[-empyre-] a new meta-narrative to guide us

[christina at christinamcphee.net]

Alexander et al, 

To insist on focussing our ethics on a strategy of infinite (as in, non-relational) withdrawal has antecedents in the Orthodox spiritual tradition of the via negativa.   

Your (AG’s) discussion of James Turrell’s light installations in ‘light of’ Laruelle’s theory of non-photography resonates with me to that tradition, and even to the figure that LaRuelle throws up, the Son of Man.  St. Matthew calls Jesus the “Son of Man” rather than “Son of God” more often than not.  Matthew is writing in an attempt to link the story of Jesus to an historical geneology of culture-heroes in the Hebraic written tradition and oral history and community consciousness during a time of tremendous catastrophic and ongoing loss of those community values. Perhaps also, if you can indulge a psycho-history, to a loss of a sense of God’s presence among His chosen. 

At the same time, Matthew’s invocation of “Son of Man” also radically points to the transcendent arrival of an agent whose parentage is of “Man” , i. e. not just the Jewish people or any tribe, but an ultimate Man.  It’s not for nothing that Pasolini chooses Matthew as his text for his film “The Gospel according to St Matthew” : Pasolini rightly builds on the radical implications of the figure of Christ as arising directly from a transcendence that gathers force not alongside, or against, but “in, with, and under” the people— transubstantiation.  On the level of poetics if not politics, Pasolini’s agnosticisms consider the possibility of accord with an ’too-innocent philosophy’ — but, by means of making of the film itself, with Palestinians, in ‘Palestine” , reject a radicalism of extraction of the Logos; no, for PPP, the Logos is in and among us qua film qua life qua body and blood.  In contrast— an opposite politics--- in your discourse on Turrell via LaRuelle, AG?  I’d like to explore this further, starting here: 

As one blogger recently notes

…. the beginning of the determination of a too innocent philosophy, a non-philosophy, a supra-rational innocence, which could only expressly mean the immortalization of the Logos through the extraction of all its radical conceivability in history, already practiced or imagined, the only reason, ne plus ultra.http://veraqivas.wordpress.com/category/immanent-philosophy/francois-laruelle/page/2/


Imagine this binary, just for a moment (it may or may not be provisional).  Let’s say : where Pasolini and Matthew remain on one side of a chasm,  on the other stands LaRuelle, the non-philosopher who may not presume to partake (through history, through ethics, through the spoken word, through the moving image..) community or communitarian values. If Matthew the historian, and Pasolini, artist of proto-Christian atheism, stand for and with community--with or without ‘God’ (AKA the noumenous) --through the figuration of relation and partaking (taking part) (=transubstantiation) of the Son of Man; then on the other side, LaRuelle proposes to stands in for, contra or at least in figure/ground opposition, to community--with or without “Man” (AKA the human community) . Alexander, are you also there with LaRuelle, or is this binary too stark? 

Listening to your talk, Alexander, on Incredible Machines, considering James Turrell’s installations as evidence of LaRuelle’s theory of non-photography, I immediately turned back to Laruelle’s desire for the Son of Man. (I must confess I am relying on impressions I had when I listened to your live talk)  Alexander, your manifesto is “ to articulate a logic being that is not reducible to a metaphysics of exchange… ‘there will be no more messages.” And you go on to point to a “logic of relation..without the….model of exchange. “ It’s possible  Laruelle espouses a (non)-figuration of the transcendent angel en arrivant. 

So: to propose a chasm here.  No exchange, means no more messages, means in its equal and opposite expression (since if there is no more  x->y or y->x there can only be x= not-x).   Turrell’s light objects, in order to be understood as new information, new knowledge….  need not require a St Matthew-esque historicity with antecedents like Moholy-Nagy, Naum Gabo, El Lissitsky…  They can arrive, like angels… ? 

I take it that 'the new meta-narrative to guide us’ — (AG, below) partakes of this only-reason, this new plus ultra of an arrival of an angel in the subject-site of theorist. Could Turrell’s space-time-image manifest the arrival of something new, like this? A Logos, of a sort? The canard of art as knowledge-production goes to something else, something very interesting.  Since always otherwise words partake of the play of the trace, the way from above is to make the person-space-time of the Logos an embodied speech act?   A via-negativa speaks, from a space of non-relation, non-photography— from the somewhat disingenuously described ‘too-innocent’ site that is outside of perceivable substance?  No transubstantiation, because the Son of Man, for Laruelle, arrives without a body, without the body of the human, without the body of community, and is self-born, self-generating, “like” (oops) God…. ?

