[-empyre-] farewell to Pacific Rim New Media Summit discussion
dear -empyreans-
Thanks to everyone who sent in texts or comments regarding the ISEA
Pacific Rim New Media Summit this month, and to all the
readers...
thanks especially Franck, Sean, Steve, Rob, Gustaff, Fatima, Jose-
Carlos, Guna, Danny, Tim and Monica.
Musing over the situation of how difficult the conversation about
'what is pacific rim' what is 'new media' what are these in connection,
I got to thinking about a post that Aliette de Certhoux sent last
March, when we were engaged on this list with the
Documenta 12 leitmotiv, 'Is Modernity our Antiquity?"
The post is in French but I tried here to give a rough approximation
in English. I feel Aliette has touched on something about the
phenomena of silences and speech
that attend the beginnings of the new. She is writing about the
classic European avant garde and its successors, but her remarks seem
pertinent all the same. Perhaps connecting to Shubha's and Monica's
observations about kinds of reckoning, 'dead' and 'alive' ( see
https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-August/
msg00002.html ).
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"Materialist modernity (whether virtual, conceptual or of concrete
reality) is always a collective enterprise, relatively unrealized as
long as the avant-garde promotes it; even at the historical moment of
the avant-garde it is a manifestation of emergence the realization of
which exists perpetually in the future. What then might constitute a
common way of understanding in modernity--a common cognition?
Reckoning against the past and its commonalities, which though in the
continuous process of becoming passe appear as fixed stars, the avant-
garde navigates by a series or process of differentiations between
its new propositions and these old, known stars; thereby creating its
own insurgent luminosity-- a generative confrontation.
>
In the midst of this process, a way of knowledge cannot ever rise up
out of its own condition of emergence, if only for the fact that
such implies mastery of a thing that must be known in order to be
outwitted and surpassed. Rather by contrast, knowledge is always
active and interactive, it is never closed, it functions between the
known and the unknown, since it always takes the accidental, the
possibility, the random, into account.
>
Further, without an exchange amongst ways of knowing, direct or
indirect, regarding the past, even the immediate past, there can be
no possible growth of cognitive inquiry. Not yet understood, the
new, except insofar as it touches on the margins of existing
theories or ensembles of theory, remains otherwise impossible to
describe or even name, in consensual terms."
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Apologies to Aliette if I misread your subtle and fairly abstract point!
The original post in French is here:
https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-March/msg00123.html
thanks again, all
-cm
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