke of a "metaphysics of the accident" rather than a metaphysics of substance, returning to Aristotle's famous distniction) corresponds to what the Greek's called <em>Nemesis</em> -- that which comes back to us when we go too far. Accidents result in death, that death becomes an indirect sacrifice for our actions.</div>
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On the one hand, we might think that Ulmer is reviving even more than the vibrant materialists or the vitalists outdated notions such as 'the gods' which are clearly not how the world really works. On the other, it is crucial to understand that Ulmer evokes these figures as <em>analogies</em> because he believes that, although we do not think of these gods as actual beings that advise us, their <em>functions</em> still persist. That is, for Ulmer, we look back to other wisdom traditions in order then to look at our world, our apparatus, our regime, in order to find how these ideas get translated into electracy.</div>
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Bogost too recommends "analogy," but, for him, analogy is used to perform alien phenomenology, so that we can recognize that any way we see/experience/describe an object is a "caricature" of it. But for Ulmer, the world (objects, scenes captured in images that may include humans, etc.) is extimate, intimately bound up with our embodiment because this is how we <em>experience</em> the world.</div>
Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-54832607506335744292013-09-16T07:03:00.003-07:002013-09-16T07:07:48.733-07:00The Limits of Ontography: Ian Bogost, OOO, and Greg Ulmer<div style="color: #333333; font-family: Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
In Professor Ulmer’s class, we have been thinking about the ‘nonhuman’ world in a different way than object-oriented ontology. For Ulmer, the objects outside of us are actually not completely outside of us – instead they are “extimate,” the outside that reflects the inside. Ulmer fully endorses several different Modernist conceits of the outside as a figure for the inside (Eliot’s objective correlative, for instance). In this sense, Ulmer is certainly a ‘correlationist’ in the sense that the world primarily addresses <i>us</i> as human beings and that the world can never be ‘the great outdoors’ separate from us, a “nonsemiotic” world as Bogost puts it. As Caroline points out, the consideration of the world as “alien” can reinforce the distinction between us and them (or “that” in this case) that ideally the notion of humans as objects among others would tend to break down. Although seeing the world as speaking to human beings seems to embody correlationism, to argue that we somehow need to get back to the world (as if we ever left it) still seems to posit an absolute split between human experience and what things experience “for themselves.”</div>
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One might argue that thinking of things “speaking to us” is kind of like Bogost’s suggestion, following Bennett, that anthropomorphism is a way ultimately out of anthropocentrism, but I’m not sure I would agree (65). One might also think that Ulmer’s method parallels Harman’s argument that things only “allude” to the depths of things, but I think both of these tend to see “depth” in objects rather than a surface of signifiers. For Ulmer, the question is “What <i>CAN</i> an object say” and that possibility is always related to the particular person experiencing it. Ulmer claims that nowadays it is this particular experience that, rather than the universal abstractions of philosophy past, paradoxically, can become understood globally. Poetry’s strength is not in its concepts and abstractions, but rather the way it names something in its particularity that can express an affective experience.</div>
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Perhaps one of the best ways to get at this is the primacy in Bogost given to “lists,” following Latourist litanies, in Bogost and Harman’s thought. In a recent talk on Laruelle and Speculative Realism, Anthony Paul Smith argues that Latourist litanies are kind of like Insane Clown Posse’s song, “Miracles,” which can be seen below. Indeed, words elevated into concepts like “wonder” and “allure,” as well as Harman’s claim that if you populate your texts with concrete objects rather than abstractions than you are truly doing more for a ‘nonhuman’ turn make it seem like these thinkers want us to just go: “Hey look! Objects! Aren’t they mysterious and wonderful!”</div>
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs</div>
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Bogost argues that lists are the perfect “antidote” to “the obsession with Deleuzean becoming,” taking it so far as to suggest that lists “rebuff the connecting powers of <i>being itself</i>.” Bogost writes, “Lists are perfect tools to free us from the prison of representation precisely <i>because</i> they are so inexpressive. They decline traditional artifice, instead using mundaneness to offer ‘a brief intimation of everything’” (40). I do not see how lists free us from representation, for, if anything, it seems that it sticks us right back in the middle of representation but without its expressive power explored in great literature. It makes literature serve as a mode of <i>description</i> of worldly detail rather than, in the case of someone like Joyce, a transubstantiation of everyday life. Latour and Harman’s lists attempt to put everything on the same plane, but without any context of why we should care about these things (except as they are ‘in themselves’ as autonomous objects), they mean very little. The example Bogost gives from <i>Moby Dick</i>, for instance, is not the same kind of “list” as deployed by Harman and Latour. Bogost then makes the banal point that <i>Moby Dick</i> can be called “a natural history” as much as a novel; indeed, some of my favorite literature is literature that mixes genres and could be called “Encyclopedic,” but I’m not sure these examples support an object-oriented ontology or an alien phenomenology. These are ways to aesthetically receive and conceive the world, but it is not meant to be a representation of reality as it “really” is outside of human perception.</div>
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As Michelle pointed out, the “all things equally exist but not everything exists equally” is a way to, in some sense, smuggle hierarchy back into the ontology while one ostensibly maintains the egalitarian rhetoric of a “flat ontology.” I do not think many of us would disagree now that hierarchy is not bad ‘in itself’ because there ARE some things in certain contexts that we should pay attention to more or that are more at stake for how we exist in the world. For instance, Bogost makes a distinction between photographs and the “actual objects,” which gets at Andrew’s point about whether the “picture” is an object with its own perception/reception of world (as I briefly argued one can claim in the case of two different cameras the record the world):</div>
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“Photographic ontography is effective as art and as metaphysics. But photographs are static; they <i>imply</i> but they do not <i>depict </i>unit operations. For the latter, we must look to the artifacts that they themselves operate” (52).</div>
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I’m really not sure how to read this statement. It seems like Bogost’s privileging of games as “not static” comes out in this chapter, as he moves on to describe “the artifacts that they themselves operate” in the examples of two games. I’m also not quite sure how he reads Shore’s photographs as “an automatically encyclopedic rendition of a scene, thanks to the photographic apparatus’s ability to record actuality” (52). Bogost argues that his photographs are ontographs because “he refuses to treat any object as primary, as subject” (52). I certainly don’t look at Shore’s “Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue” and think that everything is treated absolutely equally because, first, there is always foreground and background and, second, there is always something outside the frame. The photographer chose to take <i>this</i> photograph of this particular scene.</div>
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I think the point stands that the “picture” is somehow inferior to the game, which may both be superior to writing ‘proper’ since literary writing, especially when in the form lists, really only serves to point toward “rebuffing the connecting powers of being itself” (40). Indeed, we often think of literature as the exact opposite: a gathering together of things to show the multitudes of connections possible and yet the inability to decide meaning. Making connections is what makes meaning and context (im)possible. Not the plenitude of meaning or polysemy (“the condensation of multitudes into dense singularities” (58)) but its dissemination, our inability to decide on a final meaning. As Derrida writes,</div>
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The generalization of the grammatical or the textual hinges on the disappearance, or rather the reinscription, of the semantic horizon, even when-- and especially when-- it comprehends difference or plurality. In diverging from polysemy, comprising both more and less than the latter,<i>dissemination</i><i> </i><i>interrupts the circulation that transforms into an origin what is actually an after-effect of meaning.</i></div>
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This is still talking about language, but when can we ever talk about anything else? Just because you name something that we can recognize as a real object in the world does not mean that it only signifies this referent. As Andrew pointed out today, all these theorists seem to deny that they are operating in the same language (and the same ‘writing’) as others.</div>
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I began this reflection with thinking about how this method differs from Ulmer’s understanding of the function of objects in poetry and thus the way we should experience objects affectively as an embodied human being. I think the best way I can make this distinction is that for Bogost, it seems like the word is tied to its “outside” referent as an object whereas for Ulmer, the object <i>can</i> mean many things aside from itself as a material referent. Bogost argues that the “lists of objects” work their magic through their inexpressiveness, their lack of explication, description, or clarification. Concerning the Trader Joe’s video, Bogost writes, “List of objects without explication can do philosophical work of drawing our attention toward them with greater attentiveness” (45). But as we’ve pointed out, these objects do not exist in isolation; they already come with a certain degree of context and understanding. The explication and explanation are actually the elements that would do the philosophical work. If we list the objects, devoid of any context, we miss specific things like—what is it <i>about</i> the customers? What does the managerial policy say about the way it runs its business? These are not neutral, as we all seem to have agreed in class. Bogost’s description suggests that these lists provide THE experience of shopping at Trader Joe’s, but we’d clearly all experience it differently.</div>
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Here I am trying to get back to the attempted distinction between Ulmer’s project and Bogost’s. The key for Ulmer is not to flatten objects onto the same plane, but to notice how one’s reception of objects shows us something about our own state-of-mind or attitude toward the world. Every object does not have the same seductiveness and allure for us; instead, certain objects are important to us or <i>could</i> say something to us that would, perhaps, move us to act or at least to recognize our state of being in the world. Our embodiment and the interfaces we use in addition (body as interface just as much as camera, Iphone, Smartphone). We need to find a way to connect our embodiment with larger problems. Perhaps the goal for Ulmer is unashamedly concerned about human beings, but when did we begin to have this idea that human beings have been spoken of enough? Or that we know what a human being “is” and so we can move on to those “not-human” beings? Ulmer argues that we need to find a way to re-connect to the Macrocosm; in a different parlance, Stiegler argues that we are “dis-oriented” due to the acceleration of technological development (hyper-industrialisation). Understanding objects “in themselves” seems like a less urgent project than figuring out how we can re-orient ourselves in the midst of the rest of the matter and matters in the world.</div>
Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-26983229531769597632013-09-16T07:03:00.000-07:002013-09-16T07:06:54.585-07:00Harman's "Literary Criticism" <span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #333333; font-family: Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">Texts already reach outside their boundaries — they are already on the verge of breaking. Harman’s argument relies on a substance/holism of a text that just isn’t “really” there in an objective ontological sense. We can recognize an author’s “style,” yes (although, contra Harman’s assertion, Shakespeare’s “style” cannot “enable us to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic plays under his name” — debates still rage on; this also undermines (in the colloquial rather than Harman-esque sense) his claim later about the “death of the author”), but the claim that “to make a slight change in two lines of the Fool might not alter the general effect of King Lear, nor would it likely make much difference to the characterization of Regan or Kent” is really problematic. Although he thinks he is reinforcing it, Harman erases the text’s “materiality” that resists the reader. Readers can make decisions and do the work to argue that a play’s alterations (or one might even think of the various “versions”) fundamentally change the play. And yeah, I’m talking about meaning here — meaning to human readers (the horror!). Reading fundamentally contains an epistemological component that cannot be overlooked in favor of questions of a text’s ontology. Harman’s notion of a text’s “depth” that can never be reached reinscribes the notion of a text’s “truth” and it also isolates the text from all of its possible relations, which already changes its meaning and significance. Harman’s target is the “surface” readings of Derrida and Foucault — moving back into a language of “depth” is to reinscribe a hermeneutic mode of investigation that assumes a persisting unity of a text, outside its dissemination to its context as part of language. It is to revive the idea of the “Book” in its sense that Derrida gives when he talks about the Book of the World that God (or some other entity) has laid out to us to read and decipher. The simple binary of “undermining” and “overmining” does not do justice to the complexity of the issue. We can certainly “undermine” the book by saying that it is nothing but another object made up of atmospheric particles. And yet– the very form of the book has meaning for human beings — it has power and significance due to the medium’s history. We can undermine and overmine to a different degree, but literary criticism involves a human reader and a human reader’s decisions (the critic’s writing delimits the ‘context’ at least for that particular article or book). Thus, epistemological questions arise as soon as Harman says that we can change the text and show “how each text resists internal holism by attempting various modifications of these texts and seeing what happens.” We don’t have to even CHANGE the text “itself” in order for it to be modified by other texts. Indeed, the very fact that the text is composed of language already breaks the text’s boundaries as ultimately the text is a part of cultural context and an (open) system of meaning. Harman seems to have this idea that literary critics use “cultural context” to dismiss works of art — this hardly seems to be the case. My frustration with Harman is that he seems to think his ontology helps us see literature in a new way (rather than reinforcing naive assumptions about the unity/substance of a text). To show how a text “resists its internal holism” is already to assume that the text has a holistic unity unto itself; Indeed, Brooks and co. (New Critics) were constantly exploring the “tensions” within the boundaries of the texts. But literary critics have already done this without reducing a text’s particular materiality (as explored by Derrida, De Man, etc.). To be fair, he does mention that some “literary methods recommended by object-oriented criticism might already exist” so I don’t want to fault him for talking about methods already known by literary critics; what I do want to argue is that .</span><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #333333; font-family: Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.625;">object-oriented ontology, in its preference for a “depth” understanding over surface, is not what literary criticism should strive for, IMO</span>Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-2605159387297412162013-09-16T07:01:00.005-07:002013-09-16T07:06:23.772-07:00Michel Serres' The Quasi-Object: Hunt-the-slipper<div style="color: #333333; font-family: Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
<a data-mce-href="http://thenonhumanturn.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/hunt-the-slipper-serres-example.jpg" href="http://thenonhumanturn.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/hunt-the-slipper-serres-example.jpg" style="color: #3c2bb6;"><img alt="Image" class="size-full wp-image aligncenter" data-mce-src="http://thenonhumanturn.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/hunt-the-slipper-serres-example.jpg?w=487" id="i-113" src="http://thenonhumanturn.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/hunt-the-slipper-serres-example.jpg?w=487" style="background-attachment: scroll; background-color: white; background-image: none; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: repeat repeat; border: 1px solid rgb(226, 216, 186); cursor: default; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 5px; max-width: 100%; padding: 3px;" /></a></div>
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Today in class, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what whether or not the quasi-object is a "hybrid," which would help us understand quasi-objects. For his part, although he cites Serres, does not do a great job explaining the quasi-object. In <em>We Have Never Been Modern</em>, he writes,</div>
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"Of quasi-objects, quasi-subjects, we shall simply say that they trace networks. They are real, quite real, and we humans have not made them. But they are collective because they attach us to one another, because they <em>circulate</em> in our hands and define our social bond by this very circulation" (Latour 89, italics mine)</div>
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I tried to emphasize that the main feature of quasi-objects was its circulation through a very loose reference to Serres' introduction of the concept in his astounding book, <em>The Parasite</em><em>. </em>Book in hand and the internet as my further resource, I am now prepared to explain my reference with the hope that the concept may be further expanded in a meaningful way.</div>
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In the above we see a depiction of a children's parlor game, "hunt-the-slipper." Hunt-the-slipper serves as a relay for Serres for describing quasi-objects.</div>
