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sadbirder · 11 months

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In What Ways Can Speculative Engagement With The More Than Human World Contradict Human Exceptionalism?

Creating New Narratives Around the Position of Human Beings as Participants of Life During an Age of Mass Extinction.

The following writing was my dissertation submitted for the BA(Hons) Contemporary Art Practice Course at Gray’s School of Art. Please excuse the garbage title. It was fun to write this, but if I was to be self critical, I’m not too sure I really conclude the essay. Anyway, I’m pretty stoked on some of what I had to say, but some of it seems embarrassing already. It’s a long read and pretty tangental. I hope you make it through and find something interesting.

The following dissertation is dedicated with love to my Father.

“A cool wind blows in the city of beans.” - Fergus Connor, Gray’s School of Art Photography Studio Technician.

Introduction

It feels dumb to be hammering at a keyboard after writing the phrase age of mass extinction. I look out of my window and I can see my big, loud neighbour – the industrial structures of the international Port of Aberdeen – invade the personal space of my bigger but quieter neighbours the River Dee and the wild North Sea as a mild early season storm pushes through. The storm is an occasional visitor from whom we all recoil because it has a habit of getting so close that we can feel its breath. Herring Gulls and Common Seals defiantly travel into the bounds of the port, inaccessible to me by force of human law, but no one seems to mind them. There is a world full of life out there that is apparently becoming less and less alive with every passing moment but I am in here, in my little rented abode, that I cannot afford.

Shifting my gaze from window to screen, I question the value of what I am writing in spite of my strange enjoyment of the aggravatingly cortisol spiking activity. I am attempting to convince you that the conclusions I have arrived at after reading a dozen or so books are interesting enough to receive an abstract but quantitative mark of endorsement which may lead to a set of circumstances where I can buy, rather than borrow, a dwelling that I still cannot afford. A promise of more, when I know I want less.

The following words will explore the ways that self-contained attention and being inside (by multiple definitions) can corrupt the potential of our species to participate in living intentionally at the scale of life. The act of speculation will be considered as a mode of attention for accessing the outside, other or more than human world by exploring the activity of birding in relation to the art of Tom Sewell. Speculation will then be augmented by harmony in a discussion of Surfing as a more than human sport demonstrated by it’s connection to Birding as an activity of speculative attention. Surfing experiences will then provide demonstrations of Speculative Realist philosophy and Object Oriented Ontology guided by Steven Shaviro, Eugene Thacker and Timothy Morton in showing how participation with life contradicts human exceptionalism.

The chapter It’s Not The End Of The World will confront my personal difficulty with finding space to write about contemporary art throughout this work. This chapter will assess the place of art in my own life and its role in the wider context of the art world. Interior and exterior modes of thinking and living are questioned in the context of art as life by exploring the work of Marie Angeletti and the philosophical meaning of Roland Barthe’s concept of Studium and Punctum. An argument will be made for art as life as a state of self-contained attention that denies living through its interiority.

The final chapter will go outside by looking at the value of the world outside of art to art itself and how this is echoed by the value of experience and time spent out of doors. This will include a discussion of Emily Strachan’s navigation of employment with a fine art skillset resulting in finding more authenticity for the application of this skillset in the world of gardening rather than the world of art. This will be an examination of how limited funding and a devaluing narrative about the arts is causing artists to retrain and considers the benefits of this skill diversity.

There’s More Than One Way To Clean Your Asshole

I miss Covid-19. Lockdown was the best time of my life. I mean it - no hyperbole. Partying is overrated and busy places overwhelm me. I was a lucky dude. My furlough pay from my employer - warehouse paying minimum wage - was based on my average hours of the previous three months and I had worked 4 – 5 days a week instead of my usual 3-day week for most of that time. My pay to not go to work was more than my usual income, I was just about to become a student again, I was living with my the love of my life and we had almost zero financial obligations.

Does anyone from the UK even remember when the only time outdoors or exercise permitted was one run, walk or cycle a day for one-hour maximum, within five kilometres of where you lived? I do.

My partner, Emily Strachan, and I walked forever, 100% breaking that one-hour time limit rule. We walked slowly, inspired by Hamish Fulton’s Group Walk at Curzon Park, for hours around the ghost town Aberdeen had become. For some reason, a large portion of the population of our city had evacuated and we had both rural and urban areas within our 5km. I recognise our privilege and I know people were suffering. For us though, the pandemic was authentically wonderful.

Fig 1.

Before lockdown, while people were running around in a media-induced panic, buying towers of toilet paper and pasta, we were very scared. It was intimidating to see people flock from out of town to so willingly ransack our local supermarket because theirs were already empty. Their ravenousness eventually inspired our calm. We soon realised that we still had a shower, and that no one was buying the fresh fruit and vegetables. At the risk of sounding crude, we decided that, if it came to it, we did not need toilet paper for survival because there is more than one way to clean your asshole. Water being one of a few glaringly obvious methods, which in Scotland is almost free. Our eating became rich with a variety of nutrition and flavour as we were forced to explore the world of vegetables in more depth than we ever had before. This exposed a gap between the ways that people seem to think things should be, versus the potential for living in radically new ways within the same system.

We were questioning what normal is, in an era of narratives hallmarked by: debating the significance of upsettingly high death tolls, the greed of hoarding household provisions and the scary argument that emerged about how vulnerable people should just accept that Covid-19 may kill them rather than continue to cause inconvenience for everyone else as society grew bored of lockdown rules. The choice was between quote-unquote the new normal; a version of normal that favoured selfishness and a lack of accountability for decisions made allowing people to live in denial of how their extremely limited view of life has resulted in a fundamental change in life itself. Or; if it was not the new normal then there was desperate need to get back to normal as if normal was anything close to satisfying. What has getting back to normal got us? War in Europe for the first time this century, more of all that fun climate stuff (fires, floods, storms, extreme temperature variation etc…), global nuclear war is kind of back on the table (yay!) and at home in Britain all that ever so tasty sewerage flows into the waterways and austerity has done so much damage that strikes are once again commonplace. But, you know, actually we had a cold snap in winter, so things will probably be ok maybe actually.

Fig 2.

Emily and I realised that things could be done differently. Between us, a continuing dialogue has developed around ideas of separating ourselves from the mainstream yet narrow view of life being something oriented by the mediating actions of economy (Latour 2020) where the organisation of the world is limited to human perception as being the highest degree of reality (Shaviro 2016). We seek to free our attention from the limits of containment.

Birds Have Better Lives than Humans

Animals have always fascinated me. Birds in particular excite me in an unusually sincere way. During the planning of this piece of writing, it was unthinkable to me that I would include any evidence of my enthusiasm for birding. In a discussion with my tutor about my research for this dissertation Chris Fremantle said something about birds having better lives than humans. This comment resonated with much of my thinking and revealed to me that my interest in birds was a way to make my own research more accessible to myself.

In late 2019 Emily bought me The Hamlyn Guide To Birds of Britain and Europe. Birding was a mostly secret part of my life that I rarely indulged because my other 20-something year old peers were not that interested, often dismissing it mockingly.

Receiving that book, I realised my partner enjoys and actively participates in the same niche cross-section of interests and lifestyle choices as I do. Together: birding, surfing, watching cartoons, eating plant-based, ignoring texts and walking aimlessly, we lead a life that for the most part is dedicated to the immediacy of our tangible surroundings, enchanted by our “ongoing attention to a world that is also attending to us.” (Ingold 2018 pVI)

Today, I am a straight up birder. I love birding so much because it is boring yet substantially engaging. The feeling of gratification after seeing a bird is similar but more comprehensively fulfilling than time spent using online media. The existential dread of online encounters is pushed aside by an encounter with a bird because the bird encounter pulls my attention into the living world rather than out of it whereby instead of being a spectator of life, I become an active participant (Haladyn 2015). Of course, by my use of the word life here I do not necessarily mean exclusively an individual’s own lived experience but a more expansive idea of life as a whole collective system of processes and entities on Earth (Latour 2020).

Fig 3.

Slough - Tom Sewell; Mixed media sculpture.

Spider crab shell, plastic, willow, paracord, glow stick, shark’s tooth, ammonite, claws, bone, rubber, shells, mushrooms, iron, mermaid’s purse, flint.

Tom Sewell is a British artist who makes work concerned with active participation of life in recognition of the more-than-human world. Pictured; is a sculpture by Sewell titled Slough. This sculpture is constructed out of materials found during immersive walks in unfamiliar landscapes. The process is about giving attention to the living world and participating in being with it. Slough creates a single structure by unifying human-made objects with living and non-living natural entities. It is through this unification that Slough offers the viewer access into experiences of immersion in the landscape of the tangible realm of the outdoors. Sewell invites speculation around the conflict between the internal human-only world and the external more-than–human world. It is through this act of speculation that the viewer of Slough is able to consider life as something beyond individual experience and question the connectivity between humans and nonhumans (Birt, Shin and Clara 2020).‌

I believe the origin of many a birder’s love for the activity lies with a similar type of speculation. Much like the walks of Tom Sewell, the act of birding is an intentional attempt to participate - without interfering - in a world that is other than human. In discussing the importance of speculation in relation to realism, Steven Shaviro references what Eugene Thacker “calls the world-without-us” (Shaviro 2016 p67). A human cannot possibly know what it is like to be a bird from a bird’s perspective (Nagel 2016) but nonetheless the ways in which birds live entice the observation and attention of birders to create a phenomenon that resembles a non-dominative approach to interspecies connectivity.

The human birder has a devotional practice of speculative attention, offering time and thought to birdlife by observing, appreciating and attending to a world (Ingold 2018) that is indifferent to these actions (Tamás 2020). The act of speculation here is directing attention into the external “world-without-us” (Thacker 2011 p6) and in doing so; birders are being outside in both that they leave the internal environment of the human-constructed indoors to be outdoors and that they leave the limited, internal human perspective to actively seek and consider other experiences that are different and external to the human-centric “world-for-us” (Thacker 2011 p6). It is by being outside, out-of-doors and exterior to the human only world that birders become realists because of their recognition of a world without them that is only accessible to them through their speculative practice of attention.

Surfing; A More Than Human Sport

In May 2022, an online Stab Magazine article titled “Surfing’s Dark Secret: Birding” was published. This was another moment where two activities I participate in, surfing and birding, harmonised. In the piece, Paul Evans explains that other activities often paired with surfing such as: golf, MMA fighting and fishing are mismatched. The argument is that surfing is an activity where one engages actively but - and this distinction is important – harmoniously with multiple elemental and cosmic processes. Birding is a harmonious engagement with these processes but the other activities are not. These activities are all dominant, oppressive and contradict what surfing actually is through their violence. Indeed, as Evans points out, golf courses are chemical soaked monocultures that dominate landscapes through their denial of space for other human and nonhuman uses of the land. In Britain for example, there is “more land devoted to golf courses than to housing” (Evans 2022). The violence in MMA fighting is juxtaposed with “surfing ohana” (Evans 2022). Ohana is a Hawaiian word that means family; it is a word for addressing those with whom one has compassion. Surfing originated in Hawaii, where the most important surfing events are held today. Hawaiian cultural customs, including ohana, are still valued highly and respected throughout surfing’s now global following, to such an extent that even the best surfer, hoping to succeed in Hawaii, will not get very far without observing ohana. Both MMA fighting and fishing (when not for survival) are not practices of compassion. Finally, Paul Evans points out the absurdity of fishing for sport as a mode of appreciating nature:

“Fishing is a great one for nature lovers, marine wildlife enthusiasts or folk who just adore the great outdoors. You sense a wild creature swimming around free in the sea, perhaps even for decades, and instinctively think: “I’d love to hook you through the face, stove your fucking skull in with a mallet whilst you suffocate, then share pictures of your corpse.”” (Evans 2022).

Surfing, like birding, is a devotional practice that demands participation in the more than human world. It takes a long time to gain skill in the sport and the more experience a surfer gains, the more auxiliary skills are practiced in developing an understanding of the elemental and cosmic processes that feed and shape the surfing experience. Truly skilled surfers seek not to overpower the ocean, knowing that this is impossible; they try instead to flow with it. Surfing is a cosmic action because of the fugitive endeavour of the participants’ seeking of flow with a singular and fleeting pulse of energy. No ocean wave happens the same twice and for this reason surfing is also elemental. The multitude of ecological and environmental factors that create surfing situations ranging from local bathymetry, to global weather systems and further to the impact of the moon phases upon tidal action must be observed, understood and depended upon. This necessarily demands an awareness of interconnectedness and interdependence in an appreciation of uncertainty. It is this premise that causes me to find connections between surfing and speculative aesthetics. I believe surfing to be a practical demonstration of the claim that the philosophical concept of finitude is about more than simply the limits of knowledge. Exemplified by the following quote from The Universe of Things On Speculative Realism by Steven Shaviro:

“Finitude, therefore, means not only that there are limits to our knowledge of the moon but also – and much more importantly – that there are limits to our independence from the moon.” (Shaviro 2016 p137).

This exact example that Steven Shaviro has chosen to use, the unseen – but definitely there – effects of the moon upon which humans depend, happens to be something that is already widely recognised by surfers. The activity of surfing compels surfers not only to consider their knowledge of the moon but also their dependence upon the actions of the moon in itself, which are autonomously separate to any human knowledge of the moon.

Ok, I am sorry. You, presumably an artist, the reader of this essay, have just read several paragraphs by me, some sporty jock and somehow also an artist, about why my sport is better than other sports. Hopefully I have not lost you yet because here is where things get exciting.

When we (artists) think of sports, we tend to think of the objectivity and rigidity within them. The lack of space for the intrinsically weird (Morton 2021) in sports is probably what makes the relationship between artists and the world of sport an uncomfortable one. Surfing however is uncomfortable with the idea of itself as a sport. All that stuff about Hawaii and Ohana and golf being “a bit Trumpy” (Evan 2022) is more important than the ramblings of just some dude that likes to surf.

Surfing originating in Hawaii and being developed by Native Hawaiians means that this particular sport grew out of something completely isolated from the sports that developed out of western or European agricultural and theistic practices. This is because western colonial contact was first made with Hawaii in 1778, which happens to be after the invention of golf for instance. Obviously, surfing has been colonised, westernised and objectified; so extensively in fact that 2020 saw it becoming an Olympic sport. Yet somehow, surfing has not been completely assimilated into western anthropocentric ideals, it still sits somewhere in the margins, shrouded in something more mysterious than sport.

