Re: [-empyre-] what is to be done?

[Aliette <aliette@criticalsecret.org>]

First: "What is to be done?". Mostly the question being problematic if it is
applied to education (what "forms" the consensual things having to be taught
to tribute the life in society: but which/ what society? Is it an activist
project of a corporatist project or a reformist project and so on? Why from
the tech? The tech as ideology of the well?

The question is that our traditional process of questioning this field
installs or i.e. regards a project. Which project?

There is a funny reply as metaphor, that nobody -being so much informed in
matter of marxism and post marxism and more post-situationism- among the
different critics having reviewed the book of McKenzie Wark since 2004,
seems have noticed that if A Hacker manifesto begins by a critical plagiary
of the first sentence of The manifesto of the communist party, from
communism to abstraction, it both consists a real challenge instead simply
quote a traditional reference of the book from the commodity after The
society of the spectacle, because Debord's work exactly begins by a critical
plagiary of the first sentence of The Capital - from commodity to spectacle.
It is not a succession, it is a disjunction, you know. A disjunction that
appears to me as an interesting view to tribute the present thematic.

After the cycle of post modernity we are integrating the iconoclast society.
It is a point from what to represent again the education as a collective
project of society can be more problematic than it appears.

In every case, at least in France, we noticed the subtlety in between the
following critical post marxist avant-gardes once when the book of Debord
appeared - after others and specially in a sort after the situationist event
itself being a book from 1967-, and consequently we would not have been able
to miss the critical successive report of the first sentence of the book of
McKenzie Wark. So that it is sometimes good to be in some old-looking
society, at least it makes initiated the former into wisdom as knowledge and
allows to recognize the differences. It is probably no longer useful to
tribute others but voluptuous cognition.

Thus thank you Brian for your remark. I am proud to be out of the things in
tendency. More your quotation of Ziegler of course interests me...

"What is to be done?":
 
As former activists between the oldest here, having experimented inside of
this reference I can follow (who could negate that the repetitive choice of
this sentence is not connoted) the successive approach of a radical pamphlet
written in 1902 by Lénine. It was an answer to the different positions of
the revolutionary movement in Russia (the title being a quotation from a
novel by the communist utopist Nikolaï Tchernychevsky - Wikipedia says:). It
is the generative text famously confirming the theory as mode to tribute
both the reorganization of the movement and on a redefinition of the
objectives;  all the leaders of the revolutionary Marxism have always
re-quoted this text, particularly Mao from whom the women hold that they are
the half of the sky:) so, at my view, this reappearance all the more looks
strange than coming after the thematic to tribute Documenta 2007.

Mao Tse Dong leaving the city for the country and beginning the Long March
Hô Chi Minh, redefining a communist society from the communism of war

And so on. 

Always a redefinition of the society acting the revolutionary movement into
a transformation of the society progressing the socialist/ communist
revolution.

But please, tell me which revolutionary situation you see in our world. That
one from the tech emergence? Is the tech the motor of economy? No. Yet now
the economy is abstracted.

Whatever a world finishing by itself does not assure that a world is borning
by ourselves but more: may be the time of directly act the change is over,
first we have learnt from the past that utopia is only paper and view, not
social reality because it ignores its relative entropy even social tracks of
entropy from several point of views or situations (that can be predicted but
not described); second, all our central structures of understand and act the
world in the continental and occidental societies has turned into net
periphery. Delocalize Intelligence takes now a fundamental part of power
supported by the central armies in all the world. Activism of nowadays it is
the same as terrorism: both means of the struggles and of the power: see
Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya, but more Madrid, London or Bombay: which
opportunities conveniently tending such various and different attacks. You
cannot go believing that the generalized war (the universal a-synchronic
multiple war) is dialectical.

So what of education if it is no more dialectical?

If I well hear Brian, so far from the new world that I could take place
myself, being all the more French than Martian French, I think that rather
the post modernity without stop ending whether the field and social field
through the tech avant-gardism may be: I prefer ask several questions;
notoriously in what utopia of the ideal society do we may consensually trust
the future from the tech communication and tech information in regard of the
general environment? In what situation do we may be at the present? What of
the environmental lesson and impacts as well History, as well economy, as
well ecology, on the proper bodies?

What culture you say? You suppose one that values to be generalized in the
place of the others, (saying to tribute others consists the same as 'in the
place of) and specially discounting otherness? Why do we would tribute to
the development of the communication if this consists in misinformation of
mostly part of the material conditions of the life?