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I found a great summary of "hunt-the-slipper" in the form of a <a data-mce-href="http://www.landofnurseryrhymes.co.uk/htm_pages/Hunt%20The%20Slipper.htm" href="http://www.landofnurseryrhymes.co.uk/htm_pages/Hunt%20The%20Slipper.htm" style="color: #3c2bb6;">nursery rhyme</a></div>
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ALL the players but one - are called cobblers,<br />
and sit on the floor in a circle a few inches apart.<br />
Then the customer comes and says:<br />
"Cobbler, cobbler; mend my shoe.<br />
Get it done by half-past two."<br />
She hands one of the cobblers an old slipper, and turns away.</div>
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When she has counted up to ten she comes back,<br />
but is told the slipper is not ready.<br />
"I must have it," says the customer.<br />
"Then you must find it," all the cobblers reply.</div>
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At that the search begins.<br />
Each cobbler passes the slipper to their neighbour<br />
hiding it from sight as much as possible;<br />
but should the seeker spy it and call out the name<br />
of the cobbler who has got it.<br />
That cobbler must take her place, and brings it to be mended again.</div>
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The slipper must not stop in one place, but must keep passing round the circle, one way or the other.</div>
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The slipper functions here as the "quasi-object." Serres writes,</div>
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"This quasi-object, when being passed, makes the collective, if it stops, it makes the individual. If he is discovered, he is 'it' [mort]. who is the subject, who is an 'I' or who am I? The moving furet weaves the 'we', the collective; if it stops, it marks the 'I'" (225).</div>
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The key point about this understanding of the quasi object is, for Serres, that the object "isn't played alone" (225). If not mistaken, this is what Scott was trying to get at when he said that we cannot just describe the object "as such" "in itself." This is also, by the way, why Serres says we haven't "made" the quasi-object. "We" haven't made the quasi-object because the quasi-object makes us (even if, empirically, we made the object we call 'ball' in English). This will be explained better in a moment.</div>
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Serres argues that a ball "over there, on the ground" is nothing, stupid, no meaning, no function, and no values (225). The bodies that "play" it are "for" the ball and Serres argues that in the case of playing with balls (like basketball, for instance), "playing" amounts to "making oneself the attribute of the ball as substance" (226). While Andrew may disagree with this rather ontic and analogic way of thinking of play (restricting play to "game," as he put it to Kyle, rather than in Battaile's more radical sense), this image will help us in understanding how the quasi-object forms the "collective" for Serres and, as Serres' student, probably Latour.</div>
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How?</div>
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Today "we" as a class made a big deal out of who the "we" was. While Latour doesn't address this problem directly, Serres does:</div>
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"The "we" is not a sum of the "I's" but a novelty produced by legacies, concessions, withdrawls, resignations of the "I." The "we" is less a set of "I's" than the est of the sets of its transmissions. It appears brutally in drunkenness and ecstasy, both annihilations of the principle of individuation. This ecstasy is easily produced by the quasi-object whose body is slave or object [. . .] The quasi-object is found to have this decentering. From then on, he who holds the quasi-object has the center and governs ecstasy. The speed of passing accelerates him and causes him to exist [. . .] Participation is the passing of the "I" by passing. It is the abandon of my individuality or my being in a quasi-object that is there only to be circulated it. It is rigorously the <a data-mce-href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation" style="color: #3c2bb6;">transubstantiation </a>of being into relation. Being is abolished for the relation."</div>
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Ignoring for a second the Catholic rhetoric in the last sentence (we could critique the hell out of Serres and many other radical contemporary thinkers for the rhetoric they borrow from religion: Virilio immediately comes to mind), one pole of Serres discussion of the quasi-object explains how the 'I' is individuated from the 'we': by being "it," by stopping the circulation. This might fail as analogy, but lets think of language or words as quasi-objects. They circulate all over the place; indeed, the English language (and Language) in general binds human beings as a collective. But my composition I am working on right here right now is tending toward an "I," tending toward individuation even as I recognize the infinite iterability of every statement I make.</div>
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On the other hand, we have Serres explanation of how the collective is 'formed' (but NOT from already constituted individual "I's." Instead, the 'we' is formed by the <em>speed</em> of the circulation of the quasi-object such that it becomes a relation (a "social bond" as Latour puts it).</div>
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While I'm sure this post has at once complicated the idea of the quasi-object, I hope it also has helped in contextualizing Latour's use of Serres' concept. Serres' text has to be one of the most rich texts I have ever read because he draws such potent theoretical insights from something as simple as a French Fable (<em>parasite</em> as concept is drawn from a fable of La Fontaigne's).</div>
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What I like about Serres as opposed to Latour is even thought he refers to the discourses of science, it serves as an imaginative relay. Hayles has written an article explicitly critiquing Serres loose us of science, but I'm not sure this is always a flaw (although this is different from a former position I have held). Furthermore, whereas the tone of Latour is very confident in his project of "unveiling" (and yet not a kind of "unmasking" of a modern's 'false consciousness' of its condition; it is indeed interesting that he uses the very Heideggerian flavored 'unveiling' to discuss his method--but this is a side concern), Serres is less convinced that he has unveiled something and is self-reflexive in a, one might say, "postmodern" way. Before giving us the "Theory of the Quasi-Object," Serres reflects on the previous pages and asks the right questions:</div>
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"The problem with the preceding meditations is that they do not say distinctly enough whether they are a philosophy of <em>being</em> or of <em>relation</em>. Being or relating, that is the whole question. It is undoubtedly not an exclusive one. I still shall not decide whether the parasite is relational or real, whether it is an operator or a monad" (Serres 224).</div>
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Its Serres' commitment (paradoxically) to the space of indecision that sets him apart, I think, from Latour. Furthermore, it sets us apart from Serres, as we were trying to de-cide whether Haraway and/or Latour was engaged in an "epistemological" or "ontological" project: luckily we left this question open. This question (and distinction) will come back to haunt our discourse, however, when we get to Bryant and Harman, who argue that the mistake of "correlationism" comes down to adhering to Kantian epistemological model (at least epistemology is formed in the first two critiques -- thank you Scott for pointing this out). We mistake epistmological questions for ontological ones.</div>
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Being and relation, objects inside of objects, the circulation of quasi-objects: these lay out some of the key questions of object-oriented thought and, frankly, primary questions of philosophy.</div>
Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-66205207426314709042013-09-16T07:01:00.002-07:002013-09-16T07:05:36.686-07:00The Innocence of OOP/OOO<div style="color: #333333; font-family: Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
On re-reading Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," I was struck, more than when I first read it (or the second time) by her insistence that the cyborg body is "not innocent" and that the attitude of a cyborg politics/cyborg imaging/ cyborg ____ is <em>irony</em>:</div>
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"Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play" (Haraway 149).</div>
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But after all of our hipster malaise and detachment of who can be the most ironic, "irony" has been challenged in the name of a new sincerity, a new wonder at that world that can even seem "naive." Now, naivete is not "innocence" (or a narrative of the Fall from innocence), but it seems that Harman and the OOOers have little patience for interminable irony that forces us to hold contradictions in our heads. Could not Harman, Bryant, and co. be accused of trying to turn the world into a "problem of code" in the sense that they seek an encompassing metaphysics (even though its not a thinking of totality. Harman and Bryant both don't talk about 'the world' in general, even in the more nuanced sense of Heidegger) to describe the world?</div>
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In a footnote to an essay on Laruelle, John Mullarky criticizes Harman for what he sees as unfair criticism of Laruelle in his review of the book <em>Philosophies of Difference</em>:</div>
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Harman remains insensitive to the force of such questions, seeing ‘method’ and ‘form’ as issues concerning effectiveness (in capturing reality) and communicative facility (in convincing others of one’s mastery). Another reason for Harman’s mostly ad hominem critique stems from his faith in only specific forms of rhetoric or ‘prose style’ – ones like his own for the most part – such that Laruelle’s writing is castigated as ‘generally abominable’: after quoting one passage, he remarks, ‘taken in context, its meaning is clear enough – eventually, after some minutes of labor. But to compile the chapter summaries above was never a pleasurable experience for this reviewer, and was often a downright painful one.’ The fact that Harman clearly prefers easy-to-read, quickly consumed forms of philosophical writing – i.e., ones that he can recognize effortlessly as ‘philosophy’ – over anything challenging and novel, could simply be put down to a parochial approach to philosophical writing (though this would be to respond with further ad hominem criticism). A more helpful conclusion, though, would be that it shows the more general tendency of allrepresentational philosophies (i.e., ones that ‘decide’, ones that think they must know best) to mediate everything through themselves, to be narcissistic without ever knowing it, and so to be blind to the mystery that they should be able to have complete insight into reality.</div>
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While I think that Laruelle's style is very difficult to read and might seem to be just mystical hogwash, we could say the same of many other thinkers. Instead, its more productive to see style/syntax as a necessary part of the thought. Anyway, the specifics of Laruelle's philosophy is hardly relevant here, but I think the footnote might give us a starting point to see a possible difference between Haraway's cyborg politics (which maintains a kind of privilege of Writing in an extended sense) and OOO/OOP: "Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine" (Haraway 176).</div>
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In contrast, we see that OOO/OOP strives for a perfect kind of communication to the reader. Bryant's reflections on style, different than Harman's, can be found here: <a data-mce-href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/reflections-on-style/" href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/reflections-on-style/" style="color: #3c2bb6;" title="Reflections on Style">http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/reflections-on-style/ </a></div>
Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-89528655723813718922013-09-16T07:00:00.001-07:002013-09-16T07:04:58.075-07:00Old Posts from Nonhuman SiteLast year, I participated in a course on New Materialism and OOO. I realized that all of these are on a <i>protected</i> site that no one can see. I don't want to lose these posts, so I am reposting. Some of them, at least at the moment, might be outdated. They may express opinions about the philosophies that I have since (and probably should revise at some point) made more nuanced. Forgive these slips.Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-74851277616116910262013-09-05T19:26:00.003-07:002013-09-05T19:28:00.172-07:00Adventures at Guitar Center's Grand Opening<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPW-3iPnaEpjs0mImYlEGPq3Pjyxn-Cb1hmrgwvkoTmk0sk41GA4EpDgBzrq-l4_1xcjwsLKHFCaCEttCC99kfzI5WjK8FNwmhBSG11vDf2JzKiCj_Ftu0zTUNMNF_Wg4gvDYkPSzxdCXX/s1600/guitar+center.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPW-3iPnaEpjs0mImYlEGPq3Pjyxn-Cb1hmrgwvkoTmk0sk41GA4EpDgBzrq-l4_1xcjwsLKHFCaCEttCC99kfzI5WjK8FNwmhBSG11vDf2JzKiCj_Ftu0zTUNMNF_Wg4gvDYkPSzxdCXX/s400/guitar+center.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Imagine with me, if you will, that you walk up to a store to get that sweet deal on 12 packs of strings for 30 bucks and there's a line outside (ok, not too unexpected for a GO). While you wait in line, you are addressed by a man with flyers for lessons. You say politely but firmly, "no thanks, I'm not interested in lessons" because you don't want to carry around pamphlets all night. He says, "Oh, well, I bet you know some people who want lessons." And I thought more a minute--do I? "No sir, not really." I stand in line for a few minutes and the same dude comes up to me trying to hand me a flyer "no thank you," says I, thinking "this dude can't possibly have forgotten my firm but polite reply from 3 minutues ago. . ." But alas, this man would try and give me one of those damn flyers at least three more times while you are inside.<br />
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Did I mention that at the same time a rock band is playing in a tent in the parking lot. They are pretty solid sounding, but you can't help but laugh at a name like The Heroin. (not Heroin. Not Heroine. The Heroin.) Still, you probably would have been better off watching their set while everyone else scrambled to 'sample' a guitar or bass.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">They really do like they are having fun like this child. </td></tr>
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When you finally enter the main room, it is full of electric guitar players, all plugged in. They all are either shredding or playing the best riff they learned from the internet over and over again, trying to impress their girlfriends, boyfriends, or friends they brought along for the ride, knowing they aren't going to buy a guitar. But that's not the first thing you hear. No. The first you hear is a poorly sung rendition of a song you can't quite pin down. You think: Where is that coming from? It can't be a recording because its out of tune. You swivel your head around searching for the source and low and behold there is a fucking elvis impersonator singing in front of the electronics/mic/recording section. You double take. Nope. Still there. He's real. You think again: ok, let's get these strings and get the hell out of here. You find the string shelf, you see the Martin SPs, mediums, that are supposed to be 12 for 30. But there are only 10 packs. What the hell? There must be a mistake. Oh god, do you I really have to find someone to go check the stock? Damnit, I knew I should have stayed home. But just then, you see them. You see that there are prepackaged packs of 12. You grab them and rejoice for your journey is almost over. You see a pack of 12 tortex picks and decide--what's another 6 bucks?<br />
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You go to one of the multiple lines that don't seem to have any particular ending, find one, wait, and check out.<br />
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But then you get curious: You wonder if they are selling F-Style mandolins (they aren't). You wonder if they have any good bass amplifiers I could try out? (Ampeg, Acoustic). You wonder what kind of Martins and Taylors they have in stock (plenty). You squeeze your way into the acoustic room where you find several people playing the acoustic guitars to a MUCH less annoying effect since most of them are playing quietly and honestly look like they may be trying out acoustic guitars for actual music making rather than girl-impressing or that guy-who-plays-the-guitar-in-every-music-shop-to-show-how-good-he-is.<br />
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Just then, you hear the announcement that there will be a raffle, which you did fill out a ticket for cuz-- you know -- why not? Maybe you'll win a guitar. But most likely, you will stand in the heat and watch others win and politely clap, knowing that if something were to happen that it would be a bonus. Hell, you didn't even know the raffle was taking place -- the strings were enough to drag your ass to the store. But of course, as with all raffle drawings, there are the two guys who are tryign to get the audience riled up asking stupid questions like "who wants a 300 dollar gift card" and then pretending to care that people aren't as enthused as these guys (who do openings for a living) would like. The raffles comes and goes. You sense the people around you are actually quite disappointed that <i>they</i> didn't win anything. You can almost hear their thoughts : "Why did <i>he</i> win. What is that little shitstain kid gonna do with an Epiphone Les Paul? Oh god, that's a horrible thought. But still -- I can already shred the shit out of that guitar and he has to still learn." Or another guy to your right who is clearly thinking: "I bet that old fart is gonna sell that guitar on ebay. He's not gonna love it like I would love it. Damn old people." Maybe you are making all this up, but it entertains you while you stand there knowing that you are probably just gonna go home with your new sets of strings which will save you (hopefully) a lot of stress of coming up stringless when you inevitably break a string while drunkenly bashing out the chords to a Lucero song on your balcony--or another such situation.<br />
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The raffle ends. You think: I should probably just go home. Do I really need to see if I can play some of the nice basses. I could do this anytime -- ANY other day. But, well, there probably won't be that many people who go back in.<br />
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You are wrong. Again.<br />
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But you head back in anyway. As you cross the threshold, this lady ever so politely asks you if you have your receipt (she is your favorite part of the night: just seems like a decent, calm human being amidst the chaos).<br />
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"yes, yes I do, ma'am."<br />
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"Ok well, I need to hold your bag while you go back inside -- but keep the receipt and I'll give it back to you when you come back out."<br />
