[-empyre-] 'The art of the accident' - some kind of a riff, might have been up all night beneath mosque lamps
Christina McPhee
christina at christinamcphee.net
Thu Nov 27 06:51:01 EST 2008
Hi Verena, Tim, yes I agree that Virillio's nostalgia for a
here=and=now body is both retro, slightly fastidious, even slightly
puritanical. Also am i correct to notice the veiled nonchalance
about- or at least willful ignoring of - feminist art, language theory
and political philosophy, of which there has been a glorious
profusion of work on networks and the body, the writing on the body,
the writing of the body-- Cixhous, Irigaray? I haven t read Virilio
closely enough to be sure. Elizabeth Grosz devotes an entire exegesis
to the body-language-presence-politics nexus in her superb treatment
of 'male' philosophical authors in her "Volatile Bodies: Towards a
Corporeal Feminism" -
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=FoFYYXuhQfMC&dq=volatile+bodies+grosz&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=4Qxz6AJeVK&sig=OVKJ3N5Q16-zp73_bcgf58ihxxQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result
It strikes me that when/if Virilio's dreaming about how a certain
kind of body stasis within hic et nunc can be fetishized, that, such
a fetish has something to do with his fantaszing an ideal body as a
independent variable, outside or independent of, time: a resistance
to measurable speed (ie. the transubstantiation of bread into body in
the Mass must occur faster than the speed of light, or, to put it
another way, from beyond the limits of what general relativity can
imagine). Thus dancers, following Tim's note below on Virillio's
disgust with networked performance, must only have their bodies. Only
Be their 'bodies' . Their neurons firing away don't count if they
send impulses to Stellarckian appendages or motion sensors. Their
brains are only supposed to work muscles while we watch, for our
delectation. Maybe that's why dancers are often thought of as,
automatically girls. Thanks Tim for dragging in this reference and
especially the conversation with Ashley and Stelarc. Could be
Incarnation is ok so long as it doesnt lead to any ghosts or
apparitions or weird halllucinatory presencing, hmm ? only the 'real
presence?
Quite possibly, it is only a quick and possibly accident-prone, trip
(trope), on speed from 'here' to a kind of rushing mad language about
bodies that glorifies certain kinds as mo' betta' -- more Real.
Then, oh!, in a new here the more better- special body can and will
spread like thick mayonnaise all over the sensing of the hic and nunc
and then will extend itself juicily into all trippy futures. Just so,
the right kind of body nervilly becomes the networked body AND you
don't even need wireless, just War. And ! this special kind of body
just creates the future. No need to worry about a reality principle
elsewhere. We'll just create it as we go along. (W! where are you
now? Crawford, yet? ) Well. Its probably offensive to even think of
comparing Virillio's 'speed' to the Futurist Manifesto but I find this
kind of wickedly irresistible.
I'd love to know, is there any scholarship that develops a critique
around this thread of common interest in speedy and special bodies?
Jeffrey Schnapp? http://futurismseminar.blogspot.com/ ?
Meanwhile I may sink into Marinetti's manifesto in its entirety
including prologue, and will listen: http://www.ubu.com/sound/marinetti.html
i would love to hear more about this from anyone, Verena, Tim and
other comp lit scholars out there in -empyre- -- ?
-c
>SNIP<
The Futurist Manifesto
F. T. Marinetti, 1909
We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose
brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were
illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling
underfoot
our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing
right
up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.
Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves
standing
quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost,
facing
the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone
with the
engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the
black
spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the
drunkards beating their wings against the walls.
Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge double decker
trams
that went leaping by, streaked with light like the villages celebrating
their festivals, which the Po in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots,
and, in the rapids and eddies of a deluge, drags down to the sea.
Then the silence increased. As we listened to the last faint prayer of
the
old canal and the crumbling of the bones of the moribund palaces with
their
green growth of beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath
our
windows.
`Come, my friends!' I said. `Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic
cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at
the
birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must
break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let
us go!
Here is they very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor
of its
red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.'
We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay
along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again
beneath
the steering wheel - a guillotine knife - which threatened my stomach. A
great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us
through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and
there
unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes.
`Smell,' I exclaimed, `smell is good enough for wild beasts!'
And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with
pale
crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.
And yet we had no ideal Mistress stretching her form up to the clouds,
nor
yet a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into the shape of
Byzantine rings! No reason to die unless it is the desire to be rid of
the
too great weight of our courage!
We drove on, crushing beneath our burning wheels, like shirt-collars
under
the iron, the watch dogs on the steps of the houses.
Death, tamed, went in front of me at each corner offering me his hand
nicely, and sometimes lay on the ground with a noise of creaking jaws
giving
me velvet glances from the bottom of puddles.
`Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl
ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and
breast
of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to
enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!'
As soon as I had said these words, I turned sharply back on my tracks
with
the mad intoxication of puppies biting their tails, and suddenly there
were
two cyclists disapproving of me and tottering in front of me like two
persuasive but contradictory reasons. Their stupid swaying got in my
way.
