Logical Regression

Moved to Wordpress

2010-07-03T11:55:00.000-07:00

Please note that this blog is now here: http://logicalregression.wordpress.com/ .

There will be no new posts on this blogger blog. Please update all bookmarks, all posts on this blog are now on http://logicalregression.wordpress.com/, and many more besides!

Logical Regression at Wordpress

2010-06-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

Reminder that Logical Regression is now here: http://logicalregression.wordpress.com/ .

All old posts are featured at the new site.

counter productive; made on xtranormal.com

2010-05-15T06:19:00.001-07:00

It's pretty basic, but the medium has potential. You just write in what you want to the characters to say, and you can change expressions and camera angles too. Remember my blog is usually held here now: http://logicalregression.wordpress.com/.

Moving blog to a new address.

2010-04-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, it's been a couple years, and this blog has outgrown its current space.

Please, please update your bookmarks and links to this:

http://logicalregression.wordpress.com/

And tell anyone/everyone.

The current blog will continue to exist but will not be updated.

ALL OLD POSTS ARE AVAILABLE ON THE NEW BLOG.

Move to Wordpress - Soon

2010-04-15T02:19:00.000-07:00

Lookout for a move to wordpress in the coming months. That'll give the opportunity for more people to work on the site, and for the inclusion of more tabs, allowing for more complete a promotion of an aesthetic/art oriented consideration of (challenge to...) Scientism, Object Oriented Philosphy and Ontology, Nihilism, Neurophilosphy, and so on.

In the meantime expect posts to go missing and be generally tampered with during the move.

More details soon...

Exclusive Graham Harman article on aesthetics at indieoma.

2010-04-11T08:15:00.000-07:00

>>>A Larger Sense of Beauty: by Graham Harman <<<

exclusively on indieoma.com

Dialogue with Paul Sakoilsky on art as object, and on the re-emergence of the subject.

2010-04-11T08:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.indieoma.com/commentaries/open-ideas-object-culture-art-as-viral-commodity

coinciding with:

Object Culture: Art as Viral Commodity

1-3 Rivington Street • London EC2 Opens Thursday 15th April 2010 • 6.30pm onwards

RED GALLERY is a pop up housed in the old E-Learning School buildings on EC2’s Rivington Street. As part of Hackney
Council’s Shoreditch Regeneration Scheme, the space has seen much recent publicity, and will soon be demolished,
making way for an Art’otel, courtesy of architects Squire and Partners.

Zizek exposed in Rome - how I Read Marx, how I Read Lacan: Come Leggo Marx, Come Leggo Lacan. Comments on the talk. March 27th.

2010-04-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

Comments on Zizek's talk at the 'Libri Come...' event held on March 27th at the Rome auditorium.

I'd say Zizek is an important thinker, but I'm not sure that his importance has much to do with what he actually thinks, or if what he actually thinks is stable enough from one utterance to the next for it to be possible to speak of, and judge, any kind of system. Nonetheless Zizek is important, as a populariser of philosophy and as a persistent champion of the need for a better, fairer world. He is perhaps the most vocal, and prolific - in terms of both published works and talks - contemporary critic of the excesses of Capitalism the world over. Naturally then, one wouldn't want to crtiticise him out of hand. However, Zizek has a certain mode of delivery which ought to be questioned, and by this mode, I mean both the manner in which talks are delivered vocally and the way in which his message is carried in terms of argument structure.

Firstly, Zizek is not someone very easy to disagree with. One gets the impresssion that you'd be steam-rollered by this goliath if you dared cross him - quick witted and fast talking as he is. Further, it is not easy to disagree with him as it's so hard to pin him down. Zizek employs humour and irony, together with doubtlessly valid observations delivered at such speeds, and in such a circling manner, as to make it very difficult to isolate anything for even an instance so that it might be disagreed with in context. This goes for his texts as well as for his talks.

One further gets the impression that Zizek wouldn't very well listen even if you did prove yourself to have a valid point. His committed Leftism seems somehow to weigh on him emotionally. Between Zizek and Badiou a kind of two headed monster is presented to anyone wishing to point out the fallacy in Leftist methodology (both in practice, and theoretically). The symbolism and terminology of the Left must inhere because it must, is pretty much the nonsensical refrain echoing from their quarter. It appears, problematically, that socialism as a term is synonymous with social justice and if our two most prominent thinkers can't bypass that little schema, the rest of us are going to find it hard to overcome the Left-Right dyad, which I would argue is hopelessly inadequate to founding change both in light of what society is now, and in light of historical evidence.

Another thing about Zizek's mode of delivery is a tendency for it to take so many ironic turns that one gets blinded into an accepting the broad thrust if what is being said, however daft the detail is. As the audience was told in Italy, the fear in Europe of the muslim burkha was not a fear over something being hidden from us. Not a fear of the masking of identities at all, but the fear of the human face unmasked. Referring to the story of Salome dancing for King Herod (from Strauss' Salome), in which Herod implores Salome to take her layers of clothing off one by one, continuing to implore her to take her layers off even when she has got down to bare flesh, Zizek argues that it is the bare flesh - the human unmasked, as mortal material matter - which terrifies the cultural European when faced with the muslim burkha: the blank face with only eyes visible reflecting the blank facade of a face stripped of its facade – its semblance of humanity.

Zizek tied this in with his central message for the lecture as he inverted Dostoyevsky's message, 'if there is no god then everything is permitted' to become Lacan's 'If there is no God then everything is prohibited'!

Pointing to the hypocrisy of the church, to great approval from the audience, Zizek said, 'If you want to do bad, please don't become an Atheist... you need religion.'

The atheist Liberal hedonist becomes entangled in self imposed injunctions, whilst the adherent of instituional religion or communism can behave abominabally as the instrument of insitutional amorality.

The upshot is that the Liberal is frightened of our base animality, whereas the Church, to take one example, embraces it, or, at the least, permits of it.

Zizek's response? Looking to the New Testament, a constant point of reference in his works, he argues that Christianity, as the religion in which God has died (on the cross) should be taken for its word: 'If there is a God we need one tha doesn't exist and knows he doesn't exist'. In other words, man need be confident to stand alone, in the knowedge that 'God trusts us'. Only is so doing would it be possible to do the right thing both in spite of God and because of God (who is, in fact, in us).

This is all very well, but it is kind of deceitful too. One can easily find themselves nodding their head to the beat of Zizek's rapid fire delivery. Yet do really fear the Burkha as it presents 'no mask'? Do we really fear it at all? Those who do fear it perhaps fear it for what it presents otherwise, rather than what it in itself hides or shows... a threat to the sometimes sane values of the West*, values which Zizek strongly supports, arguing that the tolerance of Europe should be lauded, albeit in conjunction ith the kind of complex social system which might be able to sustain a freedom which is genuinely free (i.e. which neither descends into self denial or to institutional abuse of freedom). This latter point is a nutshell Zizek's motive for backing communism, as summed up in this talk.

I think we have to be selective when taking on board Zizek to filter out incongruous elements that evade careful scurtiny by the man himself. Afterall, he is doubtlessly the most prolific theorist writing today. It follows that a percentage of what he says may be unsound. Even so, he may make more (quantitatively) sound statements year on year than many other thinkers (an almost capitalist philospy of production). There is a responisibility that must be born by the reader to sift through his work, just as the consumer of media culture has a responsibility to dismiss false statements and misleading advertising.

Of Zizek's unsound statements the most alarming was one wedged about two thirds into his talk, with no seeming relation to its other parts, but also with no sensible basis in fact. 'Poets should be derpived of their natural rights to innocence', Zizek proclaimed, pointing out that behind every tyrant stands a poet. This last point is so astounding as to come across perhaps as a provocation, for would it not be more accurate to say that behind every tyrant stands a philosopher? Or a prophet. Or a text on communism, either taken as gospel, or dismissed as worthy of muderous contempt. In actual fact, Zizek is directly dimissive of the idea that we should posit art in opposition to Science (as a cipher for the worst excesses of rationalism).

Taken against Adorno's proclamation that art must continue in that its existence is not a surrender to cynicism the statment is sll the more suprising, for it suggests that the only way out of of social imbalance is via an atheistic State controlled and acultural management of the moral lives of the individual.Whereas, for me, art seemed the only thing left that might challenge precisely that kind of system – which exists - and imbue the subject with a sense of 'self' worth valuing'.

Now, I'll have to wait for the forthcoming book for which this talk was a promotion, but in the meantime I cannot shake the sense that Zizek is a very important thinker... an ideas machine, even... to whom seldom a sensible workable sequence of thoughts occurs.

* i.e., the obvious reason, which barely needs appropriating, even if it is representative of fearful bigotry in some cases. Not in all cases... there is an element of Islam which Europe, being, on the whole, not Islamic, feels reason to resist. However so long as non-muslims are not implored to wear the burkha, and so long as muslims refusing to wear it can find protection under Western laws (which surely they can, so far as the law is an adequate recourse for anyone wishing to protect their freedoms) I can't see a problem.

C'e' Bisogno di Sinistra: There is a Need for the Left. Italiano/Inglese

2010-04-04T12:21:00.000-07:00

Versione Italiana. English below.

‘C’è bisogno di Sinistra!’ si legge sul manifesto. Per quanto in passato io abbia inveito contro certi sentimenti (c’è bisogno di cambiamenti sociali ma la retorica della “Sinistra” è da tempo logora, anche se i suoi fini restano assolutamente validi) la Sinistra sembra in qualche modo particolarmente adatta all’Italia.

Non so se questo dipenda dal fatto che in qualche maniera lo spettro del Fascismo incombe ancora o perché i media mantengono una forte presa su questo Paese, ma è proprio vero che i parametri politici variano da un paese all’altro.

Per esempio, l’estrema sinistra nel Regno Unito è una forza svuotata di ogni energia mentre in Italia ha raccolto un numero significativo di voti. Lo stesso Presidente (Napolitano) era un membro del partito comunista fino al suo scioglimento e, successivamente, ha giocato un ruolo importante nel partito in cui il PCI si è trasformato, il Partito Democratico della Sinistra.

Probabilmente il fatto che qui il Presidente appartenga in genere a un partito opposto a quello del governo in carica fa sì che l’Italia sia per molti versi meno ‘capitalista’ rispetto al Regno Unito.

Ma questo è quanto Berlusconi sta cercando di cambiare, essenzialmente a suo vantaggio.

In Italia si discute della privatizzazione dell’acqua, avvenuta in Gran Bretagna nel 1989. E qui, forse, la Sinistra ha un suo ruolo. Fosse anche solo per un’ultima battaglia.

Ad ogni modo la mia visione politica è senza dubbio pesantemente influenzata dal fatto di essere inglese… e non sono sicuro che le idee politiche di chi, come me, ha trascorso i suoi primi 29 anni in un paese, si possano mai applicare a quelle di un’altra nazione.

Basti dire che i metodi per introdurre un cambiamento devono essere impiegati in maniera pragmatica. Mi riferisco alla necessità di allontanarsi dalla retorica della Sinistra in Italia e al bisogno di avere volti nuovi… almeno nel Regno Unito e negli USA sosterrei questo.

E l’Italia, a essere obiettivi, non è certo la promotrice di una spinta per un cambiamento mondiale.

Localmente la Sinistra potrebbe essere una cosa positiva da invocare, ma nel mondo le cose sono andate oltre.

Tradotto da Adriana Panza

English

'There is a need for the Left!' Says the poster. Whilst I have railed against such sentiments (i.e. there is a need for social change, but the rhetoric of the 'Left' is long worn out, even if the intended ends are completely sound) the Left seems somehow more fitting in Italy. I'm not that sure if that is because the spectre of Fascism somehow looms, or because the hold that the media here has is so strong, but it's very true that political parameters differ from one country to the next. For example, the far Left are just a spent force in the UK, whereas they pick up significant votes in Italy. The President himself (Napolitano) was a member of the communist party up until its dissolution, he then played a strong part in the party it became - the Democratic Party of the Left. It's because, perhaps, that a President here is generally opposed to the direction of the ruling party that things are in many ways less 'capitalised' than in the UK. Though that is what Berlusconi seeks to change, primarily for his own benefit.

In Italy they argue about the privatisation of Water, something which happened in the UK in 1989. So perhaps there is a role for the Left there (i,e, 'here' !). If only a last stand.

Anyhow, there's no doubt my politics is heavily coloured by my being English... and I'm not sure your politics can ever really become the politics of another nation if, like me, you spent your first 29 years in one country. Suffice to say, methods for bringing about change need be deployed pragmatically. Talk about a need to move away from Leftist rhetoric in Italy and people switch off... in the UK and US, however, I'd stand by that. And Italy, lets be fair, is not leading the thrust towards worldwide change. Locally, the Left might be a good thing to invoke, but worldwide things have moved on.

American Apparel 'Rummage' Sale: 'riot' in Brick Lane

2010-04-03T07:07:00.000-07:00

What is astounding about the American Apparel Rummage riot, in which too many people desended upon a Brick Lane warehouse where the popular clothes brand American Apparel were trying to host the latest of several worldwide sale events, is that it really isn't that astounding if one understands the London, and particularly the small area around Brick Lane, Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, in these recession hit times.

The sale turned into a small scale riot (footage can be found on youtube) peopled by screaming fashionistas, bored artsists, off shift dj's and local youth's. Looking at video footage, it seems that what London manages in multicultural diversity (people of every race are seen to behave equally brattishly here) it loses the sheer glibness of its values. American Apparel fashion items are not essential products one needs in order to live, yet the recession, and the sense that such items are out of reach for the average wage earner (or non-earner) most of the time, together with the value system held by many young people (arguably forced on them by the media) who live in London, is accountable for the chaos caused by this event. Relative to the perceived needs of the individual there was a genuine motive for the aggression unleashed at the start of the sale yesterday. This is the equivalent of Londoners chasing a UN food truck, and this is how odd things have become. Why did the governments bail out the banks? Because if they hadn't these scenes would be magnified several hundred times over, for the want of genuine essentials.

Frightening, when you think of it.

Nina Power on Indieoma

2010-03-20T00:46:00.000-07:00

Nina Power joins Mark Fisher for an edition on 'Free Education' at Indieoma.com:

http://www.indieoma.com/commentaries/mike-watson-freed-u-cation

Dialogue with Mark Fisher up at Indieoma.com

2010-03-18T02:21:00.000-07:00

Mark Fisher and Mike Watson: Dialogue on Free Education, Capitalism, and its Alternatives

http://www.indieoma.com/commentaries/open-ideas-mark-fisher-and-mike-watson-dialogue-on-free-education-capitalism-and-its-alternatives

Self Help tips for the Struggling Classes

2010-02-06T04:51:00.000-08:00

Written in response to Reid Kane's piece, 'Class, Struggle' which starts like this:

'Class struggle is not, first and foremost, the struggle between classes, social classes, already constituted as such. Struggle is the ground of such social classes, be they working and owning classes or any other. It is this struggle which, situated within the organization of human activity as a whole (and the problematicity of this formulation does not for a moment escape me), comes before and allows for the genesis of social relations in which distinct classes take shape.'

But does this mean (and I refer by extension to the whole of Reid's piece, which can be read via the above link), or could it mean, that if the working class stopped struggling, they would stop being working class? Or, rather, without struggle, there would be no class? And how would that happen?

