[-empyre-] authors and authority :.
Timothy Murray
tcm1 at cornell.edu
Sat Oct 16 22:53:21 EST 2010
>It's been incredibly interesting to read this
>weekend's posts in the midst of our conference
>on Global Aesthetics (streamed live all day
>today 9-6Eastern Standard Time,
>http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/ ) as
>interntational artists, curators, and
>theoreticians have been meeting to figure out
>ways to 'make sense' together by crossing the
>discourses of their practices and media, marked
>by the intense differentiations of their subject
>positions and geopolitical orientations. Last
>night, Bruno Bosteels delivered a plenary
>lecture by positioning Rancière's Mallarmeen
>subject as the pivot of colonial thought and
>practice, but one that Bosteels suggestes is not
>easily escapable, even from within the context
>of the Latin American context of the art
>practice of Guillermo Kuitca who he discussed.
>I'll look forward to elaborating on this in
>Paris with those comine in person for Making
>Sense.
Best,
Tim
>Hi All
>This is my first iPad email, sent from London on
>the way to Paris, which in some undefined way
>seems appropriate.
>JeanB provokes responses that put him in a
>determining position in this discussion, which
>is, in a way, a good strategy, if a little in
>conflict with his take. I say this not only
>because I think it is true, but also because it
>relates to what I want to say- I'm sure you
>won't take it personally, JeanB!
>Taking up what Lorna said at the end of her
>post, the issue of how you negotiate
>institutions is gendered (or sexed, as I prefer
>to say, as it's an embodied term) This applies
>at the level of theory and of practice: at the
>former because, as a woman in patriarchal
>institutions, I am a subaltern Subject, as is
>Lorna in getting Making Senses together; and at
>the latter, that of practice, because one lacks
>the kind of credibility so taken for granted by
>male colleagues that it is invisible
>(ideological in the sense once current in more
>politically aware days). This makes the act of
>foregoing certain privileges adhering to power
>signify differently.
>The Mallarmeen Subject is highly equivocal
>(equi/vocal), which is one reason why he is a
>male practitioner of ecriture feminine (the auto
>text changed "ecriture" to "scripture"! And I
>haven't figured out the iPad accents yet).
>JeanB, you a partly right in your interpretation
>of the ways Mallarme anticipates the web, but
>there is much more to it than allowing space for
>the reader in the generation of meaning, which
>would not really be distinct from any readerly
>text in Barthes' sense. It's about the operation
>of the Subject in the syntax, and other aspects
>of the poetics (including temporality and the
>erosion of word-boundaries. These are central to
>what John and I are experimenting with.
>There's more, but I am out of time for now
>All the best
>penny
>Sent from my iPad
>
>On Oct 15, 2010, at 6:24 AM, Lorna Collins <lpc29 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> Dear Jean-Baptise, dear all,
>>
>> JB, I want to make a very brief comment on your message, about my
>> experience of organising this event. We -- I suppose you could say
>> that we have formed a royal we, which in this instance refers to the
>> committee of people who have organised the second colloquium at
>> Cambridge. This is not intentionally separated or hierarchical royal
>> We. We have not wanted to close ourselves to a small group, on the
>> contrary we are constitutively open, but in order to organise this
>> event we have had to communicate between a small amount of (eight)
>> people in order to make it happen. These people were not 'chosen' but
>> volunteered at a meeting, and we formed a natural committee. One of
>> the purposes of the second colloquium is to set up the next event in
>> this series. We will open the floor to see who wants to be involved in
>> organising an event like this. How can we organise an event without
>> forming a smaller grouping of people, and asigning different tasks to
>> different people? And JB, how can we organise this event in a way that
> > challenges the authority of the institutions? We have found ourselves
>> continually challenged by the institutions and we try to new find ways
>> of communicating with those in authority. This is not a deconstructive
>> or destructive intention -- we need to communicate with the
>> institutions, in a language that can open and redistribute their
>> hierarchy. We do not want to incite an aggressive revolution, but,
>> rather, we try to explain to the institutions how their system and
>> authority can be challenged and an alternative suggested, in this way,
>> and we discuss how to make things make sense and then change. 'In this
>> way' -- what is this what? What is the alternative? How do we make
>> things make sense and then change? These are the very questions that
>> we will be discussing and experimenting with at the colloquium.