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(Huh? you wonder)<br />
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"Oh, you know I could just put it back into my car and come back if that would be easier. . .or wait. . .no I gues--"<br />
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"Oh no, just let me hold it -- you're already here. It will be easier."<br />
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"Ok."<br />
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So you entere the guitar room again -- a barrage of dissonance and riffs peaking out here or there that are technically correct and sometimes sophisticated but, for the most part, without any kind of goal (like a song) or soul (like when you play a song). But in the far corner, someone is slapping the bass like a motherfucker through that Ampeg amp you desire. It's impressive. You are grateful for the relief of the low end from the chugging and screeching guitars surrounding him.<br />
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You wander again, thinking you may have missed the mandolins. You encounter your good friend Pamphlet/Flyer guy who once again tries to hand you something -- at this point you just ignore him.<br />
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It's clearly time to go. It's not like you'll be able to hear yourself if you even got to play an instrument that night. You've accomplished your goal. Now its time to go home and eat.<br />
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As you drive home, you think: Man, that place is gonna be great to go to for strings and other minor accessories. But that's it. You'll probably never buy a guitar, mandolin, bass or bass amp there (unless there's a good used instrument for a good deal). For some musicians, that's analogous to buying a dog or a cat from PetCo when there are tons of pets looking for good homes at the shelter and who will not only give them shots and spay/neuter them for you, but if you buy an older cat for instance -- just straight up give it to you.<br />
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But who knows.. .maybe a fender jazz is in my distant future.<br />
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Guitar Center Gainesville lives. And despite its corporate image, I like it better than the local store in town already. It's better than Best Buy used to be too<br />
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Why'd I write this? Because I can. And initially it was going to be a long facebook post. I figured--why not just use the blog. Apologies to any academics who may actually follow my academic posting and apologies to those who actually produce nonfiction stories worth reading. But I said it. I tried to entertain you and myself. Maybe I succeeded, maybe I didn't.Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-38976927053553728732013-09-02T11:39:00.000-07:002013-09-02T13:24:25.283-07:00"The Human Element" --On Dave Grohl's Sound City and Capturing Music<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I often tell myself that one of the reasons I am glad I have a band and play music is that its something that is, in some ways, "outside" the university. It is my one activity that has little to do with my academic mind. When I play music by myself or with others, I'm not thinking about ontology or the construction of facts -- I'm 'thinking' in a completely different way. Recently, my friend Blake told me that by playing music early in my life, parts of my brain are actually designated for playing music. This may be why I can get hammered and still manage to play pretty well (unless you ask me to solo). I begin with this point because I have been afraid to incorporate 'music' (except for a paper on noise that needs a lot of development) into my academic world-- that is, on this blog. Sure, I've posted music videos and other things on the blog to break up the monotony of print, but I think the thing I fear is that my academic work is so entrenched in the "nonhuman turn" toward critical animal studies, posthumanism, speculative realism, technology, etc. that I fear deconstructing and dissecting the life out of that remainder that's always there in playing music. In his new documentary <i>Sound City, </i>Grohl calls this "the human element."<br />
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But is it really the <i>human </i>element?<br />
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<i>Sound City, </i>Grohl says, started out as trying to tell a story about a <i>sound</i> <i>board</i>: the Neve console. This sound board was located in <i>Sound City</i>, a shitty looking studio in CA where a lot of great records were made (Neil Young, Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, etc.). Despite this reference to "the human element," we see that it is actually the <i>nonhuman elements</i> that are the condition for the possibility of catching this "human element." The board, combined with the room (which "no one designed") happened to produce an amazing drum sound. For anyone who has never recorded music, drum sound is probably one of <i>the hardest things</i> to capture on an album (live, mic-ed drums that is). In fact, I find that when I listen to a local band's record compared to, say, Tool's Lateralus, one of the main ways you can tell that the band is semi-professional or at the very least producing the album themselves is the drum sound. Drums on an album need to sound full, round, and, on a rock album, BIG. However, it is the technology -- the room and the board -- that is posited in the film as the reason for the good drum sound. The 'human element" is continuously linked to the capturing capacities of the technology.<br />
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Grohl and co. are careful, however, to point out that the technology is not to be <i>relied </i>on-- one still needs good songs and good musicians who practice. Indeed, this point emerges through the latter half of the film which discusses the debate between analog tape and digital tools. The way musicians talk about analog is that it is "no frills" directly onto tape. You "had" to practice and to do multiple takes -- you couldn't simply "fix" something. One of the musicians remarks that he heard a younger musician once say "you don't really even have to practice anymore--you can just put it into the machine and cut it up."<br />
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It's not that you cannot cut tape. You actually have to cut tape in order to bond different takes and such. However, the musicians make a good point for lifetime musicians like me: you really can't just rely on the technology whether it's a guitar, pro tools, weird effects. A good song, a good cut, a good album is not just the technology, but the way in which the technology interacts with 'the human'. In some ways, digital tools can be used to <i>master</i> the music (pun intended) rather than to <i>capture</i> the music happening in the room. There is an element of chance, an 'event' feel that happens when you record live -- on tape or digital.<br />
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Big Shoals' debut album has been recorded entirely "digitally," but we played the underlying tracks "live" in the studio. Lance had previously tried to record without a full band, and it didn't sound "right." It was good, but there was something missing. On this album, we've "captured" rather than mastered the music. It's a true collaboration between us, our instruments, Ryan our sound engineer, pro-tools, and the rooms in which we are recording. I'm not going to lie -- we've had to "punch in" a few notes when we missed it, but the overall feel of live playing still lingers in the mix because we were playing the damn thing live. We also did multiple "takes" of certain solos and parts. Lance would play several takes of a lick and there would be <i>something </i>in the take that set it apart from every other take -- an event captured.<br />
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Much of the music demonstrated and played in the documentary <i>Sound City </i>was recorded "live" in the studio. Rage Against the Machine tells how their debut album was recorded "like a concert" where they invited friends in to watch them play. They said they got over half the album done in one night. And if you've listened to this album -- there's something there, something <i>captured. </i><br />
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As more and more artists -- particularly pop artists -- rely on technology in order to master their already-written and composed songs, we lose what Roland Barthes once called "the grain of the voice" (although it's not just the voice, but any note on any instrument -- perhaps its timbre). We also lose the "event" character of music. It's not that everything in an album has to be done all at once, but the collaboration is distributed across not only people, time, and space, but I imagine certain musicians divvying out their music like an assembly line. We call this music "mass produced" because it all "sounds the same." Obviously, in the western scale, there are only 12 'notes' so I am not saying that musicians are playing the same chord progressions. I mean that there is no sense of a "capturing." The voice captured is probably weak, uninspired, and a little out of tune that needs doctoring until we can no longer hear the vocal chords. Instead of working to get that note 'right', to capture a moment on tape or in bits and bytes, the note is played and then after the fact reintegrated into the song.<br />
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Am I merely being nostalgic? No. I do not long for the days of analog tape as if somehow that was always better. However, I am suggesting that there is a difference between the capturing of an event (even just one note) and being a "master and possessor" of notes and timbres. I'm suggesting that if we lose that element of chance produced through the collaboration of the human and nonhuman, then I believe we begin to colonize music -- to make it <i>more </i>human in the most Humanist of ways. To be a posthumanist musician actually means letting the nonhuman become actors (or actants) themselves rather than wielding them as 'tools'. This is why even though people like Brian Eno use primarily digital tools to make music, one could see him as a "posthumanist musician" because he introduces chance into his compositions -- a combination of skill and chance makes a music event.<br />
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"Pro-tools." It's in the name. It's a professional tool -- we wield it like a weapon or a diamond cutter -- carving out the excess in the name of perfection.<br />
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In <i>Sound City</i>, the exception to the rule of analog vs. digital is NIN -- Trent Reznor. Reznor, according to Grohl, "uses technology as an instrument, not as a crutch. He doesn't need it." Technology as an <i>instrument </i>rather than a <i>tool. </i>"Instrument" not in the sense of "instrumental" but instrument in the sense of a musical instrument. A musical instrument is not a tool that a musician uses. A musical instrument is a <i>collaboration</i> between the human and nonhuman. Things happen when you play a musical instrument that you might not have expected. I'm not simply talking about "jamming" here, but I mean the way we play an instrument. In the moment of putting your fingers to strings or keys, even if it's a song you've played a million times before, maybe you hit a chord harder than usual or do a little run that comes out of nowhere. It's not "magic" but its a collaboration between the environment, the instrument, and you. It's a subtle difference but its the difference that makes a difference between a musician and someone playing music. "Musicians" know that each performance is a unique event in which they become musicians by participating in every performance as one actant among many.<br />
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I'm far from the first academic to think theoretically about musical environments. Thomas Rickert's book <i>Ambient Rhetoric </i>shows how Brian Eno is a potent illustration of what he means by 'ambient rhetoric'. Rickert writes,<br />
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"In this process, not only do the boundaries between music and environment blur and blend, but the locus of creation is dispersed ti include the environment, which thus grants an active role to the technological apparatus as an element within the whole material surroundings" (Rickert 110).<br />
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This is definitely in part what I am trying to get with my reflections on <i>Sound City</i>. However, in <i>Sound City</i>, as opposed to the example of Eno, the other really determinate actants are not only nonhuman instruments, technologies, and spaces, but <i>other musicians</i>. When you play (and record) with other musicians, songs emerge in their performance/recording.<br />
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In another article by Thomas Rickert and Michael Salvo, "The distrubted Gesampkunsterwerk: Sound, worlding, and new media culture," the authors discuss "Garageband" --the mac's pre-installed music software. I have used garageband myself when I owned a mac and I do find it to be a powerful tool for making one's own music. Rickert and Salvo argue that Garageband helps enable what they call "worlding."<br />
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"Worlding, then, carries this double sense: It is the aesthetic realm that a visual musical work invites us to both enter and immerse ourselves, and it is the constellation of production pathways and inputs--people, communities, technologies, and networks--that are simultaneously evoked with each aesthetic world." (Rickert and Salvo 313).<br />
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The authors point out that in addition to recording traditional instruments, the program comes with preloaded beats and sounds etc. for people to (re)mix. Thus, Garageband makes everyone a (potential) composer. Garageband itself, much like the "digital tools" that Grohl refers to when speaking of Reznor, becomes an instrument: "software is no longer limited to combining or transforming pre-existing content; rather, it produces content itself no differently than a musical instrument" (Rickert and Salvo 315).<br />
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In the future, Rickert and Salvo speculate that the interface of these digital tools will become more affectively pleasing like a musical instrument. They argue that this will mean that "sound" will become more important in composing. "Sound" is different than 'music' in some ways<i>, </i>but inseparable from music as well. We just spent quite a lot of time talking about "drum sound" and how important it is to capture that feel.<br />
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One question is whether or not these digital tools allow one to make new sounds, or simply remix premade, poorly composed 'stock' sounds. We already hear a kind of levelling of sound happening in the production of recent pop music. Perhaps Rickert and Salvo are right that it is through these DIY tools that new sounds will be produced -- new soundworlds for songs to exist within.<br />
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But also, we do need to ask whether or not the sound, the song, the soundworld, the environment is poorly or well composed. Rickert and Salvo, although they use the example of some of the greatest musicians of the second half of the 20th century (Hendrix, Yes, The Flaming Lips), are more interested in the potential for garageband and other tools to allow nonmusicians to make music--or at least to make sound. These sounds and songs will also enter into the digital network where musicians can receive feedback (such as reverbnation or bandcamp -- Byron Hawk has spoken of music networks in his article "Curating Ecologies, Circulating Musics: From the Public Sphere to Sphere Politics in Dobrin's edited collection <i>Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media.</i>).<br />
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These points are apart from a concern that underlies this entire post and myself as a musician: <i>good </i>music. Now, everyone says that music taste is "subjective," but I think that even within the recent theoretical millieu of academia, we have abandoned such separations of 'subject/object'. Of course I want people to make their own music (after all, it's what i'm doing) but I just hope that democratization and public "prosumerism" does not mean levelling.<br />
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And again, I don't think it does. While there's going to be a lot of shit produced, a lot more great music can now be accessed easily through Spotify, Pandora, Bandcamp, ReverbNation, etc.<br />
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The trick now is to figure out how to get people to realize they have access to great music. It's usually even free! Yet when I ask my students, for example, what they listen to, the majority of it is not local or semi-local or stuff they found via Pandora but anything that happens to play on the radio or at the club.<br />
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I'm starting to sound cranky -- and I am.<br />
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Maybe this whole post is simply an elaborate academic ruse to privilege a certain type of music making over others. Maybe this entire time my real target is all the heartless (*sigh* such a cliche, outdated metaphor) pop music and corporate rock that leaves nothing to chance and simply leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe all that shit about Miley Cyrus's 'twerking' scandal with no one saying anything about the fact that she didn't sing well (and Thicke was even worse) just got to me--particularly after watching such a labor of love as Grohl's documentary, <i>Sound City</i>. Maybe I'm tired of people taking shitty songs and turning them into hits through spending an enormous amount of time on their production. I'm not trying to be a pretentious dick. I'm far from advocating that an older technology is far superior and more true to authentic music making. Nor am I trying to say that all popular music is bad. Shit, who knows, maybe I am saying that despite myself. Regardless, there's some DIY music that's bad too. <br />
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See. This is what I'm talking about. I can't extricate my involvement in music from any academic reflection. This is not what I'd call a 'sober' analysis of the issue. But hey, it's just my blog.<br />
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I'll end with this:<br />
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"The human element" turns out to be the element of surprise at one's own collaboration and participation in a musical event composed of other musicians, technology, instruments, and dingy rooms that just happen to make drums sound fucking badass.<br />