For if death is capital, as Reid argues, would a 'dead' life characterised by its assimilation to capital best evade that death by simply not playing along - i.e. not 'working', or not 'struggling'? Here I don't refer to the 'playing dead' of Adorno's mimesis, but simply a withdrawal from 'struggle'. A refusal to get upset. A radical 'calm'.

It almost gets a bit 'self help book-ish'. But if you bear with me, I don't think that need be a bad thing. i.e. Just as when someone says, 'I am happy, I am happy, I am happy', they may feel happier as a result, if the working class subject were to say, 'I am free' (from struggle), would they not then be more 'free' on some level?

Of course, this is a gross over simplification... the process would have to be applied from the bottom up if it were to change society... but, then, that process can't happen until the subject is 'freed' first, because there would be little point changing the infratructure of society, just for it to whir on mechanistically as some kind of 'death robot' for the fact that its principal component (the 'subject' or mass of subjects) is still struggling, as a basis for its existence.

The first step towards a wider societal freedom has to be subjective freedom, and if class is 'struggle', as Reid argues, then class stratification (which keeps the subject in place) has to be broken by the subject which struggles, refusing to struggle. They must simply cease to struggle. Or not struggle in the first place. This does not mean that the subject should capitulate to whatever it is struggling against, but simply that the only way to stop struggling is to stop struggling.

I find Reid's talk of struggle a bit disconcerting. It comes across as some kind of masochism. And he may be right that there is an element of the working class that is perpetuated by 'struggle', but the seeming identification of this as 'positive' seems a little over romantic:

'Everything existing struggles in doing so, and often, in order to do so as well; although, it is not unheard of that, in the struggle to cease existing, one only persists all the longer. This latter struggle is that of the Proletariat.'

Yet, one might 'struggle' to unlock a door for what seems like hours, then stop for a minute, exasperated, hands shaking with pain after fitfully forcing the key dozens of times, before trying just once more, ever so gently. The door finally opens. The stubborn will say that the time spent forcing the door softened up the lock for its final assault. Only the wise will admit their foolishness; all the key ever needed was a gentle turn. Maybe this will be the history of the 'struggle of the proletariat', and how many lives would have been wasted (not necessarily 'killed', but often just 'wasted' struggling) before we try applying a little less 'struggle'?

That is not to say that the worst excesses of Captialism will give way with a gentle nudge, but, rather, to say that, if, as Reid says, class is sustained by struggle, then perhaps we might better see a way to a healing of class rifts (so far as they exist; I actually think that class terminology is distinctly shakey, speaking as a PhD student who grew up on a council estate) if we just stopped the self perpetuating struggle, and opened our eyes. I say this partly as so many people do so clearly struggle as a means of sustaining their persona, regardless of what income bracket they are in. Perhaps social stratification is cemented by different groups of individuals struggling to define themselves as separate from each other. From the grimace of the Prime Minister, to the grimace of the diassaffected youth, social constipation perpetuates itself.

In respect of my aversion to Reid's 'struggle' I'd like to introduce a notion that came out of an e-mail exchange with artist Andrew Cooper. In the said exchange, Andrew helpfully explained to me the logic in the Left holding on to Leftist terminology, which is something I have challenged recently, not least as the Left, and terms associated with it, are so unpopular with the public which it aims to appeal to. Andrew explained that Badiou argues that the working class need to own something... they are entitled to own a part of history, and this part is/should be, for Badiou, a revolutionary Leftist history. He has a point (Andrew/Badiou), but I queried whether it was sensible to follow the history of Lenin, the Jacobins, Che Guevara, 1968, etc? Would Gandhi not make a better model? Or the Left plus Gandhi?*

I say this knowing the complexity of Gandhi's story, and I'd like to study it a lot more before committing myself even to elements. But there are certainly parts of his strategy which would be useful to the fair minded socially concerned person today... i.e. 'be the change you want to see' - I am not struggling.

Of course, the pacifism and humble dedication espoused by Gandhi are other aspects which could be taken up by those wishing to see a positive change in society today. One feels the quick fix hedomisn of the extreme Left - 'Warehouse Raves and Revolutions' - which tallies with our crass times, could benefit from looking outside its usual nexus of explosive influences.

* people might now point out that Gandhi was opposed to Imperialism, a Capitalist product, and is therefore a Leftist figure, but I feel he differed from the usually cited Leftist figures significantly, and in any case, Gandhi's anti-Imperialism did not spawn an empire (although that is not to belittle the justifiable woes suffered by many people on the Indian sub-continent as a result of the territorial carve-up following independence), whereas the revolutionary Leftist call has always intended upon expansion, naturally.

Mark Fisher's 'Capitalist Realism': a Sober 21st Century Account

2010-02-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.indieoma.com/commentaries/open-ideas-mark-fisher-s-capitalist-realism-a-sober-21st-century-account

See the above link for my review-article on Mark Fisher's 'Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?'

Open Ideas Project. Graham Harman Interview. Nick Srnicek Speaks. Paul Sakoilsky looks at objects in his studio.

2010-01-27T13:32:00.000-08:00

Some interesting articles up at indieoma.com, including an interview from Graham
Harman, in which he talks openly about philosophizing today, and about his object-oriented stance.

There are some great moments, including the following:

Q4: Your philosophy is ‘object-oriented’. That is to say that you consider the object to be as important as the (human) subject. Many people think this is dangerous, as activity in the blogosphere testifies. I think the issue here is that if the subject is considered as a mere object amongst others, people feel that humans might find it easier to justify abuse of other humans. What do you say to that?

GH: Freud always claimed that psychoanalysis was the third affront to human dignity in modern times. Copernicus moved the earth out of the center of the universe. Darwin made us no more special than animals, plants, and fungi. And Freud made conscious thought derivative of less palatable underground currents in the psyche. As a fourth supposed affront to the dignity of humans, let’s add the notion to which you just referred: that the human is not metaphysically special either, so that my perception of fire is no different in kind from the relation of cotton and fire among themselves. Cognitive and causal relations all end up on the same footing. And it does seem to be a bit of a traumatic claim for people, judging by how upset they have become about it (I wasn’t expecting this to happen).

Nick Srnicek introduces Speculative Realism, giving us a clear a indication of what is at stake as debates unfold within the original SR line up of Brassier ,Hamilton-Grant, Harman and Meillassoux.

Paul Sakoilsky writes about three objects randomly chosen from his studio, giving a good indication of where an object based interpretation of the artwork might lead.

See: http://www.indieoma.com/commentaries/mike-watson-open-ideas-project

the campaign to arrest blair....

2010-01-27T12:27:00.001-08:00

http://www.arrestblair.org/

there is a reward, and the rules state that it is only payable if: The claimant provides proof that he or she is the person mentioned in the report(s).

this is straight up, but who's going to get close enough to spring it on him...?

Left-Right-Left-Right-Left..

2010-01-23T02:40:00.001-08:00

I have to say that in my criticism of the Left I haven't been nearly critical enough of Capitalism. But then, it seemed to go without saying. I mean, I was criticising the Left for its failure to adequately address the problems of Capitalism, and for its insistence on a binary Left/Right divide, this divide being inadequate to the complexity wrought by the collapse of the worldwide economy.

Obama's calls for curbs on US banks, today, draw attention to this issue again, and talk on the European side of the Atlantic centres around amazement at a Right wing administration doing what a Left wing administration in Europe daren't. Of course, as we have seen in blog discussions recently, Obama is often taken as a Leftist in the U.S - or at the least, a Left-leaning Democrat - which chalks up even more clearly the daftness of political binarism.

In any case I'd have to say that Capitalism is by definition bad as it implies a system that seeks capital above all else (and that has seriously negative ethical implications). On this note, there are few sensible politicians that characterise themselves as out and out Capitalists, preferring at least to add the prefix 'Global' or 'Free Market', but often just characterising themselves as 'Liberals' (forward thinking and adverse to State Control) or 'Conservatives' (cautious, and adverse to State control on the whole). But then we have other factors which come into play, which can have any political party employing policies traditionally associated with another.

This is partly why it seems so odd to cleave to the politics of the Left. Though I appreciate that the term 'Left' might be employed to signify certain values and a history traced to any one of a number of significant Leftist events of the past, which may hold positive value for the self proclaimed 'Leftist'. In this it is pretty clear that the new 'Brit-Pack' of thinkers, Mark Fisher, Owen Hatherley, Nina Power, et al. are variously committed to certain Leftist principles without being beholden 'lock, stock' to the Leftist cause. At the moment I'm finding Mark Fisher the most convincing (see here for my review-article of his 'Capitalist Realism...') - and the most questioning of traditional Leftist forms - of this crop, though I think Owen does an important service, placing architecture at the centre of social-political considerations.

In any case Capitalism = bad, provided there are no provisos on it, clearly. What I question however is whether the Left = good, when that Left will not work with advocates of the 'Right', who are rarely 'Capitalists' per se, but rather by default, often counting as the principle motive for not affiliating themselves with the 'Left' either an urge to preserve what is 'good' about existing institutions (though one wonders if there is anything good left of them following Thatcherism and Blairism) or an urge to reform where necessary (and this often entails reforms of a Leftist nature), both coupled with a disdain for State control. They do not count among their motives an urge to rinse the masses for every last drop of Capital they can gain from them, though this is an end result of the autonomous Capitalist machine which many Conservatives and Liberals agree would agree needs addressing.

New Labour seem to have coupled State control with undiluted Capitalism, and now they're about to take lessons from U.S. Democrats on Leftist policy making. Given that extraordinary situation, my disdain for Leftist rhetoric simply aims itself at its appearing completely out of touch with the times (nothing tallies with the old Left/Right boundaries anymore), rather than at calls for equality, community, etc, which really just sit in the political minds of most reasonable people as aspirations anyhow, without necessarily becoming a rallying cry.*

With that I think I might make the unfashionable move back to art critique next post.

*Though I co concede that these aspirations are far from being realised, and seem in some senses ever more distant. I just question to what extent 'assent' or 'dissent' towards the growing distance of these aims can be drawn along traditional 'party' lines. It may be that fair minded people need find allies everywhere if there is to be any hope of slowing the autonomus machine that Capital clearly has become, before it spawns too many of its own 'machines', its own allies, and makes, for as long as we have it, the subjective freedom of the mind the only freedom we have (that being my principle motive for defending the notion of the 'subject' against object-oriented philosophy). We really are approaching a politics of the subject vs. the object if we cannot quickly salvage a democratic politics whereby subjects interact together for the good of the community.

indieoma promo

2010-01-11T06:43:00.001-08:00

See below a promo animation for another web project I am working on - indieoma.com.

Indieoma takes its name from the Spanish word for language - 'idioma' + indie (independence) - hence 'the language of independence' ...

The site will soon be hosting a regular theory element - expanding on its current 'Open Ideas' profile - kicking off late this month with a piece by Nick Srnicek of Speculative Heresy, and an interview with Graham Harman of the American University in Cairo and Object Oriented Philosophy.

Animation by US based artist Nick Damiano

Indieoma.com Ad from Nick Damiano on Vimeo.

We have not come to take away your Bordeaux property portfolio

2009-12-12T04:43:00.000-08:00

In response to a new post from Philosophe Sans Ouvre (you can either read the post there first, or read the post below as a stand alone post, though I recommend following the discussion over at Philosopher S... if you have time):

To PR and MT (thanking you first for your discussion. I mean not to trample on it, and I am sure my ideas may not go down too well with PR, but as a person sympathetic at the least to the left's desire for a more balanced and peaceful place to live in, I'd like to put forward these feelings on 'protest'):

Well, I'm with Adorno on this one, and one can indeed ruminate that if Adorno were around he'd be even more entrenched in his belief that Molotov's tend to 'backfire'.

That's just the point; Adorno didn't argue against change - as often stated by those who wish to cast him as a defender of the status quo - but rather wished to point out that change was not possible where force meets greater force, as this merely perpetuates a negative situation (and weakens the leftist cause with every defeat they suffer).

Activist politics re-emphasise what is wrong in the world, and, moreover, often utilise wholly negative imagery and sloganeering in so doing. The public will never respond to aggressive imagery and words. Learn from those you oppose. The leftist movement is full of clever graphic designers and writers. Why do they not use themselves to better effect, instead of polemicising endlessly and gratuitously?

Anyone really wanting to change the world has to admit that activist methods are not working. Yet it seems that many well intentioned people somehow fetishize the activist role, its banners, its hairstyles and its mannerisms.

We have a runaway capitalist system which has its own impetus. It makes advances that to the human intermediary are both positive and negative. An example of a positive consequence of capital is the proliferation of information, and the availability of facilities for its dispersal. The coming to light of events leading to the death of Ian Tomlinson was a consequence of this.

Over and above all the 'problem'- which invariably boils down to an imbalance in power - when it is a problem, resides in a peculiar trait of human behaviour towards the stratification and containment of all things, and towards fighting against these things when they can't be contained.

Humans are police and activists and politicians, workers, bankers, scientists, artists, and they all make up, to be sure, a society that has its ugly aspects.

The trick is in trying to reduce those aspects without merely signalling a disdain for the second holiday homes of the monied classes.

'We have not come to take away your Bordeaux property portfolio', would be a more useful refrain than 'eat the rich'. For it is no suprise that those in power will do all they can to maintain power. Historically the usurped have never fared well and yet they are in a position to resist a fall into impoverished circumstances better than those, clearly, who already inhabit those conditions.

Moreover, individual freedoms seem so concatenated - and lost - within the runaway 'capitalist' model that one need retrieve even the mere shadow of their appearance before they can approach utilising those freedoms in order to improve man's lot.

This is the philosophical battle that need be fought - whilst a reasonable political interaction is aimed towards dialogue with the 'powers that be' - in order that individuals can conceive of their own selves, their own freedom; for it is senseless to proceed to construct a model of freedom within a system in which the subject is all but completely reified.

In my mind the possibility of a subject maintaining its 'self' in the face of an automoton objectifying society can only reside in that subject, individually, being able to construe itself as a subject through force of imagintaive will alone. For an appeal by the subject to forces outside itself serves only to become contaminated by the subsumption of all things within the automoton-objectifying force that favours a stratification of experience, of which monetary value is but one aspect.

Only then can subjects come together with any hope of overturning the tit-for-tat squabble of leftist vs. capitalist politics, which the left seem doomed to fail at.

They (the left) have already been hollowed out, and carry on like hysterical marionettes.

To the extent that philosophers might desist from prattling on about the French Revolution, and the 60's student uprisings, the socially concerned individual need desist from parodying a worn-out form of praxis.

The 2009 G20 protest was not a success for the fact that it cost the government (the taxpayer) and the banks (the taxpayer) so much, as has been argued. It was a painful failure in which well meaning protesters were pitted against state employees in a repeat performance of a too-well rehearsed political drama for which the puppet master holds no resonsibility, for 'he' does not exist in accountable form.

Maintaining the view that such an activity was worthy is well intentioned, I know, and I thank a great many friends who were very involved in the protest, and who I am morally equal too in every respect, and no less of a sucker for the causes of equality, fairness, peace, etc, for their small part in 'keeping the dream alive'.

