[-empyre-] Delightenment as Mass Perception
naxsmash
naxsmash at mac.com
Fri Jan 15 15:42:56 EST 2010
Johanna
have you got a url or download site for your Quantum ?
I love this idea of your book.
But i need some enightenment (from MichelA. too) - can you shed
lumieres on Luhmann?
I have been riffing for a while on this sense (sixth sense) that
autopoesis a la Maturana etc is a linguistic generative thing... I
mean that you can actually make images and sounds do this as a kind of
meta-systems implosion- i am rambling (appropriately enough,
as in a rumble, or a walk through the woods).
christina
naxsmash
naxsmash at mac.com
christina mcphee
http://christinamcphee.net
http://naxsmash.net
naxsmash
naxsmash at mac.com
christina mcphee
http://christinamcphee.net
http://naxsmash.net
On Jan 14, 2010, at 6:10 PM, Johanna Drucker wrote:
> Michael,
>
> Wonderful wonderful! I couldn't agree more! I love Brian Green's
> work, by the way. I wrote a book called QUantum awhile back
> (artist's book), and have invoked quantum theory in the projects
> around speculative computing (SpecLab). Absolutely agree that we
> need to engage with those "non-agency agencies of systems theory" --
> also part of my SpecLab stuff, just fyi -- Heinz von Forester and
> Ernst von Glasersfeld among my favorites, a little more imaginative
> than Luhmann, oddly. Also, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's
> work very important for me. I think Maturana is filled with insight.
> Another reference in this realm, though some might see it darkly, is
> Childhood's End.
>
> Anyway, thanks for all this, very useful and intersting. Only, let's
> not call sensation "brute" -- it is the source of knowledge!
> Johanna
>
> On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:09 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote:
>
>> Hi, Johanna!
>>
>> Your remarks about aesthetic practice and it roots in brute
>> sensation take me to Dewey’s anti-elitist somatism in Art as
>> Experience and Alexander Baumgarten’s original sense of what
>> aesthetics could mean back in the 18th century, when this
>> discipline was first systematized in the West as discrete branch of
>> philosophy, something different from metaphysics or ethics.
>>
>> I also am drawn very much to the poetics of the quantum, and look
>> to physics and its unfolding symmetries as another place where
>> material complicities are being re-imagined and re-described in
>> ways that transcend mere re-naming of re-branding, and which throw
>> into chaos that simple Cartesian separation between thinking, un-
>> extended and extended, un-thinking matter(s). What do we make of
>> the famous TOE, or Theory of Everything, something that string and
>> membrane theories, with their inherent elegance, to use Brian
>> Green’s highly aesthetic word, have attempted to grasp in recent
>> years in their promulgation of a resonating, symphonic universe?
>> And what of this spooky action at a distance, gravity, which
>> involves us all in the complicities of matter and energy alike,
>> which suffuses scientific fact and myth (that famous apple konking
>> Newton on the head), and which appears to me as the ultimate
>> metaphor for metaphor, this joining of the disparate over time and
>> space within a structure capable of uniting them via only spookiness?
>>
>> I can deal with imbrications being stricken from the list of
>> potential re-brands for the term ‘complicity,’ but still open the
>> question to everyone, as it seems important for me that we find a
>> way to name complicity in a way which invokes the non-agency
>> agencies of systems theory and postmodernism, everything from le
>> schizo to the CSO to the cyborg to that minimally committed
>> Luhmannian para-subject traversing its grooved and groovy
>> (geodesic?) networks. To be honest, I liked the word mostly
>> because it sounded onomatopoetic to me: imbrications can’t be
>> anything but imbricated, the tentacles of those three successive
>> consonants flanked by identical vowels leaving me with the sense
>> that I am being pulled beneath the waters of a lake by a mystery
>> creature part human, part vegetable.
>>
>> In this vein, I look to Lynn Margulis’ recent work on bacterial
>> symbiosis and its relevance for evolutionary biology and
>> autopoiesis (for example, in hers and Dorion Sagan’sDazzle
>> Gradually, an odd fusion of poetry and biology, much of it verging
>> on syphiology). For Margulis, evolution evolved because the
>> simplest creatures learned to coexist in such a way that each
>> benefited the other, a primal form of complicity for sure, one in
>> which the most was at stake, so much more than tenureship or wealth
>> or fame, whatever we gain by becoming accomplices in the human world.