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<br />Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-72210929980248808792013-08-30T12:47:00.001-07:002013-09-02T11:43:27.767-07:00Why "Eco" now?<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOE34eFNno8llULu86nbj5JdtG1EVcrVj4Y4aQnD84OHAFFpP774idwxXjz7otwqBV5W8Jm_MLDYZCSQrVelffvC6fR768aAc0QHUtWXGheAhyHMPDtof5mMT8h85WiG76FErp0x46A7Y/s1600/ecomedia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOE34eFNno8llULu86nbj5JdtG1EVcrVj4Y4aQnD84OHAFFpP774idwxXjz7otwqBV5W8Jm_MLDYZCSQrVelffvC6fR768aAc0QHUtWXGheAhyHMPDtof5mMT8h85WiG76FErp0x46A7Y/s400/ecomedia.jpg" width="400" /></a>In the following post I hope to examine whether or not media ecology and "ecomedia" (which we seemed to understand last class as media about ecology) belong together theoretically. As Aaron pointed out to me the other day, media <i>about</i> ecology (and the 'environment') is not the same as media ecology. He argued that just because both terms contain "eco" in them does not mean that the course (or maybe even media ecology as a discipline) should necessarily concern itself with nonhuman animals or "environmental" concerns. His main point is not that we should abandon this work, but that to analyze media <i>about</i> ecology differs from the analysis of "media ecology." Thus, my analysis of the 'mediated' nature of environmental shows such as <i>Whale Wars </i>on <i>South Park </i>was a relatively standard move that many scholars have made using different texts, rather than using the <i>methodology</i> we might call "media ecology." (Is it a methodology? This will be discussed later). <i>BlackFish, </i>Sea World, and other media that deal with 'ecological' issues <i>can</i> be thought through the methodology of media ecology, but media ecology is not restricted to issues of the nonhuman animal or ecological politics.<br />
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Caroline Stone's work on e-waste, for example, <i>is</i> a media-ecological study because, although she discusses the film <i>Wall-E</i> as a representation of e-waste, the interest is not on the film per se, but the problem of e-waste and the ways in which it is circulated and eventually gathers.<br />
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But is it a coincidence that the metaphor of 'ecology' for objects of inquiry such as media or writing has become so dominant? Does it provide an original methodology for studying the ecology of writing or media that focuses on the <i>medium </i>regardless of its content (and indeed, would this not be to agree with Mcluhan: the medium <i>is </i>the message) or is it because the <i>problem </i>of the nonhuman animal, nonhuman AI/bots/search optimization, matter/materiality presses upon us as we confront global issues such as climate change, overpopulation, globalization, food production, that deal with the very real fact that the earth is a <i>finite</i> resource? And that these problems has allowed such a methodology to emerge?<br />
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<b>Ecocomposition and Ecomedia</b><br />
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In his book <i>Postcomposition</i>, Sid Dobrin recognizes the 'failures' of what he calls "Ecomposition." I recognize that Dobrin's book is situated in a particular disciplinary conversation in composition studies. I further recognize that Dobrin is not saying that ecompositional work that engages with political and ecological issues should not be done. He does write, however, that at least within composition, ecocomposition has functioned as "a misnamed approach for giving students something to write about, a political content addressed as the thing that fills writing with meaning" (124). Dobrin identifies four ways in which Ecocomposition has already failed:<br />
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<b>1.)</b> Falls prey to the 'pedagogical imperative' of composition studies.<br />
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<b>2.)</b> Ecological composition has failed because of its embrace of "floating signifiers like 'nature' and 'environment' as its primary objects of study rather than writing"<br />
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<b>3.) </b>Ecocomposition has always been anthropocentric, "focusing on the human agent's relationship with the environment"<br />
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<b>4.)</b> Ecocomposition as an idea hasn't spread and influenced further scholarly work.<br />
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Dobrin explicitly reminds us that questions about the construction of nature or the nonhuman animal should not be abandoned: they are important. Yet, this is something he explores elsewhere.<br />
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Why do I bring this up when we aren't talking about "the phenomena of writing" or even the field of composition? Because <i>writing</i> seems to occupy the place of the word we have chosen for this course: media. That is, Dobrin's description of the phenomenon of writing-as-system as isolated from other political and theoretical issues in ecology mirrors a possible position that "media ecology" does not have a <i>necessary</i> relationship to larger ecological concerns. In contrast, "ecomedia<i>" does. "</i>Ecomedia" to implies that we think about ecology as the content of media. Another way to put it -- Media ecology designates a <i>methodology</i> (in the same way that one might categorize 'deconstruction' or 'actor-network-theory') and 'ecomedia' designates something media ecology <i>might</i> choose to study, but does not have any privileged relationship to Media ecology's methodology.<br />
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But in the academic scene, media ecology as a methodology has also emerged <i>from</i> the recognition of global ecological problems. Is media ecology simply a new name for an old methodology or does it offer a different different mode of inquiry? Or am I simply wrong that media ecology is a "methodology" and that we should position media ecology as a 'field' of inquiry? (And what are the differences?)<br />
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I prefer the idea that media ecology is a methodology, but a methodology that is not an empty formal method, but one which is not only influenced by the <i>concerns </i>of those theorists that have helped media ecology emerge, but were the conditions for the possibility of its emergence. These concerns are not the same as "content," but it does seem that media ecology contains methodological assumptions that in some ways connect it to the larger scholarly endeavor of the "nonhuman turn." I turn now to those theories.<br />
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<b>The Nonhuman Turn of Theoretical Inquiry</b><br />
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In the previous post, I mentioned the Wikipedia entry on "Media Ecology." The main distinction the author(s) of the entry make between the North American Media ecology and the European is that, citing Matthew Fuller,<br />
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"<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">The European version of media ecology rejects the North American notion that ecology means environment. Ecology in this context is used 'because it is one of the most expressive language currently has to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter' (Fuller 2005:2).</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">Despite this claim, it seems that the more recent media ecology, especially Parrika (although he calls his method 'media archaeology'), look to the nonhuman animal, plant, and mineral world for models and metaphors for media, distinguishing them from the Mcluhanesque definitions offered by the Media Ecology Association (Parrika's book is called <i>Insect Media </i>for a reason, right?). Indeed, as I pointed out in my last post, the MEA's definitions all seem to use environment to describe <i>human</i> made media and its impact on <i>humans</i>. The metaphors are of "information" "code" "system" or all at once "complex communication systems as environments" (Nystrom). </span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">The title of Parrika's book would have one believe that instead of using the metaphor of "environment" to describe communication systems among humans, we appropriate elements from what we might call the 'environment' or nonhuman animals systems as metaphors or models <i>for </i>these communication systems. That is, 'media' is not restricted to<i> </i>its impact on humans, but rather becomes a problem/issue/interest between humans and nonhumans as well as among nonhumans themselves. Nonhumans do not only mean here the digital world, containing many algorithms that make decisions without direct human intervention, but also nonhuman animals and their environment. If we think "ecology" simply means the digital circulation of texts, images, videos on networks, we may be bracketing an entire realm which does not <i>appear</i> to concern the human (but really does). </span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">In other words, we get the sense that the North American Media Ecology Association is primarily interested in human endeavors and the complexity of our digital and textual lives rather than "ecology" as a biological discipline that has to bear on ecological crises. </span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">In contrast, many theorists have tried to theorize about what Quentin Meillasoux calls "the great outdoors," those parts of the world that are not directly correlated to our perceptions. An</span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"> influx of nonhuman, nonanthropocentric philosophy has arrived in the forms of Speculative Realism, New Materialism and critical animal studies. The former is a general term for philosophers that attempt to revive the tradition of realism in the face of what Quentin Meillasoux calls "correlationism." 'Correlationism' is any philosophy that makes the real conform to what is </span><i style="line-height: 19.1875px;">given</i><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"> to the human being. In </span><i style="line-height: 19.1875px;">After Finitude, </i><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">Meillasoux writes, </span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">"By correlationism, we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other." (AF 5). </span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">The main culprit briefly discussed in M.'s book is Heidegger. I'll leave the details to the reader's leisure, as it does not directly bear on the question at hand.</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">The critique of correlationism has been taken up by Object Oriented Philosophy (Graham Harman) and Onticology (Levi Bryant. These philosophers also reject 'correlationism' and propose a realist theory of objects (although Levi Bryant seems to have toned his OOO influence down a bit lately). As I mentioned in class, this philosophy has had a <i>huge</i> web presence and one could even argue that the entire intellectual movement would have been impossible or at the very least had much less of an impact on theoretical discourse today had their not been blogs (<a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/">Bryant's blog</a>, for instance). Bryant in particular, especially in the earlier days of the blog where he was developing what would become <i>The Democracy of Objects</i> worked tirelessly to respond to questions and criticisms, shoring up evidence and speculations for his argument that would result in a book and continued engagement with his own work. </span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">Object oriented ontology argues for a "flat ontology" in which even the human subject is considered 'an object' among other objects. One of the tenets of OOO is that, because of the influence of correlationism, we have mistaken <i>ontological </i>questions for <i>epistemological </i>questions. That is, instead of asking what something "is," we turn that question into "what can we know about it?" OOO tries to construct a different ontology in which we understand objects as "withdrawn substances" (Harman). OOO, at least ontologically, does seem to make much of a distinction between nonhuman animals and plants and other material objects like tables and hammers. Both Harman and Bryant have their own specific way of getting at their ontologies, with Harman relying on Heidegger and a weird philosophy of 'substance' and Bryant on his reading of Deleuze, Lacan, and Niklas Luhmann (among others). Both, however, are trying to construct a nonanthropecentric philosophy. </span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">In contrast to OOO, Cary Wolfe has recently used complex systems theory of Niklas Luhmann in conjunction with Derrida's philosophy, particularly those texts explicitly thematizing the nonhuman animal (<i>Animal that Therefore I am (following)</i>), to show how we are dependent on nonhumans for our current ways of life under global capitalism. Unlike OOO, Wolfe is very interested in the distinction between nonhuman animals (and other things we might characterize as 'living') and other objects. For Wolfe, there is a biopolitical imperative to interrogate the difference between the who and the what -- even if the 'what' is always the condition for the possibility of the who. Wolfe is not so much in "ecology" as a metaphor because of his adherence to Luhmann's systems theory. We will return to this point when we discuss Wolfe's critique of Latour. </span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">'New materialism' is, in some ways, a theoretical position that mirrors OOO except that new materialist do not think that we have to build first an <i>ontology</i> that can <i>only then</i> can lead to discussions of ethics and politics. Rather, new materialism is already intimately concerned with politic. Rather than reviving old school philosophical terms like "substance" as Harman does, Bennett and other new materialists focus on <i>materiality and matter</i> (Karen Barad can also be considered a new materialist). New materialism is interested in exploring the <i>agency</i> and the capacity/potential/energy/affect of nonhuman beings within networks. Bennet's book title? <i>Vibrant Matter: A Political <b>Ecology</b> of Things. </i></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">Bennett draws on an array of sources including Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson, and especially: Bruno Latour. </span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">While I hesitate to put Latour in a completely separate category than these other recent theorists, I feel I must. Latour springboarded "science studies." Furthermore, Latour is an anthropologist/sociologist. He is interested in a new methodology that could allow for a "symmetrical anthropology," an ongoing project that was outlined in <i>We have Never Been Modern </i>( Latour believes that we must shift from the verb "to modernize" to "ecologize." But why ecology?</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">First, we should understand that none of these thinkers that I mentioned has much interest in the well worn opposition of Nature/Culture. Indeed, the 'realist' philosophical project is also deeply invested in getting rid of the distinction because 'culture' leads to the postmodern impasse of cultural relativism. Indeed, "ecology" for some of these thinkers seems to be the only way out of this dichotomy. Because of this caveat, we cannot understand "ecology" as a synonym for a vulgar environmental politics in the name of the Natural World or the Environment (as if it was separate from human intervention). </span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">However, doesn't 'ecology' must have something to do with what we used to call nature?</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">Latour defines 'ecology' as such: "Ecology is not taken in this inquiry as a focus on Nature but as the end of the notion of nature which is presumed to be a common world of all collectives. If nature is no longer the arbiter of judgments, we now have to compose rather than modernize" (Latour, <i>Inquiry</i>, <a href="http://www.modesofexistence.org/index.php/#a=SEARCH&s=0&q=ecologize">online text</a>)</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">Ecology, then, is meant to signify not only the movement and circulation of media, but rather the imperative for a <i>common world</i>. A 'common world' in some sense that can be opposed to simply accepting the values of globalized capitalism.</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">In other words, ecology resonates with the imperative to allow 'things' and 'animals' to have a 'say' in our common future as collective beings in the world. We already know that nonhumans act upon human beings, sometimes as essential components to human ways of life. I believe that for Latour and many other thinkers the larger context that we must take into account <i>is</i> the fate of our common collective under the threat of what used to be taken as 'environmental' concerns: climate change, sustainability, overpopulation. </span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">These are our current <i>problems </i>that must be addressed not only by actions but the creation of new concepts. I am referring here to Deleuze and Guattari's claim in <i>What is Philosophy</i> that "all concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges [. . .] concepts are only created as a function of problems which are thought to be badly understood or badly posed" (16). </span><br />
<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">The question we should ask, then, is whether what I've called the methodology of media ecology is necessarily connected to the <i>concept</i> of ecology that has emerged because of the ecological problems we face today. </span><br />
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<br />Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-70912210511021194242013-08-26T19:56:00.003-07:002013-09-02T11:44:30.405-07:00Media Ecology/Ecomedia -- What is it? And South Park. . .again. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://talisa3091.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/mediaecologies/">http://talisa3091.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/mediaecologies/</a></td></tr>
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Hello again, world. It's been awhile since I've used this blog. I want to mainly just outline quickly some things I've been finding out about our two key terms for the semester.<br />
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1.) 'Ecomedia' -- In class, we seemed to focus our discussion on ecomedia around the types of texts, images, and films that participate in 'environmental' and 'ecological' discourses. We pointed out that many of the arguments made by television shows on animal planet and even some professional documentaries such as <i>The Cove </i>and maybe <i>Blackfish </i>may be critically examined not only in terms of the work's argumentative content or its politics, but also the formal techniques used to gather, present, and re-present the information.<br />
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(Side note: Using <a href="http://tineye.com/">TinEye</a> , I tried to trace the above image back to its "original" site. Many of the links were broken links, particularly some of the very early sites that used this image. Eventually I just gave up trying to get the "oldest" site. I was hoping to find out who generated/made the image, but my admittedly hasty attempts bore no fruit) </div>
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<b>South Park. . .<a href="http://jtriley.blogspot.com/2012/04/becoming-crustacean-south-park-and.html">again</a></b></div>
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I personally have never seen many of these shows or documentaries, but I kept thinking about an episode of South Park (a constant reference for me): Whale Whores (a parody of Whale Wars). The episode suggests that the people on those on the show who present themselves as "badasses" who are combatting the perpetrators by 'any means necessary', actually are motivated partially by self-promotion (Look at me being an 'activist' on tv). South Park has poked fun at activism before (for instance, PETA), but not always to discredit activist <i>values. </i>Rather, they are more interested in how their values are transformed into practical action. </div>
