Monthly Archives: December 2011

The Communicative Problematique


What does this blog communicate? It knows not to whom itspeaks; sender and receiver dance in an interminable display of uncertainty. Theremnant haunts its every move, its every trace, its every waking second ofexperience. 
The inexhaustible breaths of life-worlds collide and collude in split-second flashes across a screen. The gap, the break, the rupture opens upas words spray from page to page. Experiments in poetry dishes pretend they arepersons and persons play each other like fiddles.
What can one communicate? The Attempt at Self-Criticism inThe Birth of Tragedy asks if thereare not also neuroses of health. The answer to this questions remains inthe affirmative just as much, if not more, today as it did for the ancients. The utterprofusion of babble and words weave their way into existence in this age ofover-consumption, jumping to levels that would stop Pericles dead in his tracks. There are nomore noble funeral orations, just sensationalized exhibitions of lives that areno more.
How can thoughts stand out amidst this ever growing mountainof rubble? Klee’s Angelus Novus is upto its neck within our temporal threshold. To gain clarity in an age oftechnological claustrophobia is like trying to send a terabyte through alandline.
Can creation remain novel, nay sovereign, in an era plaguedby the simultaneity of infinite fascination and boredom? I say yes, it may, butonly if one has the courage to will it; only if one is born ready to breed newbeginnings; only if one can muster a boldness for greatness that renders the presentsubservient to a more ancient wisdom.
This is the task of our times: to learn how to live again;to learn how to will again, to learn how to love again – in short – to bewilling to risk a sort of loving madness in the face of an existentialserenity. If one admits this to task to be of utmost significance one willquickly become wanton – where, nay whence can one find the institutionproviding such an education? Although man lives in a house of mirrors, he veryseldom takes the time to reflect himself. 


 Benjamin’s Ninth Thesis: 

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Excerpt from: Nietzsche’s Attempt at Self-Criticism: 

Where then must tragedy have come from? Perhaps out of joy, out of power, out of overflowing health, out of overwhelming fullness? And psychologically speaking, what then is the meaning of that madness out of which tragic as well as comic art grew, the Dionysian madness? What? Is madness perhaps not necessarily the symptom of degradation, of collapse, of cultural decadence? Are there perhaps—a question for doctors who treat madness—neuroses associated with health? With the youth of a people and with youthfulness? What is revealed in that synthesis of god and goat in the satyr? Out of what personal experience, what impulse, did the Greek have to imagine the Dionysian enthusiast and original man as a satyr? And so far as the origin of the tragic chorus is concerned, in those centuries when the Greek body flourished and the Greek soul bubbled over with life, were there perhaps endemic raptures? Visions and hallucinations which entire communities, entire cultural bodies, shared? How’s that? What if it were the case that the Greeks, right in the richness of their youth, had the will for the tragic and were pessimists? What if it was clearly lunacy, to use a saying from Plato, which brought the greatestblessings throughout Greece? And, on the other hand, what if, to turn the issue around, it was precisely during the period of their dissolution and weakness that the Greeks became constantly more optimistic, more superficial, more hypocritical, and with a greater lust for logic and rational understanding of the world, as well as “more cheerful” and “more scientific”? What’s this? In spite of all “modern ideas” and the prejudices of democratic taste, could the victory of optimism, the developing hegemony of reasonableness, of practical and theoretical utilitarianism, as well as democracy itself, which occurs in the same period, perhaps be a symptom of failing power, of approaching old age, of physiological exhaustion, rather than pessimism? Was Epicurus an optimist—precisely because he was suffering?—We see that this book was burdened with an entire bundle of difficult questions—let us add its most difficult question: What, from the point of view of living, does morality mean? . . . 

Kant on the im/possibility of explaining self-reflexivity:

That I am conscious of myself is a thought that alreadycontains a twofold self, the I as subject and the I as object. How might it bepossible for the I that I think to be an object (of intuition) for me, one thatenables me to distinguish me from myself, is absolutely impossible for me toexplain, even though it is an indubitable fact (1804/1983: 73).

