[-empyre-] Week 3: Intersubjectivity

[Timothy Conway Murray]

Hi, everyone, thank you for an enlivening discussion in the heat of summer.

I am interested in Murat's suggestion that we turn our attention to
Leibniz, "Solipsism, as well, is present in the philosophy of Liebnitz
becoming more
and more important in definition of contemporary mediated universe. So, I
would like to propose a start of our discussion with Liebnitz Monadology,
in which I would like to propose a monad as a complex engine made out of
biological and technological compartments having any experience of self,
separately of experience of others. "

What I've found helpful in Leibniz, in view of articulating an aesthetics
of digitality in my book, "Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic
Folds," is Leibniz's notion of "incompossibility," not so much as a
condition of solipsism but as a construct of an intersubjective condition
that remains outside of the framework of what was later to be theorized as
dialectics.  He was writing about a condition in which the difference of
various monads might be understood outside of the binary of "possible" or
"impossible" so that they might exist, perhaps overlapped in the dense
complexity of digital folds, together in their impossible differences, a
condition that Leibniz termed "incompossible."  Empyreans unfamiliar with
this concept also might be interested in Gilles Deleuze's embrace of it in
his books Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition.  I have found the
term particularly helpful as a placeholder of political and conceptual
alliance in our fractured postcolonial world where various global
participants are able to assemble together momentarily without giving up
the specificities of their own cultural, artistic, racial, ethnic, and
gendered positions.

Best,

Tim


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 7/28/15 6:47 PM, "Murat Nemet-Nejat" <muratnn at gmail.com> wrote:

>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------