In name of which education are we talking? Tech? As well writing and reading
after the commune de Paris or after the commune of Chicago? Tech in the
place of reading and writing? But the public education did not consist in
learn the use of the printer machine itself, you know? That was the emergent
question of the analogical capacity of physically write and read the mental
capacity of thought, the project being the autonomy from one integrating
body. 

Please tell me what you mean by the importance credited to digital tech
modifications in this process?

As to plagiary A hacker manifesto: which disjunction as critical opening
(note well that I do not say progressive) being just a real opening as a
view, do you install, in between educate the common language (not the tools
but the abstracted concepts cannot being simply a code ? anthropologic
languages being not simply a code of competence and of performance) and
tribute to the actual: do you really see concepts emerging from the digital
codes as well from the capacity of reproduce the texts by printing ? what
does not base the thought but support it-?

I do not think so.. I am in opposition with a part of views which agrees the
symbolic tribute to data.

If you really want to begin such an exploration of education: which
disruption whether the spectra you can say before explain or call for the
common debate and common conception of educate ? but orders and commands?

The question still available being not a revolutionary question but the
regressive question: the self capacity of thinking the criticism from any
human coming at current education.


  


On 6/01/07 14:53, "odyens@alcor.concordia.ca" <odyens@alcor.concordia.ca>
probably wrote:

> What is to be done?
> 
> More than ever the question of our relationship to both art and the aesthetic
> process must be address. In a world of shifting boundaries, of profound and
> fundamental changes, a world where universals such as life, death,
> consciousness and uniqueness are being challenged by technological reality,
> the question of art, of our relationship to it, the question of its purpose
> and of its objectives must be tackled.
> 
> (What is technological reality? It is the perception of the world through both
> human *and* non-human senses. With technological reality, we now have access
> to numerous strata of reality that were formerly impenetrable to us: those of
> genetics and neurology, of protons and photons, of relativity and quantum
> physics. Technological reality questions the fundamental distinctions between
> life and death, consciousness and non-consciousness, the organic and the non-
> organic that we once believed to be universal. In fact, the more we get access
> to different slivers of reality, the more difficult it becomes to clearly
> distinguish between these phenomena. On our own biological scale for example,
> the difference between a table and a man is clear. The man is alive while the
> table is not. But on an atomic scale of reality, to which we only have access
> through technological reality, there are no differences between one and the
> other). 
> 
> What is to be done? What is to be understood by art today should probably be
> our starting point. For how should we define art in the 21st century when
> machines, technologies and software provide most of the actual artistic
> process, when some ?machines¹ (such as Ray Kurzweil¹s Cybernetic Poet) even
> produce the entire artwork?
> 
> If art is now as specific to machine¹s ontology as it is to humanity¹s, then
> the question of what is to be done must be dealt with differently. Art
> embedded in machines and technologies is art embedded in the profound
> transformation of our world. It¹s art within video games, themselves within
> the culture of war. It¹s art spreading technological reality. It¹s art
> intruding into the physical reality (where special effects become genetic
> manipulations). It¹s art initiating the Inhuman Condition. Art embedded in
> machines is art slipping away from human control, art creating territories of
> emotions outside our realm of understanding, of sensitivity.
> 
> The question of ?what is to be done¹ must thus be understood as including the
> whole concept of art. What is to be done with a process that helped create our
> perception of the metaphysical, but whose operations, whose forms and
> sometimes even content are now within the control of machines? When most of
> what art produces today ignores humanity¹s need for the transcendent, when
> what most of what art produces today responds to machine¹s perceptions of the
> world?
> 
> ?What is to be done¹ when humanity is confronted with research clearly showing
> that art, as well as the aesthetic process, are nothing else but algorithmic
> structures, structures that can be identified, defined and reproduced
> mechanically (when we respond to Jackson Pollock¹s paintings, we actually
> respond to fractals in his images. When we respond to a film or a musical
> piece, we respond to certain structures, pitch, tone, location, dialogue, that
> are clearly algorithmic)?
> 
> On Pollock:
> http://materialscience.uoregon.edu/taylor/art/scientificamerican.pdf
> 
> Music and Film:
> http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061016fa_fact6
> 
> What is to be done when a simple computer program can decipher the algorithmic
> structure of a work of art? When a simple computer program (Kurzweil¹s
> Cybernetic Poet for example) can generate an aesthetic experience? What is to
> be done when beauty appears to be nothing else but a harmonious mathematical
> structure? When the transcendence of art appears to be nothing else but a
> numerical pattern? What does it mean to be human when splendor is not a
> mystical experience but a mathematical configuration? When machines will soon
> produce beautiful and moving works of art?
> 
> What is to be done when machines and technologies force us to confront our
> inhumanity through the process of art?
> 
> 
>