Surfing seeks flow with a more than human entity through nurturing awareness of unintended consequences between the interaction of wind transferring kinetic energy into bodies of water and that same energy interacting with specifically contoured areas of near-shore sea floor shaped favourably but completely coincidentally by deep-time and geological force. This would make surfing an act of ecological awareness in accordance with Object Oriented Ontology because as Timothy Morton (2021 p16) writes; “Ecological awareness is awareness of unintended consequences”. Furthermore, the seeking of harmony with the cosmic and elemental energy of ocean waves, through surfing, is not an exclusively human desire and act. Many animals have been observed surfing. I personally have seen Dolphins surfing the same stretch of beach as me and many surf films and nature documentaries depict not only Dolphins but also Seals and Penguins engaged in the act of surfing for no apparent reason other than fun. Birds of course, are Earth’s most graceful surfers. They ride the air currents produced by an ocean wave meeting the shore and they engage in much the same ballet-esque performance of stylish manoeuvres upon the wave face as humans aim to do (Evans 2022). Surfing may be the only human sport that nonhuman beings participate in through their own autonomous choice to do so, outside the coercion or force of humans. Although humans do unfortunately, force some animals to surf, such as pet dogs.

It is my position that surfing, emerging from something outside of western anthropocentrism as a harmony with elemental and cosmic processes, is a way to relate to nonhuman beings because it comes from and alludes to an alternative to anthropocentric ideals through both its origins and its unintended consequence of purposeless collaboration with something that is more than and other than human. Or, as Timothy Morton (2021 p37) puts it when referring to art, “a glimpse of living less definitively, in a world comprised almost entirely not of ourselves.” It is this window into the “world-without-us” (Thacker 2011 p6) that surfing shares with birding and with art.

It’s Not The End Of The World

I start to question myself when I feel this uncomfortable about mentioning contemporary art despite being a few thousand words deep into an essay about contemporary art. There is a tension in the relationship between art and sports as in philosophy there is tension between the subjective and objective. Certainly, it is exceptional to be a sponsored athlete and an exhibiting artist.

Art has been central for me since birth as a completion of the whole. It has been ingrained in me that art is paramount to a holistic and healthy navigation of my thoughts, emotions and experiences in pursuit of understanding and peace. And yes, I can confirm that it is indeed traumatic knowing this and growing up in a society that almost entirely rejects this. Art has become something that does not need justification for me. It is a completely essential part of my life, but like essential things in life (such as staying hydrated) it exists in a place that also renders art somewhat banal. I think that this primacy of relating everything through art has contradictorily made art hold a secondary place on account of its obviousness. Art is already. It is necessary but it is not valuable, but it does have worth. Art has something Timothy Morton (2021 p54) calls “alreadiness”. This alreadiness is something we are conditioned to deny in the same way that much of life in global-westernised society conditions humans to exist in denial (Zerzan 2012) of Life with a capital L(Watts and Latour 2020).

“Alreadiness hints at our tuning to something else, which is a dance in which that something else is also, already, tuning to us.” (Morton 2021 p54-55).

What Timothy Morton means is that there are certain experiences in life that upset the grossly-utilitarian, survival before living, paradigm that humans have organised themselves into because these experiences do “something to you” (Morton 2021 p67) and I agree with Morton that art is one of these things. The encouraging and optimistic tone that Timothy Morton uses in their subjunctive writing in All Art Is Ecological is something I value deeply about the book however, due to this, it frames art as some kind of insurmountable and singularly special thing. This is where I have points of my own to add to Morton’s.

In his book – with a contrasting and perhaps unnecessarily extreme tone of pessimism – Future Primitive Revisited, John Zerzan (2012) explains that an art practice emerges out of a lack of earnest connection with the more than human, natural world. For Zerzan, art becomes a placeholder for a sincerely fulfilling life as it expresses the need for an absent interconnectedness and a will to disengage with mainstream narratives of what it means to be alive. Indeed, anecdotally I find this to repeat itself as at least partially true in my own experience.

Personally, I find that the established norm for us artists practicing art, particularly in the academic setting, has very little room for embodied lived experience despite any celebration or encouragement of it. Simply put, art practice demands immobility to some extent and time spent in lifeless indoor, interior environments. I must be sitting down to read, sitting to write this essay or – in the future – writing funding applications of similar density. We are always sitting. Sitting in the crit, sitting through a lecture, sitting for a seminar and sitting to invigilate a gallery. Sitting vacantly, looking interiorly. Staring at a computer screen, the white cube gallery empty of character. Staring at artefacts decontextualized by their museum setting (Haladyn 2015) searching everywhere for the absent, highly coveted contexts to serve our own academic needs. We love our little void, the white washed artist studio, with no windows and the air strong with toxic chemicals accented by the dense energy of passionate thought. Of course, we claim that art has a transformative power over these places and actions that can enchant them and I am inclined to agree but all this sitting still and being indoors is excruciating. As my favourite surf coach Cris Mills (2022) will tell you; sitting destroys mobility and posture. Too much dysfunction in those bodily systems will significantly impair the capacity of a person, named Jess Connor, to do something like surfing.

There is an undeniable vacuous toxicity, literally and figuratively, present in the space that art operates in. All this time spent in empty rooms, filling them up with manifestations of traumatic experience may well lead an artist to believe that it is the end of the world, as some of my peers do. Artists, surrounded by artists in arts environments constantly reflecting back to each other that the interior art world is life, questioning the authenticity of life lived outside the production of art. For me there is no boundary to this circle because I can walk into the photography studio at school at almost any time and talk to my father (who is also staff at Gray’s School of Art) about the exact same things I talk to my tutors about except this room has no natural light, must be mechanically ventilated and the relationship is simultaneously nuclear family and student/teacher. How much further inside the interior can it get than that?

This containment brings to mind the Studium and Punctum of Roland Barthes (1988). David Barker (2014) explains that Studium and Punctum are useful in determining if photographs are worth occupying the viewer’s attention. I find that the Studium and Punctum concept transfers well to assess attention in itself. Studium is “a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment” (Barthes 1988 p26) much like the previously stated interiority of art as a mode of living. It is a humdrum and necessary kind of attention. Art as life is a Studium because it exists within the familiar. Punctum is the disruption of the familiar. Art output can be a Punctum by the enchanting and imaginative productions of its attention. Art as life however, posits art as the exclusive input for art production whereby art operates in substitute for the other inputs of being alive. Exclusivity of input produces self-contained attention or a Studium. David Barker (2014) interprets Studium to mean kitsch, defining kitsch as “the categorical denial of shit.” (Barker 2014). Barker refers to the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera to further develop his definition of kitsch; “Kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.” (Kundera 2004 p196). This definition of Kitsch is then used to define Punctum as “the element of a photograph that forces us to acknowledge the existence of shit, or (since shit is probably used as a metaphor) the inevitability of death.” (Barker 2014).

It is through Barker’s definition of Punctum as the acknowledgement of death that we can deduce kitsch to mean the denial of death through his explanation that kitsch is the denial of shit and that shit is a metaphor for death. If art as life is an interior reflection of itself operating in substitute of other inputs to produce self-contained attention, it is a denial of the exterior. Life is happening elsewhere (Hannula, Suoranta and Vadén 2005) in an outside realm that is unknowable from the inside. An entity operating exclusively in interior to itself can only produce reflections of itself whereby its self-contained attention only serves to deny life through denial of the exterior. Art as life, or art as a Studium becomes a refusal of life because of its interiority to itself. Art as life cannot die because it is not alive and in this way it raises Kundera’s “folding screen” by seeking to be a way of being that escapes death. It is by this reasoning that I find the concept of art as life to be kitsch. It seems as though that for most artists, art as life is something to be leaned into and celebrated as some sort of quantitative indicator of commitment. For me however, art as life is something I seek to escape because of the echo chamber that causes me uneasiness through its interiority to itself.

Studio days and art events feel much the same as doom scrolling. It has something to do with being stuck indoors, it also has something to do with my ADHD but I think it has a lot to do with it being the net effect of scrollers discussing their scrolling. Not that this is unique to artists because everybody scrolls but the agonistic and speculative interrogation of information exists in few domains outside art. The denial of the outside through embracing the closed-circle of niche interest and algorithmic reification creates a separation between human and world. The human becomes less than human and the world becomes unworldly.

“Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity” (Thacker 2015 p20)

It’s not the end of the world. All this reflection inwards removes the human from the position of a participant of life. The process of interiorisation serves to decontextualize and the human becomes a spectator of life (Haladyn 2015).

An online review written by Sean Tatol for The Manhattan Art Review compares two exhibitions, The Painter’s New Tools at Nahmad Contemporary and Manhattan by Claude Balls Int. that happened over the summer of 2022.

The Painter’s New Tools showed painting, from a list of artists too long to mention, who did not use exclusively paint but used instead some variation of digital assistance to create paintings. The press release for the show makes bold claims that Sean Tatol argues the show does not meet at all. Claims such as:

“Now is the moment for art that expresses how it feels to be alive now” (Cayre and Kissick 2022)

“We want to show painting that is vital and of the moment.” (Cayre and Kissick 2022)

There are clues in the hyperbolic syntax and the repetitious assertion of newness. Tatol (2022) explains that the show achieved the opposite of the quoted aims precisely because of its use of digital media framed as something new. His key points being that while the technology that the digital field offers is recent, collaboration with it in contemporary art is already dated by a decade. Digital images are so prevalent in life at this moment but the work in the show fails to do anything to sincerely address this and serves instead only to offer reflections or extensions of the alienation of our digital lives in 2022. The show erroneously commits to a gratuitous faith in the idea of technological progress being equal to progress for the lived experiences of human and nonhuman life on Earth in a way that completely denies how unsatisfactory things actually are (Tatol 2022).

“To be sure, you couldn't physically make most of the work without modern technology, so it is literally contemporary, but that doesn't guarantee a new expression of life in 2022.” (Tatol 2022)

“Moreover, this belief in the present is now dated, ironically, because such an attitude has been untenable for nearly a decade and just comes off ridiculous in the face of our manifest reality. Positing the newness of new tools is little more than burying one's head in the sand, a naive willingness to believe in exactly what will never save anyone.” (Tatol 2022)

What Sean Tatol writes of Manhattan is much more encouraging. The ephemeral art works made using old tools were installed at night and shown in a courtyard where Marie Angeletti, one of the exhibiting artists, lived. Sean Tatol praises the work in Manhattan as definitively contemporary, not because of new tools but the new ideas the show has to offer. Much of the show was comprised of found materials and Marie Angeletti’s piece was a pile of broken glass and asphalt displayed under a spotlight that exhibition visitors were allowed to walk on and touch.

Fig 4.

The work put together by Marie Angeletti here shows a willingness to disengage with the production of spectacular but safe artworks that serve to please the conservative tastes of the financial elite (Tatol 2022). She chooses instead to engage with the tangible and immediate surroundings of Manhattan to create work that participates in life through her actions in collecting the materials for the piece. The work then maintains its tangibility through its tactility and lack of collaboration with any new or novel technology. The piece indicates a series of real world interactions between Angeletti and the people and structures of the surrounding Manhattan area in realising the work that the viewer can access through speculation upon the work’s scale and ephemerality (Tatol 2022).

“The realm of virtual fantasies has proved itself to be a hollow simulacrum, and tangible reality has therefore turned back into a new space.” (Tatol 2022).

I find the discordance revealed by Sean Tatol in the comparison of these two exhibitions to be compelling evidence of how art can be used to either look beyond by going outside of what is known or to remain inside of itself and familiar. The Painter’s New Tools straddles the familiar and the interior. It celebrates the interiority of digital media as an exclusivity of input for human thinking and progress by an output that duplicates the already known, human only realm of the digital. The work (output) is stuck in repetition of its input, forcing all momentum of thought into the inside where it can only move further inward. The work assumes the position of art as life through the presentation of its human exceptionalism and therefore becomes kitsch in its denial of life. The Painter’s New Tools is thereby Studium and doom by means of its unhumanity.

The artworks in Manhattan go beyond the interiority of the human and digital to go outside with the world by seeking inputs that are external to art from a life that includes within its scope much more than human survival. Its lack of aesthetic prettiness allows it to operate outside of commercialism (Tatol 2022) by bringing forward “how empty everything we're given to fill our emptiness is.”(Tatol 2022). The work of Marie Angeletti in Manhattan is an example of uncontained attention because it broadens the scope of input by its generation occurring outside, out of doors and in recognition of the external. This break in the eternal interiorisation of art and life becomes an allowance of being alive by producing external outputs through a diversity of input.

Get Out

The world is still there. Out there. I find it too easy to forget. It is also easy to be convinced by others that one should not be out there. When humans cannot go outside of themselves, outside of what is known and into the indifferent space that is other than human and out of doors, it places a restriction upon the scope and sufficiency of thought which becomes sour and decrepit (Tamás 2020).

Emily Strachan (aforementioned bird-book-gifter) is someone who had to get out. A graduate of Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Emily is a relentless creative maker and a lover of tactility. The way that post-graduate life is set up in regards to art-job-seeking however, is discouraging because the long applications for short-term work are tedious and often the work is much less than what the artist aspires to. For example, as a result of organisations such as Arts Council England increasingly demanding, as a pre-requisite to funding, a perceived benefit to the public (Jones 2020) many paid roles for graduates or emerging artists are often more aligned with teaching, social or care-work. In her research paper The Chance To Dream: Why Fund Individual Artists? Susan Jones (2020) uncovers that there has been a steady trend, since 2003, of declining investment in “no-strings” (Jones 2020 p3) attached funding for artists. The imposing of limitations upon the working methods of artists through funding limits the potential for the production of challenging and rigorous fine art by targeting and undermining the value of the artists work both in itself and within society (Jones 2020). This forces adaptability and enthusiasm that introverted artists, such as Emily and I, often tend not to have. My ability to produce art and my enthusiasm for making has very little or no cross over to helping an after school club make decorations for a Christmas parade. This is something I have been paid to do by an arts organisation in Aberdeen.

So for Emily, freshly graduated and met with the joy of a pandemic, the scope of things looked bleak. Weeks or even months of work go into applications for jobs that only last equally as long. Enthusiasm is expected for the work as if it is the dream of life to be indoors postulating on world improvement with other artists or being a child-minder with a capital ART somewhere in the job title or description. The art world insists an artist is soooooooo lucky to be graced with any such paid opportunity despite that if one were to remove the word “art” from the description, the job would suddenly start to look a lot like something else and much less glamorous. My point being, an art job needs to involve art and not be glamourized by (limited) association to art. Art, discordantly with its own values, follows the rules of commercialism by subscribing to glamour and in doing so objectifies itself (Tatol 2022). It is as if the art world does not believe that art is necessary. Art is in survival mode. Perhaps that is understandable, if the rest of the world is also in survival mode in an era of mass extinction (Morton 2021). Maybe the world in itself does not need to be improved and maybe artists are not saviours? As I have said, the world actually still is out there and out there feels pretty good. Perhaps it is the role of the artist to be out there to show us that there is a world of life to become immersed in (Ingold 2018).