>>
>> In her estimation, sexual reproduction, for example, began as an
>> act of bacterial phagocytosis; when nucleic materials were proven
>> indigestible, they divided along with bacterium, becoming
>> transmitted to new cells (reproduction minus the sex, which, when
>> it was introduced, could only spell death-by-meiosis). This
>> picture is only a rudimentary sketch, but I like very much how she
>> sees collusion at the heart of complexity and biodiversity, how the
>> exchanges we undertake in our banks and classrooms and performance
>> venues can be traced back to the primordial quid pro quo of
>> predatorial unicellular beauties benefiting from cooperation and
>> cooptation, albeit accidentally and contingently, and with no
>> concept of altruism.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *******************************************
>> Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA
>> http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> From: drucker at gseis.ucla.edu
>> To: empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:37:50 -0800
>> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Les Liaisons Dangereuses
>>
>> Just picking up on all this rich exposition below -- what about
>> Clint Eastwood as an interesting example with regard to what MAT
>> has suggested here.
>>
>> Can I just say I really find all of what is written by Michael most
>> useful -- but can I also say I don't care for the word
>> "imbrication" -- it is one of the plague symptoms in my grad
>> seminars.... I know when it appears a host of critical diseases
>> will soon follow (paraphrasitis with risk of metacitation and
>> logotoxicity). Picky picky, I know...
>>
>> Johanna
>>
>>
>> On Jan 9, 2010, at 9:12 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote:
>>
>> Hi, Johanna!
>>
>> You’ve really piqued my curiosity with those comments about Parc de
>> la Villette and that little chat you attended back at Columbia.
>> There’s a lot to think about here: your own uneasiness,
>> displeasure, even outrage as these intensities surface and are
>> encouraged to be denied expression by a fellow colleague (gender?),
>> the irony of a big-wig suggesting revolutionary design for
>> potential parkgoers and neighborhood locals, who might otherwise be
>> lulled to sleep by an ergonomic opiate rendering the ugly
>> beautiful, even desirable, and the various complicities attending
>> the reception of his ideas among the leaves and tendrils of an Ivy
>> where rapt professors examine the productive role of misery in the
>> lives of the unfortunate. This story is just loaded, and takes me
>> to Zola, where this ideal, fantasy park would be the site of a
>> hideous tragedy inflicted on the wrong party, and also to John
>> Waters, where killer trannies would somehow find a way to make it
>> fabulous.
>>
>> I wonder: what would it be like to design difficult and treacherous
>> parks in the best ‘hoods, making CPW a spike garden with acid
>> pools, or converting Kensington Gardens into a field of Venus Fly
>> Traps? This could be an interesting twist, and might inspire
>> something marvelous. True, discomfort and displeasure do get the
>> gears of a coup turning, reminding me of Charles Bernstein’s theory
>> of language, indeed, his own ‘complicity,’ if we might call it
>> that, with regard to Analytic Philosophy, whose currency he is
>> quite smart to trade: here, opacity makes us stumble, and stutter,
>> as absorptions are refused and the necessity for action surfaces,
>> calling us to make language into something more than transparency
>> machine. On the other side, the silence of Wittgenstein and Laura
>> Riding Jackson await, complicities with quiet, renunciations of
>> community and convocation. Ladders take us so deeply into this
>> world that we leave it.
>>
>> As you have noted, the switch from the language of contingency to
>> that of complicity is a telling mutation, one with its own material
>> history and spectrum of concrete ramifications influencing cultural
>> production and reception alike. Within this schema, I implicitly
>> want to ally complicity with necessity, which makes some sense,
>> given that the nature of complicity is to necessitate certain acts
>> and events which in many ways are a logical consequence of the
>> constellation of tessellated interests that preceded and
>> facilitated them in the first place. But what would this mean, to
>> contrast the contingency of a site-specific, potentially non-
>> collectible installation that might otherwise be dispersed to the
>> four corners of the world with the necessity of Business Art, as
>> Warhol called it in the 80s?