>>
>> At the first colloquium in Cambridge, on the day we found that we
>> could use artistic performance to open and invigorate the protocol and
>> system that governed the institution that housed us; this opened the
>> day to all who participated. Our creativity and collaboration made a
>> new kind of sense, which we went on to publish (forthcoming, with
>> Peter Lang, Making Sense 1). Most of all this was not about the names
>> or their authority, it was the way that art can open an interface for
>> difference, it doesn't matter who or where you are, the process of
>> creating an artwork, and the process of encountering an artwork
>> creates a free space.
>>
>> I realise that I can't say something like that without receiving a
>> hoard of critical questions from the large group of people who
>> subscribe to Empyre, which is quite scary. But I genuinely believe
>> that the 'we' of Making Sense, which is laid open to all of Empyre
>> during this debate, is creating something really important.
>>
>> JB you ask: "are we ready to abandon what constitutes current
>> political space, especially authority and control of curation of
>> experimental endeavours ?" I would say that this is one of the
>> questions we are challenging with Making Sense. Clearly you have a lot
>> of ideas about this, so I'd like to ask you what you would do, or how
>> you would contribute to answering your own question?
>>
>> All the best,
>>
>> Lorna
>>
>> 2010/10/14 Jean-baptiste Labrune <labrune at media.mit.edu>:
>>> Dear John (and Penny, Lorna and *.Empyre),
>>> Thanks for your time in explaining your desire and early production in the
>>> context of the Making Sense event to happen in few days. I have no doubt
>>> your production with Penny and other participants will be very creative and
>>> rich.
>>> As you mention it, the open nature of a
>>>Mailing-List like Empyre, allowed me
>>> to rant on an extended scale :) and not only in the time allocated to me if
>>> I would have asked a question during this
>>>event (especially on controversial
>>> topics such as the organisation of the event itself, and not only on the
>>> topic of the day).
>>> When Penny talks about Mallarmé and the making of his patrimonial artefacts
>>> (the book) as maybe a precursor of Memex or the Web or when you quote the
>>> text as practice, I imagine that you both
>>>refer to semiotic systems where an
>>> audience, a reader or other externalities to the author are involved in the
>>> Sensemaking process. There is therefore a difference of nature between the
>>> creators (authors) and the space of reception of the artefact, artwork,
>>> discourse.
>>> In the same way, there is difference let say of chatting in Empyre (or
>>> NetBehaviour, IDC, Nettime, ...) and publishing under the name of a famous
>>> brand such as Pompidou, Tate, Cambridge, Brown, you name it, is in the
>>> authoritative surrounding of this production. Making Sense (and society!) ,
>>> as many other events use the rhetoric of openess an experimentaton, (and it
>>> looks like you have a great line up for an
>>>extraordinary event! ), however I
>>> was just pointing out how social authority is so manifest in the
>>> publicitation of the event. From big names (Nancy, Stiegler, etc) to big
>>> brands, it looks to me that it was important
>>>for the organisers to make this
> >> event legitimate, using people or places
>authority. If we want new political
>>> atmospheres, are we ready to abandon what constitutes current political
>>> space, especially authority and control of curation of experimental
>>> endeavours ?
>>> Everybody can launch a discussion on Empyre or any other lists, so as
>>> everyone can create a webpage to express an opinion, even create a project,
>>> curate a topic. On the contrary, everybody can not be on the organising
>>> committee of a Pompidou-related event, it is a closed club, usually not
>>> constituted solely on merit or research/artistic excellency but usually
>>> following a discretionary process, involving a lot of branding, authority
>>> and social networking. The context (or situation) I was talking about is
>>> precisely the one of the curation of a public
>>>event that proposes to discuss
>>> and experiment on Sense Making in the context of politics and society. I
>>> believe that openness (like open-source in the IT world) has its limits,
>>> usually sketched by the power of people and their need to sustain their own
>>> narrative. In this sense this is more the republic than democracy - and in
>>> the kalipolis, artists where out if they didn't want to abide by political
>>> imperatives.
>>> In adressing the social constitution
>>> of this experimental event, I am not only
>>>playing the role of the party pooper/troll/etc
>>>of a party where I was not invited to
>>>participate from the organisation
>>>point-of-view, but I am also, I think, raising
>>>out how huge claims lead to the dilution of
>>>arguments or experiments.