Yet the maintenance of this form of protest surely plays into the hands of the system which the left wishes to confront. The public have no heart for being 'kettled' - contained and harassed - for hours. A series of similar protests would dwindle in number over time and would see support sway in favour of the government, who even the most vacant of observers can see to be yet another mere player in this unaccountable automoton 'system'.

Post over at Speculative Heresy internet event

2009-12-03T01:26:00.001-08:00

I have this post up at the Speculative Heresy/Inhumanities blog event page:

http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/i-am-the-subject/

Reflections upon Painting: Velazquez, Rembrandt, Cezanne. A Story

2009-12-01T00:52:00.000-08:00

---I write this back in 2007 as part of a novella, since shelved. It stands alone as a short story/art theory hybrid.---

The botoxed minions have seized our state galleries. Paint flies and fur flies. Flesh flies. Titian babes, and Rembrandt babes begin to tire, their beaux-goddess complexions growing heavy with a human burden.

I face Down Death.

Nose to nose, I see the tears welling in my ducts projected onto skull cavity. A thin light refracting each drop and issuing two pin points of light centre of each bone burrow. Death’s presence, the suggestion thereof, makes my body feel as flesh appended to bone.
Can we not both inhabit a space somewhere between life and death?

Can I not exist on a sliver between me and everywhere?

I recall the voice of General Kurtz replayed on a tape recorder, recounting the journey of a snail as it slides along the edge of razor.1 I imagine at the end of its journey two snails held together by the razor.

I stand in face of the ‘Other’. I stand face to her chest, nose touching oil.

‘hErhm.

Then, footsteps of a Gallery attendant. Unsteady, hurried.

- Clip.Clip.Clip. Pause.

I jolt. Catching a ‘nik’ on my nose. Sharp tiny triangulation of oil paint. Little bit of blood. Tiniest streak I catch upon my finger, raised hand to my face.

- Clip.Clip.Clip.

I return nose to breast with this oil that is blood. I am eyeballing a grey-green splodge. I see it mirrored in my eyeball. I see my eyeball as not an eye, but a glutinous ‘ball’ of eye. Ball of ‘I’.

I recall, with Susie some five years ago: I imagined myself biting into those wonder-fuelled eyes of hers, in much the same way that I had once curiously bitten into an oyster. Glutinous, I had merely wanted to feel that gag reflex. I didn’t do it, even in fantasy, my front two teeth slid off her eyeball, making a squeaking sound. You cannot feel eternity in the presence of someone with eyeballs for eyes. You can love them, sure enough, but as to the experience of one’s knowing and breathing oblivion, for that I could only ever turn to art, from that point on.

Back here, now, this oil upon cotton duck constitutes my eyeball. There is nothing else. My eyeballs, glossy, little, offal; the mirrored globes that capture and give witness:

‘Mirror, mirror, on the floor, drop my drawers and tan my rear.’

Her voice tumults. Oil, surpassing oil, gambols over itself in order to constitute this figure, this regal marie-bell. Saucy and French, or indeed, that’s how I have wanted her to be. Her accent was indecipherable.2 ‘Painting’, she speaks a universal language, a kind of Esperanto admixed with pigment and linseed.

Though heavily layered her top is low cut, showing one inch of cleavage, suggesting a kind of tender abandonment. She looks into me, noting her reflection, and checking the quality of her material.

Surely it was a man that gave her form, his stare, and the busy working of his digits, scurrying, sausage-plant like. His excited fussiness belying his ‘self’ trying to escape its self.

I would, if I could, get closer to her, but we are already as close as two can get. As I stand here and cross over into her, I look back upon me, mirroring myself.

-Clip.Clip.Clip.

The Gallery attendant. This must stop. I return to myself, my balls of eye, ‘eye’ again.

I was enabled only short visits to see The Lady with the Fan, gallery convention disrupting the growing intensity of our relationship. For this to further develop I would need to take her with me, an impossibility that would risk permanently breaking us apart.
Only an outright consummation can temper my desire.

For consolation I return home and drink to forget.
…

Now, the following day: I turn to one of a few men who perhaps will listen, who has sought after and known art; Paul Cezanne.3

I speak to pictures.

Let me iterate: When I say that I speak to pictures, I must be very clear as to what I mean by this. The phrase ‘speaking to pictures’ is open to misinterpretation… I would not want to be written off as woolly and new age… Let it be clear that when I speak to these pictures it is not at all in a metaphorical sense… not as if the marks and forms suggest words to me… No, rather, these pictures open up upon themselves, their surfaces becoming a wide embouchure: A sort of mouth comprised of folds and sags of paint, from which art springs forth; a spirit, great genie of the oil lamp, or a Devil, if you like.

Art is born stubborn from this wound… bloody minded, and bleeding close to death…It’s birth an affront, as if kicking and screaming it chooses its own birth- date, constitutes itself entirely of itself, making the world appear with it and out of it; the flowers of future remembrance. The affront being in choosing to be born at all; in being born it is the mother that is aborted. And its mother – the artist – is cast out ghost-like from this oily embouchure…

I have come to the Courtauld Gallery to speak boldly with Cezanne’s paintings… their open gashes making present the scars of this serious and troubled master modernist. This most sensitive and most barbaric painter…

A character in Shakespeare’s ‘Timon of Athens’ says of painting that: ‘artificial life lives in these touches, livelier than life’…

I contest… Nay… tis’ real life… the paint made flesh… These apples, these bathing beauties are more apple than apple… more woman than woman… And what of the mind that shows us to ourselves, and shows us more than we thought we knew…? To the paintings that give parlance to this ugly and majestic spirit… giving birth to questions unanswered and answers to questions not yet asked…?

I ask tentatively at first:

‘What of Cezanne’s Painting? And then, what of Cezanne?’

Is it possible to truly own a painting without owning something of the artist?4 In order to own one of these paintings, with their gaping wounds… so many message of woe… in order to own one of these ‘pain things’, I will have to access that pained and mock-heroic man, the artist Paul Cezanne.

Much has been written about ‘Cezanne’s doubt’… his not quite knowing what to do next. The paintings certainly give parlance to this… no doubt they are as real as apples and trees themselves, yet they give the lie to life itself… On the far left of room one, opposite the huge windows ‘Pot of flowers and Pears’ gives voice to the moments when one could be unsure as to whether a flower is a flower, or whether a pear is a pear at all. Is there not something beyond, just back of the pretence flower/pear, that is somehow more real; the razor that holds us together and divides us from a union with our true self?

Cezanne’s doubt; his brush strokes wrested from a hand shaking under the strain of not only wondering ‘is this a pear’, but also ‘is this a hand… is this a brush, is this a painter.?’

‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Yes… and no.’
‘Yes, yes, no and yes.’
‘No, no and thrice no.’

The paintings speak at once, in disagreement. They are unsure if there is anything majestic and fundamental to be grasped at behind the thin veil of appearance… could one peel back the mask of reality, like oil from a canvas… would one find a realer ‘real’, or would they be left grasping insanely at flat, painted apples and trees? …is there something out back, behind all this oil… can I talk to Cézanne, or I am talking to so much oil, pigment and canvas?

A singular painting speaks to me…second from the far left, as I am facing the wall opposite the two large windows in room one, 1st floor. The farm in Normandy, 1882. It looks lonely, it wears on its face the greying pallor of one who has shunned people for too long, maybe a seer of great truths that has grown weary of lesser men. The painting opens up, its mouth strangely curled at the ends, in opposite directions… not the expression of lofty solitude, but that of a mind bent under the strain of what it knows, and what it knows it never will know:

‘I wanted,’ he began, the turgid expression cracking paint upon the canvas, ‘I wanted to paint the painting that would paint the world ‘right’ again… I wanted to paint the painting that could behold in itself the world entire…’

The voice, his voice, though projecting such a high ideal, falters and waivers, betraying an unease… do paintings cry tears of linseed oil…?

If I am to own a Cézanne – and by that I mean truly own a Cézanne, the man, the paint the landscape, people portrayed, and those that are hidden, I must better understand not this artistic genius (which is undisputed), but this miserable uncertainty and loneliness. I want to understand why, in this Normandy landscape, featuring a farm, there are no people… and why, more than this, in his portraits of people, there are also no people as such… least ways, never the person that is actually depicted!

The man, knowingly, has presented not a cipher of reality in his work, but rather a cipher for art. He has painted nothing but paint. He has thus redoubled arts presence in order to bring into effect a reality perhaps more real than that we inhabit (chitter-chatter and suicide bombers). This ‘excess of reality’, that even in the portrayal of others, betrays above all the lone artist.

I ask Cézanne: ‘What of friends, and what of Lovers?’ This excess of reality, this reaching for perfection beyond our human realm risks isolation.

The Normandy Farm speaks, the mould of a face appearing from beneath the green-oil grass like a Green Man: ‘There was,’ he said in pagan tones, ‘back then only ‘One’, me and her. All else appeared contained within.’

This ‘togetherness’, a coming together of one person and the Other, walled off, a perfect marriage, leaves an excess of perfection. It betrays the ultimate impossibility of such a union. And it is that that speaks to the viewer through art..5

Back in the gallery:

-Clip.Clip.Clip

However this remainder, as a remainder, is waste; it must always recede.

I leave the Courtauld, the illusion interrupted by the busying hustle of practical necessity, the clattering of yet more gallery personnel. Art like love is thwarted by the ‘mechanism’, the machine, the body, or in this case the artistic body. But all is fair in Love and Art, and what one cannot have they may seize, or make an attempt. If I could not bring Velaquez’ Lady with a Fan to me, I must step inside and take her out.

Back at the Wallace Collection…

On close inspection the loosely rendered paint marks that constitute the Lady of Chevreuse give way. Much like taking in the skin of a lover close up, mouth to cheek, eyeball to forehead, the flesh receding back to a cellular mass, you can see where our Lady ends and everything else begins. Velazquez has rendered something just back of the veil, a jot of the area where we all meld into one, a little death.

I am reminded of a hermit who lived in my childhood village in a decrepit old bungalow. It was said that crosses and crucifixes adorned the entire interior of his barely lit home. If, in the right light, you could see long enough through the grime of his street facing windows, he could be seen bowing and reciting in front of these icons.

The story Chinese-whispered around the village, yet denied by all the adults emphatically, despite their having probably propagated it, was that the old man was a disgraced priest who had been caught pleasuring himself with the aid of a statue of the Virgin Mary in his own Church. The ectoplasm, that had for the previous months been issuing from her mouth and eyes, declared by the priest to be the sign of a miracle, was perhaps nothing more than the misdirected miracle of life. Bribed by the cleaner who caught him he later fled in the night, recorded along the way as exclaiming ‘I had only wanted to get closer to God.’ Other versions of the story have involved the latter day saints and some candle wax, but the retelling of the former version at least affords some grace.

This defilement of a ‘cipher’ for absolute beauty/innocence was, perhaps, unforgivable. Had he been caught at it with a living breathing nun, the sin could have been forgiven somewhat more easily. In order to fulfill a simple sexual fetish he had, in deed, only needed to have bought Mary/innocence into the human realm. For every Virgin Mary there were tens of Mary Magdalene’s willing to play a part.

- Clip.Clip.Clip.

On to the National Gallery, this circular art dance sufficed to keep the momentum going. From National to Wallace Collection to Tate Britain one day. From Wallace Collection to National to home, and so on. Standing in front of the Rokeby Venus, amidst a throng I could steal away to a lesser known work hanging to her right: The ‘Female Figure (Sibyl6 with Tabula Rasa)’, Velazquez, (1648).7

‘Sibyl’: an ancient female seer, a kind of sister-saint born prior to Christendom. There is something wistful about her. On the lower right of the painting, the shadow that comes off her finger as it deciphers a blank page appears to make no sense. A sharp black painters stroke; completely excessive. It damn nearly choked me first time I saw it. She is a spiritual lady, her hair soft to the touch, straggles, and I feel her neck itch. The itch on the neck of an ancient female seer, and the black mark that belies the painters agitated excitement as he paints her dressing, lacy and very nearly see-through.

In a painting of a woman who is both apparently sexually and spiritually adept I see arts main premise betrayed. By sleight of hand Velazquez, grinning, I suspect, shows us to our inescapable physical selves (our desire for Sibyl), shows us arts transcendental capacity (Sibyl the seer) and fuses them together in that black shadow mark. The mark shows us that even through the painting, even when having caught a glimpse of the ‘Other’ we are returned to materiality: The very notion of the transcendent is comprised out of our base mortality. Spirit and matter two halves of the same snail, the square jawed painter, teeth gnashing, the razor along which it crawls.

I have decided in any case I cannot have her, I cannot make of art a woman for myself. Indeed, the best I may muster is to make of a woman ‘art’.

I make one last trip again to the Wallace Collection. I have dashed from day to day, from gallery to gallery, from mistress to mistress, so much this last few weeks that even the pigeons have begun to talk about me, in gobbles and squawks.

I play it cool upon arrival, taking time to look around some of the rest of the collection before casually strolling into the main room where the Lady hangs. In reality my ‘casual’ saunter is perhaps over affected. She grins affectionately as I catch her eye. ‘Daft old sod!’ she might have said, as I nearly lose my footing. My God, she so radiant; I shake as I detail her beauty with biro on paper. I note her appearance:

‘Black veil: Brown Silk top, farthingale, the large puffed up dresses, supported by a framework beneath by a framework of iron hoops (where was I to find one of these?!), a silver Rosary and blue lace bow…a cross trinket on a chain. Pale skin, good complexion (light foundation?), lips small round, breasts inviting, neck demure.’ And so on.

Oh… and the pertness. The ripeness. I will have to go far to find a living breathing one like her.

From now on every woman, every girl, of an age, becomes a potential Lady of Chevreuse.

I survey with a discriminating eye the passing girls from my vantage point sat at a café terrace in Covent Garden. My waitress is a late teen latino, almost certainly on heat. She gives me the ‘eye’. To do what with? I cannot take her here and now amidst tables and flying milk saucers. I forget to tip her.

The search takes me to one hundred pubs and parties. Walking down the street, standing in a queue for a lotto ticket, at the Doctors surgery, I swear I see her, carrying herself and her dress with such grace, despite the lowliness and unfamiliarity of her surroundings. I see her running down an alley hitching her gown high to avoid the wet pavement. Later I see her standing trying to hail traffic, wooden and dispossessed. Something in the uncertainty of her movements makes me yearn for her even more.

A week lapses and I find her again. Outside a late night club under amber streetlights. A black dress, dark hair, black leggings and white trainers. I could do away with the trainers. Leastways, she would no doubt take them off later. She steals off into the night in a London cab.

I take a nightbus, through a London unfamiliar, painted black. I pass her again a split second as she passes through a closing doorway, darting between door and frame vampire-like before it closes firmly shut. I picture her running up stairs to a regal affair.

Arriving home to the sound of the cat that says ‘hello’, I make away to bed. Waking I find myself inside Velazquez’s ‘Lady with a Fan’. She is more than willing. Lubricated from head to toe she spews forward oil upon oil. Amid absolute and exasperated squeaks and squeals (hers) and standing on a crossroad to orgasm I envisage our offspring.

In blind panic I break free, cum upon her nape, and flee. Waking, I find my sheets covered in cadmium red paint, thinned with linseed, issuing litre-by-litre from my penis. The perfect union of art (the perfect, the ideal) could give birth only to death. I had seen my offspring, loin-seed, as a complete dearth of existence.

