[-empyre-] Starting the Third Week: Michael Boghn and Jerome Sala

Mon Nov 21 04:07:19 AEDT 2016

Jerome, capitalism and war created the computer, not the Communist state or
an agrarian utopia-- and a desire to penetrate a code. One should pay
attention how things are created --one discovers a lot about their
purposes. I talk about in in an earlier post. Isn't the same thing with
Facebook, to peek into the private activities of a college girls dormitory.
Isn't that original impulse written all over what Facebook has become
despite all the "social media" goodies it offers --to penetrate the
personal activities of one's essentially private, intimate lives, create
data out of them and sell it. The primary impulse of Facebook --the raison
d'etre of its flourishing personhood-- is to make the private public and
social interactions short and infinite. In a very few years, it has
created a Brave New World and we are all caught in it.

Ciao,
Murat

On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 11:48 AM, Jerome Sala <jeromesala502 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Murat, your comment brought another question to my mind, especially
> because it alludes to the transformation of businesses. Working in the
> corporate world for many years, I know that businesses found digital
> technology irresistible because it was a tool that saved them lots of
> money. It helped eliminate lots of jobs and made outsourcing, near
> shore and far, much easier. As a result, it's hard for me to separate
> the growth of this technology from the capitalism's desire to increase
> profits by cutting costs. So the question for me is -- is it
> technology per se that's the problem, or the way capitalism uses it?
>
> On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 10:38 AM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> > Michael, I do not agree with you. What makes it different is the
> incredible speed with which things are happening. There is no time to catch
> up and rebalance as in the old model. It is a bit like cancer or like a
> species through a mutation gaining a critical, basically irresistible
> advantage over its habitat. As a result all the other species begin to
> disappear and finally the habitat is destroyed, including the dominant
> species.
> >
> > Something like this is already happening. Wealth is concentrated more
> and more on fewer and fewer people (and Trump, who ostensibly got elected
> to fight this trend, will intensify it through his tax cuts). One day,
> companies will have nobody to sell their goods to. That sounds far fetched.
> But it will happen, maybe sooner than we think. That is when the
> pandemonium will start. My guess is it will not be pretty.
> >
> > Take the idea of Uber for example, which is the cat's meow because of
> its convenience for people who used to take taxis and the bus. By one
> "disruption" enabled by the computer, they destroyed a whole ecology of
> businesses that owned local taxi fleets or individuals who owned their own
> taxis. They seduced taxi drivers by offering them better commissions. Who
> cares for a few taxi fleet owners! Everyone is happy. It took I think less
> than five years, now Uber is talking about driverless cars. I suppose those
> drivers can find jobs in the future as traffic cops for those Uber cars.
> One should not forget the owners of the taxi fleets may represent the
> "other," but the drivers are us.
> >
> > To be continued...
> >
> > Ciao,
> > Murat
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 6:33 AM, Michael Boughn <mboughn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >> OK, devil's advocate here. Every tool humans have developed has changed
> them, has obliterated certain practices and modes of thinking and generated
> new ones. The computer is just another tool, a really sophisticated and
> complex hammer. Some of the consequences of this tool are pretty dire --
> the enablement of a post-truth polity, for instance -- but it also creates
> a potential being in common that is the  -- I want to say "cure" but that's
> not quite it. It's the antithetical action that opens into other
> possibilities. It can go either way, depending on what people do, and there
> are a lot of people doing a lot of different things.
> >>
> >> I don't think that our lack of awareness of our dependence on those
> systems is new. Isn't it always just "the world". And they (the techne)
> have always shaped us. Isn't that Heidegger's point? If you figure out how
> to make flint spear tips, you stop throwing rocks and become different. We
> become aware of it when the computer stops working in the car in the middle
> of Death Valley, or the operating system goes wacky just before the
> deadline for a huge project. It's really the same old same old.
> >>
> >> It's just that the stakes have risen catastrophically.
