[-empyre-] Re: empyre Digest, Vol 5, Issue 11

[ryan griffis <grifray@yahoo.com>]

this is a sprawling conversation! it's great, if hard to keep up with.

> 'Once rightly critiqued as individualistic self-promotion, painting as 
> a
> practice could now be called on to affirm what Julia Kristeva calls
> 'singularity' (a critical term opposed to bourgeois ideologies of
> individualism)[...] Kristeva gives ethical importance to 'aesthetic
> practices', drawing on aesthesis as that dimension of experience that 
> is NOT
> mediated by reason - she says Technology has now totally absorbed and
> instrumentalised rationality - but by affect and a relation to the 
> drives'.

this reminds me of Adorno's position in "commitment" - aimed at Brecht 
and others calling for a directly engaged, political art - also an 
update of Marcuse's 'technological reality.' it's interesting how this 
discussion continues to be compelling...  not without good reason.

a brief aside about the "hacking" dialogue, the O'Reilly marketing of 
"hacking culture" into a series of publications, i think, reveals how 
the idea of "hacking" will probably be perceived differently without 
the pretense of the early 90s movies and Gibson and Sterling 
references. from the O'Reilly perspective, hacking is about getting the 
most from your commercial technology. (i don't mean to sound cynical or 
disapproving - i find a lot of this stuff really useful and fun). but 
it's definitely not the politicization of a tech community that Ricardo 
and the EDT talked about needing.

i'm glad Renee brought up Rosalyn Deutsche - i'm a huge fan of her 
work, and some of her concepts seem really appropriate to the issues 
that Kate started us out with. i haven't had a chance to listen to that 
talk at the Tate, but her critique of a lot of critical analysis 
surrounding "public space" (its disappearance, etc) as an 'agoraphobic' 
position seems pertinent here. Where would transgressions fit into her 
assertion - that someone else made here in a very similar way - that 
'democracy' is by default an unstable system always in flux? if 
transgressions are meant to be a gesture of liberation in a situation 
that is always eluding conclusion (if it is to avoid authoritarianism), 
what does it mean to always think of your/our/her actions as always 
crossing recognized boundaries? in other words, if transgressions are 
the norm, does it make sense to conceptualize actions as such? or are 
we thinking in utopian terms? which may not be a bad thing, 
necessarily.

i think Kate's use of 'co-' as a prefix seems a great thought pattern 
that problematizes what i wrote above.
in terms of 'matrixial aesthetics' and ethics, i think subRosa's 
activities are relevant (not just because this project uses the word 
'matrixial' in its title :)
http://www.cyberfeminism.net/projects/doc/mx.html
back to reading through more of the posts...
best,
ryan