Does Laruelle’s extravagance around angels as theorists and theorists as angels deserve special notice as an auto-epipanic event- LaRuelle recreates himself ? Can we do the same? At the ‘event-horizon’ of the human…  

What do you think, Alex, does your argument of withdrawal exclude all “poetics of relation” (Glissante) with a sublimity (angel-theorist-Son of Man) in its place?   So seems to be the logic of commentators around LaRuelle. like Grelet (trans. Brassier) here http://www.onphi.net/texte-son-of-man--brother-of-the-people--behold-the-theorist-29.html

But perhaps you imply something more nuanced. I began my comment with a mention of the ‘via negativa’.  Would you instead be proposing, via Turrell a negative theology? 

"n negative theology, it is accepted that experience of the Divine is ineffable, an experience of the holy that can only be recognized or remembered abstractly. That is, human beings cannot describe in words the essence of the perfect good that is unique to the individual, nor can they define the Divine, in its immense complexity, related to the entire field of reality. As a result, all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided. In effect, divine experience eludes definition by definition:”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology

So, to put it in tragicomic mode, and yet I am serious,  is this new meta-narrative about a revelation from “God”?


Christina

http://christinamcphee.net

Incredible Machines/ Alexander Galloway March 6 2014  http://incrediblemachines.info/keynote-speakers/galloway/


On May 11, 2014, at 7:25 AM, Alexander R. Galloway <galloway at nyu.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear Soraya & Co..
> 
> I guess part of the impetus is that I'm surprised--if not unnerved--by the way in which networks have captured and eclipsed other ways of thinking. A new pantheon of dot-com philosophers reigns supreme today, ready to proclaim at every turn that “everything is a network.” Mark Zuckerberg: people are networks. Donald Rumsfeld: the battlefield is a network. Bruno Latour: ontology is a network. Franco Moretti: Hamlet is a network. David Joselit: Art is a network. Guy Debord: the post-capitalist city is a network. John Von Neumann: computation is a network. Konrad Wachsmann: architecture is a network.
> 
> Ladies and gentlemen, postmodernism is definitively over! We have a new meta-narrative to guide us.
> 
> We might label this a kind of “reticular pessimism.” And here I'm taking a cue from the notion of “Afro-pessimism” in critical race theory. Just as Afro-pessimism refers to the trap in which African-American identity is only ever defined via the fetters of its own historical evolution, reticular pessimism claims, in essence, that there is no escape from the fetters of the network. There is no way to think in, through, or beyond networks except in terms of networks themselves. According to reticular pessimism, responses to networked power are only able to be conceived in terms of other network forms. (And thus to fight Google and the NSA we need ecologies, assemblages, or multiplicities.)
> 
> By offering no alternative to the network form, reticular pessimism is deeply cynical because it forecloses any kind of utopian thinking that might entail an alternative to our many pervasive and invasive networks.
> 
> This is part of the mandate of this book, as I see it: to articulate a logic of being that is not reducible to a metaphysics of exchange, to a metaphysics of the network. This to me is the promise of excommunication: the message that says “there will be no more messages”; a logic of relation, without the tired, old model of exchange.
> 
> So, yes, strategic withdrawal is at the heart of what interests me most. Some are a bit skeptical about this notion of withdrawal -- often because they see in a negative light as alternatively a surrender monkey position (i give up! i'm outta here!), or a position of privilege (the political equivalent of opening a bank account in the Cayman Islands). But I see it very differently. I see it more as a withdrawal from representation. A structural withdrawal. I see it as a way to conceive of a kind of practical utopia in the here and now. "You don't represent us." "No one is illegal." "I would prefer not to." "We have no demands." Yes I realize utopian thinking is very unfashionable today; that's precisely why we need so much more of it. So perhaps less a bunker mentality and more about the reclaiming of a new experience of life and activity. 
> 
> Re: obsolescence of theory -- perhaps it hinges on *which* kind of theory? I don't agree with Latour and the notion that "theory has run out of steam." Marxism, feminism, psycho-analysis -- they all still work great if you ask me. But I do think that a kind of "vulgar 1968" style of theory has run its course. Nancy Fraser has it exactly right: capitalism co-opted many of the demands of '68-style theory. So now we have to reassess and recompile a new kind of theoretical method. Because of this I'm much more interested in a slightly different spin on the theoretical tradition. 
> 
> -ag
> 
http://christinamcphee.net



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