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May 20, 2012
photo - mw
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Five Works of Theory You Should Consider Reading
Christopher Higgs
HTMLGIANT
It always surprises me when creative people admit they don’t enjoy reading theory. Aside from the bountiful inspiration of ideas it provides, certain theoretical works can also inspire formal techniques. For proof, check out E.M. Cioran’s approach to the philosophical prose poem in something like The Temptation to Exist or A Short History of Decay. Or check out Luce Irigaray’s lyricism in This Sex Which Is Not One. Tons of other examples abound, from Baudrillard’s fragments to Benjamin’s montages, Blanchot’s récits to Bataille’s grotesques.
Part of the aversion to theory, as far as I can tell, comes from the mistaken assumption that the genre we call theory should be read differently than the genres we call fiction or poetry, because it’s “critical” rather than “creative.” On the contrary, I think it’s quite productive to read theory as if it were poetry or fiction, which is to say as if its primary function was to affect rather than educate.
I recognize that my position is contentious. I’ve taken heat in the past for advising people to suspend their desire for comprehension while reading theory. For reasons unknown, some readers still think understanding a text is important. I’m not one of those people. I read theory and fiction and poetry to experience, to consider, to become other, to shift, to mutate, to change. I most certainly do not read those things to understand them.
What follows are five works that lend themselves to a reading strategy conducive to works of fiction or poetry. Granted, between poetry and fiction a demarcation is said to exist, and granted some read the one different than the other, and granted different styles within different genres require different heuristics, I think readers would benefit from considering the following works as “creative” rather than merely “critical.”
...(more)
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"Tree for Goat in the Snow"
Nathaniel Otting
Big Tree Poem Feature
15th Anniversary of Big Bridge
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Ray DiPalma - 66 new recordings on PennSound
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Against the Infantilization of the Natural History Museum
Justin Erik Halldór Smith
(....)
The project of exhaustively collecting and describing the basic kinds of large animal, and analyzing and displaying these animals' bodily parts and systems, is a project that gained momentum in the late Renaissance and that was largely completed by the end of the 19th century. Like, say, realist painting in the Western tradition, it is a project that has a bounded history (indeed the two histories fairly closely overlap one another). This means that an alpaca intestine displayed in formaldehyde is a sample of a part of a South American camelid; but it is also an artefact of a modern European knowledge project. In this respect a proper natural history museum, that is to say an unreconstructed adult natural history museum, is really two museums at once: it is a museum of nature, but also a museum of the history of a very singular attempt to know nature quite literally inside-out....(more)
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Morning
after rain
Albert-Edouard Drains
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Making the Internet Safe for Anarchy
Dmitry Orlov
Thanks to vastly increased computational power, the emphasis is now shifting from enforcing the law to flagging as aberrant any sort of behavior that the system does not quite understand. That is, it is not looking for violations of specific laws, but for unusual patterns.
May 19, 2012
 Houston, Texas
John Vachon
May 1943
What the Wood Remembers
Tom Clark
What words would the wood remember, if the wood could remember words? Would the wood remember what was said in this old house of words forever lost, where I wanted to live, in the immaterial wood of the mind, when immobilized, remembering the picture without having it before me, but recalling it to the mind's eye, as a kind of meditation, lying on the metal table, under the bright light, in the passage over the bridge between worlds, the ruinous world to come and the world already ruined and left behind, those fossil worlds, those petrified woods, those stone worlds made of dead wood and dried blood and the ruins of historical time -- these pitiful reminders of mind, these unintelligible echoes of words, these woods of inarticulate echoes, in which everything is heard twice, and then again heard, for a third time?...(more)
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Puddle
Roberto Boccaccino
via
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ISSUE ONE « Epicentre Magazine
Two Poems by Rupert M. Loydell
Salvage
I am unriddling the world.
My secret history is on the shelf,
neither secret nor much of
a history, just a line of books
I brought into being, some words
and pictures in print. Do not
assume it is true, that this
ever happened, let alone
that I meant what I said.