Person(a) of the Year

ttime magazine cover occupy protester
Although the selection of a persona or groupbased identification rather than a specific individual is not a new developmentfor TIME; this year’s selection of “The Protester” points toward intriguingnew developments in the dynamics of global publics. TIME Magazine’s selection criterionis rather simple; the award goes to that person, group, or concept which mostinfluenced the news, for better or for worse.


Why “The Protester”? Why not the singularTunisian fruit vendor; the spark that spurred a fire that would rapidly proceedto engulf the globe; from the favelas of the south to the arctic blastedRussian metropolises, and the most developed countries in the world? Why notchoose even a specific group of protesters, “The Arab Spring” or the #OWSmovements?
Here’s portion of TIME Magazine’s defense oftheir selection: 

Everywhere thisyear, people have complained about the failure of traditional leadership andthe fecklessness of institutions. Politicians cannot look beyond the nextelection, and they refuse to make hard choices. That’s one reason we did notselect an individual this year. But leadership has come from the bottom of thepyramid, not the top. For capturing and highlighting a global sense of restlesspromise, for upending   governments and conventional wisdom,  for combining theoldest of techniques with the newest of technologies to shine a light on humandignity and, finally, for steering the planet on a more democratic thoughsometimes more dangerous path for the 21st century, the Protester is TIME’s2011 Person of the Year.

News by definition is generated fromcontroversy. News is a form of protest against the status quo; it pokes holesin the previously seamless fabric of the present. In re-presenting the facts ofwhat has occurred the news defies expectations of what we thought wasoccurring. But news is also analysis, opinion, and commentary on how we shouldrelate ourselves to new developments; as they emerge in real-time. News even offersanalysis on the news. And other media offer analysis on the analysis of theanalysis. Entertainment, factual presentation, commentary and opinion becomeever blurred in the era of Meta-news.Yet the news has also donned the mask of the figure of the “The Protester” inresponse to the “The Protester” itself, in its myriad forms.

The Person of the Year is not decided based on extractingdata from algorithms or trends from complex metrics. TIME’s award is ananalysis by the media of the media, but while it claims to be simplyrepresenting the facts of the case, should this award not be the most obviousof decisions? Shouldn’t the answer be staring us straight in the face? TIMEdoesn’t seem to even feign some sort of claim to objectivity or very rigorouslystress the differences between the runner-up’s and the winner. The selectionprocess is based on perceptions, and like all perceptions, from the verybeginning it is an act of valuation.

Developments in Cognitive Psychology and Neurophilosophyhave demonstrably proven the inability to maintain a distinction between factand value. At the most basic level of the visual cortex (V1), before one iseven conscious of a visual sense perception, feedback loops of higher orderthinking processes have already influenced the act of perception. Sober,rational deliberation that’s freed from all extraneous influence vanishes,always trailing in the wake of precognitive, emotional valences.

And in a sense,TIME Magazine is all too aware of this phenomenon. In the penultimate statementdefending their decision, TIME reflects on the affective capacities that “TheProtester” generated:
For capturing and highlighting a global sense of restlesspromise

The criterionfor selection is fundamentally based on the influence a person/group/concept has had on the media. The reason “The Protester” was so influential was because itfostered the conditions of possibility that connected, created and fedunpredictable desires. There was something else at work in the figure of“The Protester” this year. The figure itself always already was a figure thatembodied influence. In a sense every TIME Magazine Person of the Year recipientembodies the figure of “The Protester” in one-way or another.

In the immediate wake of the revolts experts, theorists and scholarsscrambled to try and explain why predictive models and theoretical framesfailed so miserably to foresee such a drastic upheaval. The events that we arewitnessing can only be traced to one sort of cause, the final cause, in anAristotelian sense. The TIME article relates the figure of “The Protester” to theetymological origin of democracy or demos. All of these movements are ‘caused’in the sense that they fulfill the meaning and strive to satisfy the end of thedemos.

