[-empyre-] the end of the month

[Charles Baldwin]

I thank Maria for beginning the ending of the month by noting the full circle of the discussion. To some degree we were suspended between moving examples of forms (genres?) of expressing/giving words to pain and suffering, and - on the other hand - impossible examples (the impossibility of examples) of the inexpressibility of suffering at the core of the organism.

Maria nicely stated that this full-circle "gives us a chance to consider the past month with a certain vividness." *Vividness* might be a term for intervention of events (such as Sandy, *events* as the weather or the world's noise). Vividness, as well, brings us back to art, another of our persistent concerns. In this sense, the aesthetic sense of vividness offers as term for the intervention of names (such as Sandy, names as the voice that expresses events in all their contingency). 

If we circled to some degree, it would be because of the irreducibly human and worldly problems at the center of the topic of "Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual." No "progress" is desirable or possible on this topic. What would it mean to leave this behind? How could we? What would we be without the topic of pain and suffering? The topic will continue, we have no choice.
 
I want to thank everyone who participated in this months discussion, including invited guest discussants Monika Weiss, Deena Larsen, Johannes Birringer, Jonathan Marshall, Fau Ferdinand, and Maria Damon. In addition, I particularly want to thank my co-moderator Alan Sondheim. 

- Sandy
 
>>> Maria Damon <damon001 at umn.edu> 10/31/2012 12:13 PM >>> 
this is a lovely full-circle conclusion for the month, though we've got 
some hours to go. Sandy Storm (hi Sandy Baldwin) gives us a chance to 
consider the past month with a certain vividness.

On 10/31/12 11:07 AM, Johannes Birringer wrote:
> dear all
>
> Is memory also such a thing? Can it outlive the person to whom it is said to belong?
>
> Simon wrote this question, and i was going to say, yes, this is something i always assumed, and Jonathan refered to this also in regard to how trauma may be passed on from generation to generation.
> I also think that one can "find" memory and discover how it lives in one (or the other we live with or engage with), one senses the presence of this lingering shadow world, or one finds it also in the notes left behind by our fathers or grandfathers (cf. Stifter, Die Mappe des Urgrossvaters).
>
> Simon also responded to my reference to an "emergent, globalized psychic pathology" (Malabou), and I was going to try to differ about the assumption (from Damasio) that the effort ... to follow the interactivity of the "different levels" results in a clear shape....
>
> [Simon schreibt]
>> The "notion of an "emergent, globalized psychic pathology"" is not a drug to be taken outside of a carefully controlled and monitored and emotionally supportive environment or else it is itself the project and end of that carefully controlled and monitored and emotionally supportive environment. >
> But then the hurricane came to the north-eastern parts of the united states, and i also, when reading, saw that Alan Sondheim and Jonathan Marshall got caught in an inextricable, perhaps painfully unresolvable online conversation or debate that seemed to infuriate (but i had a sense it was also performed and perhaps not real? this akinetic mirroring line by line? this warped pas de deux?).
>
> Then i remembered the many things i learnt, for example, from the postings by you all, and by Diane,
>
>>> Beyond the ways in which pain resists any separability of mind and body,
>   in our currently brain-centrist time, it also resists any explanation that focuses on the brain.>>
>
> especially on SNOWWORLD and pain distraction, shooting snowmen.
>
>> So my group is conducting a scientific study comparing SnowWorld with a volcano world
> (same terrain). >>
>
> And then i wondered how it, this month's discussion, might at all relate to the empathy now expressed to all of you in the north-eastern part of the united states hurricaneworld before, during and after the hurricane,
> and also the experiences that were mentioned initially, the hearing of wind and storm, the recording and photographing it....
>
>>> Everyone I know is documenting the storm and putting it up online. The
> reality as such is troubling... At the moment the situation is more
> severe, small explosions, more fires, flooding everywhere....>>
>
> is this not amazing.
>
> having lived through numerous hurricanes in Texas and the Gulf bay area,  I can sympathize with your excitement, the thrill, the rush, the relief?
> i also, when in Houston during these events, felt the impending disaster as intoxicating, dangerous, fatal,  and yet (yet Katrina happened nearby, very nearby, and it was awful) and yet, what is it.
> this "becoming equal to the wound" we have been talking about?
>
> this presumption of live art?  or (I refer to Kristine's defense of Burden) presumptiveness of a person somewhere under a ramp or in a white cube doing a act of self-harming, what would it matter, and for whom? what consequence?
> And probably we can't speak of it in comparison with our fathers, mothers, or grandparents not any longer recognizing themselves or their own absence. And yet we do.
>
> I am leaving now, wanting to thank everybody for what you shared here,
> and for having invited me.
>
> regards
> Johannes Birringer
>
>
>
>
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