In the end, the art world’s interiority was too disappointing for Emily and she began to look outside for work. In 2021 Emily became a National Trust for Scotland Apprentice Gardner. One of the key determining factors for Emily getting the role, which was one of only two positions available in the region, was her First Class Honours Degree in Contemporary Art Practice because of the skillset it represents. The success of Emily’s interview guaranteed her paid work, all week, every week for the next 2 years. This exposes something tragic about art. The horticulture industry values Emily’s arts-based skillset enough to pay her for her time in an entry-level position with a job title and training included. The same skillset and qualification is so under-valued by arts organisations that it is often not worth a penny or a job title as volunteer positions at the entry-level prevail in the arts industry.

Perhaps it would be to shoot myself in the foot not to consider that the National Trust for Scotland is likely the recipient of a larger wealth of funding than any arts organisation I should choose to criticise. Should organisations receive more funding, it might result in more paid opportunities for graduates. Indeed, funding for the arts has been systematically slashed (Jones 2020) and the fine work of the UK’s Conservative government sees public opinion swayed by a drip feed of rhetoric that consistently undermines the value of art by positing it as a career not even worth pursuing. Rishi Sunak, Britain’s third Conservative Prime Minister of 2022, suggested in 2020 that artists and musicians should retrain (Burgess 2020) amid a backlash against a poster backed by the government depicting a ballet dancer named Fatima with text saying she should retrain in ‘Cyber’ (Bakare 2020). As Tim Burgess (2020) wrote for the Guardian, a career in the arts is treated by the government as a “luxurious, decadent hobby” despite the arts sector generating billions in revenue (Burgess 2020) for the UK economy.

Fig. 5

In any case, the devaluation of art by the British government, reflected by the state of funding, seems to be working. Emily is retraining in horticulture. Fortunately for Emily, it seems to have put her in touch with something more authentically connected to what she was trying to express in her productions of multi-sensory sculpture. Much of her artwork is concerned with seeking a fulfilling sensory engagement with ecology but worked with ecologically harmful materials such as resin and silicon. Perhaps now that she is involved with the production of plant life in the multi-sensory garden of Crathes Castle, she is experiencing a necessary and true evolution in her relationship with ecology and all of her senses. For me however, things look pretty gross. The demands of maintaining a career in the arts within the current state of governmental deterrence (Bakare 2020) and defunding (Jones 2020) do not appeal to me. Will I achieve my Honours in Contemporary Art Practice only to move on and retrain? It remains to be seen. Certainly, it is often that shifts at the warehouse paying minimum wage are preferential to any time spent hustling, networking or filling out applications for work opportunities. All of these activities could be grouped under a singular heading; having to work while I am not at work (Southwood 2011). I should not have to feel pig-headed when I assert that I am somewhat unwilling to compromise my creative practice to meet the needs of funding bodies that seek to put limitations (Jones 2020) upon the scope of my artistic output.

Conclusion

“To exist is to be sensing continuously, consciously or not, our senses are at the forefront of it all and they build our perception of the world.” (Strachan 2019 p22)

In this piece of writing, I wanted to explore how engagement with the wider more than human world, that is external to the realm of human only knowledge and experience, can challenge the human idea that humans are exceptional in their being. To do so, it was crucial to distinguish the difference between internal and external engagement with life. Reframing human-dominant ideology with a more speculative and co-operative approach to the nonhuman is a narrative that opposes the current mainstream position that humans are the stewards of planet Earth. In the questioning of the human world’s interior containment within itself, the importance of how and where humans utilise their capacity for attention becomes imperative to understanding how humans can participate with life exterior to the operations of humanity.

The Covid-19 pandemic and its lockdown of society provided a break in the onward trajectory of human-centric progress to initiate some ideas pertinent to this dissertation. Firstly, that not all bad things are all bad, all of the time. Things are muddy and never this, or that (Morton 2021). In the case of this essay, the bad thing (Covid-19) became a good thing (Lockdown) for the writer (me) because it provided the opportunity to live more vitally and test new ways of living. In it’s horror, it threw the whole of humanity into a more immediate way of being by halting the globalised capitalist economy (Latour 2020). The second idea initiated was that the internal human only world and the external more than human world are not separate. We see this in how a nonhuman being, an unfriendly virus named SARS-coV-2 (Covid-19), forced the world into an emergency position of economic shutdown with the unintended consequence of giving me a better life than I already had, temporarily allowing me to escape the drudgery of employment (Zerzan 2012) to engage in a more fulfilling life oriented around immersive experiences out of doors. In other words, a nonhuman being changed my life and did not grant me agency or control as to how the change emerged.

At some point during this contemporary art essay about birding and surfing you may have noticed that I actually did mention some art. When I think about how urgently I feel I need to be presently participating with life in the context of art, I find myself questioning the value of art as a useful form ecological awareness in its current state of underfunding and grandiose spectacle. Recently, I have been painting a lot and I have been selling those paintings. I was consequently told that my creation of art as a commodity object is in conflict with my research around speculation, ecology and nonhumans. I agree, but painting is so easy and money is so useful. I am scared to take the risk of being more rigorous with my work. The realisation is that any art that actually is challenging, exciting and genuinely addresses ideas of ecology to me – such as the work of Tom Sewell and Marie Angeletti – is art that does not look like art to many people in my life who are outsiders to the internal world of art. This is why I look to activities like walking, birding, surfing and gardening as valuable operations of a fine arts skillset, because they all present ways of being a participant of life in a way that utilises all of the senses. When I paint, I find my own work to be a disingenuous realisation of the research presented in this essay because it isolates my thinking from embodiment. When I surf however, I am in a synthesis of thought and embodiment and I am “sensing continuously” (Strachan 2019 p22). In the sea I am literally in somethingthat is more than me and more than any other human, I can touch it, I can taste it, I can smell it, I can hear it and I can see it. I have yet to find this kind of vital, multi-sensory participation of being alive in art. I believe I might not be looking hard enough but the point remains that I cannot find something in art that better fulfils speculative engagement with the nonhuman world than active encounters such as birding or surfing.

The main way contemporary art does seem to be able to earnestly engage with this is in the ways that Tom Sewell and Marie Angeletti do. By collecting things from the tangible world and displaying them as art artefacts as a means of slowing down and looking somewhere that is not a screen with internet access. Yet despite finding value and enjoyment in this form of artwork, something in me feels like this is not enough. It does not have the same vitality as surfing and birding and I am scared that this lack of vitality in some way disconnects this kind of art from the initial immersive experiences that bring it into being.

I need to challenge human exceptionalism because humans scare me more than anything else. If humans are the cause of mass extinction then I need to be a part of something else. When I go outdoors and step outside the human world to see the rest of the world, something happens that puts me at ease. This research is about trying to find that within my arts skillset and the acknowledgement that maybe art needs to look like something other than what art is expected to be before I can find it. Perhaps what Emily Strachan finds in the non-productive garden of Crathes Castle to stimulate a multi-sensory fulfilment of interspecies connectivity is the same as what I find in my own non-productive playful engagements with birds through birding and holistic disengagement with the terrestrial realm through surfing. I want to know what this is within art, but I have reached the end of this essay and I cannot conclusively or definitively confirm that I have found it.

Birding, as a form of immersive experience that encourages interspecies connectivity through its speculative engagement with the lives of nonhuman beings, and the artwork of Tom Sewell reveal that there is scope to participate submissively with the more than human world through giving attention to the “world-without-us” (Thacker 2011 p6). We see this exemplified in sport through Surfing in its similarity to Birding. The harmony of surfing and birding, when compared with other activities, suggest that these activities are unique in the way that they place the human as a participant of life without attempting to dominate the other than human realm. This is related to the world of contemporary art because art, unlike surfing or birding, sways toward the denial of life outside of art. The value held by the art world of art is life subscribes to the glamour culture of the mainstream commercial world by refusing the input of the external and remaining internal to itself resulting in contained attention.

I see a growing emergence in contemporary art to embrace inputs exterior to art in the movement towards making work that opposes the commodification of attention by adopting a quiet, somewhat mundane aesthetic to produce artworks that deny commercial glamour and constant distraction by spectacle. This movement in art towards the exterior more than human world, out of doors and external to the known world of humanity, shows us that the internalisation of life has excluded a diversity of input for humans and artists. Operation exclusively in the interior denies life itself through its containment of attention. In a mass extinction age, a speculative approach to the external more than human world could reframe the position of the human from spectator of life to participant of life, whereby immersive experience could create affirmations of life.

Reference List

BAKARE, L., 2020. Minister Distances Himself from Ballet Dancer Reskilling Ad. The Guardian, 12 Oct [online]. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/12/ballet-dancer-could-reskill-with-job-in-cyber-security-suggests-uk-government-ad [Accessed 16 Dec 2022].

BARKER, D., 2014. Barthes’ Studium and Punctum | Nouspique. [online]. Nouspique.com. Available from: https://nouspique.com/barthes-studium-and-punctum/ [Accessed 31 Oct 2022].

BARTHES, R., 1988. Camera Lucida : Reflections on Photography. New York: The Noonday Press.

BIRT, V., SHIN, S. and CLARA, N., 2020. Well Projects on Instagram: ‘A Talk with Verity Birt, Sarah Shin and Nicolette Clara Iles. Discussing Verity’s New Film “Crossings” and Verity & Nicollette’s Long Distance Collaboration and Shared research’. [online]. Instagram. Well Projects. Available from: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CGYHpTml6oZ/ [Accessed 14 Oct 2022].

BURGESS, T., 2020. The Arts aren’t a Luxurious hobby, Rishi Sunak. They’re a Lifeline for Millions. [online]. the Guardian. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/08/the-arts-rishi-sunak-job-chancellor-hope [Accessed 16 Dec 2022].

CAYRE, E. and KISSICK, D., 2022. The Painter’s New Tools - Organized by Eleanor Cayre and Dean Kissick - Exhibitions - Nahmad Contemporary. [online]. www.nahmadcontemporary.com. Available from: https://www.nahmadcontemporary.com/exhibitions/the-painters-new-tools#slide:0 [Accessed 26 Oct 2022].

EVANS, P., 2022. Surfing’s Dark Secret: Birding. [online]. Stab Mag. Available from: https://stabmag.com/features/surfings-dark-secret-birding/ [Accessed 18 Oct 2022].

HALADYN, J.J., 2015. Boredom and Art : Passions of the Will to Boredom. Winchester: Zero Books.

HANNULA, M., SUORANTA, J. and VADÉN, T., 2005. Artistic research: theories, Methods and Practices. Helsinki, Finland: Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts.

INGOLD, T., 2018. Anthropology between Art and Science: an Essay on the Meaning of Research | FIELD. [online]. Field Journal. Field. Available from: https://field-journal.com/issue-11/anthropology-between-art-and-science-an-essay-on-the-meaning-of-research [Accessed 10 Oct 2022].

JONES, S., 2020. The Chance to Dream: Why Fund Individual Artists? A-N. A-N the Artists Information Company. Available from: https://static.a-n.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Research-papers-The-chance-to-dream-why-fund-individual-artists.pdf [Accessed 8 Dec 2022].

KUNDERA, M., 2004. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. London: Faber and Faber.

LATOUR, B., 2020. What Protective Measures Can You Think of so We don’t Go Back to the pre-crisis Production model? 1. [online]. Bruno Latour. AOC. Available from: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/P-202-AOC-ENGLISH_1.pdf [Accessed 14 Oct 2022].

MILLS, C., 2022. Mobility Drills for More Fluid Surfing. [online]. Surf Strength Coach. Available from: https://surfstrengthcoach.com/mobility-drills-for-more-fluid-surfing/ [Accessed 31 Oct 2022].

MORTON, T., 2021. All Art Is Ecological. S.L.: Penguin Books.

NAGEL, T., 2016. What Is It like to Be a Bat? Stuttgart: Reclam Universal-Bibliothek.

SHAVIRO, S., 2016. The Universe of Things: on Speculative Realism (Posthumanities). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

SOUTHWOOD, I., 2011. Non-stop Inertia. Winchester: Zero Books.

STRACHAN, E., 2019. Are We Living in a State of Hyperaesthesia or Sensory Deprivation. Undergraduate Dissertation.

TAMÁS, R., 2020. Strangers : Essays on the Human and Nonhuman. London: Makina Books.

TATOL, S., 2022. The Painter’s New Tools & Manhattan. [online]. 19933.biz. Available from: http://19933.biz/newtoolsmanhattan.html [Accessed 14 Oct 2022].

THACKER, E., 2011. In the Dust of This Planet. Winchester: Zero Books.

THACKER, E., 2016. Cosmic Pessimism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

WATTS, J. and LATOUR, B., 2020. Bruno Latour: ‘This Is a Global Catastrophe That Has Come from within’. The Guardian, 6 Jun [online]. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/06/bruno-latour-coronavirus-gaia-hypothesis-climate-crisis [Accessed 10 Oct 2022].

ZERZAN, J., 2012. Future Primitive Revisited. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.

‌List Of Illustrations

Fig. 1 Screenshot from YouTube video of Hamish Fulton’s group walk at Curzon Park. GALLERY, I. and FULTON, H., 2012. Hamish Fulton Group Walk, Birmingham. [online]. www.youtube.com. Ikon Gallery. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XaX4ktvQ_0 [Accessed 10 Oct 2022].

Fig. 2 IMAGE: MIDDLE CLASS FANCY, 2022. Middle Class Fancy on Instagram: ‘Haha I know right? It’s winter and it’s cold out? What’s all that about lol’. [online]. Instagram. Middle Class Fancy. Available from: https://www.instagram.com/p/CmjoQvbOgdt/ [Accessed 25 Dec 2022].

Fig. 3 IMAGE: Tom Sewell. SEWELL, T., 2021. Slough – Tom Sewell. [online]. Tom Sewell. Available from: http://www.tomsewell.co.uk/work/slough/ [Accessed 14 Oct 2022].

Fig. 4 IMAGE: Claude Balls Int. 2022. Manhattan Install Views – Claude Balls Int, 2022. [online]. Claude Balls Int. Available from: http://claudeballsint.com/?exhibition=manhattan-install-views [Accessed 2 Nov 2022].

Fig. 5 IMAGE: HM Government. BAKARE, L., 2020. Minister Distances Himself from Ballet Dancer Reskilling Ad. The Guardian, 12 Oct [online]. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/12/ballet-dancer-could-reskill-with-job-in-cyber-security-suggests-uk-government-ad [Accessed 16 Dec 2022].

#Dissertation #philosophy #anthropology #art #contemporary art #birding #surfing #gardening

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dfroza · 1 year

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what do you think about the True nature of beautiful earth?

always writing in question marks (?)