All the while man tries to dominate and subsume art. Yet its total subsumption would leave us striving after ‘nothing’.

Heck. Heck-Heck, Ho-hum!

The next morning I turn straight to the National.

The picture of Rembrandt’s woman bathing at the National Gallery appears from a distance to be almost just a picture of a woman bathing. Nothing more. But there is something off kilter about this image (and all art), and to be fair, there is no mystery to it. The woman is being painted by an undeclared observer, two in fact: Rembrandt, and the viewer (in that instance me). There is little unusual in that, except that Rembrandts gaze supposes ownership. Stoffels, bathing, washing herself, is boxed upon a canvas, framed, and hung upon a wall. If you then look at the list of ownerships and claims to possession we have here, the list is endless… The National, the Framer, the audience, the painter, the line of owners from its first sale, we all have come to own Rembrandt’s mistress. And this is all not so sinister… the trick of taking something in with the eyes, and making it ones own is the trick of ‘seeing’. What is demonstrated so well here though, is that the closer you get, the further Hendrickje Stoffels departs, falling away, first into matter (paint), and then into a kind of ethereal mass… again we have witnessed an excess, but here an excess of ownership. The remainder in this case is nothingness (ethereal mass - the opposite of ownership), and again we dance with the ghosts – those that do not ‘own’… are completely dispossessed – and Rembrandt, of course, is dancing with.

How long can we dance with? Not long… this would be an excess in itself, and what looking at painting teaches us is that neither excess nor lack can ever truly dominate… we can be consumed within the painting, and we can ‘own’ the painting, but in both instances we will always return to the opposite polarity – for a bit. This all carries on until we eventually stop kicking. Thing is, we will keep playing this game, trying to get through to the other side of art, to a kind of perfection or Utopia, so long as we can never win at it. To win at it would be defeated – it would rob us of the opportunity to keep playing, to keep dancing.

Yet the minions, newly rich, stand at the gallery entrance like peasants in a parliamentary square. Yet they will not be machine gunned or run over by tanks, for only those who possess poetic conjencture, might save her now. There are no guns and no gases in this death camp, but the rapes in this rape camp are real enough.

copyright Mike Watson 2007.

cont...

2009-11-28T01:32:00.000-08:00

“The longer I live, citizen. . .” — this is the way the great passage in Peguy begins, words I once loved to say (I had them almost memorized) — “The longer I live, citizen, the less I believe in the efficiency of sudden illuminations that are not accompanied or supported by serious work, the less I believe in the efficiency of conversion, extraordinary, sudden and serious, in the efficiency of sudden passions, and the more I believe in the efficiency of modest, slow, molecular, definitive work. The longer I live the less I believe in the efficiency of an extraordinary sudden social revolution, improvised, marvelous, with or without guns and impersonal dictatorship — and the more I believe in the efficiency of modest, slow, molecular, definitive work.” (pp. 13-14)Oliver E. Williamson’s The Mechanisms of Government

from: http://anthem-group.net/2009/11/24/translation-and-charles-peguy/#more-1299

A four letter word.

2009-11-22T01:22:00.000-08:00

Two, in fact.

- 'Work' and 'Love': the two things that Freud apparently said that we need to know how to do if we want to lead a happy life.

Neither in fact are at all workable without the other: Freud arguably meant that we need to love work and work at love.

What's probelmatic here is the way in which work has been consigned by leftist and anarchist groups over the years to imply being somehow subjugated, and by others as merely being a means to earn money, whereas work fundamentally means the process of deepening your understanding and ability in any given field, and need not entail financial reward or coercive force on the part of an employer.

And this muddying of the word 'work', by extension leads people to forego love altogether, or to expect it to be easy.

We need to get over the idea of work as a 'dirty' four letter word, as nothing of value, creatively speaking, ever fell from a tree. Dreaming whole tracts of a text you've been struggling to work upon in your waking hours does happen, but that is not to say that the time spent struggling when you were awake would have been better spent sleeping !

New header from Uh-oh/Psychic Attack

2009-11-12T09:51:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Ian over at Uh-Oh/Psychic Attack blog. for the new gothic-esque font heading, in the style of flesh rotting, though I prefer 'bodies hanging on to life': Kind of appropriate for the subject matter of the blog, if you've followed so far, which is, broadly speaking, the seeking after of a life that 'lives' (i.e. is not reduced to mere 'dead' cellular interactions or monetised processes), but that does not need recourse to a God, gods, or other forces from 'on-high'.
It is hoped that 'art' can step in and fill in the role vacated by God as the Enlightenment project kicked in (what dreadful timing; it was when we needed 'him' most!). But not in a majestic way you understand... no we'd still effectively be mere matter working for peanut-matter wages, just we can rest happy at least that Scientists and money-counters can't take from us the last kernel of wholesome-ness; 'art', not so long as the very term evades definition!
Anyhow, so here's to a new look and further possible collaborations across the board.
LR

Something Simple and Kind.

2009-10-31T08:40:00.000-07:00

--- Writer comments... This piece was written in the week of the Venice Biennale's opening. It has been looking for a publisher since, though I have no excuses for not having found time to just post it up here before it's too late! Not a minute too soon - I think the Biennale is over - I give you 'Something Simple and Kind'.

Something more timely and still 'kind': News at the Frankfurt Book fair this year was that we have reached a tipping point: Digital Print will now fast become the norm. In that sense I'll give a quick mention to the excellent bookrix.de - the myspace of writing. Now to the article... ---

---

The Venice Biennale naturally has a remit that encourages inclusivity. How could it not when art is left to deal with the entire gambit of freedom and the individual right to expression as a kind of surrogate? Art kicks in where politics fails, whilst being unable to undo the latter's failings. Art's role is not dissimilar, in this respect, from that of the sporting gesture, sport having been hijacked for political gain, from Germany's 1936 Olympics to the boycotted 1976 and 1980 Games hosted, respectively, in Montreal and Moscow, to Ali's 'return' of his Olympic medal, projected into the Ohio river.

Of course, whilst art has its directly political moments, this, together with art's removal from society – its autonomy – constitutes art from the offset. Art is contrary; yet it is also ineffectual, which is what allows it to maintain its contrary freedom, as a force if not of change itself, of a 'hope' for change. The difference between the major art event and the major sporting event resides in the fact that at the moment that art genuinely becomes political, it would arguably cease to be 'art', whereas sport does not have as part of its grounding definition a necessity to remain autonomous from politics. Art's central programme is its aloofness, whereas sports central programme is 'competition'. Though here one must be careful not to draw a parallel between that 'sporting' competition and competition as borne out in the wider world. Doing so would appear glib in light of the extremes committed against individuals in the name of wider 'competition'. It is art's aloofness which makes it unsuitable as a tool for political intervention, resulting in poor art at best, soured politics at worst, rather than sports competitive streak marking sport out as complicit with politics.

To explicate this argument regarding art in full would be to return us to a mid Twentieth Century debate, that which took place between Adorno and his students, who, as students were wont to do in 1969, urged a revolution, only for Adorno to put the dampers on (or try to; it went ahead, but failed anyway). As Adorno would have it, a critique of society could only effectively happen from outside that society, via the truly Modern artwork, which, feigning autonomy, could cast its critique on an unfree social system. That which inhered in art as specifically 'art' was its aloofness from politics and the social sphere. And only art, in its detachment, could oppose the wrongs of that social sphere.

This line is sometimes cast as antiquated, for the fact that politics has apparently become so shrewd as to necessitate some kind of ground level concrete resistance, implying that art must either step up and become directly involved politically – and not just through its non-complicity with politics, and the special critical status that this confers – or must defer to activist politics completely.

However, one could rebut this counter-argument in that, firstly, whilst, for example, it would be possible to present a Molotov Cocktail as an artistic Readymade within a gallery context, the moment that the said 'artwork' stepped outside of the gallery it would become an offensive weapon: This, in accordance with the ethical status that the artist must maintain if s/he is to maintain autonomy. Indeed, the moment even the innocuous artwork is used to bludgeon or maim, to burn or cause damage, the artwork is shed of its autonomous status, as if being throw into the world 'proper'. The effects of human suffering are too real for art to withdraw from. It is is this first counter-rebuttal that allows for the second; art must remain apolitical if it is to cast an eye over politics in its various manifestations.

In this case, the Venice Biennale is under no injunction to represent 'everyone', being as such an injunction smacks of the political in itself; yet to exclude anyone would be to step beyond the remit of art. Such an exclusion may be read as politically motivated.

It is greatly significant then that whilst Palestine has a presence in Venice for the first time in the Biennale's 14 year history, Germany simultaneously becomes the first National Pavilion to show the work of an artist – British born Liam Gillick - not from, or even working in, the nation represented by the Pavilion.

These two conflicting trends raise eyebrows in opposing directions; one may wonder aloud how an international Biennale ever became so nationalistically stratified in the first place, with 30 nations occupying permanent pavilions whilst simultaneously bemoaning the fact that Palestine had been so long overlooked. Of course one imagines that the Palestinian people, who will be able to see parallel shows of artists works in Palestine itself for the duration of the Biennale would be immensely more happy if they were to field a team for the FIFA World Cup Finals. However, it does seem that the Biennale confers some form of legitimation upon the Palestinian State and one that is, thankfully, as unlikely to upset the Israeli State as it would the Israeli Pavilion, which houses works of the late painter Raffi Lavie (b.1937 d.2007), an artist who worked hard to have the values of Modern Art recognised in Israel during his lifetime. Palestine confront the present head on – an unsuprising mix of politically charged works, whereas Israel prefers to look back, thus conveying a message as political as it is apparently unconcerned.

If we throw into the mix of this discussion the existence of the 'East -West Divan' – otherwise titled 'It's Not You it's Me', an exhibit dedicated to artists from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, together with the separate displays hosted by Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, despite there also being a 'British' Pavilion, we are presented with a complex variety of responses to the notions of art, the political and nationality, as fertile for the reassessment of the value of the Biennale as for Art itself.1

The difficulty with defining art's value resides in its 'push me; pull you' nature. Contradictions inhere in its very being. To pin down Art as any one thing would be to rob it of the lack of purpose - essentially, its freedom – that inheres in it. Consequently it mirrors the already existent confusion of nationhood. Whilst we eradicate nations and centralise power in the hands of bigger international bodies, we devolve power to smaller communities. Palestine, jettisoned off Venice's main island in Giudecca, may have missed the boat in declaring itself as a going interest at the Biennale. Yet who is to say? Every conceivable nationality must be seen to have a right in declaring itself even after the passing of nationality itself.

This, indeed, goes to show how abstract the notion of the nation state is; the declaration of statehood is comparable to a grandoise art declaration, which perhaps accounts for the pomposity of the Giardini – Venice's permanent Biennale showground, home to the British, Israeli, Japanese, German and American pavilions , amongst others. Art must out-art itself if it is to even register in such illustrious settings, a point which may account for the almost unanimous bi-annual proclamation by the Biennale audience to the effect that the best art is to be seen outside the Giardini – in the Arsenale, or in the peripheral spaces, where nationhood is less often grand-standed.

Beyond the complexities that beset the artwork, politically speaking, resides a kind of dragon which remains every artists' duty, knowingly or not, to slay, if they are to truly make art at all; for art is damned if it assumes a political role, and damned if it does not. In the former case, as mentioned, art somehow becomes 'less art' for its political involvement. Yet, if, in the latter case, art does not become political, it becomes somehow inhumane, becoming allied with those political tendencies that serve to maintain the status quo through a kind of busied non-action.

Combining these problems we see the idealistic notion of the eradication of borders being met with the question 'At whose expense?', whilst the enshrining of borders on the say so of the artist frames the artwork within the real world realm of division and conflict. And in response to this a lonely voice resounds: 'Is it too much to ask that art be something simple and kind?'

In response to this question one might look towards the work of two very British artists, Mark Wallinger and Paul Sakoilsky who, arguably, somehow levitate themselves out of the problem that faces the political artwork, yet on completely 'concrete' terms. Sakoilsky's wry truism, that his sleeping in the makeshift press office at the 2007 Climate of Change show held in a near derelict office block in Southwark, whilst defacing found newspapers – his 'Dark Times' - was categorically 'not a performance' (he was between homes at the time), provides an alibi for Wallinger's 'State Britain', a piece that might otherwise seem to be a bourgeois reconstruction of one man's proletarian struggle. Installed in Tate Britain as a reconstruction of Brian Haw's anti-war demonstration, comprising of painted signs facing towards parliament, Wallinger's piece is art at its best, when it is simply not art. It is a literal reconstruction of Haw's protest, masquerading as art, and thus draws attention as much to the failings of art as those of politics. Sakoilsky's perpetual defacing of found newspapers with tragi-comic appropriations of headlines and images is similarly destined to a kind of cheerful-failure; it is surely this alone that compels the persistence of Sakoilsky's work.

As for the issue of nationality, it is worn as a yoke, with both the headlines and the policies providing the disdain which is the motor for art's failure as an autonomous discipline. Art can arguably no more oppose the state of things than become embroiled in them. One could in any case argue that Wallinger's piece, displayed within the safety of the gallery, chalks up the ineffectual nature of the work. For the protest that the work represented earned the protagonist, Brian Haw, both arrests and assaults (the latter coming both from the public and, allegedly, the Police). Any real affront to the British State is dealt with harshly, whereas State Britain was, like most art, calmly overlooked. So where State Britain fails as art, it also fails as politics, which is itself always doomed to a general failure of another kind – i.e. the failure to found equality.

Or, rather, art can't fail at politics – it is not deemed enough of a threat to meet with genuine political opposition – while at the same time failure is a prerequisite of the former. Ultimately, art often fails to be politics at all, except in those Nation States where creative free speech is harshly punished, and in these places art is a form of politics from the offset, that in actuality merely resembles art in form and physicality (i.e. paint is used to decorate banners, as paint is used to make 'paintings').

To revisit the comparison between art and sport at this point throws up an interesting asymmetry between the two disciplines: where sportsmen fail at politics they are seen as brave fools. Tommie Smith and John Carlos performed almost a caricature of what was politically possible at a sporting event when they silently clenched their black-gloved fists into Black Panther salutes on the winning podium after taking Gold and Bronze in the 1968 Olympic 200 metres. It was a drop in the ocean politically and one that surely made their careers difficult. Yet it could not be said to be a failure as sport. Whereas art must foresake everything – both politics and art - in stepping up to deliver a political message.

Yet there is a congruence between art and sport here, as, if the actions of Smith and Carlos were to mean anything, that meaning resided in the action itself, as a concrete moment of assertion. That this was categorically 'not a performance' meets with the central defence of the political artwork. The artwork may singularly fail in all of its aims, but it is, for the duration of its display, absolutely what it is – and thus holds no contingent or useful purpose. It is this utterly useless nature, its failing at everything, which enables it, uniquely, to be only what it is. Some kind of freedom.