> >>
> >> I think that's true about sci-fi. It has framed the question of
> technology in terms of an address to ontology.
> >>
> >> Mike
> >>
> >> Sent from my iPad
> >>
> >> On Nov 19, 2016, at 5:54 PM, Jerome Sala <jeromesala502 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >> Murat, your question, as to whether "the computer (and the web and its
> >> consequence) has the ability to expose and criticize the condition it
> >> has created...whether the digital can be 'revealer of is own truth',
> >> brought to mind a book I've been reading - Discognition, by Steven
> >> Shaviro. One of the points Shaviro argues is that, in our everyday
> >> experience, "we're mostly unaware of how deeply our lives depend upon
> >> the functioning of complex, expert systems..." -- we're the fish in
> >> their ocean (McLuhan) (unless they break down). Another aspect we
> >> don't grasp, as your question implies, is that such technological
> >> entities, rather then just being there, inert until we manipulate
> >> them, have an agency of their own: "...if we engineer them, in various
> >> ways, they 'engineer' us as well, nudging us to adapt to their
> >> demands."
> >>
> >> I am not sure whether the "digital" can speak its truth (at least in a
> >> language we understand), but Shaviro suggests one way we humans might
> >> begin to see its truth/reality for ourselves - by creating art where
> >> the "material and technological factors are explicitly foregrounded."
> >> His book is about science fiction stories that do this. Perhaps this
> >> is also what I had in mind by the poetic project I wrote about, which
> >> foregrounds digital/corporate cliches that inform us, through the
> >> jargon we speak. In any case, Shaviro's book may offer a clue as to
> >> the great popularity of the SF genre. Often, in allegorical ways, it
> >> acknowledges the agency of the technological (remember the Borg?), and
> >> enables people to start talking about the power of its influence.
> >>
> >> On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 3:15 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >>
> >> Hi Jerome, by your question on the nature of "knowing" in poetry, I
> >>
> >> think you touched a critical point, an issue running throughout the
> >>
> >> discussions and presentations this month.
> >>
> >>
> >> Knowledge that poetic experience contains or "reveals" does have
> >>
> >> multiple facets. On the one hand, the knowledge (in some incarnations,
> >>
> >> message/propaganda) may be transactional and implicitly points or
> >>
> >> leads to action. Some great classics are of that sort, for instance,
> >>
> >> Lucretius's On Nature or Virgil's Eclogues, Shakespeare's Henry V and
> >>
> >> also, in some sense, though a book of "revelation," The Bible, etc.
> >>
> >> The election of Trump last week drove the discussion to the
> >>
> >> transactional side of poetry (art), and rightly so. That is what all
> >>
> >> the writing invited to be sent to Dispatches for the anthology all
> >>
> >> about. So are the post cards Craig refers to, as conceptual acts.
> >>
> >>
> >> There is another kind of knowledge that poetry "reveals," not
> >>
> >> necessarily leading to action-- of course, the distinction is somewhat
> >>
> >> artificial since a poem or work of art contains both simultaneously
> >>
> >> each time creating a different balance. If one extreme side of this
> >>
> >> spectrum is propaganda (all nations/cultures/languages have propaganda
> >>
> >> masterpieces), the other extreme is gnosis-- a knowledge not quite
> >>
> >> contained in the practicalities of a language, but in its peripheries,
> >>
> >> the often unacknowledged overtones that emanate from words, space,
> >>
> >> etc. (embedded in poesies).
> >>
> >>
> >> It is in terms of this same dilemma (the nature of poetic knowledge)
> >>
> >> that Heidegger is discussing technology in his essay. On the one hand
> >>
> >> it is defined as "enframing" nature to exploit it (in terms that
> >>
> >> Francis Bacon asserts as "knowledge is power"). On the other hand, it
> >>
> >> returns technology to its roots as techne, a making that reveals the
> >>
> >> truth. Their relationship is dialectical.