@savetheredwoods

Redwood Creek Trail near Orick. In the snow. #cawx #casnow

2.24.23 • 4:38pm • Twitter

And a reflective post by John Parsons:

The nature of beauty has been an enduring mystery to artists and philosophers over the millennia, and various attempts have been made to define it. For example, some have defined beauty as an order, arrangement, and harmony of some kind (understood either as objective qualities inherent in something beautiful, or as a subjective sentiment of a person experiencing something that is esteemed as beautiful, and most often as a combination of both). In other words, something is regarded as beautiful because it possesses a certain arrangement of qualities that evoke pleasure or satisfaction in the mind or heart of a person.

The Scriptures teach us, however, that beauty is part of the very composition of things; the design and form of whatever exists, and that the revelation of beauty attests to the glory of God. Beauty is not simply "in the mind of the beholder," but is objectively real, as part of the very structure of reality. Consider, for example, the flower that blooms, the bird that sings, the star that shines, and the sunset that suffuses the evening skies. "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork; day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge" (Psalm 19:1-2).

The beauty of the natural world is grounded in the mind of God, since God actively created and designed creation for his purposes and pleasure (see Gen. 1:1, 31; Rev. 4:11). The creation bears witness to the brilliance of the Creator, and the imprint of God's handiwork is evident in the concinnity, order, and marvels of the natural world itself. This is particularly evident in the case of man, who is endowed with a conscience, or an intuitive "moral compass" that discerns the demands of justice and understands right and wrong. The conscience serves as an inner witness that speaks peace, harmony, and goodness when the moral law is observed, and unhappiness, disorder, and evil when it is disregarded or suppressed. As I've mentioned before, the ancient Greek mindset regarded what is beautiful as what is good, whereas the Hebrew mindset regarded what is good as what is beautiful. The difference is one of orientation. Doing our duty before God, obeying "the moral law within," is what is truly beautiful, not merely appreciating symmetry, order, harmony, and so on. Beauty is a type of the good, in other words, and justice expresses the truth of the good in relation to oneself and others. Beauty is also a type of truth, since what is truly beautiful expresses and reveals truth, whereas what is not truly beautiful expresses what is false. The spirit of man attests to the reality of the Creator and realizes its ontological indebtedness to God (Rom. 1:20).

Theologically, the "beauty of the LORD" (נעם־יהוה) can be understood as the effulgence of God’s manifold perfections, everything about his heart and character that evokes ecstatic wonder, solemn awe, and irresistible attraction in his conscious creatures. It is the brightness and loveliness of God, the "charm of his unsurpassed excellence," his perfect justice and infinite compassion for his creation. The LORD is "the Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he" (Deut. 32:4). The beauty of the LORD is likened to the purity of Divine Light, the radiance and splendor that is incomprehensibly mysterious and good. The New Testament says "For God, who said "Let light shine out of darkness," is the one who shined in our hearts to give us the light of the glorious knowledge of God in the face of the Messiah" (2 Cor. 4:6). Yeshua is the Divine Light; the Radiance and Beauty of God manifest in the flesh (1 Tim. 3:16). "He is the radiance of the glory of God (הוּא זהַר כְּבוֹדוֹ) and the exact imprint of his nature, who upholds the universe by the word of his power” (נוֹשֵׂא כל בִּדְבַר גְּבוּרָתוֹ; Heb. 1:3). "All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:3).

So how do we wake up to the beauty of the LORD? How do we come to “see the invisible blessing” that pervades all things? How may we encounter the truth that "the whole world is filled with the irrepressible glory of the LORD" (Isa. 6:3)?

Frederick Buechner once described a "holy hush" that came over a boisterous crowd of people when they first encountered the giant redwood trees at Redwood National Park. As the people began to take in their surroundings, everything seemed to change - the loud chatter faded; the light, the atmosphere, and especially the awe of being in the presence of these enormous and ancient trees (some of which had been standing since the time of Jesus), induced a sense of smallness and humility before the glory that surrounded them.

You may have experienced this sort of awe also, perhaps while observing the starry night sky, or while watching the sun set over the mountains or upon the rim of the Grand Canyon, or when witnessing the birth of a baby, or when listening to music that touched your heart and brought tears to your eyes, and so on. Such experiences are sometimes called "self-transcendent," since they move us outside of our ordinary consciousness in an encounter with something great, breathtaking, wonderful, and sublime...

Encountering the glory of the LORD evokes conflicting emotions within the heart, a powerful combination of fear and attraction that is sometimes called the “numinous.” The LORD our God is beautiful beyond anything we can imagine, yet were we to directly encounter him we would be so overwhelmed that we would "fall to the ground as one dead" (Rev. 1:17); nonetheless he puts his hand upon us and says, "Don't be afraid; for I am with you." By his gracious touch, then, we are able to look upon the radiance of his presence, to receive the vision of his majesty and transcendent beauty and loveliness. And the amazing thing is that this is what he wants; this is the very desire of his heart, after all, the prayer to the Father that we should behold his glory (see John 17:22-24). And this, I believe, is part of what is meant when it is said that we are made temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16). " You yourselves are like living stones being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Yeshua the Messiah (1 Pet. 2:5).

This topic relates to our Torah reading for this week, parashat Terumah. As we are drawn by God’s grace to love the Lord and to understand how truly beautiful and wonderful and kind he is to us, we will be willing to worship him and celebrate his loving glory. To be alive before God is to be alive to his beauty. Your heart will flutter in joyful excitement to sing: "Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name; bow down to the LORD in the beauty of holiness" (Psalm 29:2). We sanctify the LORD God within us by affirming his superlative beauty, his infinite goodness, the greatness of his power, the perfections of his justice and truth, his unfathomable kindness, and his unsurpassing and everlasting love. The recognition of the beauty of the LORD is the awareness of his holiness, wherein our heart will esteem his sacred glory as our most precious and extraordinary gift. The beauty of the LORD our God is the heart of love and life and wisdom and truth, the Supreme Being of which no greater can be conceived, for ever and ever. Yehi Shem Adonai Mevorakh. Amen.

[ Hebrew for Christians ]

========

Psalm 90:17 Hebrew reading:

https://hebrew4christians.com/Blessings/Blessing_Cards/psalm90-17-jjp.mp3

Hebrew page:

https://hebrew4christians.com/Blessings/Blessing_Cards/psalm90-17-lesson.pdf

2.24.23 • Facebook

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pisivijudaf · 2 years

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Cultures consequences hofstede 1980 pdf

CULTURES CONSEQUENCES HOFSTEDE 1980 PDF >>Download (Telecharger) vk.cc/c7jKeU

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Geert Hofstede: Culture's Consequences (abridged edition) 1984, Beverly Hills, London and New Delhi: Sage. 325 pages Organization Studies 1984 5 : 4 , 379-380 Share Cultures nationales et pratiques managériales. Geert Hofstede, professeur émérite à l'Université de Maastricht, s'est principalement intéressé aux différences culturelles entre les pays. Son ouvrage Culture's consequences : international differences in work-related values, publié en 1980, a fait de lui un pionnier de la recherche This article describes briefly the Hofstede model of six dimensions of national cultures: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism/Collectivism, Masculinity/Femininity, Long/Short Term Orientation, and Indulgence/Restraint. It shows the conceptual and research efforts that preceded it and led up to it, and once Culture's Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values was published in 1980 by Sage Publications. Forty years later, the book's first sentence resonates just as strongly as it did on the day of its publication. "The survival of mankind will depend to a large extent on the ability of people who think differently to act together". La culture est vue comme une essence profonde, qui conditionne fortement l'individu. Le modèle d'analyse proposé en 1980 est maintenu à travers le temps par l'auteur et son pouvoir explicatif est même étendu à des questions sociétales (dans la nouvelle édition de 2001 de "Culture's consequences"). Organizations are bound by the cultures that created them, with consequences for cultural relativity for a number of areas: motivation; leadership; decision-making; planning and control; organization design; development; humanization of work; industrial democracy; company ownership and control; and the reaction of the local environment to the organization. Possible training strategies for Culture's Consequences, 40 years on 18 August 2021 by Gert Jan Culture's Consequences is 40 years old It is now over 40 years ago that Geert managed to get his major study published. This became Culture's Consequences: International differences in Work-Related values", published by Sage publishers. Geert Hofstede's first book on culture, Culture's consequences, appeared in 1980. It marked the beginning of dimensional, comparative cross-cultural study. Many others have since replicated or criticized his work. He re-worked Culture's Consequences in 2001, including a great number of new work. Read more In his bestselling book Culture's Consequences, Geert Hofstede proposed four dimensions on which the differences among national cultures can be understood: Individualism, Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance and Masculinity. This volume comprises the first in-depth discussion of the masculinity dimension and how it can help us to understand differences among cultures. Hofstede and his influential cultural model from 1980. In this article, our aim is not to merely repeat the already formulated objections to the latter model, concerning its ontology, epistemology and methodology, but rather to focus on the very words of Hofstede himself in his second edition of Culture's Consequences (2001). With a broadly Hofstede and his influential cultural model from 1980. In this article, our aim is not to merely repeat the already formulated objections to the latter model, concerning its ontology, epistemology and methodology, but rather to focus on the very words of Hofstede himself in his second edition of Culture's Consequences (2001). With a broadly Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values . G. Hofstede. Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, CA, (1980) search on. Google Scholar Microsoft Bing WorldCat BASE. Tags behavior culture impact methodology national-characteristics organization. Users. Comments and Reviews. This publication has not been reviewed yet. rating distribution. average user rating 0.0 out of 5.

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fatehbaz · 3 years

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How ought we to live with creatures whose bodies, forms, and functions are alien to our own? [...] [H]ow are we “to relate, to write, to sense, and to make intelligible that which is beyond [us]?” [...]

[C]entralizing nonhuman animals often raises more questions than answers [...]. Among a number of conceptual difficulties, attempts to dismantle assumed species hierarchies often reify others. [...] [T]he vast majority of animal studies texts prioritize organisms that are “big like us” [...]. As a consequence, [...] many of the frameworks driving much of the work in animal studies employ -- and reinforce -- violent logics of biopower in spite of themselves, recasting some lives as sacred while others are rendered killable all over again [...].

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More-than-human geographies that look beyond animals and their bodies have attempted to short-circuit some of these conceptual difficulties [...]. Actor Network Theory, Non-Representational Theory, Object-Oriented Ontology and an attendant collection of Deleuzian-inspired [...] terms -- assemblage, dispositif, milieu, emergence, event, flat ontologies, and sites -- have all risen to combat essentialisms [...]. From within this literature, ‘encounters’ have recently joined the lexicon [...]. But while attempts to include crustaceans within established frameworks of ethics and care may call an end to the kinds of [inhumane laboratory] experiments described [...] they do little to overturn the system of hierarchization and anthropocentric norms that guide scientific research on animals in the first place. Demonstrating the [lobster’s] experience [or apparent inexperience] of pain in these instances only re-codifies the lobsters’ role as experimental research subject whose bodies can be used and discarded in order to advance [...] understanding of neurological functions [...].

While the growing animal studies literature has attempted to move beyond the stark and often limited question of suffering, sites of ethical and political significance are similarly relegated to the spaces‘of and between human and animal bodies. By reframing the conditions of ethical consideration around measures of reciprocity, response, or other emotional tissue, this growing literature draws the lines of difference and species hierarchies in new ways. Consider, for example [...] in Hank Davis and Diane Balfour’s edited volume on animals and affect in the laboratory, The Inevitable Bond [...], [a] chapter on cephalopods, the only invertebrates featured in the volume, describes how octopuses spit on researchers, thwart experiments, or engage in theft, deceit and other disruptive actions (Davis and Balfour, 1992). While each of these reconfigurations of ethical relations highlights the active role that nonhumans play in our development of social life, they all maintain a focus on the animal body, its capacities, or the immediate site of interaction with human bodies. Within those sites, animals must express a capacity to connect with humans or actively fulfill requirements for participation in the extended moral community. Ethics, here, [...] come to matter by marking out similarities with difference. Even when radical dissimilarities between human and nonhuman animals provoke the reconstitution of relations, they do so only in so far as an animal’s capacity to connect with humans can be rendered apparent. [...]

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In the 1990s, as the [US] DoD struggled to develop strategies and tactics capable of anticipating post-Cold War ‘respatializations’ of war, they turned to biological life as a means of “enhancing capacities”(Gregory, 2010; Joenniemi, 2008). Being able to understand -- and hopefully reproduce -- qualities like smallness of stature, flight, certain material structures like spider silk, or the ability to navigate surf zone environments produced new systems of valorization for basic research on insects, bats, spiders, lobsters, and other animals. [...] Here, the DoD endows the active potential of nonhuman life and the constitution of more-than-human assemblages with value beyond measure; in lauding the capacities of lobsters and spiders, its strategic plans already overturn conventional hierarchies of life -- at least in the moment. Lobsters and other forms of biological life matter to the U.S. military for their ability to perform what humans cannot [...]. Like drones, the DoD’s growing menagerie of robots -- which now includes dogs, fish, and hummingbirds among many others -- can execute both commands and enemies of the state [...].

The more-than-human encounters these innovations produce do little to shake such hierarhchies of life. [...] It reveals the re-militarization of university science and the redistribution of warfare across not only the social, but also the biological milieu as “life itself” and more-than-human collaboratives become sites of strategic engagement [...].

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Rather than figuring lobster and other nonhuman animal bodies as the key site upon which to transform ethical relations and dismember the ‘conceit of anthropocentrism’, we might instead reconsider how and where we compose ethical relations altogether. [...]

Haraway and Bennett both posit the “contact zone” and the encounter as an opening in thought [...]. The uncertainty of standing within “trackless territory” fosters a capacity to respond, to be affected, to develop a sensitivity toward the world and the conditions that constitute it. Bennett insists that such an absence of a restricted framework for thought will “enable us to consult nonhumans more closely, or to listen and respond more carefully to their outbreaks, objections, testimonies, and propositions.” [...] [S]uch an ethics of the encounter finds its grounding in the capacity to affect and be affected by others, to create joyful encounters, and to expand (or stifle) joyful passions. In assessing our lives as they are lived with nonhumans, others have similarly [...] [drawn] attention to more-than-human encounters as a means of generating alternative ways of being and engaging the world. [...] What Popke and Valentine indicate and Bennett worries over are the geographical dimensions of the encounter: where and how one might locate its spatial limits to decide who and what are included within it.

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Elizabeth R. Johnson. “Of lobsters, laboratories, and war: animal studies and the temporality of more-than-human encounters.” Environment and Planning D. 2017.