Grey skies followed me here;
cold memory. I am with name,
am not myself today. We used
to sing on long car journeys
but now it is headphones
and music in the back seat,
child songs and debris,
wind sweeping the way ahead,
clearing out the future.
(....)
Sometimes I make myself invisible
and watch the shadows grow,
crawl after you into memories
of boats and beaches, dusk
across the fields, and the skies
in 1982. These are dying thoughts
you don’t deserve, ruins of a life
I hoped to hear the morning say;
but all I got was freezing rain,
low drones in the distance and
recycled images like this.
We all know that you have been
and gone, all know this weather
is normal for November and that
someone stole the stars and moon.
I have been tongue wrestling
with myself and lost, am
more fragile than I thought.
(....) ...(more)
Rupert M Loydell - Shearsman Books
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Fisherman
1899
Albert-Edouard Drains
(1855-1925)
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Nyhedsavisen: Public Interfaces, No. 1 (2011)
Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox, Jacob Lund (eds.)
Noise at the Interface [pdf]
Andrew Prior
The notion of noise occupies a contested territory, in which it is framed as pollution and detritus even as it makes its opposite a possibility. Noise is always defined in opposition to something else, even if this ‘other’ is not quite clear. I am interested in exploring noise in the context of ‘the interface’ and draw historically on information theory which defines noise in opposition to signal.
(....)
... noise is fundamental to the concept of Information Theory and predetermining an appropriate spectrum of possibilities to be communicated (through resolution bandwidth, and encoding), a necessary stage in defining what is and isn’t noise. Despite enormous strides forward in technology since Information Theory was at the ‘cutting edge’, its legacy is one of literally millions of interfaces based on its reductive logic. At this scale, the question of what is noise and what is signal, what is an appropriate spectrum of possibilities to be communicated, and how signal and noise is differentiated is thrown into stark relief, drastically altering our experience of technology, culture and biopolitics.
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Roberto Boccaccino
May 17, 2012
Photogram
Susan Bee
(1978)
E P C digital library
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Speculative Realism, the Commons, and Politics
Larval Subjects
(....)
... I just don’t think that we can give a “one size fits all” account of the ethical and political because there isn’t a set of eternal and unchanging problems belonging to the world. Rather, as entities enter into new relations with one another, new problems are generated and new values and norms are called for. Instead of asking “what is the ethics and politics prescribed by onticology?”, we should instead ask “what are the problems and what values, what norms, do they generate?” At this point, no doubt, I’m sure that others will cry “but that’s relativism! that gives us no plan of action!” I wish I had a better response to this charge. All I can say is that first, yes, I hold that systems of value and norms are relative to problems. Having learned my lessons well from Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault, it’s impossible for me to see how those things that become “issues” at any given point in history aren’t the result of problems specific to the problems that animate those circumstances. Second, charges of relativism and historicism are always accompanied by charges that one must therefore advocate Aztec sacrifice, the rightness of the Nazis had they won, etc., etc. Yet while I can readily see how problems can generate norms and values that compel people to act and refuse certain disgusting and reprehensible solutions, I’ve never seen a value or a norm prevent racist and sexist oppression, murder, the holocaust, or mass sacrifice. The value of a value and a norm lies in motivating people to act to assemble things differently, not in preventing atrocities. Finally, third, while there are no eternal and unchanging norms because norms are always a response to problems, it doesn’t follow from this that we can’t evaluate solutions and collectives and distinguish those collectives that are better and worse than others. Certainly pathological collectives that are characterized by profound instability and tendencies towards self-destruction are worse than collectives that do not share these characteristics. An ethics of problems and solutions thus calls us to evaluate the features of systems or assemblages that tend towards self-destruction and those that do not. Maybe I’m sneaking a universal, transcendent, and eternal value in through the back door here. I don’t know....(more)
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Jeremy Waldron delivers the inaugral Chichele Lecture
(....)