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The activists on the South Park version of Whale Wars throw rancid butter at ships, but Stan decides that such action is bullshit. He starts to really blow up the ships. This is just one example of South Park indictment of mild activists presenting themselves as, for instance, 'pirates' (and the commercialization/televisualization/visual rhetoric of these so-called 'activists'). </div>
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I recommend watching the full episode of "Whale Whores" (for free) on <a href="http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/episodes/s13e11-whale-whores">southparkstudios.com</a>. At the end of the episode, we find out that the "real" reason the japanese hunt and kill dolphins and whales is because the united states gave them a doctored picture of the WWII bombings where Dolphin and Whale were in the cockpit -- not for food, not for sport, not because of cultural tradition. </div>
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Instead of telling them the truth, they decide to make up another lie. It wasn't dolphin and whale, but Chicken and Cow (another doctored photograph is presented). </div>
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We then see the Japanese raiding farms and killing all the cows and chickens. To which Randy says deadly serious as he watches the massacre: </div>
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"Great Job, son. Now the Japanese are normal. Like us."</div>
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Thus, the viewer is left to ponder the contradiction in our society: Luke warm activism to save creatures because they are either endangered or aesthetically pleasing to human beings -- to the point of critiquing the country and culture that do not 'protect' these creatures -- but at the same time in our society condoning the "making killable" (Haraway) of millions of cows and chicken for mass food consumption. </div>
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Furthermore, by giving the Japanese a picture of Whale and Dolphin at the cockpit (admittedly an absurdity that only South Park could pull off), the episode shows how indifferent we once were to their killing -- as long as it wasn't us! But then, we noticed that we could make a cool tv show and pretend to care -- so we just shift the sacrifice (but they aren't sacrifices -- just killable -- c.f. Haraway, Derrida, Wolfe) to "normal" things to kill. </div>
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Why am I talking about South Park? Because I think that it usefully interrogates society's contradictions, usually ones that regard the division between theory and practice.<br />
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Though if I remember correctly, in the animal studies edition of JAC, one contributor discusses the "real" guy that stars in Whale Wars. I might want to reconsider that piece to show how South Park, as all satire does, simplifies the perception of this man as well. It's true: they are guilty of many an ad hominem attack. . .</div>
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But the more I watch this episode, the more I realize it needs a blogpost of its own for a full analysis of the show in terms of media, satire, critical animal studies, and environmental activism. </div>
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Ok, just one more point. On "Whale Whores," we also see South Park calling attention to the formal techniques and rhetorical strategies shows like "Whale Wars" deploy in order to present a particular narrative. When Cartman realizes that the show is now successful, he pretends to care about the cause and becomes part of the crew. </div>
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The first thing sign of this shift of concern is when narrator of the show begins to talk not about the conflict between the Japanese, the whales, and the activists, but rather narrates a battle between a show about Crab Fishing (Deadliest Catch or another similar show). (They shout back and forth: "Your show is fucking gay" "YOUR show is fucking gay" etc.). Before this, the 'crew' is on Larry King Live (which actually happened and can be seen here: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kimcoJc7wcw">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kimcoJc7wcw</a>) and South Park Larry is only interested in how they created a "hit TV show." They even bring on an expert who also their creation of a hit tv show rather than their political practice.. Thus, the show becomes centered around not only what they are purportedly doing to save the whales, but <i>its construction </i>as<i> a tv show!</i></div>
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One particularly poignant moment is when Cartman has his first one-on-one camera interview. </div>
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As emotional music plays in the background, Cartman, identified as "deckhand since 3 hours ago" says, "It's really hard you know, really tough. It's like we dedicated all this time and all our lives to saving these majestic creatures. [Kenny mumbles and cries, Cartman comforts him] Shhhh, Kenny. Old ken's taking it especially hard. He's always loved dolphins so much that he. . . .Yeah, yeah, but keep it in a two shot though, keep in a, yeah, there you go"</div>
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Here Cartman calls attention to how he's being cut out of the shot. This is the kind of "behind the scenes" inserted <i>into</i> the scenes. Again and again throughout the episode it calls attention to its means of construction. </div>
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Ok, I'm done with South Park now. </div>
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<b>"Ecomedia" as a term</b></div>
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So I googled Ecomedia and what did I find? That the term has been co-opted by <a href="http://ecomedia.cbs.com/">an advertising agency</a>. It's mission statement states: </div>
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At CBS EcoMedia Inc., we have a vision: To harness the power of advertising and channel it into tangible social change.</span></blockquote>
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And boasts that "an award winning company, founded by a team of environmentalists and social entrepreneurs" </div>
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Now, on the one hand, we were talking a lot about marketing in class. However, it seems like this is not exactly the idea we have of ecomedia. But, given that we were supposed to poke around at how the term is being used, it seems useful to notice the way the term has been appropriated. Furthermore, the rather excessive amount of links google brings up <i>to</i> that company before getting to a more 'academic' encounter with Ecomedia. Cubitt's book by the same name doesn't show up till page 2 of the google search. </div>
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Ecomedia also does not have a presence on Wikipedia. Media Ecology, however, does. </div>
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<b>Media Ecology as a Term</b></div>
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Partially due to the Media Ecology Association, the term media ecology seems to circulate more within an academic conversation. The Media Ecology Association offers definitions from Mcluhan, Strate and Postman, but really doesn't venture further than these canonical figures. </div>
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The Wikipedia page for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_ecology">Media Ecology</a> was a bit more elaborate. It recognizes the contributions of those mentioned on the Media Ecology Association website, but attempts to incorporate some of the more recent work, some of which we will be exploring in the course. </div>
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However, there are some strange distinctions that, while grounded in truth, seem suspect. The wikipedia article makes a distinction between the "North American" media ecology and "European Media ecology" </div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">The European version of media ecology rejects the North American notion that ecology means environment. Ecology in this context is used 'because it is one of the most expressive language currently has to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter' (Fuller 2005:2). Following theorists such as Felix Guattari, Gregory Bateson, and Manuel DeLanda the European version of media ecology as practiced by authors such as Matthew Fuller and </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jussi_Parikka" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; text-decoration: none;" title="Jussi Parikka">Jussi Parikka</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;"> presents a post-structuralist political perspective on media as complex dynamical systems. (Wikipedia) </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">The writer(s) of this post seem to assume there are two totally different traditions opposed to one another -- which in some ways, goes against a kind of "media-ecological" explanation of the emergence of the very term 'media ecology', right? This reader at least is left wondering what the writer means by a "post-structuralist political perspective on media as complex dynamical systems." </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">Granted, this is Wikipedia, but I'm casting my net wide here. I want to see what kind of stuff pops up when I google things. Furthermore, I'm not sure that The European version of media ecology "rejects the North American notion that ecology means environment" </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">Particularly in Parrika's case, whose book is called Insect Media, it seems that Parrika is very interested in thinking ecology in terms of environment, but not just the <i>human</i> environment, however. Rather, "environment" in the sense of systems theory or within the paradigm of Jacob von Uexkull's biosemiotic environmental theory. The three definitions offered by the Media Ecology Association <i>all</i> imply that media ecology concerns media's impact on <i>humans</i>. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">But "media," as Robert Mitchell reminds us in his book <i>Bioart and the Vitality of Media, </i>also means "nutrient media." A "media" that is the kind of source of food and catalyst for growth of biological entities.So maybe its not just "systems" and "networks" and "communication technologies" but "media" can also be thought of in the way that Sid Dobrin characterizes writing as <i>saturation. </i>However, whereas Dobrin characterizes saturation as<i> </i>a kind of active and potentially violent act, the other side of saturation is a soaking in. In some ways, perhaps this concept of media (drawing on the biological terminology) is closer to Thomas Rickert's idea of "Ambient rhetoric" or "ambient environments." But Dobrin's emphasis on fluidity, especially considering the biological connotation, I think remains important. Whereas we might find it odd to think of "writing" in terms of fluids (in various viscous states) "media" (and for Dobrin I suspect these terms are all but equivalent) is easier for us to imagine. We already use fluid metaphors to talk about the "overflow" of information. It's a veritable <i>ocean</i> that we must navigate while being engulfed in it ourselves. </span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">In my next blog post, I hope to go into a summary, extension, and potentially critique of Mitchell's book on Bioart. This initial exploration will also help me to re-frame and re-compose pieces of my thesis for my upcoming presentation at Rice University's English symposium. </span></div>
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Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-13495652792327126202013-05-22T12:23:00.001-07:002013-09-02T11:45:12.070-07:00Mad Men "The Crash": Of Doctors, Mothers, and Lovers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
In the episode before "The Crash," Don treats Dr. Rosen's wife, Sylvie, as an object, dictating his desires to her as if she were a common whore. Although Don tends to treat women with less than full respect, this time it seems as though he's gone much further. Sylvie seems to trigger something in him when she says on the phone "I need you and nothing else will do." An innocent enough phrase, but this drives Don crazy, as he tells Sylvie to wait for him, takes her book away, buys her a dress and tells her "you are mine." His possessiveness is very disconcerting and came off as strange to me in the episode.<br />
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However, "The Crash" moves toward explaining Don's behavior.<br />
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I want to suggest that in this episode we get a glimpse into Don's Freudian 'primal scene', in which Don's virginity is taken away by a whore and then he is subsequently punished for it. The episode does not revolve around a linear plot, but rather an endless interpenetrating series of doctors, mothers, and lovers. Don has difficulty telling them apart.<br />
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The series of figures begins with Don being called out of a meeting room to take a call presumably from Dr. Rosen, Sylvie's husband (doctor #1), but we find that the call actually is from Sylvie (lover and, as we shall see, mother). Doctor becomes lover, but Sylvie is calling to chastise Don for smoking cigarettes outside her door at night. She tells Don that she wanted to make him know what it feels like to be on the brink of her husband finding out. Although Sylvie at first finds Don's demands arousing, she breaks it off at the end of the last episode and confirms her decision on the phone with Don.<br />
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But Don's secretary saying that Doctor's on the phone, sets off another chain of events. Jim Cutler (or Cutter, I can't remember) says "That's a great idea, Don! I'll call my Doctor (doctor #2) and we'll get everyone fixed up." The viewer is at first confused -- is Cutler sick? No, the doctor, it turns out, Dr. Hecht, gives Don and the other creatives a shot of vitamins and some sort of amphetamine. It remains unclear what exactly the drug is -- and this only contributes to the freedom that the director and writer take with the effects of the drug. Drugs have become increasingly more prevalent in Mad Men as we move from the 50s and early 60s to the late 60s, mirroring the development of the drug culture. Roger, for instance, ends his marriage after a particularly powerful LSD trip administered by none other than Tim Leary. However, this episode pushes the trippiness further than the LSD episode, as it seems to operate in an associational way that was not shown in the LSD episode (limited to an outside perspective of Roger and Jane, the occasional blurring of the camera, and Roger's report that he is at a baseball game when he's really in the bathtub). This makes "The Crash" even more disorienting for the viewer.<br />
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The drug is supposed to allow everyone to be more creative for a long period of time so they can work on Chevy. While the other creatives (and the sober Peggy) are rehearsing lines from <i>Alice in Wonderland</i> and coming up with ideas, Don has his own experience. After Sylvie hangs up on him, he coughs and this throws him back to a moment in his childhood when he was told to go sleep in the cellar by the woman (not his mother) who gave him a place to stay. This place, however, is a whorehouse (we found this out in an earlier episode).<br />
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Then he goes to take Dr. Hecht's drug -- witnessing the other creatives running around like Mad Men (haha). As Don descends the stairs, he coughs again, and flashes back to a moment when a particular whore decides that he should stay inside rather than the cellar, in her room. He sees a picture of a baby on the mirror and asks "Is that you?" and she says "No," changing the subject, and says "It's a chest cold." I suspect that this may have been a daughter of the whore, whose name is Aimee (mother/doctor, lover, as we shall soon see). As he comes back to the present, he looks at a secretary and asks if they knew each other -- the vision not quite fading. As the camera pulls back, we begin to hear loud typing and noises -- including phones ringing -- then a sudden silence. The pharmakon begins to take effect.<br />
<br />
The camera cuts to the creatives where one of them says "The strategy is about some sort of love transaction between a parent and a child involving the greatest gift of all, a Chevy." It seems as though they are thinking about fathers and sons, but we shall soon find out that the episode revolves around another love transaction between mother and son. The creatives rattle off ideas and Peggy hits upon "The child is the father of the man" -- a cliche, but one that also works well with the idea of Freudian primal scenes.<br />
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After Peggy's statement, we cut to Don running into Ken Cosgrove. Don says that he has to speak to the Chevy people in the flesh. As Don says this, Ken begins to tap dance. Don asks who taught him that and Ken says "My mother. No, my first girlfriend." -- This statement turns out to be more foreshadowing as Don's 'first girlfriend' can be figured as Aimee, who is also in the position of the mother.<br />
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Don then arrives at the creative office asking how's it going (they are repeating lines from <i>Alice in Wonderland</i>). He gives a cryptic and vague speech,<br />
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"I know your all feeling the darkness here today. But there's no reason to give in. No matter what you've heard this process will not take years. In my heart, I know we cannot be defeated because there is an answer that will open the door. There is a way around this system. This is a test of our patience and commitment. One great idea can win someone over."<br />
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We suspect that there is more going on here than a Chevy advertisement. Even at this point, we might suspect that Don is indirectly speaking of Sylvie (a test of his patience and commitment and the idea that he might be able to use to win her over -- how can he seduce her again). Flashing back, Aimee feeds young Don soup and Don has an epiphany that there was a "soup account" that is the answer to his question (not the question of how to sell Chevy): "I've got it." He goes back to the creatives where Wendy (who? We find that it is a Frank Gleeson -- a man who just died from cancer-- daughter) is doing the I Ching. Don asks Peggy to find the soup account, but someone else had already looked. Don says to Peggy, again, cryptically, "You'll know when you see it and its gonna crack this thing wide open."<br />
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When Don returns to his office (presumably he already returned, but the drug's effect is taking its toll on cinematic time as there is no transition from Friday to Saturday), Wendy is there. She is wearing a stethoscope (doctor #3). When Don asks where she got it, she said it was in one of the offices upstairs (potentially Dr. Rosen's office). She tells him she's there to make him "feel better" and asks if he wants to "get it on." He ignores the question and Wendy listens to his heart, which is silent: "I think its broken." Who broke is heart? Sylvie? Megan? Betty? All the other women? The very first woman? (Aimee?).<br />