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riusugoi · 3 years

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The Possible Bodies Inventory: dis-orientation and its aftermath - Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting

https://www.raco.cat/index.php/Inmaterial/article/view/343359/434439 - Following Sara Ahmed’s invitation “to think how queer politics might involve disorientation, without legislating disorientation as a politics”

“We remain physically upright not through the mechanism of the skeletonor even through the nervous regulation of muscular tone, but because we are caught up in a world” (Merleau-Ponty quoted in Ahmed, 2006).

With the help of the multi-scalar and collective practice of inventorying, we make an attempt to think along the agency of these items, hopefully widening their possibilities rather than pre-designing ways of doing that could easily crystallize into ways of being.

Ra-ther than rarefying the items, as would happen through the practice of collecting, or pinning them down, as in the practice of cartography, or rigidly stabilizing them, as might be a risk through the practice of archiving, inventorying is about continuous updates, and keeping items available.

Among all of the apparatuses of the Modern Project that persistently operate on present world orderings, naming and account-giving, we chose the inventory with a critical awa-reness of its etymological origin. It is remar-kably colonial and persistently productivist: inventory is linked to invention, and thereby to discovery and acquisition. [1] The culture of inventorying remits us to the material origins of commercial and industrial capitalism, and connects it with the contemporary databa-se-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism. But we learned about the potentials embedded in modern apparatuses of designation and occupation, and how they can be put to use once carefully unfolded to allow for active problematisation and situated understanding (Haraway, 1992). In the case of Possible Bodies, it means to keep questioning how artifacts co-habit and co-compose with techno-scientific practices, historically sustai-ned through diverse axes of inequality. We ur-gently need research practices that go through axes of diversity.

inventory (n.)

early 15c., from Old French inventoire "detailed list of goods, a catalogue" (15c., Modern French inventaire), from Medieval Latin inventorium, alteration of Late Latin inventarium "list of what is found," from Latin inventus, past participle of invenire "to find, discover, ascertain" (see invention).

The form was altered in Medieval Latin by influence of words in -orium, which became very common in post-classical and Christian use. It properly belongs with words in -ary, and French has corrected the spelling. Related: Inventorial; inventorially.

inventory (v.)

"make a list or catalogue of," c. 1600, from inventory (n.). Related: Inventoried; inventorying.

The temporalities of inventorying are discon-tinuous, and its modes of existence are prag-matic: it is about finding ways to collectively specify and take stock, to prepare for eventual replacement, repair or replenishment. Inven-torying is a hands-on practice of readying for further use, not one of account-giving for the sake of legitimation. As an “onto-epistemologi-cal” practice (Barad, 2012), it is as much about recognizing what is there (ontological) as it is about trying to understand (epistemological). Additionally, with its roots in the culture of manufacture, inventorying counts on cultural reflection as well as on action. This is how as a method it links to what we call “disobedient action-research”, it invokes and invites further remediations that can go from the academic paper to the bug report, from the narrative to the diagrammatic and from tool mis-use to in-terface re-design to the dance-floor. It provides us with inscriptions, de-scriptions and re-in-terpretations of a vocabulary that is developing all along.

Item 007: Worldsettings for beginners

“If the point of origin changes, the world moves, but the body doesn’t.” (François Zajega, interview, 2017) In Blender, virtual space is referred to in many ways: the mesh, coordinate system, geometry and finally, the world. In each case, it denotes a constellation of x, y, z vectors that start from a mathematical point of origin, arbitrarily loca-ted in relation to a 3D object and automatica-lly starting from X = 0, Y = 0, Z = 0. Wherever this point is placed, all other planes, vertices and faces become relative to it and organize around it; the point performs as an “origin” for subsequent trans-formations. In the coordinate system of linear perspective, the vanishing point produces an illusion of ho-rizon and horizontality, meant to be perceived by a monocular spectator that marks the centre of perception and reproduction. Points of ori-gin do not make such claims of visual stability.

Naturalized means of orientation such as verticality and gravity are effects applied at the moment of rendering.

The point of origin is where control is literally located. The two-handedness of the represen-tational system indicates a possibility to shift from “navigation” (vanishing point) into “crea-tion” (point of origin), using the same coordi-nate system. The double agency produced by this ability to alternate is only tempered by the fact that it is not possible to take both posi-tions at the same time. The second form of control placed at the origin is the 3D manipulator that handles the rota-tion, translation, and scaling of the object. In this way, the points of origin function as pivots that the worlds are moved around.

The tab contains settings for adding effects such as mist, stars, and shadows but also “am-bient occlusion”. The Blender manual explains this as a “trick that is not physically accu-rate”, suggesting that the other settings are. The “world tab” leaves behind all potential of multiplicity that became available through the computational understanding of “world”. The world of worlds becomes, therefore, impossible.

Blender operates with two modes of “world”: one that is accepting the otherness of the computational object, somehow awkwardly interfacing with it, and another that is about restoring order back to “real”. The first mode opens up to a widening of the possible, while the second prefers to stick to the plausible.

Item 012: No Ground

“No ground” is an attempt to think through issues with situatedness that appear when encountering computed and computational bodies. Does location work at all, if there is no ground? Is displacement a movement, if there is no place? How do surfaces behave around this no-land’s man, and what forces affect them?

What body composi-tions share a horizontal base, what entities have the gift of behaving vertically? How do other trajectorialities affect our semiotic-material conditions of possibility, and hence the very po-litics that bodies happen to co-compose?

We suspect a twist in the hierarchy between gravitational forces. It does not lead to collapse, but results in a hallucinatory construction of reality, filled with floating bodies. If we want to continue using the notions of “context” and “si-tuation” for cultural analysis of the bodies that populate the pharmacopornographic, military and gamer industries and their imaginations, to attend to their immediate political implications, we need to reshape our understanding of them. It might be necessary to let go of the need for “ground” as a defining element for the body’s very existence, though this makes us wonder about the agencies at work in this un-grounded embodiments. If the land is for those who work it, then who is working the ground?

“Disorientation involves failed orientations: bodies inhabit spaces that do not extend their shape, or use objects that do not extend their reach” (Ahmed, 2006, p.160)

When standing just does not happen due to a lack of context or a lack of ground, even a virtual one, the notion of standpoint does not work. Situation, though, deserves a second thought. Floating is the endurance of falling. It seems that in a computed environment falling is always in some way a floating. There is no ground to fall towards that limits the time of falling, nor is the trajectory of the fall directed by gravity. The trajectory of a floating or persis-tently falling body is always already unknown.

In the dynamic imagination of the animation, the ground does not exist before the movement is generated; it only appears as an afterthought. Everything seems upside down: the foundation of the figure is deduced from, not pre-existing its movement. Does this mean that there is actually no foundation, or just that it appears in every other loop of movement? Without the ground, the represented body could be understood as becoming smaller, and that would open the question of dimensionality and scaleability. But being surface-dependent, it is received as moving backwards and forwards: the modern eye reads one shape that changes places on a territory.

In most cases of virtual embodiment, the abso-lute tyranny of the conditions of gravity does not operate. In a physical situation (a situation organized around atoms), falling on verticality is a key trajectory of displacement; falling cannot happen horizontally upon or over stable surfa-ces. For the fleshy experienced, falling counts on gravity as a force. Falling seems to relate to liquidity or weightlessness, and grounding to solidity and settlement of matters. Heaviness, having weight, is a characteristic of being-in-the-world, or, more precisely, of being-on-earth, magnetically enforced. Falling depends on gra-vity, but it is also - as Steyerl explains - a state of being un-fixed, ungrounded, not as a result of groundbreakingness, but as an ontological lack of soil, of base. Un-fixed from the ground, or from its representation

Does falling change when the conditions of verticality, movement and gravity change? Does it depend on a specific axis? Is it a mo-tion-based phenomenon, or rather a static one? Is it a rebellion against the force of gravity, sin-ce falling here functions under a mathematical rather than under a magnetic paradigm? And if so, “who” is the agent of that rebellion?

In the example, the “feet” of the figure do not touch the “ground”. It reminds us that the position of this figure is the result of computa-tion. It hints at how rebellious computational semiotic-material conditions of possibility are at work. We call them semiotic because they are written, codified, inscribed and formula-ted (alphanumerically, to begin with). We call them material, since they imply an ordering, a composition of the world, a structuring of its shapes and behaviors. Both conditions affect the formulation of a “body” by considering weight, height and distance. They also affect the physicality of computing: processes that generate their pulses in electromagnetic cir-cuits, power network use, server load, etc.

Accu-racy is a relational practice: body and ground are computed separately, each within their own regime of precision. When the rendering of the movement makes them dependent on the placement of the ground, their related accuracy will appear as strong or weak, and this intensity will define the kind of presence emerging.

Thinking present presences can not rely on the lie of laying. A thought on agency can neither rely on the ground to fall towards nor on the roots of grass to emerge from. How can we then invoke a politics of floating not on the surface but within, not cornered but around and not over but beyond, in a collective but not a grass-roots movement? Constitutive con-ditioning of objects and subjects is absolutely relational, and hence we must think of and operate with their consistencies in a radically relational way as well: not as autonomous enti-ties but as interdependent worldlings. Ground and feet, land and movement, verticality and time, situatedness and axes: the more of them we take into consideration when giving account of the spheres we share, the more degrees of freedom we are going to endow our deterritorialized and reterritorialized lives with.

The body is a political fiction, one that is alive (Preciado, 2008); but a fiction is not a lie. And so are up, down, outside, base, East and South (Rocha, 2016), and presence. Nevertheless, we must unfold the insights from knowing how those fictions are built to better understand their radical affection on the composition of what we understand as “living”, whether that daily experience is mediated fleshly or virtually. -

Item 022: Loops

Just before he died in 2009, Cunningham released the choreography for “Loops” under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncom-mercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. No dance-no-tations were published, nor has The Merce Cunningham Trust included the piece in the 68 Dance Capsules providing “an array of as-sets essential to the study and reconstruction of this iconic artist’s choreographic work.”

From the late nineties, the digital art collective OpenEnded group worked closely with Merce Cunningham. In 2001, they recorded four takes of Cunningham performing “Loops”, translating the movement of his hands and fingers into a set of datapoints. The idea was to “Open up Cunningham’s choreography of Loops completely” as a way to test the idea that the preservation of a performance could count as a form of distribution.

The release of the recorded data consists of four compressed folders. Each folder contains a .fbx (Filmbox) file, a proprietary file format for motion recording owned by the softwa-re company Autodesk, and two Hierarchical Translation-Rotation files, a less common mo-tion capture storage format. The export file in the first take is called Loops1_export.fbx and the two motion capture files are loops1_all_ri-ght.htr and loops1_all_left.htr. Each take is documented on video: one with a hand-held camera and one on a tripod. There is no license included in the archives.

In 2008, the OpenEnded group wrote custom software to create a screen-based work called “Loops”. “Loops” runs in real time, continually drawing from the recorded data. “Unique? — No and yes: no, the underlying code may be duplicated exactly at any time (and not just in theory but in practice, since we’ve released it as open source); yes, in that no playback of the code is ever the same, so that what you glimpse on the screen now you will never see again.” [11] The digital artwork is released under a GPL v.3 license.

After seeing interpretations of “Loops” by other digital artists, such as Golan Levin, the Ope-nEnded group declared that they did not have any further interest in anyone else interpreting the recordings: “I found the whole thing insul-ting, if not to us, certainly to Merce”. [12]

Cunningham developed “Loops” as a performan-ce to be exclusively executed by himself. He con-tinued to dance the piece throughout his life in various forms, until arthritis forced him to limit its execution to just his hands and fingers. [13]

In earlier iterations, Cunningham moved throu-gh different body parts and their variations one at a time and in any order: feet, head, trunk, legs, shoulders, fingers. The idea was to explore the maximum number of movement possibilities within the anatomical restrictions of each joint rotation. Stamatia Portanova writes: “Despite the attempt at performing as many simulta-neous movements as possible (for example, of hands and feet together), the performance is conceived as a step-by-step actualization of the concept of a binary choice” (Portanova, 2013).A recording of “Loops” performed in 1975 is included in the New York Public Library Digital Collections, but can only be viewed on site. [14]

Cunningham danced “Loops” for the first time in the Museum of Modern Art in 1971. He situated the performance in front of “Map (Based on Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Airocean World)”, a painting by Jasper Johns. Roger Copeland describes “Loops” as follows: “In much the same way that Fuller and Johns flatten out the earth with scrupulous objectivi-ty, Cunningham danced in a rootless way that demonstrated no special preference for any one spot”. And later on, in the same book: “Consis-tent with his determination to decentralize the space of performance, Cunningham’s twitching fingers never seemed to point in any one direc-tion or favor any particular part of the world represented by Johns’s map painting immedia-tely behind him” (Copeland, 2004).

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niobefurens · 2 years

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On the Nature of Marx’s Things is a major rethinking of the Marxian tradition, one based not on fixed things but on the inextricable interrelation between the material world and our language for it. Lezra traces to Marx’s earliest writings a subterranean, Lucretian practice that he calls necrophilological translation that continues to haunt Marx’s inheritors. This Lucretian strain, requiring that we think materiality in non-self-evident ways, as dynamic, aleatory, and always marked by its relation to language, raises central questions about ontology, political economy, and reading. “Lezra,” writes Vittorio Morfino in his preface, “transfers all of the power of the Althusserian encounter into his conception of translation.” Lezra’s expansive understanding of translation covers practices that put different natural and national languages into relation, often across periods, but also practices or mechanisms internal to each language. Obscured by later critical attention to the contradictory lexicons—of fetishism and of chrematistics—that Capital uses to describe how value accrues to commodities, and by the dialectical approach that’s framed Marx’s work since Engels sought to marry it to the natural philosophy of his time, necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marx’s thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of what counts as translation, and wholly new ways of imagining what an object is, of what counts as matter, value, sovereignty, mediation, and even number. In On the Nature of Marx’s Things a materialism “of the encounter,” as recent criticism in the vein of the late Althusser calls it, encounters Marxological value-form theory, post-Schmittian divisible sovereignty, object-oriented-ontologies and the critique of correlationism, and philosophies of translation and untranslatability in debt to Quine, Cassin, and Derrida. The inheritors of the problems with which Marx grapples range from Spinoza’s marranismo, through Melville’s Bartleby, through the development of a previously unexplored Freudian political theology shaped by the revolutionary traditions of Schiller and Verdi, through Adorno’s exilic antihumanism against Said’s cosmopolitan humanism, through today’s new materialisms. Ultimately, necrophilology draws the story of capital’s capture of difference away from the story of capital’s production of subjectivity. It affords concepts and procedures for dismantling the system of objects on which neoliberal capitalism stands: concrete, this-wordly things like commodities, but also such “objects” as debt traps, austerity programs, the marketization of risk; ideologies; the pedagogical, professional, legal, even familial institutions that produce and reproduce inequities today.

