[-empyre-] Post #3 After critique and the politics of capta

[Stephanie Strickland]

I am grateful for the fullness, and what seems to me the accuracy, of
Johanna's account.


On the basis of it, it seems to me that the challenge of visualization
cannot be “met,” but can perhaps be to some degree temporarily outfoxed by
insisting on a minimum of three alternative visualizations for any
situation in which visualization is used.


Either by attempting a cross-fix of these three or more forms, or by
learning from their contrastive elements how to see and thus avoid the most
habitual or unwanted or deviously dangerous elements of each, we might take
a next step, now, involving action and once again the generation of
multiple displays.

Stephanie

Stephanie Strickland

1175 York Avenue 16B
New York NY 10065
212-759-5175
http://stephaniestrickland.com
..  ..  ..  ..
Hours of the Night
http://hoursofthenight.com
House of Trust
http://www.house-of-trust.org/
*Dragon Logic, *Ahsahta Press
*Vniverse *iPad app


On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 3:47 PM, Christina McPhee <naxsmash at mac.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dissembling, passing-as, representing-as-if…….. Johanna Drucker puts so
> well the condition we are blind to and yet complicit in----
>
> "The politics of capta, therefore, are the cultural politics of all
> semiosis, in which the fundamental processes of sense-making and sign
> systems come into being so that they pass themselves off as "what is"
> rather than "what has been represented to appear to be what is". Such a
> politics is always freighted with the baggage of any and every hegemony at
> work, and the "nothing is ever/never natural" assertion has to be taken
> literally here as a way to undo the easy habit of familiar thought. For
> though we "know" that data is constructed, we do not always know how that
> knowing encodes the blindness that keeps unfamiliarity at bay, keeps the
> "otherness" of the world at a distance in all of its true profundity.”
>
> To ‘undo the easy habit of familiar thought’— such is the enormous task of
> this conversation and the work of the scholars and artists coming together
> here.  We’re asking, what’s feminist about this visualization?  Drucker
> charges us
> with understanding that ‘display itself is conceived to embody qualitative
> expressions, and that the information is graphically constituted’ (Drucker,
> Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, Harvard, 2014).
>
> This gets at the deepest crisis of our time and moment!  How many levels
> of ‘undo’ are there… infinitely or indefinately— and this is the horror
> from which we recoil— when like little children touching a burning piece of
> hot asphalt with our toes and screaming with fascination and the sharp
> allure of pain— is there ANY ethical position possible if we realize each
> level of blindness is acceded to another level?  The horror, the horror, as
> Joseph Conrad foretold.
>
> Drucker goes on, nevertheless: "Our "of course" we know statements are
> almost all framed within the terms of our social world, an acknowledgement
> of the instrumental and operationalized terms on which structuring occurs.
> We turn nature into a fantastic term, "otherness" into a political category
> through which to guide apparently ethical actions, but we have few ways to
> undo the ways that knowing has already been produced to create knowledge
> according to terms programmed in advance. My argument does not resolve into
> a set of discursive metaphors in which geographies of "beyondness" or
> "limits" can be invoked. The unfamiliar is in the normative, the immediate,
> and the habitual, not what lies "outside" these realms. What is most
> "known" is what is most "unknown" because we do not think about the ways in
> which we know. Hard to see ontological blindness.”
>
> In the heady days of cybernetics in the post-war, post-Bauhaus, Gyorgy
> Kepes promoted the notion that visual literacy could rest on the empirical
> objectives of identifying patterning in ‘nature’ — a necessity of all
> taxonomies in the natural sciences, surely.— but Kepes and others hoped for
> such within an understanding of the ‘nature of culture’.  As evidently this
> cannot be, not now at least, we have to ask how to ‘capta-mine’  , to mine
> what we can see in the dark, even as we know our own blindness exceeds what
> we can see .
>
> "The challenge for visualization is to simultaneously intensify the
> representationalism of its methods--call them to attention in a graphical,
> critical, way while undoing the belief system that representationalism
> supports--that a world can be known in some stable way.” — Drucker’s
> challenge causes me to ask what element in this semiosis is ‘stable’.  I
> think, perhaps that she is onto something when she asks, in another post
> about enunciation and voicing.
>
>
>
> Christina
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Christina McPhee
>
> http://christinamcphee.net
>
>
>
>
>
> Christina McPhee
> naxsmash at mac.com
>
> http://christinamcphee.net
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20160721/bc8a5daa/attachment.html>