[-empyre-] Fungal Arts and Despolitics

Fri Nov 18 20:32:46 EST 2011

Dear Simon, 

Since you mention Kittler several times, here is a cross-post from nettime about his funeral yesterday: 

> Resent-From: nettime at kein.org
> From: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
> Subject: <nettime> more on Kittler
> Date: 17 November 2011 11:24:36 EET
> Resent-To: Nettime <nettime-l at kein.org>
> To: nettime-l at kein.org
> 
> Via Telepolis
> 
> http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/35/35887/1.html
> 
> Hegel is dead
> 
> Axel Roch 17.11.2011
> 
> Miscellanea on Friedrich A. Kittler (1943-2011)
> 
> Recently, on the 18th of October 2011, one of our most prolific thinkers in
> art, media, and culture died: Friedrich A. Kittler. You might have read this
> some time ago in some sort of news. Today, on the 17th of November, he was
> buried. His final place to rest is a well known graveyard: Dorotheenstadt
> cemetery in Berlin with prominent neighbours, such as Bertolt Brecht, Heiner
> Müller, Georg W.F. Hegel, Johann G. Fichte, Herbert Marcuse, amongst others.
> 
> The sudden but expected death of Kittler - after a long and severe illness -
> allows us to take a break and think a bit about his possible contributions to
> the academic landscape, as he considered universities to be his larger or
> extended "kind of" family. In doing so, we need to neglect for a while the
> permanent and all-round dispute and criticism of him as a person, as a
> scientist, as a cultural thinker, or as a media philosopher. I would like to
> give a few miscellaneous comments or subjective impressions, as I could
> collect some while being one of his students some time ago. 
> 
> ...
> 
> 
> #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission

And an interesting coincidence: Yesterday, the 17th of November, commemorates in Greece the Student Uprising of 17th November 1973, which led to the fall of the 7-year military dictatorship (1967-1974). 

Axel Roch's reminiscences at http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/35/35887/1.html are the best, most extensive and informative about Kittler as a person, philosopher and teacher that I have read so far, and I recommend them. 

Anyway, good point differentiating economy from monetary value. Here I will not elaborate on your concisely formulated points, but will only provide a link to another "world" yet, prompted by your sentence: "What we have are layers redoubling of byzantine more than baroque and labyrinthine sinuous codings to hide the material fact of the physical machinery, the hardware." This is a text about the "Origins of the Labyrinth" by Nikiforos Metaxas, originally published as part of a CD of ottoman classical music which he produced. 

You can find the text here: 
http://www.halkicentre.org/Text.aspx?ID=52&PageID=98

The text is all about folds, and is quite "rhizomatic" one might say. The only reference to digital technology is in these sentences: "To observe the thread of the interlaced sounds of our penetration into the womb of Ottoman musical history unwinding on a computer screen was a disconcerting experience. There through the microsoft universe of modern technology, like a mollusc in its shell, lay the coiled musical soul of a past era. "  I find it rather deleuzian, though its author is not into postmodern philosophy, he wrings a similar writing style and manner of interconnections as by necessity. 

Nikiforos and his wife Vassiliki are engaged in a very serious effort to fund the "Hebeliada International Sound Centre" on the island of Chalki near Istanbul, and in this sense theirs is another concrete example of the fighting for values in this monetarized world of ours. 

Iannis Z. 

On 18 Nov 2011, at 04:33, simon wrote:

> Dear Ioannis and <<empyreans>>,
> 
> Not everything even within the economy is within reach of money's grasp was more my point. When the discourse of the former is limited to the sphere of the latter what we see is ideology - even as Values may be given a price - even as it is the "wrong" one - even as we await the "right" one - so the legitimacy of a market-ridden political ideology is affirmed.
> 
> There follow some thoughts, some rather fugal - apologies for frugality of explanations also:
> 
> The arts speak the language of the carneval? A babble. Out of which everything sensible comes. From the sensate meatspace of it and from the multiplicity of voices - not even voices, chords and vocal folds and sheer inspirations, expiring ... - despite that art is prediscursive?
> 
> A creative prediscursivity then as precondition for the discourses that may come thereafter. When, in which postideology, with Wilde we attest that we have come to know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Now even that that value is up for sale, in the art of disappearance of art into relationalism.
> 
> I agree, Ioannis, which end of history are we at? Where it is incumbent - a comfortable word - on us to 'start again'? Or where we are more excitingly - where my agreement may be placed - called on "to build what comes next"?
> 
> The software example is interesting. Mr. Moglen speaks and Friedrich Kittler answers with less urgency, less (techno)positivism, however persuasively that "there is no software." What we have are layers redoubling of byzantine more than baroque and labyrinthine sinuous codings to hide the material fact of the physical machinery, the hardware. Which, while it may be very little, is disbarred from accounting for itself at the quantum level by noise control. Mr. Kittler makes an economic point when he alludes to the "price of programmability" as at the root of inflationary representative (software or fiduciary) practices.
> 
> Monetizing is all very well and a god-given activity (albeit by a green-eyed god), even as the term has been perverted in the usage of the IT industry to mean "how to make money from..." and turned away from fitting the monetary model to the practice, discipline, skillset, art in question. How to monetize the arts? The lesson of Kittler would be riding the information boom into out-of-control representational overload.
> 
> But isn't this exactly where we are? The 'traditional' 'pedagogical' arts may want to edify us about gods other than Mammon or Hygieia but there has never been such a time for the arts! Design is everywhere. The motorways are lined with artistic concrete mouldings in Auckland. Depictions of pohutakawa flowers, silhouettes of Rangitoto, and abstract patterned indentations, signs everywhere showing the impressions left by the artist's expressive gift.
> 
> To make theatre I ought to work in PR. There is no end of coaching as we gear up for the general election. Dramatic and cosmetic resources are stretched to the limit to turn our political representatives into aspirational representations and media puppets. Meanwhile the mailbox groans with publicly funded graphic art on pamphlets describing the electoral process and how to fulfill one's democratic obligations. Now a matter of cartoons - or cartoonization.
> 
> Which is to say nothing of the media - the mass media = monetized - in both senses - arts.
> 
> On asked why people like second-rate art, a friend once observed that they do not like it; they prefer it.
> 
> In order for fine or even good art to get money and ... mushroom ... mustn't mass media be overcome? forming a rich bed of mulch.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Simon Taylor
> 
> www.squarewhiteworld.com
> www.brazilcoffee.co.nz
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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