[-empyre-] - noise of contagion

[Johannes Birringer]

thank you , Annie, for your response, 
I can see now I got your earlier sentence wrong, when you wrote about stopping some movements, and not others.
(We could refuse to see our personal safety as our zero-sum due and instead see that inevitable, unintentional connection—transmission, even—is another name for solidarity..) - that last sentence confused me, as it seemed to imply transmissions, the inevitable ones, are an expression of solidarity.  I tried to link it to the idea of blackness as unrepair, and unreconciled solidarity. I see now there is so much more to ask ("about what it becomes possible to ask for or demand in these times") and to hand over. 

Junting, can you tell us more about the "noise" you have worked on, and how noise aesthetic and political discourse on “noise” intersects or converges between media, writing, performance (did you see "Formosa" by Lin Hwai-min?) and autobiography?  and what so many here, in this provocative debate, have talked about, or written/painted, as the personal as political?

Writing, I feel, now, having looked at the language blur image and Alan's brilliantly evocative " Confusion entanglement: etymological impulse, poetics rooted in
roots",  is also an ethical choice for dialogue (not the "new normal" which as Annie correctly assume will be the old normal) and the way one listens to the vibrations.

regards
Johannes Birringer


________________________________________
 [Junting Huang schreibt]



Thank you, Luca. A quick note on your last point, Eric Hayot’s The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain traced that whole tradition to the Enlightenment period, when European philosophers often used the Chinese in their thought experiments on ethics. At its core, it asks us again and again what we should do about the suffering from afar.

I also tried to follow the debates originated from Agamben, and I do feel the remarks he has made are a bit out of touch with reality, even though he may have some valid points in China’s context—considering civil liberties in the state of exception (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/09/the-new-normal-chinas-excessive-coronavirus-public-monitoring-could-be-here-to-stay), etc. However, his deliveries read more like an ideological commitment than a theoretical guidance.

Junting

Junting Huang
Department of Comparative Literature
240 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853

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