 

But there are also very specific figures that are emblematic of “TheProtester.” There is the Tunisian Fruit Vendor, the romanticized figure ofself-sacrifice and ineffable defiance of conventional wisdom. There are the#OWS protesters, the leaderless and organic network of protesters, but a morecontentious figure, admired, mockupied and demonized all at once. Within theOccupy Wall ST. Movement the most famous representatives are the victims; the NWGrandma and UC Students Pepper-sprayed, the Iraqi War Veteran whose skull wasfractured by Oakland Policy with a tear gas canister, or countless others whowere subjected to police brutality.
I posted during the first few months of the #OWS protests about thestatistical connection between acts of police repression and media coverage ofthe protests. There was a significant positive correlation between instances ofstate violence and the amount of media traffic consumed by global publics; thusits no surprise that the most well known figures are the victims.
    
    Yet TIMEMagazine repeatedly insists on the fact that this revolution was not linearly causedby advances in technology:


Technologymattered, but this was not a technological revolution. Social networks did notcause these movements, but they kept them alive and connected. Technologyallowed us to watch, and it spread the virus of protest, but this was not awired revolution; it was a human one, of hearts and minds, the oldesttechnology of all.

But perhapsthe human heart itself has changed. What if our affective sensibilities havegrown drastically? The article explicitly asks the question:

Is there a global tipping point for frustration?
To me the more interesting question is not whether there is a tippingpoint or brink in terms of the numbers of people that have to be frustratedbefore general sentiment translates into action; or whether there is a brink interms of how pissed people have to get before an emotion becomes an occupation. Instead, what if technologicalprosthesis expands our collective affective horizon of possibility? Or if therewere a brink, what if it were not fixed or timeless? What if we could activelywork on finding ways to lower or raise its threshold? Or return to a moreancient education of the sense? In so many ways (that need not be repeatedhere) the sources and levels of frustration within the varying contexts (from#OWS to the Arab Spring, to Russia and Greece) differed dramatically, yettactics by the different groups were remarkably similar. This movement emerged from and continues to generate a social imaginary; an envisioning that feeds forwards and backwards through the public , other movements and the prefigured present; like an electric charge. Thebonds of solidarity sedimented through millions of bytes in the bucket spurredpassionate attachments to the trajectories of other protesters and movements.The interconnectedness of the movements provided an infrastructural base thatwould outpace its wildest dreams.
The movementscombine:
the oldest oftechniques with the newest of technologies to shine a light on human dignity

What if thenewest of technologies is really just as ancient of principle? Are thetechnologies, as they disclose themselves in their many-sided mystery not thetools enabling one to take to the task of generating an ethos? Can wenot think of ethos as a technique as well as a technology?

A technique ofthe self;
A prostheticallyenhanced capacity to respond;
An augmentedduty to own up to one’s ownmost potentiality for respons(e)ibility. 

Rumi-nating – Of Mystics and Media
    The poetry of the Sufi Rumi often lends itself to mysticism and serene slippages of the tongue. Rumi represents the tremendous hermeneutic depth inherent in the incessant reinterpretation of Islam and the Quran. As a scholar and headmaster of schools in the Middle East Rumi was exposed to the most modern advances in science and philosophy of his time, which is evident in the topos of his writing He was a firm believer that if you speak a new language you shall have a new world before your eyes; which points to the very modern concept that language is constitutive of our shared reality.  
Confused and distraught
Again I am raging, I am in such a state by your soul that everybond you bind, I break, by your soul.I am like heaven, like the moon, like a candle by your glow; I am allreason, all love, all soul, by your soul.My joy is of your doing, my hangover of your thorn; whatever side you turn your face, I turn mine, by your soul.I spoke in error; it is not surprising to speak in error in this state, for this moment I cannot tell cup from wine, by your soul.I am that madman in bonds who binds the “divs”; I, the madman,am a Solomon with the “divs”, by your soul.Whatever form other than love raises up its head from my heart, forthwith I drive it out of the court of my heart, by your soul.Come, you who have departed, for the thing that departscomes back; neither you are that, by my soul, nor I am that, by your soul.Disbeliever, do not conceal disbelief in your soul, for I will recitethe secret of your destiny, by your soul.Out of love of Sham-e Tabrizi, through wakefulness or nightrising, like a spinning mote I am distraught, by your soul.