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At the same time as Don's drama, the creatives are throwing pens at Stan and one gets stuck in his arm. The camera cuts to Don listening to a song through Sylvie's (?) door ("Going out of my head over you/out of my head over you/out of my head . . ."I must think of a way into your heart"). The song sets Don's project and gives further significance to some of Don's more cryptic speeches earlier in the work: he must find a way to 'get his foot in the door' as Ginzberg will say (more on this later), find an idea that will convince Sylvie to listen to him.<br />
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But then it cuts back to Stan and Peggy, who has become doctor #4 ("You have a great bedside manner"). Peggy moves from doctor to lover (Stan kisses her), to mother, as Peggy recalls the pain of her abortion ("I've had loss in my life") to comfort Stan, whose 20 year old cousin has died in Vietnam. Peggy says that you can't dull the pain with drugs and sex.<br />
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A musical interlude is called for at this juncture.<br />
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While all this is going on at the office, Sally has been put in charge for caring for her little brothers in the place of Megan, who is going to audition. She thus plays a kind of "motherly" role (that she is not ready for). Earlier in the episode, we also find hints of Sally's burgeoning sexuality through Betty's comment on Sally's short skirt. We may also remember the episode where Sally has her first period. Sally's transition into a young woman is further suggested by the book she is reading: Rosemary's Baby. The satantic undertones of this book is reinforced by a seemingly meaningless comment by Stan in the creative room earlier who says "I did it! I've got 666 ideas!" The book sets the tone for the sinister scheme about to unfold.<br />
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Sally hears a noise outside her bedroom and investigates. A large black woman is rummaging around the house. She says she's her grandmother visiting, claiming that she raised Don (mother (?)). The ensuing scene is awkward, as the viewer is suspicious (like Sally), but also find it plausible that we may learn of yet another twist in Don's past. Alternately, the woman says "Your dad is Donald Draper?" We might think that this woman raised the <i>real</i> Don Draper, whose identity was stolen by Dick Whitman.<br />
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But this mother is not a mother (or at least not Don's mother). She robs the house although, fortunately, does not hurt the children.<br />
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Meanwhile, Don is searching for the soup advertisement. The advertisement turns out to be an oatmeal advertisement with the words "Because you know what he needs." A mother holds the shoulders of a young boy about to bite into oatmeal. The image of the mother, however, has a beauty mark or a mole on her cheek and this causes Don to flashback once again.<br />
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Aimee is doing her makeup, but with a pencil, marks her cheek, in the exact same spot as the woman on the advertisement. She says "do you like this?" Don says, "I do." Aimee begins to seduce Don "You like my bosom." This is clearly Don's first sexual experience.<br />
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This dot, this mark, even though it is not 'natural' is the mark that links Aimee to Sylvie, who also has a dot on her cheek. If Don doesn't realize this, the viewer does. We can now begin to guess at why Don treated Sylvie like a whore: she reminds him of his mother/lover ("My mother. No, my first girlfriend" says Ken) Aimee.<br />
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After a cut to Grandma Ida, Sally, and Bobby, which increases her and the viewer's suspicion of her motives (Sally calls the police), we cut to Don in his office to perhaps the most significant scene in the entire episode:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Don (reading to himself): "This may be hard to believe, but the history can't be ignored. The history should not be ignored. Look, I don't want to waste your time, but. . ." (calls for Peggy, resumes reading) "I don't want you to shut this door. Just let me say a few things. You and I both know. . ."</blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He tells them that he's "got it," showing them the oatmeal advertisement, saying that "it says it all." </blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Don: Ok. I've got this great message and it has to do with what holds people together. What is that thing that draws them? It's a history. And it may not even be with that person, but it's. . it's like a. . .well, it's bigger than that.</blockquote>
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Peggy: And that makes them buy a car?</blockquote>
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Don: If this strategy is successful it's way bigger than a car. It's everything.I keep thinking about the basic principle of advertising. There's entertainment and then you stick the ad in the middle of the entertainment like a little respite. It's a bargain. They're getting the entertainment for free all they have to do is listen to the message. But what if they don't take the bargain at all? What if they're suddenly bored of the entertainment? What if they don't-- what if they turn of the tv? </blockquote>
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Ginzberg: You gotta get your foot in the door. </blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Don: Exactly! So, how do I do that? Let's say I get her face to face. How do I capture her imagination? I have a sentence, maybe too. </blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Peggy: Who's her? </blockquote>
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Ginzberg: Promise them everything. You know, you're gonna change their life. <i>Your gonna take away their pain.</i> [. . .] Then you hit 'em with the one two punch. What's the answer to all of life's problems? A Chevy. </blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Don: No, it's not. </blockquote>
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First, note the slippage between the abstract notion of advertising and shared history (even if its not with that person) and the pronoun "her," which is clearly Sylvie. Is Don planning on telling her this history? Her strange and almost arbitrary connection to his first fuck? We are not sure.<br />
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So how do you do it? You become a doctor -- I'm gonna take away all your pain. Don goes home, rehearing what he's going to say to Sylvie: "Don't close the door on me. When in the course of human events. No. . .You haven't heard everything I have to say. Don't shut the door on me."<br />
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. . .But these plans are spoiled as he realizes he's been robbed (and that he left the backdoor open). Betty is there and call the city "disgusting." Don faints. We flashback.<br />
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Aimee is charged with robbing/withholding money from selling herself on the street and is kicked out of the whorehouse. Just before she leaves, she tells him "Considering I took that boy's cherry for 5 dollars we'll call it even." Don is then beaten by the woman of the house -- called "filth" "disgusting" "shameful" "You're trash."<br />
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Don wakes up in the middle of the night. Briefly talks to Megan, who says "Sally seems so grown up, but she's really still a kid."<br />
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Cut to the morning.<br />
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Sylvie and Don ride the elevator in almost total silence ("How are you?" says Sylvie, "Busy"). Why, we should ask, has Don changed his mind about Sylvie (has he? Or is he just keeping up appearances?). What is it about the robbery and the flashback that make him realize that they should not be together? Does he realize that he was treating her like a whore? Or is he afraid of getting caught? Perhaps further episodes will shed light. Was it the drugs that cured him of his desire?<br />
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But for now, its important to see where this particular episode ends.<br />
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He calls Sally, telling her that he left the door open and that she did everything right: "Sally, I left the door open. It was my fault."<br />
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What seems to be a relatively straightforward remark becomes incredibly significant when we attach it to the many references to doors in the episode. Ginzberg: "Gotta get your foot in the door" and Don's repeating to Sylvie: "Don't shut the door on me." Its as if his obsession with Sylvie and his obsession with keeping the door open (keeping his options open?) led to the robbery.<br />
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Don goes to see Ted to tell him that he can only serve as creative editor rather than come up with advertisements for Chevy. We find that Wendy is Gleason's daughter (and know that Stan fucked her after a failed attempt with Peggy) and Ted chastises Don for the gibberish produced over the weekend: "Chevy is spelled wrong."<br />
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The last line of the episode: "I'm sorry Ted, but every time we get a car, this place turns into a whorehouse."<br />
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A brilliant clincher to the episode.<br />
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But where will they go from here? Has Don's creativity dried up? Or is he directing his creativity toward winning Sylvie back? But if that were the case, why wouldn't he have tried to talk to Sylvie in the elevator? Is that over? Where is Don, and <i>Mad Men, </i>going from here? I will patiently await next week's episode.<br />
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<br />Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-72852359820035680512013-05-13T22:06:00.000-07:002013-09-02T11:46:53.388-07:00On "Writing Studies" and recent projects"Writing studies," is a somewhat hypothetical discipline (insofar as we still don't see research positions in "writing studies," but rather "new media," "communications," "composition," "rhetoric") mentioned in Sid Dobrin's book <i>Postcomposition, </i>as a way to mark a form of disciplinary research apart from "composition," traditionally associated with First Year Writing and 'research' on pedagogical methods. In Dobrin's own words,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Thus, the primary agenda of Postcomposition is to argue for a move<br />
beyond the academic work of composition studies in favor of the revolu-<br />
tionary potential of the intellectual work of writing studies, specifically the<br />
work of writing theory, an endeavor likely best removed from the academic<br />
work of pedagogy and administration." (<i>Postcomposition </i>24). </blockquote>
Too often in composition, 'writing' is tied to a subject, usually a student subject. Writing as an <i>expression</i> of that subjectivity or writing as constituting that subjectivity. For Dobrin, 'writing' should be the focus of a 'writing studies' such that the subject cannot be torn from the inscriptional practices themselves. I like to think of this as thinking each inscriptional practice as a performance of a subjectivity, one that can only be described through that particular assemblage of inscriptional practices. That is, "subject," is no longer an expression of a human being or a consciousness, but the particular moment of inscription. The human and nonhuman actants work together to inscribe a 'subject' (if we still even want to preserve that term, so as to preserve a sense of agency). Byron Hawk gets at this through Deleuze and Guattari's ideas of the 'molecular' and the 'molar' in <i>A Counter History of Composition</i>:<br />
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"Meaning, purpose, and intention all are molar and separate subject and object, but the desire and the force behind them are molecular and collapse subject and object [. . .] The subject is a molar residual, off to the side, a side effect of desiring-machines, not a single center from which desire is born" (165).<br />
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Raul Sanchez argues in his 2012 article, "Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity," that the subject is neither an 'effect' nor an origin or something that precedes a moment of inscription:<br />
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"<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.571428298950195px;">Identity names this singularity, which is neither a precursor to the act of writing nor merely its effect. If we no longer say that identity is expressed through writing, but rather that identity names the moment of inscription-the intrusion or emergence into Judith Butler's "grammatical time of the subject" (117)-yet is only available in and after writing as writing's condition of possibility, then we can also say that identity manifests, at once metaphorically and materially, in both the figure and the body of the writing-subject. These claims make it possible to recognize that there is neither an origin story for the "moment" of inscription nor an aporetic limit at which one must hover perpetually. They make it possible to name the act of writing, the moment of inscription, as that which marks a convergence of time, space, and linguistic code at the production of a text. More important, they make it possible-necessary, actually-to use this very convergence to embody, figuratively and empirically, the convergence itself. They make possible the writing-subject as both thing and word, object and concept."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.571428298950195px;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222;">The writing-subject in this sense is an event -- an event that draws together all of the actants, human and nonhuman. As Latour puts it in <i>We have Never Been Modern, </i>"History does something. Each entity is an event" (81). </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">Ok, so the writing subject is linked to an act of inscription. Is writing simply any act of inscription? In broad terms, yes, it is. Every event leaves traces -- I would be tempted to say irreversible 'traces'. "Writing" ever since writing scholars' took notice of Jacques Derrida, has been refigured as 'the trace' in general. "Writing" is not necessarily about conscious invention and arrangement of an essay, but writing could be as simple as a mark on a wall or an animal's tracks. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #222222;">If this is truly the case, then scholars of "writing studies" are able to study practically anything as writing, as acts of inscription, of traces. My question, however, is what do we get by understanding in terms of 'writing' rather than 'rhetoric'? Are there not rhetorical limitations to the word 'writing'? Although his tone bothers me, I can't shake Ian Bogost's point in <i>Alien Phenomenology</i> that, "writing is only one form of being" (90). Of course, the problem with his statement is how he slips from 'writing' to "language" and then proceeds to deny the medium of writing and even language of a certain materiality, so brilliantly traced by Derrida. Bogost writes that in contrast to philosophical works (with the exceptions of Derrida, Nietzsche, or Wittgenstein) "philosophical works generally do not perpetrate their philosophical positions through their form as books. The carpenter, by contrast, must contend with the material resistance of his or her chosen form, making the object itself become the philosophy" (93). Here Bogost makes two mistakes: 1) seeing Derrida's form as a "book," when Derrida explicitly attempted to subvert that very medium, and 2) denying the inseparable bond between medium/form and content. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #222222;">In other words, Bogost makes no meaningful distinction between writing/carpentry outside of the fact that carpentry seems to lead us to 'doing philosophy' with objects other than the pen and paper. But if we understand writing as any trace, then these 'carpentry' projects of philosophy are just as much 'writing' as they are carpentry. Furthermore, the 'designation' writing, given its rigorous deconstruction by Derrida, avoids some of the baggage that 'carpentry' contains -- an emphasis on the 'hand made', for instance. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #222222;">Thus, carpentry just becomes a better metaphor for describing the practice of 'philosophy'. But what exactly is 'philosophical' about Bogost's projects? Of course this depends on our definition of philosophy, but if philosophy is the "invention of concepts" as Deleuze and Guattari contend, then Bogost's projects are not philosophy, even if they contain an 'affect' or a 'percept', which is the domain, according to D&G of ART. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">Within Derrida's understanding of writing, however, such art works would be considered "writing." But what do we get from describing artworks within a general system of writing? Does it erase the specificity of it being <i>art </i>or does it put into question the boundaries of what constitutes the art "work" (does it include all of the 'writing' and 'responses' that take place because of it? . . .and any possible future response?). </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222;">Currently, I'm trying to adapt a significant piece of my writing on BioArt to a writing posthumanism. In my original piece, I framed the project in terms that would preserve these works as <i>art, </i>even if, at the same time, the artwork is always within a complex system of writing events, which will affect the function and efficacy of the artwork (critics reviews, theoretical statements from the artists, etc.). </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222;">The question I have for myself is: what is it about BIOART that makes visible art as entwined within a writing system of human and nonhuman actants? My hunch is that by using 'life' materials as their medium, there is an increased probability of the artwork to not simply be the subject of writing surrounding it, but 'writes us' in some unique way. There is an unpredictableness, a propensity for failure that can be made visible through Bioart that reveals the general conditions of artworks: the possibility of their 'failure'. However, it is precisely the <i>failure</i> of BioArt that gives it's significance for biotechnological practices because the force of this failure is to recognize our inability to simply program and control life through genetic coding or otherwise. We can substitute "writing" for genetic coding, since there is no real way to control, in this age, the effects of our writing practices. What is the fate of this blogpost? What videos go viral? BioArt also is potent example of how our best laid plans can be foiled by nonhuman agency. </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222;">But then, does BioArt simply become a stand in for any "writing?" Indeed, could not the same point be made with other artworks or even other inscriptions? Is there something that BioArt <i>adds</i> to our understanding of 'general writing' (that is, 'writing studies') or is the point of writing studies to show the very <i>specificity</i> of this writing practice? But then would we not succumb to the temptation of 'rhetorical analysis'? What words, what concepts does BioArt suggest that would be an essential supplement to our understanding of writing-as-system? </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">These are the issues I am struggling with as I attempt to integrate some very specific research on an important group of artists and artworks in the biotechnological age. </span><br />