#now we know #necrophilology #marx #huh? what?

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gsasustainability · 3 years

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Annie Graham, MLitt Sculpture, Winner 2021 Sustainability Degree Show Prize

For as long as there have been humans on Earth, we have used wood. Making tools, weapons, religious idols, and so on. Yet the materiality of wood is constrained by heteronormative logic that has been shaped by the colonising, patriarchal influence of the West. Through the ontological questions of both woodcarving as object and as practice, my work aims to open up the phenomenological territory. Thus creating a space where orientations can render even when “queer” may not be part of the immediate scope. Queer ecology seeks to reimagine societal understandings of labour, identity, gender, and environmental politics.

Referring to Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, it is understood that there can be no universal human apparatus for perceiving objects as “neutral”. Further, my research posits that the same can be said for figurative sculpture. The temporal act of woodcarving becomes an analogy for how ‘matter’ is not simply given but is formed or materialised through time. Carving is characterised by a subtractive and destructive process. The inherent capitalism and power of anthropocentrism is also established through processes of removal; the appropriation of land, the removal of civil rights and of identity.

Before I have even begun carving, the tree itself from which the sculptures are made is an effect of labour - transplanted by commerce, felled, and processed into timber. Applications of Queer Theory allow the labour in the background to slip into the foreground where we can witness capitalism fragmenting. Like branches sawn off from a tree, the conditions of an artworks arrival are often detached and discarded from view through the dissimulating power of commodity fetishism. Marxist undertones in Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology raise questions of the conditions of liveability for those people in the background of the wood industry. The importation of exotic woods is predominantly unsustainable and unethically sourced. Violating the rights of indigenous people, deforestation is harmful to the planet and is historically engrained with the slave trade.

The valuing of ‘nobler materials’ such as marble or exotic woods is rooted in colonial ideology. Reflecting on the marble carvings from antiquity, eurocentrism has privileged the patriarchal paradigm for white male sculptors. As an extension of the research, I began the Queering the Workshop archive to dislodge this hegemony of heteronormative representation. This development allowed me to develop a more socially engaged practice, showcasing contemporary creatives and establishing an online community during this period of isolation. The newly formed collective aims to connect those who are exploring their own personal enquiry in woodwork; and then share that enquiry to advocate for intersectionality and the multitude of queer methodologies. It is my hope that by viewing oneself as the “work in progress”, one might develop critical awareness of the ethical issues of the wood industry. Like links in a chain which power the chainsaw, collaborative research through Queering the Workshop project can mobilise socio-relevant sensibilities.

Queering haptics can operate to undermine gendered assumptions about the practice of woodcarving. Referring to Halberstam, the chainsaw is not an inherently gendered object in itself. However, societal expectations of gender norms perpetuate a ‘preferred’ heterosexual reading which equate ‘strength’ or ‘capability’ in operating the chainsaw with heterosexual men. Therefore, queerness manifests through my operation of the chainsaw in order to destabilise this ‘preferred’ heterosexual reading. The speed and force of the chainsaw demands attention in the here and now with the essence of a manifesto, charging the wood with emotional force that the solid form can endure. By embracing the temporal or fragmented aspects of the body, my figurative works resist binarised categorisation with no clear gender or defined level of completion.

My approach to woodcarving refuses to assimilate with just one ‘authentic’ method of woodcarving. My use of the chainsaw and the mixing of mediums through casted concrete elements is a queering of the ‘authenticity’ of the mallet and chisel which was so valued by the Western woodcarving purists. The processes of woodcarving are similar to the rules and structures of a game. Strategies are employed to navigate the inherent limitations of the material and there are consequences should one deviate from the path. My playful approach to carving is inspired by Sister Corita Kent’s method of ‘plork’ which advocates for an amalgamation of the methods in-between the poles of the work/play binary. It is this playful engagement and orientation towards tools that led me to create the second artwork which is using a band saw as a hula hoop. “Playing” brings the body back into the forefront by concentrating on the haptic experience of woodcarving.

Recycling debris and undesirable wood is not just a means of sustainability but a means of decolonising the field of woodcarving. My decision to carve only discarded material is significant when one considers the connotations of filth or uncleanliness. Heteronormative society has historically linked queer orientations or bodies with ‘abjection’. According to literary critic Julia Kristeva, the abject (or “Other”) body is characterised by the impure, fragmented body which threatens patriarchal notions of propriety. The abject stands in opposition of heteronormative ideals which value one body over another. The colonial ideal of the unmarked body is adhered to a falsehood and is therefore a failure. To dismantle the hierarchy of form over matter I leave visible tool marks and textured surfaces as evidence to the objects construction. The matter of wood and the matter of the body are both dynamic fields of relations.

Both classical marble sculptures and modern monuments have always been used to enforce political structural violence and societal expectation of bodies. The conditioning of bodies through heteronormative ideals leads to racism, ableism, transphobia, and so on. But these monuments are in constant need of maintenance and restoration over time. Without the intervention of unseen labourers in the background the sculptures would surely collapse. Showing that nothing is eternal not even marble, metal, or the powers of capitalism. My carvings are raw and unvarnished. Eventually the wood will crack, the metal will corrode and the concrete will crumble to reflect this idea of temporality.

The chainsaw is a dangerous tool with the potential to function both as a means of destruction and creation. By using it for constructive rather than destructive ends my work aims to stimulate a more mindful use of the seemingly static and inanimate material by contemporary artists. The conservationists, labourers, slaves, and marginalised people behind the woodcarving industry come to the forefront where we can observe how materiality is the dissimulated effect of power.

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queernuck · 6 years

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“Care Less”: Timothy Morton’s Casual Ontology of Ecology

Morton’s discussion of ecology ends with a vague archaeology of differentiated forms of ecological thinking, thinking about and “of” the ecological, both in that one is conceptualizing the ecological, and in fact thinking within a certain construction of the ecological, of an anthropocentrism (even if through misanthropy) that is fundamentally, “intrinsically” a part of the vocabulary of the ecological – that is, it fundamentally and unchangingly involves demarcation between the unnatural and the natural in order to create a concept of Nature, one separate from a singular human subjectivity. Moreover, this “human” population is responsible for climate change, global warming, and more general processes of ecological change and collapse, on a scale that has created the conceptual “Anthropocene”, a geological era defined by human activity. In a book about objects relating to one another without the privileging of subjectivity, the singular focus upon the subject created by other ontic measures of subjective experience, Morton acknowledges a certain sort of relationship between humans and other objects, humans and one another, that manifest unique properties, that possess certain qualities surrounding and processes of emergence. Then where is the object-oriented quality of this object-oriented ontology? In Being Ecological, what does Morton teach about being and becoming “ecological”?

By avoiding “facts” and instead focusing on “facticity” as a paradigm, by discussing certain means of developing object-oriented ontology in relation to the structuring of ecological knowledges, by specifically looking for patterns and processes of structural development and emergence to describe, Morton provides a certain sort of frustrating but worthwhile experience that develops as a text both on a surface level of introduction, and making far deeper claims that those looking to it as an introduction are unlikely to acknowledge as such, a means of discursive exchange that itself is tacitly acknowledged by Morton. His coy repetition of acknowledging certain devices of philosophical development in order to calm the reader, to feel as if they are outside the very structuring of the text, is a kind of laying-bare that acts as paint on a scaffold, an acknowledgment that may change the perception of the structure but does not shift the structure itself.

Thus, Morton turns to Object-Oriented Ontology as a specific sort of philosophy, one linked with his Kantian concept of transcendence: beyond the limits of what the philosopher “themselves” would have allowed, specifically as a sort of taunting of the philosophical, a development that requires one specifically perform a kind of rabattement upon the philosopher, much as Foucault is read against Foucault, the Derridean approach of deconstruction is used to read Derrida, so on. However, there is a profoundness to an entire field developing out of Heidegger-past-Heidegger that is not lost on Morton, a means of expanding the understanding of life-as-such past simply the demarcation of the body by applying the work of a philosopher who acted in support of an ideology of genocide, of fascist collapse, the singularity of fascist ideologies when referring to the sorts-of-claims fascists deal in, the ideological figuration of fascist identity and the exact sort of group, exact sort of consciousness that Morton must deal with. His acknowledgement of anthropocentrism is one that points out that the anthropocentric reproduces that label upon itself: it requires marking “Nature” as differentiated from the human, it sees humans as not “of” nature but rather artificially and unnaturally arising within it, a specific sort of emergence that relies upon the creation of a specific kind of subjective relationship between objects in order to not merely determine but in fact create the material.

Vital to understanding this is asking what about Object-Oriented Ontology could possibly be more Heidegger than Heidegger, an answer found in prodding the limits of Heideggerian thought just as Morton notes the limits placed on Kantian concepts of transcendent knowledge. The transcendence of Kant requires a kind of limit upon it of divinity, a specific conceptual God based in specific theological holdings regarding the very nature of what one may claim, a theology of the epistemic. Kant’s knowledges are determined, in a final turn, by this, even if the transcendent experience of knowing and reasoning and obtaining reason and exerting reasonable thought seems to show otherwise. The limit of Kant, then, is exactly the point at which one begins to generate Kantian philosophy of a certain sort, to create a Kant that can deal with subjects outside of the limits previously imposed upon his work. For Heidegger, this involves a basic aspect of his phenomenological thought, the structuring of the Dasein. In setting certain limits with which one recognizes Dasien, recognizes the Other, recognizes likeness and separation at once, then one begins to understand the break necessary to maintain Dasein as exclusionary. That beneath the Dasein, that is, unthinking, reacting, akin to the lobster unable to feel pain, perhaps not worthy of cruelty but by no means worthy of protection and in fact often a subject of justified and even admirable violence, is then used as part of a colonial demarcation, justification of antisemitic exclusion, the creation of an animal other on human bodies. Kohn, in discussing anthropology beyond the human, recognizes different structures of subjectivity that require moving past most accounts of a central, colonial subjectivity necessary to producing anthropological knowledges. Rather, the Forest itself teems with life, life that mirrors and creates and constitutes and emerges into subjectivity. The subject, the creation of the relationships encompassed by Dasein, are present in Kohn's subjects even as they writhe and wriggle beneath the Dasein. They are “beneath” it but interact with it in a specific fashion, even without animation. Plants call to one another in a fashion that impacts the animal, the human, are related without the privileging act of subjectivity necessary to certain understandings of being and its origins. It is in setting a limit that Heidegger allows his fascism, it is in surpassing it that one can present a certain means of Denazification.

Denazifying Heidegger, the Denazification of his thought, is vital in part because of what it implies regarding potentiality and analysis based on Derridean acts of deconstruction: Derridean analysis relies on relations within the text that are at-hand, that call the experience, that evoke qualities of Heideggerian subjectivity into themselves in order to question exactly what it is that a text states. By some interpretations, this means a foundational and unchanging fascist quality to postmodernist and poststructuralist thought. However, by using Dasein not as the central and irreducable point of experience, the privileged subject, one instead allows for the way in which the world is “at hand” just as the Dasein processes it, to become a new point of convergence. Thus, the specific quality of at-hand, the interrelation of intratextual convergence in deconstruction, is applied to a wider range of play of symbols, flows, objects that have been confined by neuroses and complexes and relations of producing-production to interact with one another without the privileging that the Heideggerian subject produces. This does not make Heidegger’s own concept of Dasein useless, just as the political structure does not make the metapolitical useless. These are different orders of ontic questioning, different means of responding to common questions, of considering beyond a simple material acquaintance recounted in a vulgar phenomenological language of immediate experience as part of a privileging subjective act. Heideggerian influence on assessing questions of subjectivity does not mean that the subject is not privileged when one applies OOO to a situation, but rather that there is a certain structure to identification, to acts of attunement, one that can then be itself restructured by OOO. The sorts of objects that are marked by OOO, that emerge within OOO, are defiant of subjective measure but include subjective measures such as those of the scientific as a certain sort of fictive objectivity. There is not an “objective” to relate, but rather a vast means by which objects are interrelated with one another. The object being at hand is a continual quality to how it interacts with another object, how exactly an object holds and manifests value, use, its quality as both phantasmic and material object. Being able to deny objects as morally neutral is foundational to understanding capitalist semiotics, the means by which capitalism understands and creates itself on an infinite scale, produces the Deleuzean shadow outside the campfire, the expansive sublimation of all into capitalist relation. One aspect highlighted by Morton is that of “pollution” as a kind of picaresque assemblage.

The structure of pollution as a measure is, frequently, uselessly individual in that it does not allow for the relationship between objects and larger hyperobjects of relation that develop as a result. Morton describes the notion that one’s actions have little (if any) significance now, compared to an enormous significance in relation to a hundred years of time: the culmination of a lifetime of action, as articulated in relation to a series-of-lifetimes, potential lifetimes, so on carries far more importance. One’s choice to take a plastic bag or obtain a reusable canvas one is not terribly important, regardless of the fate of one’s actual plastic bag. Instead, the demand both for plastic and reusable bags flows into certain producing-productions whereby the status of one or the other is a kind of fetish object, is a sort of embodiment of the status of the user in relation to environmental consciousness. Reusable bags require production, require certain already-present or implied-present relations of productivity, are often made from recycled materials in a fashion that itself only emerges as “sustainable” when one accepts the notion that sustainability is, in part, constructed by capitalist individualization. The plastic bag as part of the ecological, the sustainability of garbage and of objects made to be durable enough to pass into the mundane, bags that do not break when in use and able to be collected for later re-use before being dumped, thus constitutes a certain sort of relationship, one that cannot be reversed on anything except an enormous scale because even its personal reversal implies the already-present relations between plastic bag, ocean, animal life, so on. The objects are already related to one another, always-already have been, and the breaking of this only happens on a near-geological scale. Thus, the individualization of pollution, the confronting of subjectivity with a certain concept of what garbage “must be” such that guilt is central to the action at hand, as well as the reactionary insistence that this is all part of some domain being maintained, an active exertion of power rather than the mundane constituting objects and elements of it, are both diverging but consistent statements on what the globe, the processes of change it goes through, the factoids of global climate change, one has at hand. It creates a common object which is then acted upon by the singular, capitalist subject. This is where one “does something” in the sense that Morton describes as often useless despite the compulsion to ask how one can simply seem to do nothing instead.