“Mystical Poems of Rumi 2″ A. J. Arberry
The University of Chicago Press, 1991
There are some who try and abstract Rumi out of his historical and cultural context in order to harness the eternal essence of his writing, his poetry has been translated into contemporary American idioms as well. There is an undeniable benefit to making the language of his works more accessible to larger audiences, however its clear there is little value in completely ignoring the origins and influences of his work; i.e. the theological environment from whence it arose.
Rumi’s work has the feel less of a sermon than a dialogue or discourse, a song or a conversation. In the above poem he writes “I, the madman, am a Solomon.” There is an uncanny similarity between his poetry and the Songs of Solomon, odes of love to the divine rather than Jeremiads.
While there is a stark similarity in styles between Solomon and Rumi in their mode of presentation, there are much more poignant cleavages running through the content of the messages themselves. One major difference between the belief systems erected by the different theological traditions is in the understanding of the origin of evil. While Christianity tells a narrative of the Fall of Man and Original Sin, for the Sufi’s it is a question of ‘vic’ or remembrance of a forgotten divine. Humanity is impregnated with a spirit that is both beyond and every bit a part of itself, one gets a glimpse of or tastes a bit of this ethereal yet immanent essence through finite yet particular experiences of love.

For Rumi, the task of living righteously in the world is not a prohibitionist warding off of evil, but rather a hopeful stylistics of existence that seeks to affirm the divine in one’s working on and understanding of the world. It is a mode of being that begins with an ethos of generosity, in its interpretation of Islamic code, in its disposition toward others, and in its cultivation of habits in the daily regimen of life. To live justly is less so the protection of a body from harmful pathogens, than is it a joyful journey in search for the lost ruins of the spirit.


This interpretation of Islam, one that is more commonplace for many Iranians, is one radically opposed to that in the lamestream media. It seems to strike at and shatter the certainty of the American conception of radical Muslims. Moreover, it is an ethos that embraces and actively advocates for a cosmopolitanism in global affairs. Perhaps there are overlooked wooden grains in the carpentry of religion. 

Bernard Stiegler on the Trace-ability of our Times






The contours of our contemporary horizon are composed of an infinite marking, tracing and erasing – the apparatus of technological prosthesis has become more than cathartic but compulsive, cthonic even. 


The edges of the current spiraling dance of crisis are not clearly identifiable but definitively multiple – this state burdens the subject – breeds heavy spirits – born free but everywhere enchained to a spirit of gravity. 


It would be not only ill-conceived but impossible to try and prevent the tracing of the times – the constant recording of the self and others in everyday contact. 


The true question remains: How can we cultivate techniques adequate to a time entangled in the trace? 


How can we reckon with the excess of the trace over the task but not over the tale?






Bernard Stiegler speaks to the trace-ability of our times. 


Marcel O’Gorman of the University of Waterloo published a conversation he had with Stiegler in Volume 18 Issue 3 of the Journal Configurations entitled: “Bernard Stiegler’s Pharmacy.”  



 Here’s an excerpt:

Yes, this is a very important issue. I would like to say one thing about it. There is this question of the traces that we produce. When I called you earlier today, I produced traces; every time I do a search on Google, I produce traces. But I do not believe anything that consists in saying we must prevent the development of trace-ability. We are now in an industrial society that rests on the recording of traces. And it is not worthwhile trying to make us believe that we should prevent it—it’s just wrong. That’s what I personally believe. The question is not how to prevent the recording of traces; the question is to create a consciousness of the recording of traces, a politics of the recording of traces.