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Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-51276180853456612442013-04-20T20:51:00.004-07:002013-09-02T11:47:41.799-07:00Philosophy and Autobiography: On the Heidegger QuestionA good friend of mine who has just started seriously reading Heidegger (Sein und Zeit) asked me if my reading of Heidegger changes when I consider his fascist politics-- to the point that it may discredit his thought! Related to this, I've seen a few posts by one ardent blogger who is obsessed with the argument that because Harman respects Heidegger, Object Oriented Philosophy is inherently fascist -- its an absurd argument. Anyway, at the time (maybe I was just in a bad mood) I said "absolutely not." I justified this statement in several ways. First, I said that I no more feel that Heidegger's thought is discredited than I feel Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Knut Hamsun, are somehow discredited. The idea that literary artists get a pass (or at the very least are less condemned than philosophers) on their personal lives or politics, but philosophers do not is silly to me. Philosophical work such Heidegger's has influenced an entire new way of thinking. What's the difference between Nietzsche's texts which were <i>appropriated</i> in the service of Fascism and Heidegger's texts which one might rightly say have passages that resonates with fascism? True, Heidegger participated in a cruel system and should be held responsibile for this, but all this says something about the texts and helps contextualize them, in no way does it mean that they somehow should be ignored or discredited. The sheer power of Heidegger's works shines through by itself; Derrida, an Algerian Jew, could not help but be captivated by Heidegger's thought! Some might try and explain this through Derrida's biography and to say that somehow deconstruction is not really "essentially" concerned with the challenge of phenomenology. But without Derrida' encounter of Heidegger -- how would his thought be different? Would we have deconstruction? We can never know.<br />
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Derrida brings us to an interesting point, since Derrida is famous for weaving "autobiographical" aspects into his work, going so far as to say in a documentary that he wished philosopher's would talk about their sex lives. However, Derrida also puts autobiography into question -- the very possibility of an 'auto-' biography ties to critiques of presence-to-self. It is tied to the question of whether we do not also have an other-of-oneself inside oneself (a theme of philosophy since Socrates' <i>daimon</i>). For my purposes, this is to say that we can never divorce Heidegger from his politics and his life; however, at the same time, believing that we cannot separate these events from his texts <i>does not</i> imply that his texts can be explained by his politics -- as if his philosopher were some allegory of his seduction by fascism. This would be just as reductive as exculpating him from responsibility. We find a similar situation, deftly navigated by Derrida in a lecture, with Paul de Man's participation in a fascist journal. On top of that, we have Derrida himself saying that deconstruction is not in itself "left" or "right" on the political spectrum, but can be appropriated for either end.<br />
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My argument boils down to the idea that <i>of course</i> Heidegger's texts can be appropriated or read through his fascist politics. However, as Derrida also reminds us with regard to Marx in <i>Positions</i>, Heidegger's 'text' is not a unified corpus, but multiple. Heidegger is the proper name that gathers these texts, sure, but they are and are not essentially tied to them.<br />
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This post was actually inspired by reading Bernard Stiegler's long essay <i>Acting Out</i> in which he reflects on how he came to become-a-philosopher. For Stiegler, <i>accident</i> plays a large role in our becoming. I personally agree, as I find myself reading encountering texts seemingly at the "right" time which structure the way I attune myself to the world. For Stiegler, the very development of what we call the "human being" was an accident, an encounter with a "what" that constituted a who. This is why I ask: Would deconstruction exist if not for Derrida's encounter with phenomenology? What drew Derrida to Husserl, to Heidegger? Does it even matter? Yes. It matters in the sense that it will have been the case that all accidental encounters produced the possibility of deconstruction as we know it now through Derrida's disseminated texts. <br />
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My final point is one that I suspect will infuriate some, but I think is warranted. In America, the Holocaust/Hiter/Nazism has become our de-fault relay for <i>everything. </i>We use it as an example of the very worst parts of history. Please let me be clear: there is no doubt that the Holocaust is unjustifiable (and anyone 'justifying it' would terrify me and I hope any of my readers). However, why do we assume that everything that came out of Fascism is thus unequivocally bad? For goodness sakes, how much art has been inspired by the events. This is not a justification, it is an observation. An attempt to get away from our obsession with Hitler -- a call for a new reading, an invention of new concepts and new ways of thinking. Consider the Futurists: a fascist lot if there ever was one (and mysoginist to boot) but would we ever consider never speaking of them again or dealing with their challenges to the status quo? This is the same logic conservatives use against anyone speaking the name of Lenin, Stalin, or Trotsky positively as serious writers and thinkers. Hearing the name is anathema to those who don't read -- or who believe that everything produced by an individual associated with a political party or programme to which we disagree is useless (this cuts all ways you Dogmatic Democrats and Militant Marxists!).<br />
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But as Heidegger's lover, Hannah Arendt, tells us: evil is banal. As Derrida tells us following Kant, the radical opening to the (im)possible future also opens us to radical evil.<br />
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I'd rather have an open future than a paralyzed present.Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-47652672559445450592013-03-15T22:24:00.001-07:002013-09-02T11:49:22.908-07:00Reflections on Wolfe's Before the LawI am in the process of composing a review for Cary Wolfe's <i>Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. </i>In my first crack at a review, I tried to stick as close as possible to the text, tracing the main argument through the entire book, and carefully crafting my language to condense the argument of each section while staying under the 2000 word limit.<br />
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I'm not sure how that turned out yet -- but it seems like it hardly reads like a review. The theoretical background required to understand the arguments are daunting. Wolfe both critiques and preserves moves and arguments from prominent theorists in the same section. He vacillates between abstract theory to concrete examples that illustrate how the theoretical lens makes visible aspects of the political previously ignored through politics grounded in the concept of sovereignty or humanist 'rights' discourse.<br />
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In this blogpost, I'm going to do the complete opposite of my first try at the review. I am going to contextualize the text as a whole within my own recent readings in ANT, Object Oriented Ontology, and New Materialist philosophy. I want to show how Wolfe's methods and arguments differ and correspond to these other theoretical paradigms.</div>
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Harman's Object-Oriented Philosophy may be the furthest from Wolfe's own project. Harman's philosophy, at least as elucidated in <i>Guerilla Metaphysics</i>, departs from particular phenomenological figures: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Alphonso Lingis. For the most part, it seems that Harman picks out passages from these thinkers that deal with objects in a quasi-mystical way; indeed, it seems that Harman is less concerned with their major arguments (particularly his treatment of Levinas, so concerned with ethics as first philosophy) than tracing thinkers who use the same rhetoric he wishes to preserve in his own philosophy. No doubt, these passages are beautiful, but one cannot help thinking that Harman does not take seriously the legitimate critiques of phenomenology, particularly those of Jacques Derrida, which he dismisses as an instance of tortured self-reflexivity. Furthermore, even Harman's use of Heidegger rarely addresses the fact that Heidegger's work is oriented toward the <i>meaning</i> of Being itself (late Heidegger) and the meaning of Being for Dasein (Being and Time). Harman's uses of Heidegger Heidegger make almost no reference to temporality, Being-towards-death, or even Dasein. I would argue that Harman's appropriation of Heidegger ignores Heidegger's desire to move beyond thinking of Being in terms of the "present-at-hand," as it preserves the idea of 'substance'. </div>
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Harman quite unashamably develops a metaphysical system of relation based on autonomous 'withdrawn' substance.Harman uses the concept of "withdrawness" in order t avoids accusations of a return to naive metaphysics. While Harman's articulation of a grand metaphysical system of relations is impressive, it says little about the crucial distinctions among these entities. Because Harman does not believe the physical world should be left for scientific investiation (an epistemological endeavor) he posits a general metaphysical account of the world's constitution. But where does this ontological/metaphysical description get us if it cannot make meaningful distinctions among objects? Is this not still left to epistemological and empirical inquiry? Harman admits that the human relation to everything else is surely "more complex" than other relations among objects, but not different in kind. <i>How</i> is our relation more complex? What is the difference between a rock, a deer, and a human being? </div>
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Harman's metaphysics, and his rhetorical decision to use "lists" random objects that fascinate him (usually objects in the natural world or objects not specific to our contemporary time), flattens rather than thickens and multiplies kinds of relation. Even as Harman says that we should populate our texts with objects and things, he does little (if anything) to articulate the object's concrete specificity apart from naming it in a list with other objects. Objects are not considered in terms of their <i>meaning</i> but, Harman argues, should be considered because they are part of the world. Harman's metaphysics, then, is framed as an autonomous realm from ethics or politics; for Harman, we need to articulate a foundational metaphysical system first and only then can we consider and decide on these other issues. If I'm not mistaken, Harman has argued that metaphysics do not necessarily imply a particular political or ethical stance. Even if we accept that, it still might be worthwhile to 'speculate' on how his metaphysical position can be used to support and even justify particular political or ethical orientations. </div>
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Levi Bryant's Onticology (or OOO) fares a bit better in relation to Wolfe's work, since he recognizes that each object is an autonomous system with its own structured relation to its environment. Like Wolfe, he draws on Luhmann's systems theory. However, as Wolfe's points out in a footnote to <i>Before the Law</i>, Bryant still remains tied to Harman's theories of relations and objects on an ontological level (with the addition of the realm of the 'virtual' drawn from Deleuze). That is, Bryant agrees with Harman that each new relation creates a 'new object' so that objects are nestled inside other objects. Bryant and Bogost have both maintained that ontological problems are often mistaken for epistemological ones, a position I do not think Wolfe shares. In a <a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/promises-of-posthumanism/">blog post</a> on <i>What is Posthumanism?, </i>Bryant writes that the weakness of Wolfe's book, citing Harman, is that</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> Wolfe still seems to think these issues in </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">epistemological</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> terms. Rather than seeing selective relations entertained towards other objects as a general </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">ontological</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> feature of</span><em style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">each</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> and </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">every</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> object or as a fundamental feature of the world itself, Wolfe seems to adopt the pessimistic thesis that this marks the </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">impossibility</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> of our </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">knowledge</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">.</span></div>
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For Wolfe, this does not just mark the impossibility of a complete knowledge (which Wolfe addresses in <i>Before the Law</i> as the God's Eye View) but also assures that no matter what entities we choose to consider as possessing what he calls, drawing on Heidegger, a "self-contestatory" relationship, that we will have been wrong in our decision. Does this relegate knowledge of how other beings 'see' to scientific inquiry? To a certain extent, yes, but I do not think Bryant would necessarily disagree with this delegation.. Indeed, is not scientific inquiry (or at the very least, empirical inquiry) the mode of 'second-order observation' (how something observes rather than how we observe it) occurs? If we do not rely on such empirical inquiry, then our method results in anthropomorphization. Sure, we do this anyway, but without the check of empirical inquiry into a system's observational systems, then perhaps we go too far in assuming that ALL objects function as autopoietic, closed systems. </div>
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Wolfe argues against the ontologizing of relations in a footnote to <i>Before the Law. </i>Even though Wolfe agrees with Bryant's <a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/questions-about-the-possibility-of-non-correlationist-ethics/">ethico political position</a>, in the following passage, he argues "we do not need the either/or-ism of 'literally different agents': </div>
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"when we relate to something, we literally become a different entity," that "an entity that enters into a relational network with a hammer or a computer has <i>different</i> powers and capacities than an entity that does not exist in these relations and is, therefore, by this logic, a different agent." (Bryant qtd. in Wolfe n131)</div>
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Wolfe responds: </div>
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"we can simply say that we are and are not the same agents depending on the context, Bryant's 'pre-hammer' entity does not vanish when the hammer is picked up (and if he did, he, naturalistically speaking, couldn't pick up the hammer in the first place). We are (to put it in Derrida-ese) constituted by differance pre- and post- hammer" </div>
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In other words, Wolfe does not see much benefit to following Harman's ontological distinction of separate objects. . </div>
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For Wolfe, distinctions between system and environment, as for Luhmann, are <i>functional </i>distinctions. These functional decisions are based, in some cases, on our current state of knowledge. I think that for Wolfe, these new forms for ontology go too far in considering any and every object as worthy of speculative inquiry. We have pressing political and ethical questions that call for pragmatic action, informed by empirical inquiry, and even though, as he puts it, we will <i>always have been wrong </i>in our choice, we must make one conditioned action at a time. </div>
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This is not to say that Wolfe exclusively privileges the living or even carbon based life forms. He writes, </div>
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"The relevant question, which I cannot explore in detail here, would be the mode of embodiment in relation to recursive developmental change that allows not just requisite plasticity in the organism's individual ontogeny, but also, and therefore, its ability to thereby enter into an essentially prosthetic relation to the external technicities of code, semiosis, archive, and so on--regardless of whether the organism is made of 'flesh and blood' or silicon and silicone" </div>
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We have to seriously ask whether it is worth thinking about the relations between a banana peel and the floor, given that the banana peel (at least so far as we know) cannot enter into a prosthetic relation as the condition for the possibility of having its relations <i>matter</i> to it. This is why the speculative realism of Harman and to a certain extent, Bryant, goes too far in its kind of object fetishism. Bryant even speaks of "abstractions" as "objects" that act in the world and Bogost even asks if we have an ethical responsibility to these "ideas." Ideas and abstractions are 'embodied' in particular material instances, as Bryant has argued, but do ideas <i>matter</i> to ideas? Do ideas <i>mean</i> to each other? Are ideas and abstractions really "whos" that can relate to other whats? I have my doubts. </div>
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And Bryant recognizes, in a way that Harman never even begins to address, that entities have different capabilities. Relying on Maturana and Varela's distinction of allopoietic and autopoietic entities in <i>Democracy of Objects, </i>he writes, </div>
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allopoetic systems often appear to have a greater degree of elasticity with
respect to their qualities, autopoietic systems seem to have a greater degree