>>
>> I know that Pop in particular invokes the language of complicity,
>> and that Warhol does the most to bring to the foreground
>> connections among lucre and aesthetic creation. And speaking of
>> Warhol, I am sure some one of his many reviewers—I would look at
>> Arthur Danto—used the word ‘complicity’ or some homonym as a
>> response to one of his exhibitions (my suggestions would be any
>> reviews of the “Celebrity Portraits,” “Still Life (Hammer and
>> Sickle)”, the Mao series, or any of those dollar signs, since these
>> collections inherently beg the question of a necessary and
>> productive connection to capital). Stephen Koch might have also
>> used the word in a Warhol film review in his Stargazer.
>>
>> You are correct to suggest draining complicity of its pejorative
>> connotations, since otherwise we will be blinded and miss the
>> Fibonacci motion of its unfolding. The point is not to judge it,
>> but to examine, maybe even appreciate it. I would go so far as to
>> say indulge it. As Nicky has pointed out, there is complicity in
>> an ornate altarpiece of High Catholicism, just as complicity
>> suffuses a Nine Inch Nails track: the trick is to examine the
>> specificities and particularities of each alliance as it
>> crystallizes in a particular space, place and time and among unique
>> accomplices—for example, the complicity of the system of patronage
>> is not identical to that fostered by popular entertainment within
>> the global village; each must be investigated in kind, savored in
>> its own right. 'Complicity’ cannot be reified: it changes over
>> time, as new connections materialize and older ones are eradicated,
>> even within the life of a particular accomplice. I am drawn to
>> evolving complicities, those ententes and unions that transform
>> chronologically, as, for example, in the political career of
>> Alcibiades, or even Arnold Schwarzenegger. I am thinking in
>> particular of his recent break with Gold’s Gym, which is now
>> forbidden to run his image in the wake of steroid scandals.
>> Perhaps Arnold will forbid his Mapplethorpe from being exhibited as
>> well, since it, too, can be read as document of a past medical
>> order he can no longer avow. Reversed complicities, such as Sartre/
>> nicotene, are also curious developments, calling the temporality of
>> complicity into question (what can complicty be, if it might take
>> be undone posthumously, subjected to historical revision and its
>> motivating forces?).
>>
>> On this map, which border separates complicity from collaboration?
>> For example, in the 80s triumvirate Debbie Harry, Stephen Sprouse,
>> Andy Warhol, so much more is at stake then electric camouflage. Is
>> there an art of complicity, an almost honest duplicity, as we find
>> with Jeff Koons, or perhaps Machiavelli (and Makaveli, as revised
>> by Tupac)? Where does complicity meet the gesamtkunstwerk?
>> To turn to your own fascinating work on visuality and textuality,
>> what relationships do Dada orthography embody, create, mobilize,
>> move, erase? Is the intertextuality of Dada script, its evocation
>> of other venues, other surfaces, other dialogues, other languages
>> and language games, relevant here, pointing to a cultural
>> complicity riddled with revolutionary aspirations via the twists
>> and turns of a détournement? And what of those secret complicities
>> that surprise us in their emergence: for example, Man Ray’s
>> displeasure when his famous eye-metronome (Object to Be Destroyed)
>> is actually destroyed, or efforts on the part of Agrippa’s
>> publisher to violate Heisenberg and make Gibson’s poem both
>> readable and collectible? Are these acts of aesthetic treason,
>> secret moments when an entente between art and temporality is
>> revealed, and ephemerality finds itself suddenly and surprisingly
>> dissipated, when all along it has been promised to us as the
>> glittering content of modernism?
>>
>> Perhaps we have moved from complicity to imbrication, to use the
>> word so popular among New Historicist circles. This would gel with
>> systems theory and its interconnected networks redefining humanism
>> and ethics, as well as cyborg subjectivity, which rejects models of
>> depth in favor of those emphasizing intertwining, conjunction,
>> nexus. The CSO cannot be complicit, but it can be caught up
>> (ironically, via disinterest and counterproduction). Most notably,
>> your experimental poetic hypertexts call out for a technocracy even
>> before one properly exists, emitting a telepoetic call not unlike
>> Nietzsche’s addressing of a community-to-come in texts like
>> Zarathustra (and hence a complicity-to-come). Yet in here
>> somewhere, we must locate that elusive term, which, as the post-
>> différance Derrida reminds us, might or might not exist.
