[-empyre-] excommunication

[Carol-Ann Braun]

I disagree.  
In the field, where a group of us is trying to give a political dimension to neighborhood projects, "x" is the point where a person fails to take into account or convey information or act upon a lead (i.e. a gift). 
The "x" is what turns projects into simple "events". 
Everyone of my colleagues is tempted by "x".
The locus of "x" shifts from person to person and project to project. Yes, it can be built-into "structures", it can seem anonymous… 
If each project's "x" becomes every person's responsibility, we have a crack at political "authority". 


Carol-Ann




Le 28 mai 2014 à 03:01, warkk <warkk at newschool.edu> a écrit :

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Sorry to come in late. Just done with the end of semester. Have been reading the various empyre threads for the month of May with interest. I won't be able to keep straight who said what, and lists are a sort of smeared authorship anyway.
> 
> The space of technology is always both blu-tack and duct tape, both a space of things intentionally created for an instrumental purpose and things hacked out of that intentionality for no purpose, or counter-purposes. Tech is slightly exogenous to the social order.
> 
> So i don't see the current state of the tech ensemble that is the net as pervaded by any particular essence. It isn't entirely of militarization, or the commodity form, or whatever. Its not an expressionist totality. We might be losing our toeholds, but that's no reason to start imagining it as bad totality.
> 
> Here i don't see how Snowden changes much, other than perhaps clueing in some publics in things that have surely been obvious all along? Surely listserv veterans remember the revelations about Echelon? One only had to follow the evolution of technical capacity from that point to grasp what was feasible. And if a tech is feasible, one should assume the security state already has it.
> 
> The Snowden moment happened when I was finishing The Disintegrating Spectacle, and simply confirmed the theses about the state of the state to be found in the late Debord. That (1) the security apparatus had achieved autonomy from a state which had (2) lost its capacity to know and act *historically*. That seems to describe the present quite well.
> 
> Its too crude to think that one could simply withdraw from such a situation. That's why in that book i wrote about the tactics of the 'devil's party', which is neither hidden nor transparent, but pursues the tactics of obscure presences, readable by those who need to know.
> 
> It is surely the case that the 'network' is at one and the same time *both* a reality and pure ideology. Like the sun, it actually exists, it just lacks the divine powers that its priests would attribute to it. Pointing this out is no great breakthrough, but it seems to be where pop netkritik is at the moment.
> 
> So one withdraws from representation, but to what? Are we not here still playing out the tactics of modernism. That may be no bad thing, but here i think there's more continuities than any grand break. Foucault once warned of the dangers of always trying to see oneself as at the fulcrum of history. This is now what counts as ordinary times.
> 
> I think i need to point out that for me (can't speak for Alex and Eugene) excommunication is a *structural condition*, not something one chooses. Communication needs to excommunicate in order to communicate. It has to appear to sever the link to those who would take it upon themselves to be their own authority. Authority over what i call xenocommunication, or communication with the absolute. 
> 
> Excommmunication may now be an everyday thing, maybe a micro thing. The discussion of bots on the net makes me wonder if a spam filter is what excommunication is today. That which decides which communication can be considered authorized. 
> 
> Where i perhaps part company with Alex and Eugene is that i think there's other paths besides the via negativa. Rather than a non-relation to the absolute, one can have an absolute relation. This is the 'other path' out of correlation signaled by Meillassoux: empirio-criticism, and its descendant, the empirio-monism of Alexander Bogdanov, on whom i am working now. 
> 
> I think its time to end the attempts by philosophy to control xenocommuncation, the communication to the absolute. Rather, i think media theory is that theory of the reality of media itself, of how media make sensation, not out of nothing, not totally determined by the social or the political or the discursive or whatever. But rather the media that are of interest now are those which render the nonhuman perceptible via an inhuman apparatus. 
> 
> Here the techniques of climate science might be a good example. Without the satellites and computers of the cold war (those inhuman media) the nonhuman real of the Anthropocene is not visible -- even though, ironically enough, our collective labor is what produced it. Strange how climate change knowledge is produced by inhuman technical media that are duct tape in origin but put to a blu-tack purpose. tech is always a strange space in that way.
> 
> 
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