For Smith and Carlos' gesture the same cannot be said – for on the left of the podium stood a white Australian bronze medal winner, who, in good humour, remained silent and still during what for him was very much a sports ceremony. The situation was thus framed. It had to be sport, for the inclusion on scene of a sportsman (one that wasn't foregoing their sportsman role for the role of activist). Whereas, artists can sometimes elevate out of the confines of art practice, suspending the notion of art, whilst preserving the uselessness of art to shield themselves from the dangers of politics, without the uncomfortable presence of someone on the periphery who might point out that what we are witnessing is art. The thing is, with art this just wouldn't matter, because we have come to expect art to masquerade as all things, not least as something entirely 'other' than art. This operates only on account of what art in fact is - a pretty useless charade. So, for example, Rancière’s belief that art is political in a very real sense – i.e. art's autonomy from the political sphere is its political gesture - sees in the impossibility of art's making an effective political statement, the possibility of it being remote enough to critique politics. Yet Ranciere's belief that art and politics are ultimately akin – with art's autonomy blending into a wider heteronomy, each being a condition of the other – fails to acknowledge art's radical difference from politics, or, indeed, sport, or religion, or cookery, or crochet. The radical alterity of art, even in light of its connection with wider society, has to be taken as real.

Returning to nationality, the inclusion of Palestine at the 53rd Venice Biennale, simultaneous to Liam Gillick exhibiting in the German pavilion plays on art's 'push me-pull you' designation, demonstrating that whatever is creatively declared will be negated elsewhere: The plurality of opinions and works at play within the art world is not an art performance, it is reflective of political failing in general, even if it, perhaps happily, cannot have the devastating impact of politics proper. Art is, in this sense, ruined from the offset, whether political or ostensibly autonomous; any real art, as completely free from society, would have to simply not exist: Adorno's preference for an abstract art, lest the discernibly figurative be subsumed within the world that it aims to yoke off, becomes a demand that art should somehow maintain its effect, as pertinent yet useless, whilst shedding its actual being.

In this sense the works of Sakoilsky, Wallinger and innumerable others are objects of contemplation around the notion of what art might be, if it could viably exist. That art might realise the transcendental capacity that it so perpetually seeks after is the ongoing promise, the utter failure of which guarantees its critical capacity.

Joan Of Art

2009-05-21T05:16:00.001-07:00

There are some tens of art galleries worldwide that carry the name 'Joan of Art'. It is almost as if the replacing of that final 'C' with a 'T', whilst secularising one of Christianity's biggest contemporary mass appeal Saints, is not enough. A kitsch art shop must then be born to nullify the 'Art' aspect too!

See: http://www.joanofart.com/

Interestingly this attests to the problem of 'Art' itself, namely that the genre 'Art' cannot be done justice to in the objective realm. Galleries and artworks categorise and spoil the promise of Art. In this sense, it is to an ethereal 'Art Saint', an imagined figure who's non-existence in reality tallies with the imperative that Art must not be spoiled by its objectification, that we must look.

We could then declare the unreachable, the non-existent, 'Spirit' as 'Art', like an artistic Readymade, thus demonstrating that what especially inheres in the artwork, is never its objectivity, never the work itself. The work merely obfuscates what is unique about Art; its lack of use, lack of value, lack, indeed, of existence in a world where where a categorised use, a value and therefore a tangible 'existence' are deemed essential accrediting factors necessary for the idenitifcation, and homogenization of all objects.

Art's resistance - the residue of it that is still discernible - can then remain, in its status as utterly illusory. We must set aside the artwork, and hail Joan of Art, because she doesn't exist.

Paul Sakoilsky and Mike Watson – An Online Dialogue.

2009-04-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

A dialogue conducted between Mike Watson and Paul Sakoilsky, on hope, art, the media, and the persistence of the 'apocalypse'.

‘Are We Living in The Dark Times: Or is it just the Persistent
Culture of Apocalypse?’

Rome/Hastings. Start Date/Time: 9.10.2008 - 10.44 PM.

MW: Paul Sakoilsky asks 'are we living in the dark times?', a question which entails some responsibility. To use a well-worn theoretical idea, it's a gamble. If Paul Sakoilsky were wrong - i.e. if we quite definitely are not living in the 'dark times', and it turned out to be noticeably so, he'd probably feel pretty accursed. I'm asking him now, what makes him so sure that of all the rhetorical questions that might be asked, he feels that this might be the most appropriate?
PS: Are we living in the dark times? It is always important to simultaneously pose its rider, 'or is it just the persistent culture of apocalypse?' That is to say, what, if anything, is special about our times? What is so special about us, that we assume, what? Stability? Homoeostasis? Has it always been the apocalypse? (That is, is the apocalypse always there, the end times, the dark times? As a figure standing before humanity?) Of course, this figure of darkness and its realities, dialectically, perhaps even ontologically, presupposes its opposite. As regards responsibility? This is a strange concept - or rather a problem - it lands me, us, humanity, in the face of ethics; or one hopes it does.
…[…]…
MW: I see a contradiction here: it's the Dark Times, but it's persistent, (re: your tag line): how would you equate something being dark, (i.e. darker than before) with the persistence of that state? That is, are we living in Dark Times, or is this (the apparent 'darkness', as you put it) just part and parcel of life? One of the attendant necessities of being 'alive': i.e. there is darkness because there is light? And as such, would one not be better off chalking up the light, instead of the darkness?
PS: That is, in fact, the question. One wonders. Personally, I don't know the answer. I do know, re. working with/against and playing with the media, that in this dispersed mediated 'world' of ours it is evident that - although when I started the project, apart from the constant terrible trickle, then pour of teenage killings in the UK, the ‘war’ on terror, climate change, etc.,– the headlines weren't so dark, as it were, but, over the last few months and more so, with the credit crunch etc, the 'darkness' , the majority of people now are speaking of hard times, dark times. As regards, chalking up the light, I actually think there is a lot of humour in the work, (albeit, of the dark variety - although sometimes just plain stupid in the best, positive sense) - and this is vital. Of course, on the other hand, some of this work has been made through a cloud of real tears and fears - so what can one say? 'HOPE'. Without that we are doomed - full stop. I find the propagation of doom and banality that the media mediates, to have a virus like quality. It is self propagating and self fulfilling.
MW: I agree, and it is unfortunately the case that we are used to reading disclaimers and warnings. Hence your 'dark times' seems in some sense to belong to a Modernist era, (no bad thing, as such), in that they don't have glaringly obvious, 'it's not so' or 'it need not be so' signs attached. ‘The Dark Times’ requires that the audience input some effort in order to think through the 'problem' posed themselves, without cues. Would you agree with that, and deflect the concomitant elitist charge that might come with this? Next, I would like to agree emphatically with your characterisation of 'hope'. Would you agree, that 'hope' only exists in the real presence of its opposite? i.e. - it's always 'hope' after what one hasn't got ?
PS: Firstly - as a premable to the answer. I was, and have been heartened by the fact that 'everyone' seems to 'get' the works, at least at the basic level. As you know, ‘the dark times: press office≠2’ was housed in the squatted ex-Mercedes Showroom in Finchley Road (London), where Mark Hammond and I ran the Climate 4 Change exhibition. Here a lot of people were living the 'alternative' life, as it were. I was also living there, as I had no other option at the time. It was an eye-opening experience. It was a very dark period for me, personally. But also, looking back, an intensely creative one. Having absolutely no other options, I worked and worked, and the act of making, brought with it the possibility of hope, art, life.
Re. ‘Modernist’ - I am just showing x, y, z without the subterfuge of irony, (although I am not so sure about your characterisation); the audience should have to work a bit. Firstly one gives them an image/text, a work. I don't think it is necessarily elitist - even if to really understand something, one has to have done a little work - of course, there will also, always be people who are naturally intelligent, visually/semantically. I am somewhat of a Nietzschean I guess, i.e. there will always be hierarchies. I would not presume to tell a mechanic his/her trade, and also, importantly, I would never condescend (how could one!) to presume that this is lower/higher, than what I/we do - it is simply a different field of expertise. Of course, my/our field is one that structurally one might say, involves a certain perversity, a going-beyond. So saying, with the dark times, I am dealing with a ‘common currency’: the newspapers. The starting point being images/texts, etc., that we all see and read.
I recently showed some new copies (Hastings editions) of the ‘papers’ to F-ISH gallery director Simon Hedges and we were somewhat drunk, and we were literally laughing our heads off looking at them. So maybe the dark times are a healthy antidote to the dark times that we live in?
It is the question of hope, hope in that darkness, hope where we call out to the gods, at the breaking point – that point of 'rupture'. So yes, 'hope' can only exist in light of its opposite, but then I don't know, really whether this is simply linguistic, or whether, (of course, it must be an admixture of all these things), ontological, structurally intrinsic to hope’s very concept/conceptualisation. And interestingly, 'hope', the light/dark, is something, evidently, entirely human. By this one means, it can not be pickled, surely, by/in the hard sciences, or by neurologists. It is one of the things that ties us to the world, to the Other, to ethics. Therefore, there is always already an ethical dimension in the art/thought, even if this is not always immediately apparent.

MW: Yes, I think hope must separated from the hard sciences, but that is so difficult. It must be concomitant with our state of 'being', and if by dint of what we are, or because of exterior social forces, (i.e. science, and politics), we are reduced to the status of mere material beings - objects - that somehow register 'hope' as a factor in their material minds, even though that hope is merely an objective inscription, it is hard to see how 'hope' might really offer anything beyond its own illusion. But then, of course, it is still there, and thus still effective under the terms that we do exist. But then doesn't this all become semantic? 'Hope' and 'life' are terms that exist and are accorded relevance by those that 'speak language'. Does that make 'language' or 'art' (as communication) fundamental to life, or just appendages to our objective existence- that is, our existence as 'objects', with communication being a sideline interest of 'us objects'? Is the question over whether we are in the Dark Times as deeply tied in with these issues (that are fundamental life/death issues) as would seem from your comments thus far?
PS: I think that the question of being, which is ineradicably linked, conjoined, combined, always already, with the question of hope/despair, the light/dark, is always linked with EVERYTHING. Thus, of course, ( I say 'of course', but it is only through/within dialogue that i can come to say this), that The Dark Times are definitely linked, existentially, phenomenologically, totally, to such questions. We are; we are not. Life/Death. And all things in-between. In the end, as in the beginning, we are always at this point.
And, I am not lying, earlier, when I say, that some of my work, is literally painted/made through a veil of tears - but then, also, through roars of laughter.
MW: OK, then the statement you make has a metaphysical tone. In a sense it passes no political judgment, as you are, by you own admission, accounting for the duality of 'life' and 'death', 'subject' and 'object', and so on. How then, might you pass judgment on 'now' and call 'now' a 'dark time'? It's a pressing issue, as either you have a solid statement, or you have the rambling of a 'subject' that thinks it is an 'object'. Either you have made the point that we are flitting around helplessly as conglomerates of cells that think that they are persons, or you have made the point that things are 'dark', that they are bad, and that we can make things better... we can bridge the gap between object and living subject (so far as that term is perceived in the 'mind' of the former)... it all gets Nietzschean- striving to be somehow, somehow, 'Super', better as 'humans'.
PS: This is where it gets, potentially, interesting, and also very difficult to put into words. You see, on the one hand, there is discourse, on the other, there is the work itself (i,e, in this instance, The Dark Times and co.).
The world that we are currently living in is a scary place. I get frightened thinking/talking about it. I just hope my worst fears (some would call them conspiratorial) are not correct. Foucault's philosophy, re. panopticicism, surveillance/normalisation, was always brilliant, but seemed back then, and this was to take nothing from it, pretty hyperbolic. Now? It seems to be, in large extent, a simple, albeit complex, statement of facts. Especially as regards our 'fair, sceptered, Isle'. Why? What is all this present, and continuing, surveillance, for??! The current 'credit crunch' - how did this come about? Greed, it seems. And a great deal of structural and governmental, mismanagement, short termism, and downright idiocy. Who pays for this? Well, the little men/women - that is 'us'. As Jarvis Cocker's song so eloquently states, 'To be perfectly clear boys and girls/the cunts are still runnning the world'. Now, what are we, can we, do about this? These are serious questions. They are also questions, whose potential answers, even, if only answers posed at the theoretical/aesthetic level, can get us into trouble. Censorship is on the rise – the so-called 'PATRIOT act' in the states, and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (combined with the criminal justice bill), etc., in the UK… As human beings capable of , that is, at least potentially, more than mere empty longing, (mirroring the about-face of despair) - as agents capable of affecting change - we are potentially in serious trouble.... We are in danger of being eradicated - it is like a Philip K. Dick script/novel except it's for real.
…[…]…
MW: Well, it may be that it is a fact, but to state it is as fact would be to set it in stone. Can we afford to do that? If we had done that at any point in history (stated our complete lack of freedom) then we would indeed have had no freedom.
PS: Ok - by ‘fact’, I mean, it seems to be so - a fact in a socio-politico sense is surely, not a fact, in the sense of gravity? Therefore, I guess, hope still pertains. Let us call it, re. the dark times, a statement of a vision of the now, that is now not only a vision, but also a description - with understanding, facing things head on, at least comes the possibility of knowing where and how to start to change, or at the very least escape such a state of affairs... although, if the climate change contingency, esp. I mean, those who project the worst case scenarios, are even partially correct, we really going to be up against it ... thank God for 'Art', decency, laughter, tears, paint, wine, sex, love, heroics, dialectics, food, etc etc.. No?
…[…]…
MW: Perhaps change then is the substance of life, such that we could describe 'life'; and 'Art', when it is really Art is the cipher of change, and then of 'life'. Art is 'life' 'lived', the cipher of the present, and questions over what came first 'life' or 'art' are null (I think when it gets to this sort of point we can't really expand, it would be self defeating.)
PS: Not an expansion - but simply, a run-on: When one reaches a certain point - a point that is a decision, or a constant re-affirmation, stemming from a point of no-return, the divide, art/life, work/play, becomes, not meaningless, but dialectical, creative, something that creates and re-creates itself.

©Paul Sakoilsky/Mike Watson 2008/09.

Paul Sakoilsky presents: Mayday: The Dark Times (Editor's Choice ≠1)
Opening May 1st
Exhibition 2nd May - 12th June Wednesday - Sunday 11am - 6pm
Gallery- 45 Robertson Street, Hastings TN34 IHL - UK

May Day show: http://www.f-ish.co.uk/paul_sakoilsky_show_2.html
Paul Sakoilsky: http://web.mac.com/paulsakoilsky/iWeb

Speculative Realism Live! Bristol 2009.

2009-04-12T09:09:00.000-07:00

(l-r); Meillassoux, Drums and 'Hums'; Harman, Vocals, Electric Bass; Brassier, Rhythm Guitar (Chunky Riffs), Backing Vox; Hamilton-Grant, Lead Guitar, Noodles and Samples.

Yes, they're back and in good form, riffing on the twin ideas 'we don't exist' and 'we don't much mind'.

Tub-thumper Meillassoux is out, suffering perhaps from a Gardening related injury (actually, we have no idea why, we hope he's back soon).

A replacement comes in the form of the able Toscano, who will join original group members Brassier, Harman and Hamilton-Grant.

24th April 2009, UWE Bristol.

Be there or be a Post-Kant.

Speculative Track Listing:

Christ, Don't Mention God to Me
Aren't we 'Dead' Yet? - Yes, we're Not!
Bring me the Head of Logical Regression
Unchained Melody (Nihil Reprise)

For commemorative t-shirts of the above print, e-mail; logicalregression@gmail.com. 12.50 gbp (plus postage) payable by paypal.