>> Philosophically, it is only a rumor, a ripple transmitted from
>> Aristotle to Montaigne to Nietzsche to us, its inheritors and heirs
>> and signatories, and the site of a recoil: friendship. I am
>> reminded of Hannah Arendt’s forgiveness of Heidegger, as well as
>> Levinas’ withholding of this gift. But if there is no friendship,
>> can there be complicity? Perhaps complicity is an idealized or
>> perverted version of friendship, or friendship an idealized/
>> perverted version of complicity? I pass this stream along to
>> Cinzia, who holds the key.
>>
>> Love to All, Michael Angelo Tata
>>
>>
>>
>> *******************************************
>> Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA
>> http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> From: drucker at gseis.ucla.edu
>> To: jhaber at haberarts.com; empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 06:44:40 -0800
>> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Unfolding Complicity
>>
>> All,
>>
>> Great to read all this! I find myself nodding and wanting to
>> underline and put notes and check marks in the margins of these
>> texts! So much for the awful physical impermeability of screen
>> space. So here are a few affirmative comments and a couple more
>> thoughts.
>>
>> Since I find myself so much in agreement, I will only mention one
>> or two things. John's comment at the end of his last post seems
>> really important -- we really DO have to make judgments because
>> that is part of the ongoing civil project. I remember once, years
>> ago, when I was a young prof teaching contemporary art. I was a
>> guest in public forum addressing free speech issues and took the,
>> to my mind at the time, only position which was that all speech
>> should be free and all censorship avoided. A visitor from
>> Scandinavia raised his hand and said very gently that no, that was
>> not the case, that in fact the very nature of a civil society was
>> that it was always engaged in figuring out what was permissible/
>> acceptable and what was not. That remark changed my thinking in
>> many ways, most profoundly, because it pointed out the always
>> unfinished and ongoing foundation of ethical behavior. So, that is
>> just to extend John's significant remark.
>>
>> I originally thought of complicity as a way to complicate the
>> historical sequence of concepts that began with modern autonomy and
>> was replaced by contingency in a post-modern formulation. It was
>> meant to express much of what Cynthia put eloquently into her post
>> -- the combination of our understanding of ourselves within a
>> structuralist/poststructuralist sense of subjecthood (enunciated
>> and enuciating) but also with the recognition that pace Baudrillard
>> et al, we are still individuals with actual quirky selves and lives
>> that matter in a humanistic sense. I'm resolutely against the
>> notion of posthumanism, as I think it makes concessions to a mind
>> set that is destructive to the social values of a culture that
>> needs to keep the fictions of humanism alive -- that is, the
>> respect for individuals within the polis -- while evolving a more
>> conscientious and sophisticated understanding of community. I guess
>> I think that for all I love Luhmann's work, he seems not to be able
>> to create a model in which the somewhat contradictory conditions of
>> system theory, complexity, and autopoiesis, and humanist self-hood
>> fictions all co-exist. I see all of those things in daily life, and
>> hear them in what Cynthia and Sean are saying (though do correct me
>> if I am misreading).
>>
>> Finally, here is a story about hypocrisy and academics to make my
>> other point clear, because of course I am an academic as well as an
>> artist and love critical thought as much as any other theory-head.
>> Once, when I was teaching at Columbia, I had occasion to attend a
>> talk by a very famous architect and theorist whose name I honestly
>> do forget, though someone else will no doubt remember. He was
>> talking about the then recent renovation of Parc de la Villette in
>> Paris. He took issue with the design that had been developed-which
>> was created to make a recreational, pleasant outdoor space in a
>> high density neighborhood whose demographic was working class and
>> at the lower end of the economic scale. He suggested instead that
>> the park should be made as unpleasant as possible, disagreeable,
>> difficult to use, grating on the senses because then and only then
>> would the working classes rise up and overthrow the capitalist
>> masters. This from a person whose yearly income had long since
>> topped out the salary scale at the University and who lived a life
>> of security and relative luxury. I found this appalling, but the
>> colleague I was with told me to hold my tongue because the audience
>> was in thrall -- all thought this was the most brilliant and
>> radical talk they had heard in ages. This seems to me to be a
>> completely different thing from teaching students Foucault, for
>> instance, to give them tools for critical thought.
>>
>> Johanna
>>
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