[-empyre-] Critical Dromology - and terror, capital

[KUMAR, NAVJOTIKA X]

Hi, Christina and everybody,
 
The experience you describe of your encounter with the Deleuzian diagram is fascinating as is your question about it being a means of effective resistance. I wonder too about the extent to which it is a form of resistance or whether it is even a phenemenon of resistance or counterattack. Rather, in so far as it enables resistance, it is through the assumption of strategies of complicity/mimicry/appropriation, or by means of circulating/flowing/immersing within the bloodstream of the system or within the flow of desire and subverting it from within. In this regard, it opens up, as you note in your compositing in video and photomontage, or your 'exploding' of layers and layers of documentary image, or your manipulation of disaster images which otherwise are pornography, "lines of flight" to the outside as a way of destabilizing/blowing apart ossified structurations. It seems the diagram or diagrammatics functions most effectively when its features are flowing, moving, changing. And in this sense it appears to be especially amenable/ adapatable to modes of thinking, perceiving, and experiencing in the digital age given its own character as an experiment in interactivity. Of course, its constant morphing and its immersive character raise the question of whether diagrammatics as much perpetuates as destabilizes the given order of things. There seems to be an ambiguity here given how the conception of diagrammatics in terms of infinite alteration seems paradoxically to mimic or echo Deleuze's very notions of "control" as "a modulation," a "self-deforming cast that.. continuously change(s) from one moment to another like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point," of the "man of control" as "undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network," and of the corporation as a dispersive, floating, "spirit"/"gas"/abstraction. So, is diagrammatics inherently subversive of social formations or can it be appropriated by dominant regimes of power that conceive of themselves as engaging in new ways of thinking? Is it beyond appropriation? Or, as you ask is the diagram enough and how to move beyond the diagram?
 
Navjotika
KSU       


________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Christina McPhee [christina at christinamcphee.net]
Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 2:07 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Critical Dromology - and terror, capital

hi Navjotika and Jordan and everybody,

You've brought up this weird mention of the diagram in Deleuze.
There's a thread here.  Beyond the diagram moves this terrain of
erotic assemblage Jordan is beginning to note- but first i want to say
something about the psychological force of the apparition or sudden
appearance  the diagram in relation to assembling visual data of
disaster sites. Hassan's beautiful work is also in the mix moving
beyond a frozen gaze, resistant. Navjotika's suggestion that the
'diagram' is some part of resistance makes me wonder.

During the making of La Conchita mon amour I encountered an intense
experience of the Deleuzian diagram.  As I was compositing in video
and photomontage. I noticed how shooting and remixing into the digital
causes the facts of place to disappear. Visual ambiguities to which
the human eye assigns a meaning, reduce to cliche.  Disaster becomes
another kind of pornography: look at it, shoot it, tart it up in
Photoshop, distribute the images electronically.  This very banality
of the software ensures its overriding[writing].  It's too predictable.

If you explode the layers upon layers of documentary image a strange
things starts to happen. The strange  phenomenon of the birth of a
structural visual zone, an anomaly, happens.  Thinking of 'diagram' as
Deleuze may have meant the term with regard to the paintings of
Francis Bacon, in "The Logic of Sensation."  You start with all
potentiality; from zero,  you begin to scratch , line, tear, slash and
frm this something happens that refuses to be set aside or to go away.
This Deleuze calls the diagram.  He writes of how it emerges as soon
as Bacon marks, materializes,  image fragments.  Left to its devices
the diagram will be the monster in the garden-- messing up the perfect
grid of the canvas- or the html.   It confronts. It refuses to be
tamed. No tidy grids.  You feel shocked by something forcing you to
attention. You are implicated.

Disaster images become pornography almost default.  Until you start to
manipulate them.  The diagram turns on, turns on you. The feeling of
being implicated in the disaster and sequelae appears with the
emergence of the diagram.  Something else happens that is not
predictable. The strange thing is that the diagram rears its strange
head in a field it's not supposed to be in, the rationalized regime of
surveillance aka graphical user interface.   The diagram emerges as an
affront to the image. It refuses to be pictorial, stay inside its neat
little boxes of photos, or any lineup of suspicious activities or
territories. It refuses me.  It stares you down.

Navjotika writes

>  years are missing from dates provided on photos, photo grids of
> similar locales and meals are created that blur information about
> specific locales and times, and so forth. Is this assumption of
> "guerrilla tactics," or the enactment of an artistic insurgency that
> may be deemed what Deleuze called “diagrammatic,” the only viable
> means of resistance in “societies of control”?


Is the diagram enough? Resistance? The diagram hypnotizes as surely
you as it does the FBI.  I find this apparition of the diagram to be
like a Medusa head.   In an awareness that is already assuming
(consuming) everything as an apparition or phantom effect; the
pictorial sensational catastrophe is overridden, overwritten by
something else, or something less. The diagram is kind of like staring
down a death angel.  So then how to move beyond the diagram?

(further comps:  Naked Lunch  (Burroughs: Elahi) , or L'Ange au Secret
(Cixhous:Crandall)

Or :  http://www.christinamcphee.net/tesserae/works/american_iraqi_flag.html
    lines up video clips from a memorial protest installation
(landscape)  of civilian Iraqi deaths.   Is it a resistance?   It was
cathartic to make, I can say that.


-cm




http://christinamcphee.net




On Nov 18, 2008, at 8:06 AM, KUMAR, NAVJOTIKA X wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am reminded by Gabriela's observations about his writing on
> various governments' use of surveillance technologies to wage war on
> their own civilian populations of Hasan Elahi's project "Tracking
> Transience." Elahi, then a professor and conceptual artist at
> Rutgers, and now at San Jose State, was detained upon his return to
> the US in 2002 shortly after 9/11 at the Detroit Airport by the FBI
> and extensively interrogated based on the suspicion that he was a
> terrorist. After numerous subsequent interrogations and 9
> polygraphs, as well as the knowledge that he was being constantly
> watched, he started carrying a GPS device that enabled anyone,
> anywhere, to track his location and activities online at all times.
> He also began posting numerous digital photos of these locations and
> activities, including the toilets he used at different places, the
> different meals he ate, the airports he passed through etc. This
> ongoing project of interrupting governmental surveillance by self-
> surveillance, or of enacting a mock complicity that overloads the
> system with excess information/ transparency, is ongoing at www.trackingtransience.net
>  and receives many hits (including, it seems by the FBI and even the
> executive office at the White House). His exhibition "Tracking
> Transience: The Orwell Project" of course reveals that Elahi's
> manner of presenting all this information is ultimately designed to
> subvert his stated objective of collaborating with the government/
> FBI as usually years are missing from dates provided on photos,
> photo grids of similar locales and meals are created that blur
> information about specific locales and times, and so forth. Is this
> assumption of "guerrilla tactics," or the enactment of an artistic
> insurgency that may be deemed what Deleuze called “diagrammatic,”
> the only viable means of resistance in “societies of control”?
> And how does the assumption of these tactics intersect with students
> putting all their information online as noted below? While they do
> seem unafraid of surveillance, or of sharing private information,
> does the storing and availability or archiving of this information
> online represent a potential threat in the future given that
> employers and others can potentially access their photos and
> information later on, etc?
>
> Navjotika Kumar
> Kent State
>

Christina McPhee
http://christinamcphee.net

skype: naxsmash
facebook: Christina McPhee

contact:  c/o info at silverman-gallery.com

http://silverman-gallery.com, San Francisco



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