[-empyre-] THE SOCIETY OF DEFICIENCY / DARK MATTER in the ruins of imperial culture

[Johannes Birringer]

and 'Thanks Scott for returning with "the Society of Deficiency,"  I am catching up....,'  i wrote, 

not knowing what a darkly imaginative and richly probing essay it turned out to be, and you have given us much to grapple with, writing also the second dance/choreography piece, and sending it along to today's philosophical and scientific
rehearsal. thank you for the poetic rhythms of and in your text, and sincerity with which you try to stand against the nihilisms even if i spot a saddened irony and lovesickness in your reference to Shiva Nata, but not to Jorg Immendorff and Ahkamatova.

when you write:

>>
“I think that we are at a crossing in the roads of history, history in the grand sense. One road already appears clearly laid out, at least in its general orientation. That's the road of the loss of meaning, of the repetition of empty forms, of conformism, apathy, irresponsibility, and cynicism at the same time as it is that of the tightening grip of the capitalist imaginary of unlimited expansion of "rational mastery," pseudorational pseudomastery, of an unlimited expansion of consumption for the sake of consumption, that is to say, for nothing, and of a technoscience that has become autonomized along its path and that is evidently involved in the domination of this capitalist imaginary. / The other road should be opened: it is not at all laid out. It can be opened only through a social and political awakening, a resurgence of the project of individual and collective autonomy, that is to say, of the will to freedom. This would require an awakening of the imagination and of the creative imaginary.”

But this incisive collection of essays simply raises in the mind the supposition that perhaps we have entered a decontextualized-context, an anti-bacterial-bactierial phage, a digital static without reference to time and/or space, which is, quite literally, actually and phenomenologically “unthinkable.”  What, then, would be an imagination of the unthinkable?  >>


you are addressing, and will later address specifically, the kind of perceptual choreographies that are a crucial concern in the ethical and political discussion we have here on any possible slowing down, and on the limits of perception, which i believe are readily admitted by Akram and his physicists-colleagues at CERN, even if not on the level of hope and imagination (or the amount of money this undergrounded accelerator costs)

 You say:

<<But there are limits to how quickly an individual can perceive and no clear psycho-physiological philosophy, really, about how quickly one can choose, in the broader more substantial sense of what choosing might include.  The history of the verbal notions of perception tend to regard perception as an ordering, and not so much in terms of hierarchical power, but in terms of experiential patterns of behavior and bias right down to epigenetic connotations.  In short, there is no such thing or no means currently available, or will perhaps ever be available, for speeding up decision-making processes, especially when all causal orientation and environmental orientation is being absolved, dissolved, resolved, have it how you may. That is, we are moving in a decontextualized/context where decisions themselves are irrelevant>>


if those and other environments mentioned here were indeed being decontextualized and emptied out through acceleration, then how would you deem the chances – the imaginability –  of the kind of projects Sonja Leboš has stirred in Eastern Europe, say, for instance, her "Theatre of Memories. Phase I: Getting Together / Encounters" [http://www.theatreofmemories.org/]   and "Retrodynamics" [http://www.cybercine.org/past_streams.html] ?   aren;t we all to some extent retro-engineers, here?


Dear Sonja, as Scott may of course not know these projects and how they opened paths or awakenings  –  on the traumatic history of the 20th century, and this devastating history  i s  , I venture to argue, our social "pain body" or trauma corpus collectivus, Branden [via Sonja], and such traumatic history underlies butoh as Michael tried to extrapolate from Ohno Yoshito's teaching   –-   could you perhaps comment on your acting techniques, within their clear contexts and other clear contexts (and I do not mean digitallly remoted) of the OCCUPY movements even if the latter turn out to have been delusional?    what were your MNEMOPOLITICS, MNEMOTOPIAS,  MNEMOPOETICS?  do they work?  did they work?

And Re: Dancing on a Tangent, 

yes, that was exactly what I thought you were saying in your "Immendorff" test, a critique of accelerated technoculture and its accompanying hip hop dance routines (including all the pretensions of the avant-garde and the experimental media arts dis-cern-ing themselves into mainstream funding or sponsorship or devisualizing such needed funding through so-called resistance routines and "dance-outs",  -- ah, you cite Taussig, that is quite brilliant). You changed the brush from one hand to the other.   I kind of liked your error on the win and lose scenario between the tribes:

"The tribe which was unable to follow the coordination presented by the other tribe would win the contest".


and happy the yet-contexted cultures who honor their fools and trickster/Ellegguá, and thus build on ancestral knowledges and "indigenous sensibility when it comes to perception, conception and communication" (Taylor)
  

No need to feel worried about your previous polyamorous text, you surely displayed a fabulous sense of the mystagogic in your dance, 
"contemplating the question – where do you stand?”

And your suggestion seems to quite synergistically be echoing Claudia walking down the crumbled sidewalks, slower, slower again, a Beckett Buster Keaton dance.  Try Again Fail Again Fail Better ... (Beckett, "Westward Ho")
 [for language and acting technique, see http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xjqonm_samuel-beckett-try-again-fail-again-fail-better-liam-neeson_creation] 

"Thought experiment: on this Halloween or All Saints Night take Michael Jackson’s choreography for Thriller and slow the dance of the zombies down to Butoh.  It’s not so scary or silly anymore, is it?"


peace
Johannes Birringer

+ + +