[-empyre-] Lichty: Theory and Media Art in 2014

[Curt Cloninger]

I myself have a dream to marry deleuze with derrida (ah, the resultant intellectual buggery). Plateaus of affective language and media entangled with plateaus of ecologies and flocking alforithms. We jettison (or ignore) Derrida to our detriment. Because, as Brian observes, it's not bubblegum we're chewing. Ideas are adventures in the world of the world. Orherwise we should just stop talking and reading and pack it in (the eternal art studio slumber party). Derrida as wildcard ethical pragmatist? The more I read him, yes. Along with Alex and Eugene, I find a hypertrophic value in negative theology and aporia (eckhart, pseudo-dionysius), but why not also invite Derrida to that party (and his disciple, Jean-Luc Marion), since they've been stewarding it all along anyway? Jews, catholics, and Whitehead's lowercase god. And a bunch of dutiful marxist, atheists, and computer scientists left scrambling to figure out how to re-balance the contemporary theoretical equation so that we get to keep the creamy immanent remainder while factoring out the chewy chunks of God. But God is no-thing. Re-balancing to factor out a null.

From my phone in my bed in summer,
Curt


On May 19, 2014, at 12:48 AM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I always wondered how to say the below and this is it! Thank you, Patrick.
> 
> On 05/18/2014 11:51 AM, Patrick Lichty wrote:
>> In
>> 1998, it was Benjamin (I say this arbitrarily), in 2013 it was Whitehead,
>> And I wonder deeply whether the shifts from Poststructuralism to Non-Human
>> Ontologies, or from epistemology to ontology for that matter, is a
>> reflection of culture, or the resultant disconnect of sheer interest of a
>> community who has, at the call of its finest, decided to follow as a path of
>> least resistance or merely a desire for acceptance and to be part of "the
>> conversation".
> 
> One does sometimes wonder what intellectual life would be like if theories were ways to get at existential issues and not the reverse. Since the turn to Non-Human Ontologies I lost interest in following. The previous theories of language, technology, capital and social class were so invigorating for those who wanted to do things with media. Perhaps the new ones will encourage some kind of ecological practice -- but media will not be able to do much about that, so I guess a good blah blah blah is what you have to look forward to! Alas. -- BH
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