>>> After a second look at the flyer and homepage of the event, and after
>>> re-reading all the emails on Empyre, it is obvious to me that the actual
>>> experimental collaboration that was pulled up by Lorna and colleagues is
>>> pretty impressive and I have no doubt that it will be a kick-ass event (and
>>> yes, very experimental compared to traditional formats such as 20min pres
>>> adn 2 min question), and I see here a tension with what is claimed (as in
>>> territory) on the webpage announcing the
>>> event http://www.makingsensesociety.org/
>>> I also want to underline how much a challenge it is to organise an
>>> international line-up of speakers/experimenters in my dear french capital
>>> where french is still the only intellectual currency :)))
>>> With that said, I wish you bon courage for
>>>the organisation and look forward
>>> to reading the post-hoc accounts of Making Sense !
>>> Cheers,
>>> Jb
>>> --
>>> Le 14 oct. 10 à 00:13, John Cayley a écrit :
>>>
>>> Dear -empyre-
>>> I was ready to write with some thoughts on my collaboration with Penny
>>> Florence when my reading of Jean-Bapiste
>>>Labrune's recent responses rendered
>>> me acutely aware of the context of this practice, and of the context of
>>> aesthetic practice generally. I've become so paralyzingly aware of context
>>> that, for example, I originally wrote 'Penny' and 'Jean-Bapiste' (as if you
>>> and I know both of these people well) and went back and added surnames,
>>> since I don't know J-B and many of us may not know Penny, at least not as a
>>> collaborator. I have just playfully (I hope) evoked the indeterminate play
>>> of address that is prevalent in all critical discussion but radically so in
>>> digitally mediated fora. The link here is institutions. J-B asks us to be
>>> aware and wary of the institutions within which we work, especially while
>>> pretending an autonomy for this practice. I agree absolutely that we are
>>> always within and necessarily complicit with _many_ institutions as we work
>>> and that the value systems of these institutions - only occasionally
>>> aesthetic - often manifest agonistic and contradictory relations. A
>>> contemporary problematic - the institution of a contemporary problematic -
>>> arises from networked and programmable media's ability to generate
>>> potential, emergent, virtual (in the strong, contra-digital sense of this
>>> word) institutions with close-to-immediacy. I'm here. I'm in -empyre-. How
>>> did I get here? And do I belong? Scaled-up somewhat, these remarks apply to
>>> the institutional complicities which J-B interrogates.
> >> As it happens, and perhaps in opposition to the practices of what are now
>>> suddenly and shockingly predominant
>>>institutions - Facebook, Google Accounts
>>> - -empyre- is exemplary. I have been introduced. You already know that next
>>> week I will play a collaborative role in a presentation to the 'Making
>>> Sense' colloquium in Paris-out-of-Cambridge. Terrifying. I have, through
>>> Penny, been introduced to an institution that I do not yet know well. As
>>> Penny set out in her recent post, our work entered into productive
>>> correspondence during and after the
>>>organization and realization of a series
>>> of events at the Tate Modern that placed
>>>digitally mediated literary poetics
>>> in dialogue with art. My other qualifications for this engagement? Until
>>> 2007, I practiced and theorized irregularly and relatively independently as
>>> a poetic writer in and of programmable media. Pretending the role of a
>>> writer of this description means that I
>>>attempt to produce literary work for
>>> which computation is a vital aspect of the
>>>literary artistic medium. In 2007
>>> I accepted a position in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.
>>> Although Brown's program is rightly recognized as strongly innovative,
>>> institutionally it is also a part of the "creative" "writing" program(me)
>>> that has pullulated in the US academy (cf. Eli Batuman in a recent LRB).