What, then, is to be done? Morton concentrates repeatedly on a certain notion of societal change, the kind of Orientalist concept of countries such as India and China as global polluters, of environmental collapse in the Global South, as injury against first-world spirit rather than the way in which it is in fact demanded by the kinds of lifestyles lived in the first world. Even if one does not intend the consequence, the consequence is not removed. Capitalism relies upon these consequences, these apparent acts of contradiction. When describing one sort of absolute ecology, a notion of society beyond the unintentional, Morton highlights that intentionality is itself a limited framework and the “unintended” is, at least to some degree, contained within the very structures of experience at hand and their repetition in action, in the realization of an action as certain object-relations being offered and realized. Borrowing the Deleuzean concept of a control society, he imagines the society where the unintended is not punished as such, not understood as part of action, but rather is structured into intentionality before the action itself occurrs, and while he does not dwell on the notion, he at least offers a remark on it that proves useful. A control society structured around unintended consequence would be stifling – the environmental would be realized as restrictive, as a measure of limitation beyond any prevailing interpretation. A development of this can be described more easily by discussing the means in which "triggering" is by nature an asymmetrical process, the psychological processes involved. To move to a paradigm of eliminating all possible-triggers would be useless as what highlights a word, object, experience being “triggering” is often that it induces the manifestation of PTSD without the immediate connection that widely-accepted “triggers” hold. A certain name can be a trigger: perhaps it was the name of a friend, or an abuser, or a dealer, or a street. Creaking stairs and jangling keys, the taste of McDonald’s cheeseburgers or the return of pain and suffering that drove one to self-medicate. Eliminating all “triggers” is not impossible, but rather far worse in that its near-impossibility presents a tantalizing morsel of possibility. The specific way in which so many relationships beyond those we most immediately would describe as at-hand reflect the same qualities implies a certain aspect of OOO: it is only realized on a scale far greater than any experience can denote because it would otherwise be the exact sort of sublimation that prevents this realization. The way that, more generally, Morton talks about different ideologies of action is guided by this. When assessing Vegan Discourses as a commitment to a Levinasian Other, to a body of an imagined other, he notes that often, the ideology of commitment is stronger than the consistency between the commitment of action and the action itself. By asserting a possibility of better life, better potentialities, one eliminates certain means of looking to the apparent “ecological” that are themselves recognizing human input into the environmental not as artificial, but in fact as an equally misunderstood part of what allows for a more global ecological consciousness. Principles of vegan identity are often indicative of a larger, more holistic understanding of ecological collapse, its relationship to the individual, and the way in which individual action is meaningless except through how it implies a larger course of action. Of course, this is not directly Vegan alone, but more generally environmentalist. When dividing the concentration on “animal rights” from “environmentalism”, Morton describes an assessment that posits the former consists of placing an individual over whole, while the latter is a whole over individual. Neither quite understands the other and both require a foundational divestment from knowledges of ecological affinity specifically because both are unable to see what Morton describes as the difference between a whole and its parts: that the sum of parts is, foundationally, in some way greater than the whole. This requires a look at certain means of apprehension, of understanding hyperobjectual relations that Morton describes a potential for, but no real possible cultivation of. The potential space is one in which the arising of the whole from its constituent parts is named, understood, is able to be altered specifically by the addition of other objects to this relation-of-objects. However, this does not make a new “whole” in the same sense if one simply expands the naming of the hyperobject, as there is no “thing” to be changed by this inclusion. The relationships implied and observed within have been determined by the objects-at-hand, and simply stating that relationship as present will not mean it is present in an idealized sense. Morton describes the vastness of capitalist solutions to Anthropocene global warming as hopelessly arbitrated by a kind of language of appeal to the subject, one that then justifies action on an irreversible scale, the kind of change that creates new relationships on the scale of a hyperobject. It is only in an appeal, then, to the subject that one begins to find a nebulous quality of awareness, of attenuation to the possibility of a world that does not lie simply in one’s personal experience, or the development thereof. The schizophrenic connections of Deleuze, Lacanian desires and Butlerian accounts of performativity, Said’s Oriental Other and fear thereof or the Levinasian Other and commitment to it, the Heideggerian Dasein and its paradigmatic angst, the very means by which Merleau-Ponty’s attenuation of the phenomenological body are established, all of these present certain subjective relations but moreover certain statements on exactly what qualities being takes on, ones that inevitably lead to certain recognitions like Kohn or Derrida of the seeping-out of subjectivity into the surrounding world. However, this is prevented, is controlled by the use of anthropomorphic language, anthropocentric ideology, in order to understand the relations at hand. Anthropomorphic language is embedded in the very relating of subjects, the appeal of charismatic megafauna ties into the charismatic itself as much as the recognition of the Animal Other that Kohn or Derrida describe. The designation of certain other animals as of equal importance relies on a reversal of the anthropocentric that ironically affirms it as a measure of that which “is” and determines resulting relations in the natural world. The ideation, the fantasy of Nature as absent the anthropomorphic qualities that Kohn describes in subject-recognition, that Vandermeer’s biologist expresses her contempt for even while herself engaging in them, are a part of exactly what we are bound to when understanding and expressing subjectivity or even relating experience through it. When this is at its most hidden it is at its most dangerous, as the fictive then masquerades as naked, bare and perhaps even barren “fact” instead.

For Morton, the approach is one found in application of numerous other theoretical applications, reversed in a fashion that highlights its truth, the invitation to “Care Less” as a means of doing better about the exact thing one cares about. That defocusing, the way it results in various sorts of reterritorialization by the objects most at-hand, the way in which reserving and taking away care itself restructures a new sort-of-caring, is thus part of the enacting of meaningful long-term ecological conceptualization, ideation. We cannot imagine these things because they are unimaginable, because their potentiality is refused by that which we measure potentiality in. Acknowledging, accepting, and moving on from this allows, then one to recognize that which one is already doing, that which one is creating and able to create. Morton is working in this fashion specifically because he sees it as a problem too important to care too much about, one that is too important to burn oneself out over. Perhaps this was, then, the notion that one will “always have the poor”: so long as there can be a marking of the poor as such, of misfortune and grief as such, these are sensible and understandable terms. If we do not have that poor, that Other we have an ethical obligation to, we have changed in a fundamental fashion. Caring less, perhaps, leads to a capability of doing more to care.

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liliesofpur-i-ty · 7 years

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Jacques Derrida on Hamlet's "Time Is Out of Joint", from Specters of Marx, translated by Peggy Kamuf

“Cette époque est déshonorée,” this age is dishonored. However surprising it may seem at first glance, Gide’s reading nevertheless agrees with the tradition of an idiom that, from More to Tennyson, gives an apparently more ethical or political meaning to this expression. "Out of joint” would qualify the moral decadence or corruption of the city, the dissolution or perversion of customs. It is easy to go from disadjusted to unjust. That is our problem: how to justify this passage from disadjustment (with its rather more technico-ontological value affecting a presence) to an injustice that would no longer be ontological? And what if disadjustment were on the contrary the condition of justice? And what if this double register condensed its enigma, precisely [justement], and potentialized its superpower in that which gives its unheard-of force to Hamlet’s words: “The time is out of joint”? Let us not be surprised when we read that the OED gives Hamlet’s phrase as example of the ethico-political inflection. With this example one grasps the necessity of what Austin used to say: a dictionary of words can never give a definition it only gives examples. The perversion of that which, out of joint, does not work well, does not walk straight, or goes askew (de travers, then, rather than à I'envers) can easily be seen to oppose itself as does the oblique, twisted, wrong, and crooked to the good direction of that which goes right, straight, to the spirit of that which orients or founds the law [le droit] – and sets off directly, without detour, toward the right address, and so forth. Hamlet moreover dearly opposes the being “out of joint” of time to its being-right, in the right or the straight path of that which walks upright. He even curses the fate that would have caused him to be born to set right a time that walks crooked. He curses the destiny that would precisely have destined him, Hamlet, to do justice, to put things back in order, to put history, the world, the age, the time upright, on the right path, so that, in conformity with the rule of its correct functioning, it advances straight ahead [tout droit] – and following the law [le droit]. This plaintive malediction itself appears to be affected by the torsion or the tort that it denounces. According to a paradox that poses itself and gets carried away by itself, Hamlet does not curse so much the corruption of the age. He curses first of all and instead this unjust effect of the disorder, namely, the fate that would have destined him, Hamlet, to put a dislocated time back on its hinges-and to put it back right, to turn it back over to the law. He curses his mission: to do justice to a de-mission of time. He swears against a destiny that leads him to do justice for a fault, a fault of time and of the times, by rectifying an address, by making of rectitude and right (“to set it right”) a movement of correction, reparation, restitution, vengeance, revenge, punishment. He swears against this misfortune, and this misfortune is unending because it is nothing other than himself, Hamlet. Hamlet is “out of joint” because he curses his own mission, the punishment that consists in having to punish, avenge, exercise justice and right in the form of reprisals; and what he curses in his mission is this expiation of expiation itself; it is first of all that it is inborn in him, given by his birth as much as at his birth. Thus, it is assigned by who (what) came before him. Like Job (3, 1), he curses the day that saw him born: “The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right!” (“to set it right” is translated as “rejointer” [Bonnefoy], “rentrer dans l'ordre” [Gide], “remettre droit” [Derocquigny], “remettre en place” [Malaplate]). The fatal blow, the tragic wrong that would have been done at his very birth, the hypothesis of an intolerable perversion in the very order of his destination, is to have made him, Hamlet, to be and to be born, for the right, in view of the right, calling him thus to put time on the right path, to do right, to render justice, and to redress history, the wrong [tort] of history There is tragedy, there is essence of the tragic only on the condition of this originarity, more precisely of this pre-originary and properly spectral anteriority of the crime – the crime of the other, a misdeed whose event and reality, whose truth can never present themselves in flesh and blood, but can only allow themselves to be presumed, reconstructed, fantasized. One does not, for all that, bear any less of a responsibility, beginning at birth, even if it is only the responsibility to repair an evil at the very moment in which no one can admit it except in a self-confession that confesses the other, as if that amounted to the same. Hamlet curses the destiny that would have destined him to be the man of right, precisely [justement], as if he were cursing the right or the law itself that has made of him a righter of wrongs, the one who, like the right, can only come after the crime, or simply after: that is, in a necessarily second generation, originarily late and therefore destined to inherit. One never inherits without coming to terms with [s’expliquer avec] some specter, and therefore with more than one specter. With the fault but also the injunction of more than one. That is the originary wrong, the birth wound from which he suffers, a bottomless wound, an irreparable tragedy, the indefinite malediction that marks the history of the law or history as law: that time is “out of joint” is what is attested by birth itself when it dooms someone to be the man ofright and law only by becoming an inheritor, redresser of wrongs, that is, only by castigating, punishing, killing. The malediction would be inscribed in the law itself: in its murderous, bruising origin. If right or law stems from vengeance. as Hamlet seems to complain that it does – before Nietzsche, before Heidegger, before Benjamin – can one not yearn for a justice that one day, a day belonging no longer to history, a quasi-messianic day, would finally be removed from the fatality of vengeance? Better than removed: infinitely foreign, heterogeneous at its source? And is this day before us, to come, or more ancient than memory itself? If it is difficult. in truth impossible, today, to decide between these two hypotheses, it is precisely because “The time is out of joint,” such would be the originary corruption of the day of today, or such would be, as well, the malediction of the dispenser of justice, of the day I saw the light of day. Is it impossible to gather under a single roof the apparently disordered plurivocity (which is itself “out of joint”) of these interpretations? Is it possible to find a rule of cohabitation under such a roof, it being understood that this house will always be haunted rather than inhabited by the meaning of the original? This is the stroke of genius, the insignia trait of spirit, the signature of the Thing “Shakespeare” to authorize each one of the translations, to make them possible and intelligible without ever being reducible to them. Their adjoining would lead back to what – in honor, dignity, good aspect, high renown, title or name, titling legitimacy, the estimable in general, even the just, if not the right – is always supposed by adjoining, by the articulated gathering up of oneself, coherence, responsibility. But if adjoining in general, if the joining of the “joint” supposes first of all the adjoining, the correctness [justesse], or the justice of time, the being-with-oneself or the concord of time, what happens when time itself gets “out of joint, dis-jointed, disadjusted, disharmonic, discorded, or unjust? Ana-chronique? What does not happen in this anachrony! Perhaps "the time, time itself, precisely, always "our time,” the epoch and the world shared among us, ours every day, nowadays, the present as our present. Especially when “things are not going well” among us, precisely [justement]: when “things are going badly, when it’s not working, when things are bad. But with the other, is not this disjuncture, this dis-adjustment of the "it’s going badly” necessary for the good, or at least the just, to be announced? Is not disjuncture the very possibility of the other? How to distinguish between two disadjustments, between the disjuncture of the unjust and the one that opens up the infinite asymmetry of the relation to the other, that is to say, the place for justice? Not for calculable and distributive justice. Not for law, for the calculation of restitution, the economy of vengeance or punishment (for if Hamlet is a tragedy of vengeance and punishment in the triangle or circle of an Oedipus who would have taken an additional step into repression – Freud, Jones, and so forth – one must still think the possibility of a step beyond repression: there is a beyond the economy of repression whose law impels it to exceed itself, of itself in the course of a history, be it the history of theater or of politics between Oedipus Rex and Hamlet). Not for calculable equality, therefore, not for the symmetrizing and synchronic accountability or imputability of subjects or objects, not for a rendering justice that would be limited to sanctioning, to restituting, and to doing right, but for justice as incalculability of the gift and singularity of the an-economic ex-position to others. “The relation to others – that is to say, justice,” writes Levinas. Whether he knows it or not, Hamlet is speaking in the space opened up by this question – the appeal of the gift, singularity, the coming of the event, the excessive or exceeded relation to the other – when he declares "The time is out of joint. And this question is no longer dissociated from all those that Hamlet apprehends as such, that of the specter-Thing and of the King, that of the event, of present-being, and of what there is to be, or not, what there is to do, which means to think, to make do or to let do, to make or to let come, or to give, even if it be death.

#jacques derrida #specters of marx #hamlet #shakespeare #the book of job #emmanuel levinas

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ramrodd · 4 years

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Is the Christian Bible correct?

Quora Moderation has censored this commentary for offending their IT sensibilities and questioning their collective omniscence

COMMENTARY:

Additional Dialogue with Ross Whittle

Nope. There is nothing about the bible that is correct. It is a collection of ancient myths. Some people, such as yourself, are desperate to cling to faith, and thus take outrageous leaps to overlook this and find some truth- in your case “perceptive doctrine’. from this, It seems you take something you believe is good- capitalisms- and then interpret something ELSE you like- the bible- to reflect that. The fact the Jesus teachings are far more socialist than capitolist is irrelevant to you. You will see things as you wish them to be.

When confronted with this, you will retreat to another typical Theist trope- you will ignore answers that contradict you, and simply re-ask the question as if it has not been asked.

I’ve outlined a few of the multitude of instances where the bible reflects huge immorality. You simply display a total LACK of morality, so I understand you cannot comprehend this. Perhaps if it had been YOUR family killed in a religiously inspired massacre, you might feel differently.