What a bore! Pouah! I stopped short, and in disgust hurled myself -
vlan! -
head over heels in a ditch.
Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I
savored a
mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my
Sudanese
nurse!
As I raised my body, mud-spattered and smelly, I felt the red hot
poker of
joy deliciously pierce my heart. A crowd of fishermen and gouty
naturalists
crowded terrified around this marvel. With patient and tentative care
they
raised high enormous grappling irons to fish up my car, like a vast
shark
that had run aground. It rose slowly leaving in the ditch, like
scales, its
heavy coachwork of good sense and its upholstery of comfort.
We thought it was dead, my good shark, but I woke it with a single
caress of
its powerful back, and it was revived running as fast as it could on its
fins.
Then with my face covered in good factory mud, covered with metal
scratches,
useless sweat and celestial grime, amidst the complaint of staid
fishermen
and angry naturalists, we dictated our first will and testament to all
the
living men on earth.
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and
revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and
slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish
sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the
blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new
beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet
adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a
roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more
beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses
the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to
increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has
not an
aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of
the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of
looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters
of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living
in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent
speed.
9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism,
patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful
ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality,
feminism and
all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and
revolt;
the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern
capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops
beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations
devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the
thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across
the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the
horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous
steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of
aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the
applause of enthusiastic crowds.
It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and
incendiary
violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to
deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist
guides and antiquaries.
Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get
rid of
the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.
Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of
bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep
side
by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal
ferocity of
the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with
blows of line and color. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to
see the
graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine
placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take our
sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum every day,
that
we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves? Do you want to rot?
What can you find in an old picture except the painful contortions of
the
artist trying to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full
expression of his dream?
To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn
instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and
action. Do
you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless
admiration of
the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?
Indeed daily visits to museums, libraries and academies (those
cemeteries of
wasted effort, calvaries of crucified dreams, registers of false
starts!) is
for artists what prolonged supervision by the parents is for intelligent
young men, drunk with their own talent and ambition.
For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It
is,
perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a
moment
when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the
young,
strong and living Futurists!
Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are!
Heap up
the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the
cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the
picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!
The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at
least
ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and
stronger
men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts!
They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of
their
first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and
sniffing at
the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits,
already
promised to the catacombs of the libraries.
But we shall not be there. They will find us at last one winter's
night in
the depths of the country in a sad hangar echoing with the notes of the
monotonous rain, crouched near our trembling aeroplanes, warming our
hands
at the wretched fire which our books of today will make when they flame
gaily beneath the glittering flight of their pictures.
They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and
exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage, will hurl themselves
forward
to kill us, with all the more hatred as their hearts will be drunk
with love
and admiration for us. And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly
from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.
The oldest among us are not yet thirty, and yet we have already wasted
treasures, treasures of strength, love, courage and keen will, hastily,
deliriously, without thinking, with all our might, till we are out of
breath.
Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least
tired.
For they are nourished by fire, hatred and speed! Does this surprise
you? it
is because you do not even remember being alive! Standing on the world's
summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!
Your objections? All right! I know them! Of course! We know just what
our
beautiful false intelligence affirms: `We are only the sum and the
prolongation of our ancestors,' it says. Perhaps! All right! What does
it
matter? But we will not listen! Take care not to repeat those infamous
words! Instead, lift up your head!
Standing on the world's summit we launch once again our insolent
challenge
to the stars!
On Nov 26, 2008, at 8:28 AM, Verena Conley wrote:
> Hi Tim,
> Wonderful post.
> I am afraid I don't have much to say since I am not familiar with
> Virilio's texts on dance, etc. nor with the art scene that sounds
> fascinating.
>
> A couple of observations:
> Virilio always strikes me, a truism, I'm sure, as a very acute but
> conservative thinker. He has an idee fixe about the phenomenological
> body that has been confiscated and to which we should return. In
> Cyberbmonde that you quote, Tim, as elsewhere, he wants to go back
> to a body with what he calls "psychic depth". It's his insistence on
> "going back" that's not working. He wants to go back to an
> existential dimension that has been lost rather than ask, the way
> Tim does, how to exist in networks. We can also recall how in
> Bunker Archeology he considers the work of art to be a gift of nature.
> I nonetheless also wonder about speed that for PV is not just
> acceleration but a third dimension.
>
> Verena
>
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 10:42 PM, Timothy Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu>
> wrote:
> Welcome, Steve,
>
> Thanks so much for your fascinating post on
> Virilio's museum of accidents. As you may recall
> from my brief presentation at the San Francisco
> Virilio conference, a small part of which I
> include below, I am troubled by the irony that
> his artistic interests distance him from exciting
> developments in new media art.
