[-empyre-] Digital Delirium revisited

[ole a. birch]

Thanks to Milinda.


2014-05-25 6:03 GMT+02:00 Melinda Rackham <melinda at subtle.net>:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hi all,
>  as a story teller not a theorist,
> I've been loving the lateral directions these conversations have taken.
>  yet they feel like new growth on a tree, reaching towards different
> strong lights
> strong potential, but sparse as foliage and flowers are still in their
> formative stages.
>
> I think it would be telling to revisit in a year or so.
> but for now
> my branch is of truncation
> - physical and geographic excommunication.
>
> Is this a "natural" evolution - a generational love affair with the
> network that has matured and dwindled,
> a set of circumstance, a natural hiatus, a time to move on?
> For me it  writing stories about people for print books made from trees,
> of interest to only a tiny fragment of society.
> the narrowest of narrowcast.
>
> It could be seen as a privileged withdrawal... the Duchampian retreat,
> or it could be seen as a form of situated resistance...  living local.
>
> Renate writes:
>
> > Lovink insists that it is not necessary or important to parse new media
> theories through comparative geographic distributions.
> >
> Yet it is particularly European perspective to Snowden. 1st rule of fight
> club is that you dont talk about fight club.
> If one doesn't live in the gated network of USA, we already live in a
> states of excommunication, or perhaps ecstatic ex-stasis.
>
> Of course im saying all of this without having read excommunication
> a position I take perhaps because I cant buy it in e-edition due to my
> geographical location in Australia.
> Of course I do have a copy ive dipped into because the internet if for
> routing around..
> but u know.. who we are,
> and who we are routing around has changed.
>
> We knew the end was coming when
> the moddr_lab at WORM in Rotterdam developed
> the fabulous web2.0 Suicide machine..
>  http://suicidemachine.org
>
> "sign out forever"
> what a promise.
> 5 years ago when I saw my 1500 best Facebook friends disappear before me
> I knew everything had changed.
> some non-artist/academic contacts, contacted me to see if I was
> emotionally  ok?
>  was I really suicidal?
>  why would I deliberately unjoin the network?
>
> 6 months ago I moved to a mostly abandoned industrial area quiet close to
> the city centre,
> toxins buried deep, being gentrified with creatives as the shock troops.
> Interestingly I have no fixed network connection.
> I have been extra excommunicated by lack of infrastructure in a first(?)
> world city of 1 million.
> The fat optical rollout goes right past my suburb
> and its previously sparse low income politically unimportant demographics.
>
> After the shock of being denied what I felt like was my god given right to
> fast connection,
> I started to like my very physical excommunication.
> I choose to tether to get on,
> to jack in, as they used to say.
> a delicious nostalgia for the 14.4k baud modem
> the sound of which will forever generate excitement
> and the deliberate act of communing
> rather than the constancy of familial relationship.
>
>
> x-communictedly
>  Melinda
>
>
>
> On 13/05/2014, at 12:06 PM, Renate Terese Ferro wrote:
>
> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> > Thanks Alex for talking a bit more about your usage of the word
> > excommunication.  Also thanks to Christina for posting the interesting
> > theological intersections.  My thoughts were running more in parallel
> with
> > political theory in listening to your last post, most particularly Martin
> > Luther King's notion of non-violent resistance or perhaps Gandi's? .  Put
> > simply resistance by not participating, exiting the system, not "playing"
> > any longer. I realize that in the book you conduct a pretty lengthy
> > discussion about the use of the word "excommunication" a strategically
> > theologically implicit word but what do you think about Excommunication
> as
> > resistance?
> > Renate
> >
> > On 5/11/14 10:25 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 ³everything is a network.² 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 ³reticular pessimism.² And here I'm taking
> >> a cue from the notion of ³Afro-pessimism² 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 ³there will be no more messages²; 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
> >>
> >>
> >> On May 9, 2014, at 1:16 PM, Soraya Murray <semurray at ucsc.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >>> I am intrigued by this discussion, and would like to acknowledge the
> >>> posts by Alex Galloway, Geert Lovink and Renate Ferro. Greetings to all
> >>> of you.
> >>>
> >>> I keep circling back to the notion of strategic withdrawal, alluded to
> >>> several times in the last few posts, as well as somewhat enigmatically
> >>> toward the end of Alex's recent lecture here at UC Santa Cruz. For
> >>> example, from his post:
> >>>
> >>> "This book is not about the world ³for us,² and not the world ³in
> >>> itself,² but what Eugene calls ³the world without us.²"
> >>>
> >>> This, in relation to Geert's recent essay in e-Flux ("Hermes on the
> >>> Hudson"):
> >>> ""This leaves us with the question of the mandate and scope of today¹s
> >>> media theory‹if there is anything left. Are you ready to hand over the
> >>> ³new media² remains to the sociologists, museum curators, art
> >>> historians, and other humanities officials? Can we perhaps stage a more
> >>> imaginative ³act of disappearance²? Are we ready to disguise ourselves
> >>> amidst the new normality?"
> >>>
> >>> ...and which seemed to betray a similar anxiety around obsolescence of
> >>> theory -- or a strategy of withdrawal? With respect, is this to be seen
> >>> as an act of battening down the hatches? Is this disappearance/disguise
> >>> a radical strategy to shift perspective as a means to generate new
> >>> possibility? Something conceded, or something new gained?
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >
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