Here in France, along with some students, in particular at l’Université de Compiègne, we’re developing work on how to become conscious of traceability, and how to open up debates about traceability, how to create new systems of traceability, for example, and how to create laws so that this traceability is actually individuated by what it is tracing. This does not mean that the conscious mind will be able to master all of this—I do not believe in mastery—because behind the trace there is always the unconscious, and the unconscious is multi-layered, which is what I was saying earlier. And so the question is: How do we reorganize the conscious and the unconscious? And I say that this is a question of technology—that which is able to link the conscious and the unconscious is always a technique. And, by the way, Freud speaks of the psychoanalytic technique. Psychoanalysis is a technique. But such a technique must be able to think through today’s industrial technics, and, sadly, psychoanalysis does not know how to do this (467-468, Configurations 18.3, 2010) 

Rumi or Sue Me


The nafs is a sea of calm until it roars. The nafs is a Hell that radiates little heat. The nafs is an ankle-deep river you drown in. Better to be ignorant of worldly concerns, better to be mad and flee from self-interest, better to drink poison and spill the water of life, better to revile those who praise you, and lend both the capital and the interest to the poor, forgo safety and make a home in danger. Sacrifice your reputation and become notorious. I have tried caution and forethought; from now on I will make myself mad.

-Rumi


The nafs is to be understood in a similar light as Cartesian ego cogito, the transcendental subject of reason,  or the immature, bounded subject of the Enlightenment. For Rumi the uncanny contradictions of faith in concepts rendered mythical breeds a forgotten and forlorn mood; externalizing self-reflexivity onto the certainty of identity of the self with its conceptual apparatus deflates and depletes being of its creative capacity for poesis.

Yet, the situation isn’t completely overdetermined by the drudges of despair; one may always flee from the imposed order of an alien selfhood, take a topsy-turvy turn, deciding without judgment between madness disclosed as melancholy or the mayhem delivered as a melody. A melody completely unknown to the Athenian flute player of Aristotelian teleology, or the Corp of Drums when the sun refused to set on the British Empire and composed of barely beyond boyhood drummers, learning and giving the orders of warfare, where comprehension of the threshold of play, when the drum beat’s dance between wooden member and raw hide head ceases to play but becomes an unthought extension of a heart stuck in the violent oscillations of a warrior resonance.

Crisis, Chaos & Kairos

Jodi Dean wrote an insightful piece for Al Jazeera a couple of days ago that describes the shifting field of global capitalism in the face of crises, chaos, and what some might call the kairos of the multitude. She outlines several broad theses that describe just how fragile the situation has become. These changes are distinct yet interrelated.

 These include but do not exhaust such fundamental realignments such as; the limits of capital’s totalization, processes of de-ruralization thru economic expansionism have proven just how totalizing neoliberalism has become.

The vast numbers of people dwelling in the slums has made a system which organizes the direct dispossession of entire populations explicit and increasingly visible, the crises at home and aborad in the Eurozone have rendered impotent the abilities of Nation-States or Supranational entities to control the many headed hyrda of an economic system churning, spiraling and oscillating according to its own laws, like the sorceror who can no longer control the spells he has cast. And in the final analysis:

[P]opular forces worldwide have moved quicker than anyone could imagine from the defensive to the offensive. The initiative clearly passed this year, 2011, from the transnational elite to popular forces from below. 

The entire terrain of global politics has reached a point of Manichean extremes, yet each of these decisive moments occurs within seemingly hybrid, zones of indifference. New, increasingly dynamic and undeniable publics are emerging, converging and coalescing. True, they may not be as articulate those in ’68 or ’89 in terms of theoretical or hermeneutic frames for interpreting their resistance. Yet, one thing has become clear. People would now rather opt for an alternative, no matter how uncertain, ineffable and enigmatic it remains, then re-weld the links of enchainment to the status quo. 
Dean herself puts it best at the penultimate point of the post: 