Concept: Mike Watson
Design: Sam Cox
Original: http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/uploaded_images/IMG_7707-769965.JPG

(CC) Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved on Image. You have full rights to post to your own blog, to print and distribute, with acknowledgement of the artists, via link, or similar.

Put Simply...

2009-03-31T10:02:00.001-07:00

I suppose to simplify everything that has thus passed here (bar the blog post on the Birkbeck conference, which is another matter) I could simply say that where the Speculative Realists - and really I mean here one Speculative Realist (Brassier) and one Speculative Materialist (Meillassoux), no more a movement then than John Wayne and John Lennon are brothers!* - might, arguably, argue against the adage 'I think therefore I am', positing the mind as inessential to existence as such, I would argue:

I think that I am not therefore I AM not.

This crucial capitalised AM accounts for the essential difference I would accord to the human 'subject' over the 'object', the former being a series of objective impulses feigning a conscious personality, that can at least know 'itself' to be a series of objectified impulses, whilst the object cannot know that it is not.

I think that this crucial difference accounts for a lot, and it is this difference that for me characterises existence. Not to say that existence is born of the human mind, but simply that it is born witness by the human mind in a way that is surely defensible, as the single most curious development in existence known to humans, thus far! Without it, the rest (everything in the objective realm, 'the great outdoors') would be inconceivable. Surely this elevates the human status.

*In fairness Brassier and Meillassoux openly object to the moniker 'movement'; my point is that they are not even an '-ism', something that I don't suppose would upset any of the thinkers that go under these umbrella terms, but which is worth pointing out: They are valuable independent thinkers, no more, no less.

Here's Hegel

2009-03-29T07:45:00.001-07:00

I'm overlooking Hegel a bit here. I think I'll have to resolve to include him somewhere in the debate between an object-oriented philosophy and some kind of viable alternative, at least as a nod towards his influence on Adorno, though in some ways I think Hegel may even have it more right than the latter.

Illustration Sam Cox

Back to the Left ? On The Idea of Communism; A Conference

2009-03-16T09:47:00.000-07:00

On 'On the Idea of Communism' - held March 13th, 14th, 15th, Birkbeck College. Illustration Sam Cox: 'Zizek and Friends':

“The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.” Alain Badiou

(http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/on-the-idea-of-communism-conference/) :Conference Blurb.

I would be interested to source the papers given at 'On the Idea of Communism'. I have, so far, this to go on:

http://pervegalit.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/ranciere-and-badiou-on-the-idea-of-communism/

A selection of videos from the conference, courtesy of Perverse Egalitarianism.

And this:

http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/report-of-conference-on-the-idea-of-communism/.

A conference report, courtesy of 'Commune', a self proclaimed 'Communist' blog, which is naturally critical of this convention of academic behemouth's, assembled apparently in their name, but with no intention of considering concrete issues surrounding the politics of the Left:

'The symposium will not deal with practico-political questions of how to analyze the latest economic, political, and military troubles, or how to organize a new political movement.'

That sounds to be an invitation to disaster, on anything up to an epic scale, both within the conference hall, and in the wider world.

Zizek apparently adding to this last statement that: 'more radical questioning is needed today – this is a meeting of philosophers who will deal with communism as a philosophical concept, advocating a precise and strong thesis: from Plato onwards, communism is the only political idea worthy of a philosopher.' (From http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/12/philosophy).

They will not deal with practical issues, but they are in agreement that we should maintain the 'communist hypothesis'. Hypothesis towards what? - Surely towards a practical realisation of Communism, otherwise there would be nothing to be hypothesized, hypotheses being, as they are, projections of real outcomes or actual existent realities; one cannot hypothesise a concept.

More radical questioning of an academic nature is apparently needed by the Left before they proceed. Yet Zizek acknowledges simultaneously that we have been questioning 'from Plato onwards'.

Indeed, if Communism is such a good idea, and has been from Plato onwards, why does it still need to be considered as an idea alone? Are we to gather that what is meant by Zizek is precisely that it is a good idea, good ideas being defined by their difference from good actual practical events: Good 'things'?

Good things come to those who wait: Good ideas are just mulled over for eternity!

What I'd most like to get to here, is the exaspersating notion that somehow, in Communism's failing - the triple failing of 1990 - 'the retreat of the social-democratic Welfare State politics in the developed First World, the disintegration of the Soviet-style Socialist states in the industrialized Second World, and the retreat of emancipatory movements in the Third World,' (this from the above mentioned conference blurb) - 'Capitalism' seemed to triumph, as 'Free market Globalisation', and yet in the apparent - temporary at the least - failing of the current model of Capitalism, a failing which had been evident since the conference was planned a year ago (and since long before, one could proffer), we must look back to 'Communism', and in a quite ineffectual way; much in the same way, in fact, as we always have.

Why would there not be another option? And, indeed, one that is not gauged as exactly half way between the two extremes - re; the 'Third Way' of Blair, Brown, Clinton, Sarkozy, et al. - as if pinning a tale on a donkey.

To be sure, Zizek, as can be seen immediately below, shows some considerable flexibility on the issue of Right vs. Left.

Ths Communist 'thing', he says - and I have to paraphrase here, so I won't quote as such - does not have to happen outside Capitalism: There is no 'outside Capitalism' (a point which Badiou also makes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oco4ZX1f11g). Such a sentiment is heartening, so long as it does not imply, along with so many news commentaries, that, due to the part nationalisation of the Banks in some countries, we now have a form of Communism sanctioned by Liberals, and bought in through the back door, against even their own wishes. This latter view is nothing short of naive: We have a State system propping up Capitalism, so scared that, left to its own devices, Free Market Globalism will not run its course as effortlessly as was once believed by that same Liberal State.

Where such a sentiment might otherwise be heartening is where it points to the need to collapse notions of both Capitalism and Communism, as, indeed, following the effective non-existence of Communism - if it 'died' it cannot be revived as it was - there can be no Capitalism per se, merely a world which we inhabit, which may be tweaked on a social level to facilitiate greater or lesser sharing amongst beings, should we want to (incidentally, follow the link to Perverse Egalitarianism for a video of Ranciere talking on the importance of 'sharing' as a notion central to the Left, aside from dogma).

In this case, and this is what I'm saying - here we have to leave Zizek, a prolific writer who speaks for himself - it is of the utmost importance that we do not slip back into a consideration of Communism, political or ideological (what good would the entertainment of the 'idea' do, if the 'thing' itself could not be seen to work?) as a term useful in facilitating a World in which wealth - or more especially food and access to essentials - is shared and not horded.

Yet the conference blurb has stated that:

'This defeat [the triple defeat of Communism] raises the question: is “Communism” still the name to be used to designate the horizon of radical emancipatory projects? In spite of their theoretical differences, the participants share the thesis that one should remain faithful to the name “Communism”: this name is potent to serve as the Idea which guides our activity, as well as the instrument which enables us to expose the catastrophes of the XXth century politics, those of the Left included.'

I cannot think of a notion more blind: how many names did the notion of 'sharing' go under before it settled with 'Communism'; doubtless very many - and more so if we consider variations in syntax and language ? Why keep a name which is divisive, which evokes the image of Stalin, amongst others, and which sets up again, as an enemy, the full force of 'Capitalism'?

It is suprising that with the full philosophical resources available to them ('since Plato') the participants of the conference did not consider another name, another option, another course ... Though I am going on snippets here. I would be interested to see what anyone who attended the conference thinks - especially those who were speaking!

Late thought: This all brings to mind attempts by many of the same assembled philosophers to consider Christianity from a secular purview - as in Zizek's 'The Fragile Absolute' and Badiou's 'Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism'. Is there a reticence to move onwards here? Perhaps that in itself would be cause for exploration.

This just in (17/03/09): Total Assault on Culture has posted extensive conference notes, having actually been at the conference. A useful resource, and one that makes it all the easier to critique the conference itself. Not sure if anything here makes me want to renege on what I have said re; the snippets of info I have based this post upon: http://totalassaultonculture.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/on-the-idea-of-communism/#comment-51.

Artistic Contingency Vs. Scientist Contingency

2009-03-15T05:47:00.000-07:00

Extract: 'If the artist were to try and institute meaning in life, by dint of the artists own saying so - a sort of Duchampian - 'this is art' - declaration meeting the raising of Lazarus - 'this is life', or 'this', humanity, 'is alive' - Brassier's text would always be there to remind us that, as dreams are wont to, our fly's waking nightmare has taken an artistic bent. All human artistic creation is but a phase within a fly's waking nightmare in which things get slightly skewered in a kind of funky art-school way. Anything is possible, reasons the fly: A sort of lacunae of implied meaning forms in a universe of nothingness, as if the fly ate cheddar before bed, and now is having a psychedelic bed-fit. Only, we must reason that the lacunae is as illusory as art itself is. The fly is but a fly.'

See:

http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/002/articles/mwatson/index.php

The Symptom for the Cure

2008-10-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

art: n Making meaning mean something.

Dialogical Response to Nihil Unbound

2008-03-19T02:08:00.000-07:00

Logical Regression Says:
March 10, 2008 at 9:05 pm
The book has been out for a while now (Ray Brassier's 'Nihil Unbound' released in the latter part of 2007) - I’d really appreciate any opinions on it as I’m addressing it as part of my thesis.
Wilhelm Fliess Says:
March 11, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Good luck my friend! No seriously, it would be great to get a discussion going about Brassier’s old thesis and his new book: it’s probably the most interesting work out right now…hope you manage to find some interlocuters who are up to the job!
Logical Regression Says:
March 12, 2008 at 12:06 pm
OK, I will get back to you with some thoughts over the next week. Please tell interested persons and we can try and unpick this difficult text.
Wilhelm Fliess Says:
March 15, 2008 at 5:10 am
Great, I look forward to your response. I’ll be interested to see what you consider to be the main claims of the book, because aside from the general claims put forward in the preface, I’m still not sure exactly what these claims are. But it works perfectly well as a sharp critique of all the main players in continental philosophy (including a critique of Laruelle, which Miller’s otherwise excellent review failed to notice). My own crude critical hunch about the book relates to the way there seems to be no role for art or aesthetic construction in his philosophy. What is the status of art for Ray Brassier? I’m sure that he doesn’t consider art to be merely a form of qualia, or simply another means of communication. Awhile back there was a piece published in Multitudes about one of his favourite Noise bands, and towards the end of his thesis there’s this enigmatic invocation of a Universal Noise which will resist capitalism exchange, yet I’m not sure how concepts like intelligibility, and his brand of realism, can account for the role of experimentation, or creation in the arts and sciences. In this regard I find Deleuze and Guattari’s late philosophy to be more versatile, but I’m willing to be put straight on this issue. Why is the issue of art of critical importance for understanding Brassier’s project? Because his is a nihilism that would do away with that last comforting thought, that life can be justified aesthetically. My hunch is that there’s a disavowed, residual aesthetics in speculative realism… Anyway, will try and get others involved in this thread too-
Cheers
Wilhelm Fliess Says:
March 15, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Here’s link to the Brassier article, ‘Genre is Obsolete’:

http://toliveandshaveinla.blogspot.com/2007/05/ray-brassier-genre-is-obsolete-from.html
Logical Regression Says:
March 16, 2008 at 4:26 pm

Yes, Brassier appears to afford no significance to ‘art’ even in his criticisms of Adorno and Horkheimer, which is suprising considering the importance of art to the former's overall project. Arguably, in following Brassier’s account, one would have to take art (going on the account of Brassier, Churchland, Meillassoux, et al.) to be inscribed within the wider system Brassier espouses, which reduces the human mind to a random system of chemical reactions in line with neuro-scientific discovery. Going on this argument, art can be of little consequence philosophically (as regards 'truth'), aside from testifying to the lengths that the human will go to to feign 'meaning' in a 'meaningless' universe.
However, I would argue (and will continue to) that art in its affirmation of its own meaninglessness - by dint of what art is, as, arguably, the designation of objects as existent, and as having 'meaning', for their own sake - can testify to the continued possibility of meaning even as the output of human activity - i.e. 'the artist' (governed as it is by random material occurrences).
This accords rather with another argument I have with Brassier’s work that states that his seeming proclamation that life has no inherent meaning (as opposed to a post-Kantian stance that that tries to maintain meaning as an a priori condition of consciousness) is a bias that contradicts itself, on account of the fact that in a Universe with no meaning the terms ‘meaning’ and ‘no meaning’ are of equal measure - they both occur as proclamations issued from human minds that only think themselves to have the power of logical discrimination: in this case whether to proclaim a meaning or not is an irrelevance - the opposed statements are purely flipsides of a personal philosophical bias that in any case ‘does not exist’. In this sense, providing that we believe ourselves to have conscious discriminating minds, and providing we cannot really know for sure the truth as to whether we have meaning or not(an argument I can divulge later in this thread), arts status as the field which has as its sole purpose the proclamation of ‘meaning’ (or beauty) despite its meaninglessness (which, again, is inherent in the notion of ‘art’) is viable, and, indeed, ethically necessary. In this case I would argue 'art' to be of greater import to the philosopher than ’science’, in direct contradiction to Brassier’s claims.
Logical Regression Says:
March 16, 2008 at 5:51 pm
[...] And to answer your question, the main aims of the book appear to me to be those laid out in the preface. Several philosophers and thinkers are addressed in communicating these aims, principle amongst them Meillossaux, Adorno and Horkeimer, Kant, Hegel, Badiou, Laruelle Heidegger, Nietzcshe, Lyotard, Levinas and Freud. The main aim of the book is to discredit philosophical accounts that place existence as having a direct correlate to occurrences in the human mind, as it is argued that they are mere inheritors of mythic and Judaeo-Christian tradition. Taking statements about archaic history together with reliable scientific predictions Brassier points out that human consciousness is but a blip on the scientific radar as it registers the history of our Universe.
Personally I can speak most reasonably about what I understand best, and that is Brassier’s accounts of Adornianism and Nietzschianism, as well as his account of the importance of neuro-scientific study. On all three counts I would argue that Brassier’s extreme (nay, ‘evangelical’) nihilism demonstrates a peculiar bias that could be seen as a ‘belief’ of sorts and thus is out of keeping with its own rationalist claims, which demand non-bias.
The Conformist Says:
March 16, 2008 at 7:17 pm
The mobilization of Laruelle’s non-dialectical unilateralization is intended to annul the distinction of meaning and meaninglessness, which are, in any case, both folk-psychological terms. In this respect, the real indexes a ‘positive insignificance’ contra the collapse into relativism and perspectivism that ultimately lands Nietzsche in trouble.

It is simply not the case that human ‘meaning’ is simply reduced to the random fluctuations of matter etc.., rather, the point is that meaning can not be upheld as the transcendental vanguard that insures some form of qualitative interiority or other unbreachable realm. What cogsci a la Churchland, Dennett, Metzinger, offer, is a philosophical charge that states that ‘meaning’, qualia etc. are in fact perfectly amenable to objective scientific description; they can be completely (without affective or phenomenological excess) explained with regard to underlying insensate, inorganic, insignificant processes.

