[-empyre-] digital incompossibility

[Timothy Murray]

>Hi, everyone.  I want to thank you for such an interesting 
>discussion which I've been following while on the road, etc.

The reference to earlier philosophy and its dialogue with more 
contemporary thinkers  and artists who have been engaged in activist 
politics and thought makes me think of a concept from Leibniz, which 
is very central to Deleuze's philosophical writings and which highly 
informs my recent book, Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic 
Folds.  Leibniz speaks of the possibility of "incompossibilities", 
which stand apart from the binary of possibility-impossibility in so 
far as they accomodate the habitation of mutually exclusive 
conditions or positions within the same spatial and temporal field. 
I've found this notion very usuful (insofar as it sidesteps the 
binary without necessarily endorsing the stand-off of 
"incommensurability)" in considering the strategic occupation of 
territories and networks by activist media artists who often work in 
"alliance" with one another without sharing common world views.  Key 
to what I call "digital incompossibility" are artistic and conceptual 
actions of subjective and communal fold , mobility and network (in 
contrast to digital dialectics and subjective perspectivalism) that 
have been expressed quite profoundly by queer theory's sensitivity to 
multitudes of coexisting subjectivities and corporeal positions and 
identifications. Thanks so much for the provocative discussion.
Tim

>"what sandoval articulates so well, i think, is that under postmodern
>conditions, where meaning and truth are destabilized, that all people
>exist in a state of uncertainty or precarity which was previously
>particular to migrant people, queer people, people of color, broadly,
>oppressed people.
>
>what to do about it is a very big question, but i think that da silva's
>work helps to point out that the very categories through which
>resistance has been organized, through which solidarity has been found,
>are based in enlightenment conceptions of the self, of the I, and of
>truth, which then create the very conditions of oppression. what i want
>to do about it is to continue to rethink these very things. for example,
>with becoming dragon, i want to help contribute to a dialog about how we
>can think of the subject as something that is always in transition. and
>i dont think this is a recent concern, ala deleuze and guattari, but
>that it goes so much farther back before bergson to people like
>heraclitus and to indigenous traditions of shapeshifting and shamanism
>before that (again here anzaldua's serpent spirit raises her head). the
>question is, how do we think and communicate in a way that accounts for
>the fact that concepts themselves are fabricated constructions, as
>nietzsche talked about, that everything is in flux and we only see forms
>because of the particular tempo of our neurons, rods and cones?"
>

-- 
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