Now all this has changed. The global revolt underway has shifted the whole political landscape and the terms of the discourse. Global elites are confused, reactive, and sinking into the quagmire of their own making. It is noteworthy that those struggling around the world have been shown a strong sense of solidarity and are in communications across whole continents. Just as the Egyptian uprising inspired the US Occupy movement, the latter has been an inspiration for a new round of mass struggle in Egypt. What remains is to extend transnational coordination and move towards transnationally-coordinated programmes. On the other hand, the “empire of global capital” is definitely not a “paper tiger”. As global elites regroup and assess the new conjuncture and the threat of mass global revolution, they will – and have already begun to – organise coordinated mass repression, new wars and interventions, and mechanisms and projects of co-optation in their efforts to restore hegemony.

Prosthetically, Poetically, Post-Humanly – Supplementing the End of History

prosthesis

On the University of Chicago’s Theories of Media online glossary Sarah Coffey offers an interesting genealogical mapping of the concept of prosthesis. The glossary and Coffey’s essay itself performs the concept itself.

Combining the Latin pro (forward) with thesis (stressed syllable), prosthetics denotes addition or extension. The OED defines “prosthetics” in its plural form as “the branch of surgery concerned with the replacement of defective or absent parts of the body by artificial substitutes.” “Prosthetic” derives from the word “prosthesis,” which can refer to the addition of a syllable or letter at the beginning of a word, or to surgical prosthesis. The shift from the literal connotation of grammatical prosthesis to the figurative connotation of surgical prosthetics took place in the 16th century, when “prosthesis” was adopted by medical terminology to denote the substitution of an artificial body part for missing limbs or teeth (Jain 32). This article will examine prosthetics in reference to both the actual extension of the body by artificial means, and the virtual extension of the body by various forms of media.

Media theory examines the double meaning of prosthetics, as simultaneously supplementing a deficiency and signaling deficiency in the object to which it is supplied. In Marshall McLuhan‘s seminal text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he uses the concept of prosthesis to explain media’s function as “any extension of ourselves” (7). Stressing the physicality of media extensions, McLuhan describes the wheel as an extension of the foot, clothing as an extension of the skin, and electric technology as an extension of the central nervous system. Yet as media extends, it also amputates. Although electric technology extends the central nervous system, “such amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or blocking of perception” (McLuhan 43). Thus McLuhan asserts that a process he terms “autoamputation” accompanies any extension of media.

Prosthesis is adoing, a making, and a placing of the supplement. The addition to bodiesincludes something previously existing outside itself. Prosthesis ruptures therelations between man’s tripartite divisions, psyche, soma and soul. Yet inmodern times, it has become not simply an addition but a replacement.Prosthesis begins to work by removing the previously deviant aspects of man’sexistence. A reconstitution of ability inaugurated in the shadow of man’suncanny wounded self. 
 
Does posthistorical man create the edifices like birdsbuild nests, as Kojeve posits? Out of the question itself emerges thedefinitive characteristic of man, defined not in terms of attributes but animperative, to know thyself through experimental investigation. Whereasdisability, disease and madness previously were seen as a source of disclosingtruths hitherto unknown to average man, in modernity, disability is exhausted ofits vital force “by way of investment in believing that disability makes aperson available for excessive experiment” (Snyder & Mitchell, 37). Man’s“speculation parading as empiricism” is most intense and uncertain at thelimits of the anomalous body. “cultures thrive on solving the riddle ofdisability’s rhyme and reason” (25). 
In this sense Agamben’s work offers apromising site for investigating the disabled body. Politics in modern timeshas been depoliticized, emptied of its life force, by reducing the question ofpolitics, history and ethics to a preordained reaction, not response, to theinjunction to end suffering, cure the pathology, or fulfill the abstractcontainers of ‘human’ rights. The inability to reconcile the disabled body withthe defining characteristics of man’s constitution performs an “interruptive labor” (53). The internal divisions of man are exposed as the conditions ofpossibility for any limit to be drawn between the human and non-human, as thefuel for the anthropological machine’s fire.
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