+++ Editor (LR): We have here to thank The Conformist, who appears very well informed, and to apologise for not following up on her/his statement fully (although some attempt is made below, in the main text). It just was not possible to sustain a dialogue on two fronts. However, in response to her/his comment, I think it higlights precisely Brassier's failing, if anything. It is unclear what is intended by Brassier's project if all that is achieved is to lay the account for 'meaning' at the foot of 'underlying insensate, inorganic, insignificant processes', whilst claiming that this does not harm meaning ('qualia etc'.) as such. There is a reflexivity to this argument that is akin to watching 'truth' presented as in a hall of mirrors, wherein every image is indiscernible from a reflection of the original intended image (taking that the original image=meaning): We can have no idea if we are seeing real 'truth', or a refracted form. Put simply, if 'meaning' is designated as possible only on account of underlying processes, one wonders just which of these processes (or almalgamation of processes) makes such a designation possible? Is not every proclamation of 'truth' or 'meaning', or of the origins of either, dependent on those underlying arbitary processes?

As such, it is not possible to stand aside from these processes, and, indeed, any belief - even those that are scientifically founded - that we have found the originary cause of human conciousness, could in any case be a mere reflection of our own thought projections - they being in fact predicated on underlaying processes that we cannot understand or access. I try not to beggar the point too much, but a repetitive reiteration of this failing goes precisely to show where the fault lies - in a perpetual reflection of the base problem of philosophy (the subject's inability to know for sure that it really knows what it knows!), that is most distant from truth whenever it claims to truly know that truth: Yes, science is as perverse as religion, and no amount of criticism aimed at the latter (and its agnostic and atheistic correlates) will absolve the former.

And here is where Brassier's attempt royally fails, as the extent of his own complicity within processes of thought that will show up biased results (the philospher's mind being ever amienable to 'wishful thinking', the likes of which Brassier would like to see banished) can never be itself wished away. The only way, in my mind, out of this quandary, is to accept as given the impossibility of the mind perceiving the truth re; there being meaning in life or not - and the bases of that 'meaning' - and to then predicate a 'meaning' construed under those terms - a meaning based upon there being no real existent meaning, and, thereby, not a 'rescue' of meaning by any measure: Meaning must be construed as co-existent with its opposite, but must be seen as no less 'meaningful' for this fact. It is here that Aesthetics becomes central as recourse to the artwork, and the illusion it plays in creating a 'meaning' despite its inherent meaninglessness provides us with the grounds upon which such an undertaking might be achieved with regards to 'life' itself.+++

[The re-numbering, from '1.' of the entries here denotes the passing of the dialogue from 'Larval Subjects' to this current 'blog' site. There is also a marked difference in the material approached. Whilst the broad subject remains the same, a shift is made towards a more direct consideration of 'art', and, later, 'conceptualism'.]

Wilhelm Fliess Says:
March 17, 2008 at 4:27 am
Logical Progression, thanks, this seems like a good summary of what is at stake in Nihil Unbound, and it’s great to discover that I’m not the only one who thinks that the question of art might be the key to determining the value of Brassier’s work. Now before I carry out any further research, here’s a preliminary response to your post:

1) Just because Ray Brassier (and perhaps the other philosophers grouped under the title ‘Speculative Realism’, which I think we should from now on refrain from referring to, for the sake of clarity: Brassier’s work is complicated enough!) believes that the human mind can ultimately be explained by physical and chemical processes, does it necessarily follow that ‘art can only be of little consequence’ for his philosophy? I agree with you that there seems to be an almost ‘evangelical’ tone to his nihilism, perhaps Brassier would value art which contributes to the displacement of Man as source of meaning for the universe? I’m hoping that a close reading of his essay ‘Genre is Obsolete’ might provide us with an outline of his position on art.

2) This leads on to my second point: I’m sure that for Brassier, art is not a legitimate realm of mystificatory Being. The significance of art lies not in its evocations of an originary nature which must be forever interpreted. When you write that ‘art in its affirmation of its own meaninglessness can testify to the continued possibility of meaning’, what kind of ‘meaning’ are we talking about here?
I’m resistant to the idea that art contains hidden truths, or that it provides a platform upon which ‘meaning’ for the intentional subject can be grounded, because then it seems to me that art becomes nothing more than a form of communication which needs to be hermeneutically decoded. Following Deleuze and Guattari, my preference is for a physiological conception of art, as something which affects us, transforms us, creates a ‘new partition of the sensible’ (Ranciere) and thereby creates ‘a new people, a new earth’. (Deleuze and Guattari)

3) No doubt this conception of art is something which Brassier would consider to be incurably Romantic. I believe that he does subscribe to the notion that life IS inescapably ‘meaningful’, but only according to the intrinsic biological teleology of the finite organism, rather than it being an a priori (transcendental) condition of human consciousness. However, Brassier doesn’t seem to consider the idea that human beings might be capable of transforming themselves through the artistic construction of their material environments, perhaps because for him these transformations don’t go far enough, and can only be accounted for through a feeble phenomenology of sensation. How can we assess the way that art and culture (understood as ‘institutions of instinct’) have really transformed humanity, through endless descriptions of qualia? Instead, the idea that the human species might be genetically remodelled in order to make it isomorphic with capital is viewed as a potentially positive outcome of technological developments, and getting involved with this process, rather than lamenting for the lost original meaning of humanity, is for Brassier a political exigency.

4) When you write about ‘the fact that in a universe with no meaning, the terms ‘meaning’ and ‘no meaning’ are of equal measure’, I assume you are alluding to Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence. After learning that the world has no intrinsic unity, origin, or purpose, it is only the artist (as overman) who can reinvest the world with value, and redeem our meaningless suffering. Yet Brassier believes that Nietzsche’s aesthetic transvaluation illegitimately endows human-beings ‘with an infinite reservoir of spiritual energy which furnishes them with an inexhaustible capacity for physical resilience’. Justifying life through art amounts to investing suffering with meaning, which will ‘automatically reinscribe woe into a spiritual calculus which subordinates present suffering to some recollected or longed-for happiness.’ Brassier thinks it is crucial to do away with this redemptive valuation, but I would question his seemingly literalist reading of Nietzsche’s usage of the terms ’suffering’ and ‘pleasure’. Nietzsche insists that ‘joy is deeper than the heart’s agony’, not because human beings as finite organisms have the physical capacity to experience more pleasure than pain if only they choose to affirm life, but because the human species transforms what it experiences as pleasurable and painful through its collective culture, understood as the highest expressions of the (inhuman) will to power. By this I mean the intensification of experience which is concomitant with the constructions of culture (art in its broadest sense, and not a million miles away from Marxian notions of collective labour) through which the limited pleasures of the finite organism takes ever more circuitous routes to find satisfaction.

5) I’ll draw this long post to a close with what I consider to be the main problem with the position I’ve just put forward, the status of the will to power as a speculative biological impulse. if Nietzsche’s will to power will be re-constructed by Freud as the death-drive, and transformed into the concept of desire by Deleuze and Guattari, then it is also worth remembering that it began life as a vitalist principle in Romantic philosophy, not unlike Schiller’s concept of the ‘play-drive’. My question is, on what grounds can we attribute such a striving capacity (conatus) to life? Life is redeemed through art as the expression of the inhuman will to power which intensifies it, but how does this anthropomorphic notion apply to life as a whole, to unicellular organisms, for instance, to use Brassier’s example? Is this not just a postulation of a vital capacity to life as a means of comforting ourselves, a new god to replace the old one? I will wait patiently for your reply.
Wilhelm Fliess Says:
March 17, 2008 at 4:38 am
Apologies to The Conformist, who seems to have already partly answered my question before I finished writing it! I haven’t quite got my head around the chapter on Laruelle yet, but I’m working on it…
Wilhelm Fliess Says:
March 17, 2008 at 6:56 am
and apologies to Logical Regression, for not following your counter-intuitive name logic!
Logical Regression Says:
March 17, 2008 at 11:43 am
‘What cogsci a la Churchland, Dennett, Metzinger, offer, is a philosophical charge that states that ‘meaning’, qualia etc. are in fact perfectly amenable to objective scientific description; they can be completely (without affective or phenomenological excess) explained with regard to underlying insensate, inorganic, insignificant processes.’
Yes, but this implies a bias. Churchland is not against meaning per se, but meaning as inherent to 'being'; he sees meaning as not central to existence, but amenable to it. Meaning is something felt by humans, but to exteriorize it would be to place an anthropomorphic dimension on an otherwise oblivious objective reality; whereas meaning, for the post-Kantians that Brassier derides, is intrinsic to existence. That is, meaning is inscribed in the experience of the subject.
With regard to Laruelle’s thought; even to nullify the distinction between meaning and non-meaning implies a bias and a ‘decision’. It operates, indeed, on account of a desire to split off the concomitance (as, arguably, dialectical poles are co-dependent) of two poles of a dialectic - 'subject and object', 'life and death' - in the creation of an apparently independent unified whole, i.e. 'Laruelle’s non-dialectical unilateralization'. That this conception of existence could be independent of the subject-object dichotomy naively circumvents what could be described as the 'main complaint', the principle failing here: the starting point for such a declaration has been an attempt to overcome the distinction between 'subject' and 'object'. On who's account, then, did a splitting between subject and object occur? If thought must have thought the split between subject and object, in it's attempting to reconcile subject and object, then under the conditons that thought thought that thought it must be taken that that such a split between subject and object existed for thought. How might any reconciliation between subject and object then have been approached other than a further splitting from that point? Non-dialectical philosophical forms are none other than the subjective pole of the dialectic reckoning its linkedness with the object. Now, as much as its linkedness with the object be a certainty (science shows we are all linked to all things, and we are, in any case, materially composed), its separatedness from the object is a condition of thought itself... even of the thought that 'wishes' away the subject-object dialectic.
(cont... Editor[LR] - this lengthy repsonse has been split in order to differentiate the criticism against Laruelle, with that against Brassier, following) Put simply, the distinction between 'meaning' and 'non-meaning' in any case implies that we live with ‘no meaning’ or ‘non-meaning’, under the terms that we understand meaning. It favours one pole of the dialectic. This is something necessary to such a statement, and cannot be a criticism as such against Brassier’s cause, yet it still demonstrates a bias incompatible with his theory, as he so favours the negative aspect of any dialectic;'non-meaning', 'extinction', 'death'! The thought that he could approach these elements from anything other than a 'living' purview (and in that sense one that is not 'dead'), would require the kind of spiritual belief that Brassier abjures. Of course, Brassier claims to collapse the dialectic and register life under the aegis of 'extinction', but completely, and unaccountably, from my purview, on the account of death... life goes 'hanging'. He does what Laruelle does (see above), but worse... he collpases the dialectic, not realising that he does so on account of his inscription within the same dialectic, as a subject, but then credits the object (i.e. 'death'), unwittingly, with this achievement.
Wilhelm Fliess Says:
March 17, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Logical Regression, when you write that ‘meaning is intrinsic to existence’, what kind of ‘meaning’ are we talking about? Surely Brassier would argue that although human beings as finite organisms are compelled to find meaning in existence, bound as they are by their specific needs; this pre-theoretical subjective notion of meaning is not as valuable as the insights gained from more objective forms of knowledge, ‘cogsci’ being one example, Spinoza being another. The point is that these more objective, rational forms of knowledge can reveal certain things about the human species which we would prefer not to know: i.e. that we are driven by biological drives rather than free will, or that our solar system will explode in four billion years; hence the reason why philosophy should be ‘the organon of extinction’. If not, then philosophy loses its value as a means by which we can comprehend our existence, and becomes little more than a subjective therapeutics.

What is this sense of ‘meaning inscribed in the experience of the subject’? A hermeneutics of language? A subjective phenomemology of sensation? Instead of trying to discount the apparently circular logic of his argument (’he argues that life is meaningless but then he must have a notion of meaning to assert that’), it might be more productive to analyse the specific metaphysical (epistemological and ontological) arguments which correspond to his veneration of the natural sciences. Yes, there seems to be an evangelical tone to his enthusiastic nihilism, but is that surprising given that the book originally had ‘gnostic skepticism’ as part of its subtitle? Brassier’s position isn’t arbitrary: his own explicit metaphysical commitments outlined in Nihil Unbound, I would argue that there is an implicit ‘aesthetic’ dimension to it too. It is this ‘constructive’ aspect of Brassier’s philosophy which I am keen on exploring.
Wilhelm Fliess Says:
March 17, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Sorry, the second from last line should read ‘Brassier’s position isn’t arbitrary: his own explicit metaphysical commitments ARE outlined in Nihil Unbound, AND I would argue that there is an implicit aesthetic dimension to it too.’
Logical Regression Says:
March 17, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Thanks, this is interesting: I understand with regard to Nietzsche that Brassier gets very hung up on Nietzsche’s instruction to grasp every joy and pain equally. Whilst Brassier points out that to do so is to accord some spiritual significance to the experience of both joy and pain I take it rather that Nietzsche wished to point out that both were of equal import. i.e. he does what Laruelle does with regard to ‘meaning’ and ‘non-meaning’: neither exist as dialectical oppositions. I would argue that, overall, Brassier does with Nietzsche what he does with Adorno: he takes the endless cycling of suffering and joy (for the latter ‘hope’) as indicative of a wish for redemption when, rather, both of these philosophers do not argue for a redemption, but merely point out that life exists within the circling of death, pleasure under the aegis of pain and joy as concomitant with suffering. Taken in this sense, and against Brassier’s claims philosophy, and art, could be seen as the inscription of the conditions of the possibility of life and meaning coexistent with their opposites, rather than philosophy being taken to be the ‘organon of extinction’. Given that I don’t see anything radical in my readings of Adorno or Nietzsche I still maintain that Brassier’s thought holds a peculiar bias towards an amoral and unaesthetic rationalism - scientism, in a word.
With regard to Brassier’s piece on Noise we could perform a close reading to see if he gives anything away there. But I have a feeling that he could counter that the piece you refer to was never intended as ‘philosophy’ per se, and in any case, as a separate text to Nihil Unbound perhaps it cannot be criticised in the same breath? +++ Editor (LR): Brassier, incidentally has an interest in ‘Noise’ as the organiser of NoiseTheoryNoise# 1 and 2 - two conferences held at Middlesex University in 2003 and 2004.+++ So, yes, with regard to Brassier’s interest in Noise we could ruminate that he may hold some aesthetic yearnings, but I’m not sure if we could go deeply into this unless he divulges himself where such a link may reside in his theory. We can only gather, arguably, that his dismissal of ‘poesis’throughout Nihil Unbound rules out an interest in ‘art’ (other than in its being dismissed as wish projection).
Wilhelm Fliess Says:
March 17, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Logical Regression, I’m guessing that the reason why you haven’t yet attempted to define your concepts of art and meaning is because there’s a backlog of posts on this thread. (and before I forget, thanks to Larval Subjects, for enabling this discussion to occur!)

When you write, “philosophy, and art, could be seen as the inscription of the conditions of the possibility of life and meaning coexistent with their opposites, rather than philosophy being taken to be the ‘organon of extinction’” do you mean that philosophy and art is the intelligible grounds upon which our understanding of life and death, meaning and non-meaning, is given? If so, then I’m not sure that Brassier’s position is so far removed from yours, only he might add that scientific knowledge and logical argument also provide us with an understanding of life and death, meaning and non-meaning, which is not as dependent upon human consciousness as say, a hermeneutic understanding of philosophy and art.