>>> Context indeed. That's how it's happened; here (at last) is how I see it
>>> working:
>>> Penny's outline has been posted. Here is a summarized retelling from the
>>> viewpoint of my current practical engagement (in the midst of my attempt
>>> actually to make something that is new to me
>>>- and I do mean that I am doing
>>> this in this extended, shifting present). Penny responded to certain
>>> formalizations of iterative, literal translation that I have represented as
>>> process in coded, time-based pieces of
>>>literary art. She refers specifically
>>> to the series that I call _translation_, and has already provided a link to
>>> my lamentably 'ancient' website. In this series, nodal, natural language
>>> texts are sited within a dynamic system driven by relationships between
>>> protosemantic elements (those _on the way_ to 'making sense' - although
>>> 'sense' for me is a difficult word) at the level of the letter. The texts
>>> perform transliteral morphs from one to another, often across languages. At
>>> stake, I believe, is an aesthetic and critical wager that (even) these
>>> directed protosemantic processes have some significance- and
>>> affect-generating bearing on the texts with which they engage and also that
>>> such time-based processes themselves can and
>>>should be read as _the text_ in
>>> a broader and ultimately more comprehensive understanding of text and
>>> textual practice. The process is the text.
>>> Penny was as interested in the virtual critical address of such
>>> text-as-process towards (found or composed or conventionally translated)
>>> 'host' and 'guest' texts (these terms are from Lydia Liu's _Translingual
>>> Practice_) in systems where these categories of text are implicitly or
>>> explicitly paired. Do the generated liminal, transitional states of the
>>> system have a critical or aesthetic purchase on our readings? My investment
>>> has already been made clear. Yes they do, I wager, poethically (Joan
>>> Retallack's formulation). But Penny sees a way to go further. Taking up her
>>> long-standing readings of Mallarmé, she paired a sonnet, 'Le Pitre chatié'
>>> with some verses extracted from the 'Prose pour Des Esseintes' and
>>> challenged us to find a way to put these texts into a dynamic relationship
>>> based on underlying translations, ultimately by both of us, into English.
>>> Penny is also interested in allowing the protosemantic, transliteral
>>> processes back into the work as, I would
>>>suggest, subprocesses of those that
>>> will drive an initial iteration of 'Mirroring Tears: Visages' but I may not
>>> get that far in the coding before our presentation next week and I also
>>> worry about the incorporation of the audio correlates that Penny has
>>> identified.
> >> It all sounds reasonable now but it took a while before this made sense -
>>> practical sense, sense as practice - to me. In my other work, currently, I
>>> am explicitly engaged with reading (_The Readers Project_ another
>>> collaboration between Daniel C. Howe and
>>>myself) - with what reading is, and
>>> with how all the endlessly various dynamic visualizations and
>>> representations of reading that digital media make possible - how these may
>>> reveal or conceal, enhance or destroy what reading has been for us. Now, I
>>> am tending to see many of the digital poetic pieces that I have made as
>>> 'readers,' but as readers that read critically and that also, arguably,
>>> write - with and against me, with and against us.
>>> What one may see or read, when 'Mirroring
>>>Tears: Visages' is presented, will
>>> be two poetic texts, in French, each with "wind-eyes" "torn" in their
>>> "tissued facade" (quoting phrases my my own translation of 'Le Pitre
>>> chatié'). Inside these windows, words and
>>>phrases mined from all the English
>>> translations made for both texts by Penny or I will be shown, according to
>>> an algorithm the details of which I am still working out. These "tears" in
>>> the texts will read and translate the two texts one into and out of the
>>> other, with, virtually, a critical, human translator's address - an address
>>> that will be mediated by a technological
>>>encoded representation of 'reading'
>>> - reading that relates to human reading but is programmatic: exhaustively
>>> describable in terms of digital symbolic manipulations. Penny asked: can
>>> digital poetics perform a critical address to these texts? We hope to
>>> present one of many possible answers.
>>> And all I really wanted to say is that I have already learned and will have
>>> learned so much from this collaboration. And I anticipate that much of what
>>> I will have learned will derive from its context. I will have been making
>>> sense, although I may still have been struggling with the object implied by
>>> the practice that this rubric continuously suggests. On the other hand I'm
>>> sure, more or less, that we will have been making.
>>> Yours,
>>> John (Cayley)
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jean-Baptiste Labrune
>>> MIT Media Lab
>>> 20 Ames St E14-464C
>>> Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
>>>
>>> http://web.media.mit.edu/~labrune/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Lorna Collins
>> PhD Candidate: "Making Sense; art practice as a social act"
>> Jesus College
>> Cambridge
>> CB5 8BL
>> http://web.me.com/lornacollins/
>> http://www.makingsensesociety.org./
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>_______________________________________________
>empyre forum
>empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>http://www.subtle.net/empyre
--
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
27 East Avenue
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
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