[-empyre-] Mediated matters and design abjections

[Davide Panagia]

Yes Johannes - lots of time for conversation would be ideal! I’ve been dealing with other (family) matters entirely over the past few days and have only now been able to catch up. 

So to answer some of your astute questions, let me begin with the zombies issue which for me isn’t so much about who the zombie is or where it is, but about the ways in which we understand influence to work. I don’t think (at least for me) that the transmissional model of cause and effect of influence (which is also the model of coercion) is sufficient for our day and age (maybe it was never enough). Hence my lack of pursuing (also) of questions about biopolitics and subjectivity - which aren’t uninteresting questions to raise and follow through; they’re issues that I don’t feel equipped to deal with well enough - or rather, I should say, that the issue of control always already has a moral answer built into it; namely, the one who controls is the one (or it) that simultaneously exploits. And so biopolitics is pernicious, neoliberalism is horrifically exploitative, and subjectivity is suppressed.

But once we’ve established this moral/ethical trajectory - let’s call it critical thought’s a priori - what can we say about the structures of association in our contemporary condition? And are those forms of association sustainable over time, or are they somehow related and relatable to the entanglement of technical life within our not so human vitalities?

As for the issue of code being indifferent to content what I meant to provoke is simply this: that there can be an entity in the world that is not invested in the content of representation suggest, to me, a surprising manner development that points to (perhaps) a new structure of disinterest. If this is true, what are we to make of such disinterest - which isn’t so much, a "detached perspective” but a disregard of interest as a  necessary function or activity or quality. The disregarding of interest seems like a unique dynamic of datapolitik that distinguishes it from both biopolitics or neoliberalism, though that doesn’t mean it is either independent or uninvolved or complicit with them. 

Finally, thank you all for your thoughtfulness to my post.

Davide


***********
Check out my new book: Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity
**********
Davide Panagia
Associate Professor, Political Science
UCLA
Co-Editor, Theory & Event

On Sep 29, 2014, at 1:57 PM, Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> dear all
> 
> from or along dataveillance zombification (subjectless datapolitik) to what Ross today posted as his envisioning of the total "destructive urbanization of the planet" ... " the nature of this form of power is one of controlling life. So the expansion of life and the ever greater control of it occur simultaneously through the construction (and expansion—urbanization) of a sophisticated, technologically managed and machinic spatial template that can be reproduced across the surface of the planet.>
> 
> Hmm, most would think that's a very dystopian vision leaving little room for critical design and odd design, for the provocations Oron was to tell us about 
> (tinkering biological regeneratives, immortal design [see Revital Cohen/Tuur van Balen's 'organ replacement machines' [http://www.cohenvanbalen.com/work/the-immortal], tissue culture, third ears, titanium legs,  or - an example from the dance world - Jaime del Val's "Disorientations,"  i.e. abstract telematics mixed with amorphous presence and proximity of bodies without identity, moving on the limits of the recognizable or legible.
> 
> Interestingly,  perhaps ironically revising Davide's datapolitik & surveillance assemblage, del Val's performance between Madrid and Dresden, in what he calls a corporeal space of Social Commons even at the moment of its capture/telematic transmission and de-visualization (the "idea" and form of the moving bodies here regenerated via chains of data [software engineer Frieder Weiss speaks of communications of blob and contour processing via particle engines, genetic algorithms, sprite rendering, etc]), nevertheless acts as kind of datamining of the lovely absurd, disorienting desire or, so the project hopes, undermining capitalism's (and datapoliitk's) expansion of life and Lebensraum, to be interfering with the technologies of standardization and control, and the grand spatial templates.  When the lively real bodies dance, the proximate other bodies were of course only imaginable - through the particle physics -  but still could be felt as the behavior of the translocal virtual created moments of great intensity and strange beauty.... 
> 
> I suppose one would need lots of time now for conversation, Davide, do you agree? you argue that "Software code is indifferent to content, which means that datapolitik is indifferent to identities."  Well, my experience of the telematic dance was otherwise: I sensed the software (called 'Kalypso,' like the mythic figure on her island; her name: griechisch: »Verbergerin« /gr.:  someone who hides], ) was not indifferent to us at all.
> 
> regards
> 
> Johannes Birringer
> dap-lab
> 
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