I’m still interested in what you make of my point five in my earlier post, as it’s a problem that I’m wrestling with at the moment.

I thought the Multitudes article might be useful for providing us with clues to the aesthetic dimension of Brassier’s philosophy. I still think that this is the case, and I’ve explained why I believe the question of art is of critical importance to his position, and why I believe there’s an implicit aesthetic ‘constructive’ dimension underlying his book. Examining a shorter article specifically concerned with (non-)aesthetics might be an expedient way of figuring out this ‘implicit aesthetics’, regardless of whether ‘he’ will refute my argument!

Frankly, I’m not interested in trying to simply refute the claims of Nihil Unbound on the basis of a banal argument. His dismissal of the Romantic concepts of poesis, poiesis, and autopoiesis, is a result of a serious study of philosophy as well as the biological sciences, and I believe it is these arguments which we need to clarify if we’re to have an insight into the role of art for Brassier.
I’ll be busy for the rest of the day but I look forward to your reply.
Logical Regression Says:
March 17, 2008 at 11:19 pm
OK, apologies - to define 'art' and ‘meaning’:
Art I would define, for these purposes, in an Adornian sense - art is , as the ‘absolute commodity’, that which can claim to stand aside from a commodified society by mimicking the autonomy of the commodity form. It therefore plays the trick principally of claiming to be other than it is, and on that basis claiming to be ‘free’ and to have ‘meaning’. I would argue, however, that it is unclear whether it could really bear this capacity today, in our contemporary society, when it may be subsumed within the capitalist/rationalist framework before it has a chance to elide it. However, I argue that it is necessary to suppose that art, as the communication of that which is truly ‘autonomous’, ostensibly at least, must be evoked in the sense that its concept allows the potential promise of us transcending the conditions of a reified society.
With regard to ‘meaning’, I mean to argue for the possibility of their being a meaning even in face of the possibility that there is not a meaning inherent in life: i.e. there is not a meaning that is god-given, neither one that operates by dint of a sensus communis, or in terms of a historical destiny. In light of there being no meaning as such I would like to argue that meaning can be construed, but that it might be in spite of there being no intrinsic ‘meaning’ to life. I.E. It can be construed as the ‘projection’ of meaning via art as illusion.
- - -
In response to point 5, then yes I agree entirely that the Will to Power as you consider it could be seen as ‘a new god to replace the old one’. Yet, I would argue that art need not support this position, as art in its illusory capacity does not necessarily support the Will to Power but rather points to ‘meaning’ as ‘illusory’: thus art does not will 'power' as such. Art is truthful in that illusion inheres in its very being - yet it continues to exist all the same; thus its truth resides in its inherent untruth. It is in this sense that I believe art could well account for the possibility of ‘meaning’ - even in striving after a meaning that is not a given and does not necessarily exist. It can ‘mean’ something in that it has the capacity to feign meaning no less than the human mind does. Yet, unlike science and rationality, it does not have as its condition a duty to meaning as material truth, and so as a capacity of the human mind is not bound to objective truth as are the aforementioned capacities/disciplines.
The only terms on which I could see Nietzsche as reflecting this attitude is in an extreme reading of his attitude towards Christ in The Antichrist, where Christ demonstrates his power, given as an example of the Uberman, by ceding all power…by walking to his death willingly. Art essentially does just this in that its striving after perfection is undertaken in the acknowledgment of the impossibility of reaching such perfection. In that sense the will to power as expressed through the artwork could be seen as an expression and acceptance of mortality, of human imperfection, of a lack of meaning, and thus would not be just a new god replacing the old one. But that is to view Nietzsche on account of one extreme interpretation - and there are so many readings of him. In this sense, however, I could find myself quite liking Nietzsche.
Yes, we could attempt a close reading of the piece from Multitudes. I would be grateful if you would start us off and I am sure I could benefit from this as I have done from our exchange (and thanks to Larval Subjects for the opportunity - I would not have found a worthy debate on the subject elsewhere).
Yes, I agree there has to be a concentrated effort to address the complexity of Brassier’s text. I would propose that if we are to look at the ‘aesthetic’ in relation to Nihil Unbound the sections on Adorno, Nietzsche and Deleuze would be most useful to us at this point. Thanks.
Wilhelm Fliess Says:
March 18, 2008 at 8:00 am
This sounds good to me, it’s the sections on Adorno and Horkheimer, Deleuze and Nietzsche that are most interesting for me too. I will try and extrapolate the key aesthetic arguments from ‘Genre is Obsolete’ today and then see what we can come up with on the Thanatosis of Enlightenment chapter- I’m particularly interested in defining the radically different conceptions of nature used by Adorno and Horkheimer, and Ray Brassier.
Cheers
Logical Regression Says:
March 18, 2008 at 9:26 pm
Ok, that sounds good. A close reading of the two would be a grand idea. Look forward to what you initially come up with.
Wilhelm Fliess Says: If a Speculative Realism cannot think aesthetics then this has serious political consequences for their philosophy. To my mind, there is no such thing as a purely rational politics solely based upon axiomatic egalitarian prescriptions. Even a sympathetic reader like Nina Power will concede that Badiou’s axiomatic politics can only function through the postulation of a Feuerbachian minimal humanism, and despite Peter Hallward’s condemnation of ontologies which base their politics upon a notion of something like ‘shared feeling’, I would contend that every specific instantiation of an egalitarian prescription simultaneously requires the implicit postulation of an enriched life. The communist ideal of Marxism only functions if one can imagine a world in which our collective labour becomes the highest joyful expression of our species-being. Collective labour is not a utilitarian ethos which derives its value from the fact that by working together we can be more productive, it is rather a Romantic belief in the idea that there is a joyful aspect in creation: every work will be an unconditioned work of art; desiring-production. This is why I think that finding the aesthetic dimension of the Speculative Realism project is a political necessity
If the aesthetics of ‘Genre is Obsolete’ are anything to go by, then things do not bode well. The essay begins with Brassier explaining how the term Noise ‘is at once a specific sub-genre of musical vanguardism and a name for what refuses to be subsumed by genre.’ He selects two groups who exemplify this anti-conventional stance of Noise, two groups who are so anti-conventional that they even (predictably) disavow the label Noise. Hardly the most radical gesture, and a negative definition of art which appears to confine it to the realm of semantic meaning: non-Noise is valuable simply because it disrupts our semantic categories. How is this non-aesthetic semantics experienced? At best it can only be like the twinkling of the undecideable in Derrida. In short, art seems condemned to become a mere play of signification.
Continuing with further negative definitions of Noise (it is not knee-jerk academic reflexivity/ it is punk beyond punk/it has an affinity with rock’s knowing unselfconsciousness) the second section quietly concludes with the mention that each of the two groups ‘implicate delirious lucidity within libidinal derangement: intellect and libido simultaneously tweaked.’ It’s as if Brassier realises that a purely intellectual role for art will not account for arts specificity, and is thus forced back into using folk-psychological theories of sensation: the tweaking of the ‘libido’. Rather that than contaminate his philosophy with a more abstract but more Deleuzian notion of affectivity. But what else is the simultaneous tweaking of the intellect and the libido, if not the experience of joyful passions through the intuition of common notions?
The third section sketches out the following criteria for a non-aesthetics, each of which, arguably, conform to a typically Romantic, if not classical conception of art. i) it is always excessive ii) it is against interpretation iii) it is a work of constant experimentation iv) it produces an infinite movement of form. Again, what is interesting about the descriptions is the lengths to which he will go to avoid using inherited terminology. With Noise, there ‘is always too much rather than too little to hear at once; an excess which invites repeated listens.’ What is this always excessive complement to the formal arrangement of music, if not its affective dimension? That element of sound which the senses register but which our consciousness is unable to process into either thought or feeling. Isn’t this also why the abstract lyrical component of the music always refuses interpretation, because the semantic content ‘cannot be separated from the sound in which it is nested’? The term ‘PRE aesthetics’ is intended to describe the way in which form should never become fixed in a non-aesthetic approach to art, and constant experimentation ensures there is no final totalised product; what we have is the infinite movement of form, or, ‘the moving matter of a continuous variation’. (Deleuze and Guattari, appropriated from A.W. Schlegel) Here we are getting closer to the idea of art as a living form.
By section four non-aesthetics has become intolerable. Brassier identifies the horrendous performative aspects of his non-Noise artists by examining their concerts, accurately described as ‘psycho-physical tests and training’. I won’t go into grim detail about what the audience is expected to undergo, but Brassier justifies the simultaneously shocking and ridiculous aspects of the concerts as ‘experiments in controlled absurdity, poised at the tipping point between comedic entertainment and intolerable provocation.’ Two things strike me about this section: firstly, whilst it contains an admission that artworks have a precise physiological dimension, it doesn’t contain a consistent set of terms to account for this physiological aspect (such as a theory of drives, or a theory of affects); and instead, merely resorts to a hyperbolic use of adjectives to describe sensation. Here at least Brassier is comfortable with his qualia. Nor does it consider the political consequences of this physiological dimension of art (such as the way that Ranciere, following Schiller, will envisage a revolutionary potential in the ‘new partitions of the sensible’ which the artwork imposes). Secondly, the dark precursor to this notion of performance as a ‘psycho-physical test and training’ must surely be Antonin Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’; why is there no mention of his work? In fact, the parallels between Artaud’s vision of a total art and Brassier’s conception of non-aesthetics will extend far beyond the necessary cruelty of performance. Both Artaud and Brassier share an undeniable Gnostic sensibility, a sensibility which is ‘organised around the idea of knowing-gnosis-rather than around faith.’ In the preface to Artaud’s Selected Works, Susan Sontag delineates the Gnostic trajectory in Artaud’s writing. Explaining how the ‘leading energies of Gnosticism come from metaphysical anxiety and acute psychological distress-the sense of being abandoned, of being an alien, of being possessed by demonic powers which prey on the human spirit in a cosmos vacated by the divine’, she goes on to describe the psychological and physical torments the adept must undergo in the ‘Gnostic passage through the stages of transcendence…a move from the conventionally intelligible to what is conventionally unintelligible’, until finally one reaches the total work of art:
‘And Artaud’s hope for art is also Gnostic, like his hope for the body. The vision of a total art has the same form as the vision of the redemption of the body. “The body is the body/it is alone/it has no need of organs,”…Art will be redemptive when, like the redeemed body, it transcends itself-when it has no organs (genres).’ (Sontag)
The brief final section, which concludes with an invocation of a ‘noise which is not ‘noise’, the noise of the sui generis’ only further underlines the similarities between Brassier’s singular conception of a non-aesthetics, and, I would contend, the idea of an artwork as an abstract machine, which is non-reducible to the artist; but is instead the living form of an orphan artwork. Of course, this brutal reading of ‘Genre is Obsolete’ can be easily discounted: this essay is peripheral to Brassier’s philosophy, I am criticising it for what it is not, and it was never intended to be a manifesto for a non-aesthetics. But I think I’ve managed to identify the key problem inherent in any potential non-aesthetic theory of artworks: it will need to found a consistent set of terms to account for the role of sensation, and not just an insincere ‘rhetoric of exasperation.’ My next reading will involve an examination of the role of the Freudian death drive- what was always a speculative biological impulse- in the second and seventh chapters of Nihil Unbound.
Logical Regression (Response): Willhelm - I'm going to have to clean up this blog... this may even require another move, to a more customisable blog format. But for the moment we'll make do...
Your comments are interesting, and worthy of the subject. Also, I can ascertain you are a Middlesex Student, but perhaps I'm wrong ! I agree with you with regard to your feeling that some kind of inscription of aesthetics is necessary within, or against, Brassier's system, for reasons both ethical and, put simply, aesthetic. However, I do believe a kind of non-aesthetics might be precisely the way forward, though not the one suggested by you via your reading of Brassier's text on 'non-Noise'. I think for one that there is something almost comical about the extremes that Noise/Noise Theory fanatics go to to distance Noise from the conventions of music, and now to distance non-Noise from Noise. It does rather point to the fact that there is nothing in modern society that can circumvent being commodified (see Nick Smith on Noise and Adornian theory: http://clogic.eserver.org/4-2/smith.html). Ever more desperate attempts to avoid 'labelling' devise ever more predictable labels (as in 'non-Noise'). What art and music might better do is extricate themselves from the world of capital and of science altogether: in becoming beyond categorisation art may have to shed precisely what it is, the 'art-object' itself. I advocate that art migrates into the pure 'thought-of-art' (as the thought of the possibility of pure freedom). On the back of Duchamp's declaration that anything can be art, and Beuys' that 'We are all artists', such a course of action allows that we can declare ourselves as art (as free) on our own say so, and it need not involve a dismissal of the claims of neuroscience, as art is, in any case, an illusory projection of freedom (projected and experienced as very real) and not a faith-oriented religious belief. What I am arguing is that if science eradicates the 'spirit' in man, that man reclaims 'spirit' (or 'meaning' in life) as an 'artistic readymade'. With regard to your close reading of the Freudian death-drive, I will read the same chapters and await your response. I will say firstly that what I ascertain from reading Nihil Unbound is that Brassier's interpretation of the Death Drive is very biased indeed - where he reads life as only barely inscribed under the aegis of death, I would argue that Freud can actually be read as demonstrating that life is triumphant in its living in death's shadow. Again, please invite others to join in.

Into the blogsphere.

2007-02-25T16:47:00.000-08:00

The Oxford World Classics edition of Joyce's 'Ulysses', carries an introduction that states that 'It is impossible to start reading Ulysses'... and one might add to that that it is impossible to finish reading it too - and this not due to its length or complexity. It really is a book that has no beginning (and thus has no end), owing much to the Odyssey, which itself has no beginning...

In a sense, cyberspace, the internet, etc. is fast approaching a 'physical' realization of the non-ending/non-beginning of all things: We are all party to a huge corpus of being that feeds into itself, feeds on itself... and on, and on!

This never ending end.

This being part of a huge spiralling, swirling soup of ideas...like so many 0's and 1's painlessly fired through space is perhaps the apotheosis of a technocratic democracy, as to whether it's a 'good' or 'bad' thing... this really amounts to a question of who's pulling the strings up there? Are we all fast heading for an existence plugged into a virtual Utopia at the hands of tyrants who run the streets ragged in orgies of human excess to which we are denied (this being a well worn paranoid fantasy taken to its nth degree)?

[ ]

But even then, in this worst case scenario, I sense that many may counter that: 'a peasant need be grateful for the scraps he receives... and ask nothing of the masters table'.

I suppose, then, a better way of aligning the debate, would be to make explicit the shared responsibility that we all have in averting what could amount to a possible destruction of the human project as we know it - as we all willingly become 'Nobody'. In so doing we present each and everyone one of us as the excessive tyrant... after all, it is for want of power and recognition that we approach myspace/personal blogging etc... Now, having assumed this role and having consigned humanity to hell, we are left enormously free, more free even than the digitised minions who live blissfully unaware in their false Utopia. And here we must urge a caution... because whilst the 'devil' enjoys a complete vantage point over all of hell... it is, nonetheless, still hell.

And herein there is a choice.

-Cast your eyes aside of the screen one moment now.
Were there not mountains, and sea, and things?

-I don't know, but a Google search should leave us in no doubt...