> >>
> >>
> >> I have been on Empyre list for about two years, following it on and
> >>
> >> off with interest because it presents to me a digital culture that is
> >>
> >> of great interest to me; but in which I am not directly involved as a
> >>
> >> practitioner. What struck me most is that, save for important
> >>
> >> exceptions such as Alan Sondheim and Isak Berbic (and I am sure there
> >>
> >> are others), the focus of the participants was on what the internet or
> >>
> >> the computer can do for them, on the computer as a new potent enabler,
> >>
> >> the computer as artistic or political power. As far as I can see,
> >>
> >> little attention was given to it as a revealer of "truth," the
> >>
> >> knowledge of human condition and psyche in a digital technological
> >>
> >> age.
> >>
> >>
> >> In my view, poetry (art) is doomed to die without containing within
> >>
> >> itself both these knowledge, though the melange may be different in
> >>
> >> each.
> >>
> >>
> >> The underlying focus for me this month has been, that is why I
> >>
> >> accepted the invitation to moderate, to explore whether the computer
> >>
> >> (and the web as its consequence) has the ability to expose and
> >>
> >> criticize the condition it has created, in other words, whether the
> >>
> >> digital can be the "revealer of its own truth." I can not say I have
> >>
> >> been that successful up to now.
> >>
> >>
> >> The primary text for this month is the fifteen minute video clip I
> >>
> >> referred to in my introductory statement at the beginning of the month
> >>
> >> in which the film maker Jean Renoir discusses the effect of technology
> >>
> >> on art (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Mtd6GE_PI ). He says that
> >>
> >> art becomes boring to the extent that that the art maker is in total
> >>
> >> control of his or her own materials and techniques. He refers to a
> >>
> >> group of 11th century French tapestries (the Bayeux, the first known
> >>
> >> ones) where the threads were coarsely spun, the colors were primitive
> >>
> >> and of a narrow range; but they contained great beauty, revealing the
> >>
> >> strife of their making.
> >>
> >>
> >> That is why "Overcoming Technique"--the first two words of my
> >>
> >> introductory title-- is crucial, whether one finally agrees with
> >>
> >> Renoir or not. In our daily lives with family and children and
> >>
> >> teaching and grading papers, etc., I hope some of us find time to
> >>
> >> re-focus on these issues the remaining days of this month. As artists,
> >>
> >> the issues are important for all of us.
> >>
> >>
> >> Ciao,
> >>
> >> Murat
> >>
> >>
> >> On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 9:28 AM, Craig Saper <csaper at umbc.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >>
> >> Relevant to the discussion and the “dispatches” this event might speak
> to the issue of, what Jerome Sala called in a recent "poetry is a
> particular way of knowing the mind” …
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> "Post Card Avalanche"
> >>
> >>
> >> Join in and send a postcard directly to Trump! Here are the basic
> instructions to participate:
> >>
> >>
> >> ** IMPORTANT - Don't mail your card until NOV. 26th **
> >>
> >>
> >> In the message section, write this simple message: NOT BANNON!
> >>
> >>
> >> Throw a post card Avalanche party. Make postcards.
> >>
> >>
> >> Address it as follows:
> >>
> >>
> >> Donald Trump
> >>
> >> c/o The Trump Organization
> >>
> >> 725 Fifth Avenue
> >>
> >> New York, NY 10022
> >>
> >>
> >> Affix a stamp - you can use a 35 cent postcard stamp, or a normal
> letter stamp.
> >>
> >>
> >> Take a picture of your postcard that you can share on social media
> using the hashtag #stopbannon
> >>
> >>
> >> Drop it in the mail! We are aiming to get these mailed between
> Saturday, Nov 26th and Monday, Nov. 28th to create a concentrated avalanche
> of postcards.”
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >>
> >> empyre forum
> >>
> >> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> >>
> >> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >>
> >> empyre forum
> >>
> >> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> >>
> >> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> empyre forum
> >> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> >> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> empyre forum
> >> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> >> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> > http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> _______________________________________________
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