[-empyre-] slippery synaptic summaries and rolling ronellian resonances

[dj lotu5]

in the spirit of tweeting, i'm going to pop in again quickly now that 
i'm mostly caught up... looking fwd to virginia and emily's posts...

seems like we're off to an expansive start, getting to good questions, 
like can we use the notion of Relational Aesthetic, add to it, parasite 
it, exploit it for our own ends?

i'm still interested in hearing more from folks about their notions of 
queer...

its also good to see derrida's spectre being raised and my friend and 
advisor avital ronell. i always thought she was an amazing at making 
connections, thinking the call of Dasein through technology and 
schizophrenia, through AGB's first words to watson and their latent 
homosexuality "Watson, come here! I want you!" reading the desire in the 
exclamation point!

yet still one of the most important works of Ronell's for me was her 
book Crack Wars, in which she wrote

"Much like the paradigms installed by the discovery of endorphins, 
Being-on-drugs indicates that a structure is already in place, prior to 
the production of that materiality we call drugs, including virtual 
reality or cyberprojections."

which for me recalls the question of biopower being heteronormative, if 
we can consider, weigh and differentiate those two structures from those 
of our own biology... surely if we think of Foucault's definition of 
biopower as control over populations through bioinformational practices, 
then we can think at a basic level, is biopower heteronormative, and if 
the census options of male/female and married/single and the medical 
forms i fill out when i visit the doctor which have no checkbox for my 
gender ( [genderfucked/transgender/fluid/dragon/moonlight on dark miami 
waters would] be an exciting checkbox to stumble across) are an 
expression of biopower, then perhaps biopower can be heteronormative, 
but in our expansive alter-globalization optimism perhaps there is also 
a biopower of the multitude, if we step back a level and think of 
biopower as a quasi-cause, or as a virtual structure, not a specific 
instance. and in agamben's formulation surely the oikos of oikonimia 
pointing to the managing of the house as the root of economics surely 
shows a patriarchical root to even neoliberal economics, but lets be 
clear and keep our patriarchy separate from our heteronormativity.

Again returning to Ronell, and Crack Wars again she writes “You 
understood so little about the chemical prosthesis which was the real, 
insubstantial vehicle constituting the virtual... The age of the 
chemical prosthesis has already begun.” Bourriard's formulation of 
altermodern seems curiously centered around travel to me, and perhaps in 
that forumlation the checmical prosthesis is not simply caffeine or 
cocaine but petroleum or silicone, as in both chips and implants.

And considering the virtual in Bourriard's Altermodern, if you'll 
indulge me for one more messy gooey moment, another quote from Crack 
Wars may be of use to consider the broader implications of our 
discussion so far:

“If the literature of electronic culture can be located in the works of 
Philip K. Dick or William Gibson, in the imaginings of a cyberpunk 
projection, or a reserve for virtual reality, then it is probable that 
electronic culture shares a crucial project with drug culture. This 
project should be understood in Jean-Luc Nancy's
and Blanchot's sense of désoeuvrement—a project without an end or 
program, an unworking that nonetheless occurs, and whose contours we can 
begin to read.”

Ronell's writing may be of use here in dissolving or disarming the 
binary of critique/creation, in that perhaps we can imagine a 
world-building project such as queer theory, alter-globalization, 
virtual worlds and/or science fiction/meta fiction/magical 
realism/transreal, which is simultaneously an unworking, which is both 
rigorous and leisurely, both militant and pleasurable, both ethical and 
acknowledging our fault, our finitude, our failings, aesthetically and 
theoretically... Perhaps this kind of unfolding serpent full of shifting 
intensities is more akin to a dark precursor or line of flight than a 
set diagram? ( Really my objection to Badiou is the void. How can there 
be an ontology based on the void? How can anything be created from the 
void? What is the "real world" expression of the void? Or perhaps years 
of studying set theory in my compsci days makes me more jaded to the 
idea of a set diagram for love. )

oops, looks like my desire to tweet morphed into a longer post, hooray 
for stealing time from the neoliberal system of art/academic employment 
for quasi-professional/artistic but more pleasurable networked 
theoretical environments! perhaps a discussion of how this space is 
itself a queer relational space is in order, or how it can be, how we 
can make it such...


-- 

micha cárdenas

Artist/Researcher, Experimental Game Lab, http://experimentalgamelab.net
Calit2 Researcher, http://bang.calit2.net

blog: http://bang.calit2.net/tts