... the chair whose sixth occupancy we are inaugurating this afternoon is not devoted to political science; it is devoted to social and political theory. But with regard to the theory of politics, there are similar choices to be made. Where should we direct our philosophical energies? Should we focus on institutions? Or should we focus on the virtues—looking for example, to test Machiavelli’s claim that politics demands a set of virtues quite different from those extolled in the Christian tradition,or the claim of some political theorists that neither a democracy nor a republic can survive without the prevalence of certain virtues of self-restraint among the politically active section of the population.
Is that correct? Or is there a version of the Hume/Madison thesis for subjects as well as their rulers? Can we so design our institutions in a modern democracy that a democratic constitution can survive the corruption of the people, their obsession with material wealth, and the revealed unwillingness to sacrifice anything for their country? So, which is it? —structures or character? institutions or virtue?...(more)
via Jim Johnson
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La Piscine
Sarah Moon
1999
lens culture
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Interface: A Forum for and about Social Movements
volume 4 issue 1. The season of revolution: the Arab Spring and European mobilizations
May 16, 2012
Old Mask VI
2006
John Stezaker
Out Of Focus:
Photography
Saatchi Gallery
via
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Under the Gaze of Theory
Boris Groys
(....)... theory starts to see the figure of the meditating philosopher and its own position in the world from a perspective of, as it were, a normal, profane, external gaze. Theory sees the living body of the philosopher through aspects that are not available to direct vision. This is something that the philosopher, like any other subject, necessarily overlooks: we cannot see our own body, its positions in the world and the material processes that take place inside and outside it (physical and chemical, but also economical, biopolitical, sexual, and so on). This means that we cannot truly practice self-reflection in the spirit of the philosophical dictum, “know yourself.” And what is even more important: we cannot have an inner experience of the limitations of our temporal and spatial existence. We are not present at our birth—and we will be not present at our death. That is why all the philosophers who practiced self-reflection came to the conclusion that the spirit, the soul, and reason are immortal. Indeed, in analyzing my own thinking process, I can never find any evidence of its finitude. To discover the limitations of my existence in space and time I need the gaze of the Other. I read my death in the eyes of Others. That is why Lacan says that the eye of the Other is always an evil eye, and Sartre says that “Hell is other people.” Only through the profane gaze of Others may I discover that I do not only think and feel—but also was born, live, and will die....(more)
e-flux journal issue 35
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Oguinquit, Maine
1919
Niles Spencer
b. May 18, 1893
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What Kind of Times Are These
Adrienne Rich
(May 16, 1929 - March 27, 2012)
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
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View of the Studio
Socrates & Adam and Eve
c. 1922
Brancusi: The Photographs
Bruce Silverstein Gallery
via
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Enculturation 11
Master Hands, A Video Mashup Round Table
(....)
Master Hands is a 1936 film sponsored by the Chevrolet Motor Company that shows the inner workings of a Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan. It is available for download at the Internet Archive, and it offers rich material for mashups and remixes. Richard had been considering a project involving Master Hands for some time, and when he shared his mashup of the film with Jim in May it triggered a discussion between the two of us about how such a work might be published. Richard was not interested in writing an essay to accompany his video project – he wanted the video to stand on its own. Jim suggested that the best way to engage with such work was to create another mashup, and we began discussing a round table format in which other scholars would create their own mashups using the same source footage and respondents would discuss the mashups.
During the summer, we invited four other scholars to create their own mashups of Master Hands. Richard, bonnie kyburz, Jeff Rice, Jody Shipka, and Anthony Stagliano were presented with four constraints. Mashup artists had to use footage from Master Hands, could not provide a companion text, had to create a mashup that was no longer than ten minutes, and were not permitted to see anyone else’s work until all five were completed. We also invited five others to act as respondents. Those respondents are Will Burdette, Bump Halbritter, Billie Hara, Jentery Sayers, and Geof Sirc, and they will spend the next week discussing the mashups. At the end of the week, the conversation will be closed and the comments will remain as part of this publication.
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Politics of Hate in the USA, Part III:
Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret Societies
John Miller
e-flux
Part 1 and 2
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The myth that Canary Wharf did east London any good
There are few places so utterly implicated in our discontents as this symbol of the ludicrousness of 'trickle-down' economics
Owen Hatherley
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