>
> While Viriio expresses concern about "speed
> pollution," we could take the lead from many
> artists, such as Irvine's Beatriz da Costa, who
> has profited from the speed of technological
> interfaces to map the air pollution streams
> traced by slow flying pigeons carrying miniature
> monitoring devices. In this case, speed
> pollution itself ends up helping to counter the
> degrading conditions of the inefficient
> technologies that pollute the air. To be fair,
> it is important to note that Virilio moderates
> the pessimism of his account of interactive media
> by acknowledging the importance of tracking its
> future. In an interview with me and Gaëten
> Lamarche Vadel in Sites, the journal of 20th
> century French Studies, he marvels at how
> "programmed situations make images appear that we
> wouldn't have imagined, because they themselves
> have been subject to modifications linked to the
> environment that one has created around them.
> There you rediscover the accident. I am an
> amateur of accident. I think that the accident
> is the future form of art."
>
> If accident is the future form of art, it's
> ultimate expression will take place, he suggested
> in the same interview, in the form of passage
> through which the environment of events consists
> of an environment of passage, one that ultimately
> ruptures the unity of time and place.
>
> But I remain uncertain about how far Virilio is
> willing to open himself to the accidental future,
> at least in the arena of the arts. For his
> notion of artistic resistance seems to be
> circumscribed and delimited by his identification
> with the same aesthetics of the past that is more
> loyal to the logistics of perception than to the
> pollutions of speed. This became particularly
> evident when I asked him to elaborate on his
> sense of the future of dance and performance,
> which have aggressively transformed themselves
> via the technological interface. The context of
> my question was a statement he made in
> Cybermonde, a book highly reflexive about the
> performing arts, that theatrical "telepresence"
> delocalizes the position and situation of the
> body in a way that negates the here and now, "le
> hic et nunc," for what's happening, "le
> maintenant." "Ici n'est plus," he writes in
> Cybermonde, "tout est maintenant." Just how we
> might understand this temporal distinction
> between "le hiv et nunc" and "maintenant" becomes
> clearer when Virilio expresses his anxiety about
> current techno developments in dance, occasioned
> by his concern that "dance and theatre are arts
> of the "hic et nunc" and of "habeas corpus."
> These are arts that present the body. That's
> their force. Whether it's Cunningham or others,
> there's a tendency to perform (à faire danser)
> specters Š To remove the body of the actor or
> dance," he continues, "to replace it with a
> specter is the equivalent of transforming dance
> or theatre into a form of automation. Why
> wouldn't one oppose the resistance of the body to
> these technical derivatives? Particularly," he
> adds, "since the body is the very place of
> resistance. Not simply an ideological
> resistance, but an ontological resistance. It's
> the essential nature of theatre and dance to
> present the body, not to telepresent it."
>
> What's striking in these strident words is their
> commitment to an ontology of performance that's
> concomitant with the long history of classical
> theatre in France that is inscribed in the
> presence of the body and its framing in the
> unities of time and place, "hic et nunc." I
> probably don't need to elaborate on the
> metaphysical and ideological implications of this
> tradition, from its grounding in the absolutist
> ballets of the Sun King to its reference to the
> Eucharistic body, which is presented in religious
> ritual as the "hic et nunc."
>
> To be fair to Virilio, he's also concerned with
> how the reductions of telepresence in speed and
> scale can have a negative impact on human agency.
> But I'm wondering whether Stelarc [who addressed
> the San Francisco gather via Second Life] might
> be one of the many artists who might have a
> different appreciation for the potential of
> miniaturization, as the interface of the
> performing body with the new media network might
> well extend our notions of the localized "hic"
> and the corporeal "nunc." Just last spring, I
> sat in wonder while watching an animated
> conversation between Stelarc and Ashley
> Ferro-Murray, a choreographer now in Performance
> Studies at Berkeley, as they traded their
> expressions of excitement over how the condensed
> speed of censors and interactive technologies
> have sensitized them to the miniaturized
> movements of their corporeal digits and
> facialities in ways that have expanded the
> terrain of performance and realized the
> longstanding inscription of the body in its
> technological interface and horizon. Their
> willingness to inhabit the accidents and
> pollutions of speed transforms performance from
> its ontological isolation in the unities of time
> and place and their stultifying ideological
> legacy by opening it to the accidents and
> uncertainties of resistance and its catastrophes.
>
> I hope everyone will excuse me for this longish
> post, but Steve's opening words on museology
> prompted me to position these interests within
> the technological context of new media art.
>
> Best,
>
> Tim
>
>
> --
> Timothy Murray
> Director, Society for the Humanities
> http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
> Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
> http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
> Professor of Comparative Literature and English
> A. D. White House
> Cornell University
> Ithaca, New York 14853
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
>
> --
> Verena Andermatt Conley
>
> Department of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages
> and Literature
> Dana Palmer 202
> Harvard University
> Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
> tel: 617-495-2274; 617-496-6090
> fax: 617-496-4682
>
> http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~rll/
>
> Kirkland House
> 85 Dunster Street
> Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
> tel: 617-495-2272
> fax: 617-496-4620
>
> http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~kirkland/
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Christina McPhee
http://christinamcphee.net
DANM Digital Arts and New Media
Porter Faculty Services
University of California at Santa Cruz
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
001 805 878 0301
skype: naxsmash
More information about the empyre
mailing list