[-empyre-] incoming

["Sean Cubitt" <seanc@waikato.ac.nz>]

Kia Ora Empyricists

melinda tells me to start with an intro, and some idea of what is interesting me at present.

We moved to Aotearoa at the end of 2002 after a motley career in communty media, arts and teaching. I like to write. I am also fascinated by the relationship between writing and writing about (http://130.217.159.224/~seanc/). I make my living as a teacher, so veer between the pursuit of clarity and the realisation of complexity, ambiguity, overdetermination. 

Apart from an essay in Polish, my most recent publication is the Third Text Reader, co-edited from the journal. My inspirations are green, anti-imperial, feminist, transnational, indigenist, queer and marxist. I'm a jobbing theorist. Currently I am trying to complete a manuscript about cinema. The project is slightly odd, for me at least: it has to be disciplined (film studies is very established) and it has to be clear (rather than poetic in tone)

The first section (reflected in the pages called 'The Hours') is about three moments of early cinema that I take as elements of moving images: the moment of raw sensation in the Lumières' Workers leaving the factory, the moment of objectification in Melies (and an Indian pioneer, Phalke), and the moment of meaning (Emile Cohl, an early animator). Various triplets shape it: Real, Imaginary and Symbolic; referent, signified, signifier; valueless, use-value, exchange-value; Peirce's 1stnes, 2ndness, 3rdness; zero, unity/multiplicity and infinity. I call the three elements pixel, cut and vector to establish a retrospective history from a digital perspective. I think it has to do with analysing sensation into the perception of objects in space-time (and the subject-object split that accompanies it) and then re-stitching space and time back together in the social moment of interpretation. As you can infer, it's a reasonably (unreasonably?) technical argument.

The Hours I bashed together as an example for a discussion among NZ media academics about what we might publish as a journal; what might we do to make our research chime with the media on which it is conducted. Not a great example, but something for a group to develop or reject. It makes some of the metaphors in the manuscript explicit. 

It is also an example of a wider theme. Digital media make it increasingly obvious that media mediate. I believe that communication is fundamental (after a couple of beers I'll say the universe communicates; at the very least humans, animals and machines communicate). All communication is mediated (barring telepathy, but the attempts at signalling telepathically undertaken on a daily basis by NZ drivers suggest there are limits to it). At the time of cinema's invention, the commodity was the dominant form of mediation. Today it is money, more specifically electronic data flows of which money forms a wildly significant proportion. Digital money doesn't represent, it mediates. 

That's probably what I have to say. I think, I hope, that the work I'm doing on fundamentals of mediation in the early moving image will help clarify what media do when they mediate: what it does to the world to be made object or made meaningful; what it does to subjectivity and sociality; what options those processes open to makers a hundred years later. Topics that interest me greatly include human-machine dialogue, and the opportunity we now have to grant autonomy to machines, so that we might have someone else in the universe to talk to (while we're waiting for the aliens to show)

There are a few negatives that come up from this argument. There are bits of the ms (some of which will have to be edited out) which offer criticisms and critiques of concepts widely used as basic in media and art discourse. Against representation; against resistance/subversion; against play; against genre. Oddly, I find myself *for* authorship, in a guarded way. I'm also going to have to work through a difficult idea of audience, or rather 'audiencing', in terms of the cosmopolitan media (Matrix, Crouching Tiger, The One, Moulin Rouge) that address a de-differetiated, global market by mixing North Atlantic and East or South Asian styles, techniques and themes. (Equally true of games industry titles like Lara Croft). The first draft of that section is deeply depressing. One other thing (it relates to authorship, the role of the artist, the activity of audiencing): I think communication comes before the people who communicate, and that 'we' are effects of communication, and even more specifically media of communication (from the point of view of global finance, 'I' am only a node through which money flows; if language is a virus, 'I' am just a medium in which it replicates and mutates)

Any of these might well be empyre topics.

I've been enjoying sleeping on the list for the last month or so. Looking forward to renewing acquaintances and making new ones. Apologies in advance for various asynchronicities, but then we all know that the sociological line about 'instantaneous communication' bears no relation to the experience of communicating. Morgenstern: 'von Korf has invented a new kind of joke. You never get it at first. But you wake up in the middle of the night gurgling like a drain'.


sean