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bryant's term, "channels" refers to an autopoietic system's ability to make new distinctions "thereby enhancing their capacity to be irritated or perturbed by other objects" and this is what we mean when we say that certain autopoietic entities have different degrees of 'freedom' (the freedom to develop different distinctions) (173). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">Bryant thus addresses a major problem I have with Harman: his offhanded description of relations between human and other objects as "more complex." In Bryant's terms, then, we might say that Wolfe is much more interested in investigating autopoietic systems than allopoietic systems -- at least in terms of biopolitical choices. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">The key distinction for Wolfe, however, drawing on Stiegler, is that the nonhuman animal (or the nonhuman entity) must be able to have a prosthetic relation that constitutes it as a 'who' in the first place. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">I find th<i>e </i>following passage in <i>Before the Law</i> as making a similar point as Bryant, referring to evidence of 'neuroplasticity' of certain animals:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">"their individual ontogenies are quite rigid and subject to a very limited set of variations. Thus, their individual ontogenies are of little importance in explaining their behavior. For creatures of sufficient neurophysiological plasticity, however, it is a different story, one in which the correspondingly high degree of individual variation in individual ontogenies give rise to more complex social and communicational behaviors necessary to coordinate them" (70). </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">He expands on this in a later passage, </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">"the animal behaviors and forms of communication we have been discussing are 'already-there', forming an exteriority, an 'elsewhere', that enables some animals more than others to 'differentiate' and 'individuate' their extistence--and thus to be 'thrown'-- in a manner <i>only possible</i> on the basis of a complex interplay of the 'who' and the 'what', the individual's 'embodied enaction' (to use Maturana and Varela's phrase) and exteriority of the material and semiotic technicities that interact with and rewire it, leading to highly variable ontogenies, complex forms of social interaction, individual personalities, and so on" (76). </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">I think this relation -- the individuation of 'whos' is what Wolfe will compare later to Dasein later in the text, but not Dasein as understood by the Heidegger of <i>Being and Time</i>, but the 'limited' Dasein given to the 'animal' in Heidegger's <i>Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics:</i> "having a world in the mode of not having" (79). </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">Bryant agrees that each entity has its own 'world' as it appears to it and this is why it is necessary to use second-order observation. But for Wolfe it is crucial to distinguish between having a world in the mode of not having and simply that any entity (or even abstraction) always has a limited way of seeing the world. That is, because of pressing political and ethical issues, Wolfe is most concerned with the nonhuman animal just as much as the 'human' as 'thrown' Dasein. This is because the world <i>matters</i> and <i>means</i> to a Dasein -- the Dasein cares for its own individuated being and is constituted as a 'who' by relation to a prosthetic what. The block of wood outside is not a 'who' because, so far as we know, it does not have sufficient neuroplasticity to make new distinctions, which would eventually result in a collective memory shared among the community of wood-beings. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">Indeed, Wolfe seems to make the argument that this position may even be more 'posthumanist' than Bryant's, who (at least in a blogpost) restricts the conditions of value to the existence of the human. Bryant writes, </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">"No case could here be made [. . .] that there's something of <i>intrinsic</i> value in nonhumans such as animals or planets. Rather, we would be committed to the thesis that there are only <i>relative</i> values of some sort of another. . .the planet, for example, would only take on value-predicates in relation to humans. Were humans to not exist, the planet would neither be valueless or valuable, it would just <i>be.</i>" (Bryant, qtd. in Wolfe 84). </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">In contrast to Bryant, Wolfe maintains that we need to leave open the possibility that the 'to whom' it matters might not be a human being; he leaves open the possibility that "the addressee of value--and indeed of immunitary protection--is permanently open to 'whoever it might be'" (84). </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">One thing is for sure, though: Wolfe emphasizes that there must be a qualitative difference (not just a difference in 'degree' as if there was a 'biologistic continuum') among "the chimpanzee in biomedical research, the flea on her skin, and the cage she lives in--and a difference that matters more (one might even say, in Derridean tones, 'infinitely' more) to the chimpanzee than to the flea or the cage?" (83). </span></div>
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Of course, we might ask, why should we have an ethical and political obligation to those beings that we learn 'have a world' in the sense of Dasein, but not to other nonhuman objects or ideas? I think this returns us to the basic question posed by Bentham: not can they reason ,but <i>can they suffer</i>? Although 'suffering' is an insufficient criteria as we are not quite sure of its extra-human meaning--it is already an anthropomophism-- it seems as though that being a 'who' to which the world matters is a condition for 'suffering'. A block of wood, so far as we know, does not suffer, nor does a cage: it just 'is'. It seems like Wolfe may suggest that an originary technicity may be a necessary condition for something to 'suffer' in the sense of Bentham. </div>
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Still, we are left with the question: what is to be done? That is, if we cannot simply extend "rights" to various animals, then how do we enact our choice through law? Do we need to think law in terms of 'immunitary protection'? According to Wolfe, we cannot depend on outmoded terms of political sovereignty. </div>
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And just who is this "we" that decides? I t think Wolfe is aware of the problem of assuming a 'we', but his pragmatic bent means that 'we' as human beings who are reading this book, who are helping to shape and enforce laws, must choose. We must choose to <i>want to know </i>rather than not want to know about the animal Holocaust taking place in service of globalization -- the mass 'letting die' so that we might live. We must choose to want to know that our consumption of meat may endanger the ecological sustainability of the planet. We must choose, we must decide, we must act conditionally -- and we must do this satisfied that we should never be content with a 'good conscience': no matter who we choose for "immunitary protection" <i>we will have been wrong</i>. We must act on our incomplete knowledge and hope that we will come to know and make ever more subtle distinctions, thickening and multiplying the lines rather than flattening relations through an all-encompassing metaphysical ontology. </div>
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Wolfe writes, </div>
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"This very act of immunitary selection and protection on the basis of the capacity to 'respond'--a capacity itself based on a constitutively prosthetic relation to technicity--can never be juridical, however, because is is always already traced with the automaticity and mechanicity of a reaction. It is a 'line', to use Derrida's formulation, that is always already 'multiple' and nonlinear, always folded and in motion, always under erasure" (103). </div>
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The benefits of thinking in a biopolitical frame is that "it puts us in a position to articulate the disjunctive and uneven quality of our own political moment, constituted as it is by new forces and new actors not very legible by the political vocabulary of sovereignty we have inherited" (104). </div>
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Biopolitical thinking is to think the <i>apparatus</i> or <i>dispotif</i> (the institutional practices!) that subject both humans and nonhumans. We no longer just think about the ethics of eating "animals" (as if they were a unified category) but of what Wolfe provisionally calls "flesh." </div>
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One of the best examples Wolfe gives to illustrate the complexity of Biopolitical thought is the problem of 'synthetic meat', which, now that I think about it, challenges my idea that the notion of 'suffering' is sufficient to decide (to draw a line, make a cut) of who counts and who does not. Wolfe argues that synthetic meat according to someone like Peter Singer, would be perfectly ethical, since (presumably) no animals had to suffer in order for it to be made. Leaving aside the fact that most synthetic meat production requires serum derived from other killed animals in order to grow (and issue explored in The Tissue Culture and Art Project's artworks), Wolfe argues that from a biopolitical standpoint, the issue is not so clear: </div>
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"From this vantage, synthetic meat might not even appear to be an 'animal' issue per se, and would be seen as utterly continous with the technologies and <i>dispotifs</i> that are exercising a more and more finely tuned control over life and 'making live' at the most capillary levels of social existence. Indeed, it would seem continuous with the practices of domestication, manipulation, and control of life that characterize factory farms" (96-97). </div>
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Because it even further distances us from the animals we kill, leaving it to industrial production, some groups are against the production of synthetic meat. </div>
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Thus, it is not only that we need to choose which animals might fall under the criteria of Dasein, but the institutional practices that fundamentally change our relationship to the nonhuman world. </div>
Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-1201931332680098332013-02-28T11:48:00.003-08:002013-03-01T05:47:45.535-08:00The "Holy Grail" of Design? <a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/461553%C2%A0">Colbert Interview</a><br />
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I just wanted to reflect briefly on a comment by a Curator of Architecture and Design when speaking to Stephen Colbert. Stephen asks, in his characteristic tone, "We have two sizes of Ipads, aren't we done?" Antonelli responds that we could have a 3rd, and a few more or that really, the "holy grail" of design is to make the Ipad <i>disappea</i>r.<br />
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What can she possible mean by that? She elaborates<i>: "</i>The idea is to make everything disappear so you can be in things so you can be in the interfaces." Not only could be "in" the interface but rather the interface would be "in" us. Stephen asks, "What would I show the people who don't have one?" She says "You would show your retina."<br />
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Stephen's question reveals one problem with the ubiquitous design paradigm: not everyone can have one. If the interface is "within" in our body, even more so than now (its not as if we are separate from our interfaces; as Marshal McCluhan reminds us, our technologies are extensions of the central nervous system) than it is like saying not everyone can have such an extravagant interface. <br />
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But aside from the question of access, the deeper problem lies in our desire for the interface to "disappear." Once interfaces disappear, we forget about them as filters and reality simply becomes "the way it is." Devices are already disappearing into our every day use of them (my computer for instance) but once they become incorporated back into our bodies, it will be even more difficult to see them as mediators, as one possible mode of existence among others.<br />
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When shown the "bee vase," Stephen's remarks reveal the problem with forgetting the materiality of the interface: "Is that more or less expensive than having Chinese people do this?" Only recently has the media made visible the exploitation of foreign labor for our high-tech devices through the scandal at FoxxCon. Still, we forgot about this exploitation and go on using our devices. The "bee vase" most likely does not only exploit bee labor (animal labor is explored by Haraway in <i>When Species Meet</i>), but most likely human labor as well.<br />
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Thus, if our devices our microscopic (or 'nano') then we will most likely forget this labor altogether -- until the device malfunctions.<br />
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When we talk about devices disappearing into our bodies, we tend to focus on what this does to our essential "humanness." As a relatively committed posthumanist, this is not my issue; my issues are, in addition to the ones above: <i>What about continued tech support</i>? If our Ipod fails, we have to throw it away and buy another one. Although this creates problems in terms of e-waste, we should also consider the possibility of the possible failure, or, if not that, the regular maintenance required for devices that disappear into our bodies.<br />
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And the Ipad (or perhaps the MacAir -- see below) is a perfect example of this, since Apple arguably makes some of the most closed and mysterious "black box" technologies of any company today. If we cannot maintain our external computers ourselves and must rely on "geniuses," a crucial device for professional life in America today, how could we ever expect to be able to maintain and care for the devices that will most likely be <i>surgically </i>inserted into our bodies. If this were the case, we would have to subject our embodied flesh (and not just our minds) to corporate technicians/surgeons.<br />
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What if we cannot pay for such maintenance? What if, instead of having a broken phone and being disconnected from others, we go deaf, blind, dumb -- insensate to an extreme. As we know from drugs we put in our bodies (vaccinations, SSRI's, Aspirin) anything we put into our bodies affects them in unpredictable manners and if we are allergic to a medicine or our body rejects it, it can leave traces on our body and mind. The artist Stelarc ran up against this limit when he tried to change his evolutionary architecture by grafting an <a href="http://stelarc.org/?catID=20242">ear onto his arm</a>, complete with bluetooth capabilities. The fictional novel, <i>Feed</i> by M.T. Anderson also explores the problem of inserting internal hardware, particularly when this hardware is controlled by for-profit companies.<br />
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Clearly we need to think about these issues when we state unproblematically that the "holy grail" of interface design is for them to "disappear." I think Antonetti is probably aware of these dangers, but if design is sold to citizens in such a manner, we may forget these dangers in our techno-optimistic visions.Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-80376659991955732032013-02-04T08:26:00.001-08:002013-02-04T08:26:03.286-08:00"Getting it" This post asks a deceptively simple question: "What does it mean to 'get it'?"<br />
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Recently, my friend Scott told me that with theory you either "get it" or "you don't get it" and there's no way to teach this "getting it." Its true that those people who don't get it now might get it down the line. They might read more texts or maybe they'll have an experience in their lives, something will connect and the theory makes sense. <br />
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But I want to reserve the term "make sense" for something else. Because, relatively at the same time, my friend <a href="http://fragilekeys.com/2013/01/03/at-the-ends-of-art/#comments">Tim</a> posted a text that made me grateful that there are writers that do not always have to "make sense" because they are not beholden to academic standards of clarity or the exigency of the "hot topics" in academic discourse. I wrote,<br />
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From those of us who are doomed to make a little bit of sense for the sake of a career (rather than to be sensible), its a refreshing reminder.</blockquote>
Tim responded to me and initally reversed my qualification: That is, all we can do is make "a little bit of sense" the career forces us instead to "be sensible." This is different from "be sensitive" (even if the difference also always puts it in relation). To "be sensible" is a call to pragmatism; Here I am specifically referring to the pragmatic imperatives of the academic discipline rather than to the philosophical position of pragmatism. <br />
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These are not mutually exclusive calls; as Tim writes, <br />
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By “being sensitive” — attentive, curious, creative– one can surmount the rather rough sensibilities of academia (I think, I hope). It’s all a matter of how to learn to play the difference– with the sense: to somehow establish a rigor sensitive to multiple demands, often contradictory. Obscure contradictions are less observable, but more important than the blatant ones. Always.</blockquote>
Now how does this relate to "getting it"? It's that "getting it" is "experience making sense" (to use Tim's phrase and to incorporate all of the meaning of "experience" recently gleaned from Gregory Ulmer's Avatar Emergency). "Getting it" is what we say alternately to saying "that makes sense." Both of these refer to a flash of understanding or intuition in which we grasp something, even if we are unable to articulate it, to turn it into knowledge.<br />
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It is possible to turn it into knowledge by transforming it through an expression of our insight -- this might be called the more "aesthetic" response. In academia, in contrast, the challenge is sometimes to articulate that insight by a "reading" of the text. This involves an immense amount of energy and time because part of a "reading," arguably, traces the moves of the argument. Even if it the argument is not strictly "linear," a "reading" is a tracing of the texts twists and turns, morphing into an assessment of these turns on its own terms or otherwise.<br />
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But that's not quite right either. For as academics, we just have to "get it" enough to use it in our own writing. Indeed, the move seems to be to "get it," use it, and move on -- critical reading has become unfruitful. However, this puts young academics in a difficult spot: We shouldn't operate critically and yet we cannot break too many conventions in our own writing to be truly inventive because we are still trying to enter the discourse. <br />
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And we should never forget that there is no final "getting it," but a series of insights that unfold and are invented over time through our engagement with various "whats" (to use Stiegler's terminology). It is whether we feel (and it truly is sometimes a feeling) we can come to new insights and new knowledge with texts that we devote the time to trace their turns, to uncover a method or instructions for our own project. </div>
Jtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.com2