I don’t agree there IS a “perspective doctrine” as you outlined- it seems a complete distortion of what little in the bible might be redeemable- it, for instance, in no way reflects “do unto others.

You are example of someone who can be completely without morals while claiming morality, so you are a living embodiment of my claim.

Tom Wilson: Well, unlike you and Dick Harfield, I’m not making any moral claims for myself: I’m not in a position to judge. Nor do I claim to be a person of faith: I know The One and have had a working relationship with the Holy Spirit since 1954.

Knowledge and faith are not the same same thing.

You haven’t confronted me with anything novel nor enlightening. As I have said from the get-go, I get the gist of your complaint, which you have just recapitulated on the basis that you expect to be able to beat me into submission with your puny dialectic, and I’m bored with it.

The Bible is divine literature. It’s complexity is infinite and, like the Lotus, blossoms eternallly to the humble pilgrim, but is manifestly unavailable to those who refuse to submit to its pulse.

As far as holocaust, I know what that is. I’m an Army brat. I lived in Europe as a child at a time in Germany just past the moment when a loaf of bread could get you a blowjob in Berlin. I’ve been to Hitler’s bunker in East Berlin when the godless commie cocksuckers were in charge and I’ve been to their magnicent cemetary for the Soviet cucumbers who died taking Berlin. It’s a vast park, like something out of the English estates of Downton Abbey, only emphasizing the the horizon with a huge sculture of Yaweh, Queen of Battle rising from a small hill that rises above the tree line. The Soviets call her “Rodino” or “Mother Russia” but she is the feminine aspect of The One described in Revelation 4.2. It’s one of the secrets of the Torah, the actual ontology of God abiding in the narrative.

The cemetary had a long, broad Paris-style side walk up to the sculpture and on the right were 10 or 12 mass graves that held 10,000 soviet soldiers as I remember. I’ve been to Verdun where one of the memorials is a marble shelter 25 - 30 metres long that keeps the elements from a row of rifles with bayonets sticking out of the ground, waiting for the signal to go over the top and unto the attack when the trench collapsed on the soldiers who were issued those rifles. “To Keep and To Bear” means something to me so outside your prissy little League of Nations existence that it may as well be a Sanskrit quotation at the beginning of a T. S. Eliot play about cats.

“Pearls before swine” comes to mind with every sentence of every one of your responses. If I wasn’t satisfied with writing for my own amusement, I wouldn’t waste my time in your useless attempts at resembling critical thinking and dialectical competence.

The fact that you are appalled at the slaughter in the bible means that you accept the historicity of the Bible and, consequently, the existence of The One. I was raised to matriculate at the US Army Command and General Staff College in the fullness of time, beginning in 1952. Since then, I’ve been to Verdun and Vietnam. If I had stayed in the Army and retired as a general, I would have caused 100,000 casualties learning my trade. Killing is an essential element of the Clauswitz Paradox.

Jesus. of the Gospel of Mark, provides the Christian model for the sworn servant leader of the American republic and Cornelius, the centurion featured in Acts X, provides the Roman model for the sworn servant leader of the American republic.

The centurion is not a myth. S/he represents a profound military innovation that became an essential element of the trajectory of the Roman empire for 500 years. The difference between Real Warfare and True Warfare is the difference between the Samurai and the Centurion. The Samurai is. literally, a creature of the mythos while the Centurion is a creature of the rule of law.

I was raised by centurions to be a centurion. It was a conscious aspiration of mine as a vision quest from 1962 until I got to Vietnam in 1970.

I was confirmed as a Christian in the Chapel of the Centurion at about the same time, 1962 or so, but I already had a working relationship with the Holy Spirit before that moment. I literally saw myself preparing to go forth as a knight in the white armor of the Crusade marching as to war. As I say, I have knowledge of the one, and, at the same time, I developed a deep faith in the training I was getting as a soldier from ROTC until Jungle Training in Panama before.

In Vietnam, I was confronted by an existential dilemma that required me to make a choice between continuing to believe in myself or in the US Army. It was a no brainer. I lost faith in myself. I still knew Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but not in my own moral compass. So, I left the Army.

So, all your representations of moral superiority are totally wasted on me, no matter how secure you may feel in Bart Ehrman’s apostasy. My opinion is that his whole “Born Again” conceit was phony from the get-go: he just did it high school because all the popular girls were doing it and he wants to be popular. And he built a career as an Evangelical pastor flogging the Pro-Life heresy until he went to Princeton and met Dale Martin, a gay Christian professor who flirts with apostasy because it makes his New Testament History and Literature course at Yale popular and Bart realized he could be even more popular at Chapel Hill by going full apostate and it’s working as well as Jared Kushner’s crypto-Nazi business plan he acquired from Robert Murdoch.

And you’re just another mongrel baying in that ant-theist evangelical imperative. I’m not writing for you. I am witnessing for combat veterans totally mystified by what they have discovered about the American civilian culture since they left the spiritually cloistered cacoon of the infantry squad. They are coming from an ecology where the violence of the Bible was part of their job description to an environment dominated by people like you and the IT folks in Quora Moderation whose entire concept of the violence in the Bible is circumscribed by the boundaries of video games defined by the League of Justice and Gal Gadot.

The Book of Job, the oldest book in the Bible, establishes the reality that you cannot unknow God once you have encounted God. That’s why my opinion is that Bart Ehrman is a phony: he either never has encountered God in his “Born Again” mode or did and has found it profitable to deny God.

Free Will isn’t just a theological construct: it is structural to the human psyche. God cannot violate individual sovereignty, morally (that is, intellectually): the individual must voluntarily expand his or her boundaries beyond the personal wisdom, which is to say, beyond the finite horizon of trust into the mind of God.

The whole purpose of the Bible is enlarge the population of humanity which has exercised their personal Free Will to come to know The One. The only unforgivable sin is to deny the Holy Spirit because it is a sin against the self, a form of suicide, to not embrace the personal responsiblility for their own Free Will and project their intellectual boundaries beyond the box of needless ignorance and frightened atheism.

I first read Marx in 1962, when I was 15, on the basis that it is essential to understand your enemy. As a prospective career Army officer like Alexander Vindman, the Soviets were my enemy and I read Marx to learn how to strike to kill the enemy, like the mongoose studies the cobra. So, when someone like you is determined to display his ignorance of the economics of the Bible as a dialectical gambit, it’s usually not worth the effort to help you lift the burden of your ignorance. I mean, the only difference between a Bernie Sanders groupie and a MAGA hat forever Trumper is the object of their affections.

Marxism is based on the same fallacy as the 18th Amendment. Our entire strategy in Vietnam was based on this fatal flaw in the Soviet system. Because of Vietnam, the Soviet Union no longer exists.

However, it is important to understand that Vietnam came down to a contest between Marxism and the Harvard Business Model and Marxism won precisely because people like Robert MacNamara agreed with your economic model.

Currently, Donald John Trump* is running America the way Robert MacNamara ran Vietnam. Strictly speaking, there is no one in the Old Testament like Donald John Trump*. King David comes close, but all those oriental despots were the law: Donald John Trump* just operates above the law, the basis of his lie, cheat and steal “Art of the Deal” crime family business model. He is trying hard to become the law, like an oriental despot, or Stalin. with the help of Moscow Mitch and Bill Barr, but he, Donald John Trump*, isn’t an oriental despot of the Old Testament.

He is more like Nero in the context of the New Testament. Cornelius, the centurion featured in Acts X, was part of the Xth Legion stationed in Caesarea that participated in the investment and reduction of Jerusalem anticipated by Revelation. Our annual calendar is based on this existentially certain moment which anchors events around 70 because the number is numerologically significant figure of speech in the literature of the BIble. According to Richard Carrier. the dates on all your checks are based on mytholog, because the year 70 wouldn’t exist if the Cross hadn’t happened in 33 and the Cross in 33 wouldn’t have become a pivotal moment in history if the Romans had not been witness to the moment of Resurrection. The Gospel According to Mark is a military report from the front in Palestine to the Emperor in Rome, via Theophilus in the Preaetorian Guard, based on contemporary intelligence records and the debriefing of Peter from inside the Jesus insurgency, aka “the Christians”, Roman soldier slang for the Jewish cult that emerged from the Resurrection.

It isn’t so much that your dialectic produces a puny argument: it’s that your anti-theism requires a willing suspension of disbelief Job was totally incapable of attaining and, if Job, who was Righteousness, itself, couldn’t do it, who am I to attempt the same self-delusion.

I make no claims of morality. The purpose of the Bible is epistemological and the purpose of epistemology is moral clarity.

I’ll settle for that.

*(impeached)

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bluewatsons · 5 years

Text

Ronan McDonald, Critique and anti-critique, 32 Textual Practice 365 (2018)

Is the literary academic destined to become less like Sherlock Holmes and more like Dr Watson? Rita Felski likens those caught in the mood of ‘critique’ to a detective. They decode the literary work for clues and hidden meanings, unmasking criminal complicity with oppressive norms and exposing the nefarious ideologies of patriarchy or imperialism. Yet, Holmes’s brilliance as a detective makes him somewhat lopsided as a human being. He is an obsessively deep reader, hyper-rational, distant and good at decoding, but less so at intimacy, fellow-feeling, attachment. The benevolent but somewhat plodding Watson, by contrast, can form emotional connections and relationships. Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) calls for literature professors to turn away from clever suspicion and cynical knowingness towards an affirmative and affective mood that encounters literary texts with trust and attachment. ‘Rather than looking behind the text – for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives’, she urges, ‘we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible’.11 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 12. Hereafter cited parenthetically. Reviewed in Textual Practice, 30.4 (2016), pp. 787–90.View all notes Felski, following Bruno Latour, insists on the enmeshment of both the critic and the artwork in networks of meaning-making. These networks produce our sense of literary value, that which drives most of us to study literature in the first place. Teachers and students who study English should approach a text with an open hand rather than a closed fist, a laurel rather than a scalpel. For Felski, the love of literature has been a love that, all too often in an academic field devoted to rigour and radicalism, dare not speak its name.

Critique tends to unravel values and to expose their contingencies. ‘The Zeus of Critique rules absolutely, to be sure, but over a desert’, claims Latour in his famous essay ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?’ (sounding a bit Olympian himself here).22 Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30.2 (2004), pp. 225–48, 239.View all notes The turn to ‘post-critique’ marks in part an urge to connect literary studies and the humanities to a language of positive value. A follow-up collection of essays edited by Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker declares that we are ‘currently in the midst of a recalibration of thought and practice whose consequences are difficult to predict’.33 Elzabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, ‘Introduction’, in Elzabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (eds.), Critique and Postcritique (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 1.View all notes Yet, there are strong dissenting voices who suggest that forsaking critique is buckling to reactionary pressure and threatens to strip the discipline of its ethical and political purpose. In a waspish contribution to the PMLA forum on Felski’s book, Bruce Robbins accuses her of putting the discipline through a ‘corporate restructuring’ and even suggests that there would have been less opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq ‘if Felski and her allies were to get their wish’.44 Bruce Robbins, ‘Not So Well Attached’, PMLA, 132.2 (2017), pp. 371–76, 372.View all notes (If only the structuralists had done a better job in clearing out the Leavisites, perhaps we might have avoided Trump and Brexit too.)

If some English professors are turning more to the ‘literary’ than the ‘critical’ side of ‘Lit Crit’, there may be good intellectual and political reasons for it. While understandably many in the profession deplore giving up the role of Batman to play Robin, those who advance post-critique are not trembling liberal humanists or anti-‘Theory’ reactionaries, getting their chance at last to reinstate courses on ‘Great Books’. It is no coincidence that queer theory, schooled in the dismantling of normativity, would be amongst the first to twist the spirit of suspicion back onto itself. Cardinal in this regard is of course Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s classic 2003 essay on ‘paranoid reading’, a sophisticated analysis of how the sclerotic grooves of suspicion and paranoia, in inhibiting shock and hope, can stymie the affective, epistemological and political possibilities of criticism.55 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy and Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 123–51.View all notes Other figures with backgrounds in feminism, object-orientated ontology, actor network theory and deconstruction have developed the sense of weariness and fatigue with the dominance of a tone and attitude of cynicism and skepticism.

There are institutional reasons too. As Andrew Hadfield argued in this journal in 2014, the calls in the 1980s for literary studies to expand into an all-embracing political criticism ‘actually made subjects like English inchoate, unfocussed, arrogant, and over-ambitious in their aims and understanding of what they could achieve’.66 Andrew Hadfield, ‘Turning Point: The Wheel Has Come Full Circle’, Textual Practice, 28.1 (2014), pp. 1–8, 5.View all notes In this respect, the renewed openness to the ‘literary’ is actually a sharpening of disciplinary focus and indeed social effect, not because it is a capitulation to a managerial university and neo-liberal ideology but rather because it affords the discipline better equipment to defend its province. Felksi claims:

Literary studies is currently facing a legitimation crisis, thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves us struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? In recent decades, such questions have often been waved away as idealistic or ideological, thanks to the sway of an endemically skeptical mind-set. In the best-case scenario, novels and plays and poems get some respect, but on purely tautological grounds: as critical thinkers, we value literature because it engages in critique! (5)

It is precisely this stripping away of evaluative language that has left literary studies shivering on the heath and exposed to the cold blasts of instrumentalism and accountability. In reanimating a language of positive good for literature, post-criticism can contribute not just to the sense of the worth of the discipline and its subject matter, but to its articulation of that purpose to external audiences. Relatedly, there has been a surge in explicit treatment of ‘value’ as a category of analysis in literary studies in recent years.77 For example Cambridge University Press has published a number of ‘value of’ titles designed to encourage affirmative articulations of the point and purpose of a subject. They include Peter Boxall, The Value of the Novel (2015) and my edited collection The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas (2015).View all notes

The critical spirit seeks to perforate disciplinary boundaries, exposing their constructedness and artificiality. Yet, removing the distinct sorts of knowledge that a discipline like literary studies offers makes it hard to protect from institutionalised streamlining and rationalisation: the deforming pressure placed upon subjects like English to model themselves on the sciences. Arguing for literary studies as having an identity and discrete object pushes against this force, preserving the discipline from bureaucratic equivalence. Moreover, from a student’s point of view, if there is no distinction between literature and other cultural products, why not enrol in media studies? If inculcating critical thought is the main goal of the humanities (and everyone on campus, from radical sociology lecturer to the vice chancellor, tends to pay obeisance to ‘critical thinking’), why not gain that skill through a vocational degree?

It is no longer common, as it was in the 1980s, to hold the word ‘literature’ between ideological safety tongs, a loaded and old-fashioned word that should always be ironised by scare quotes. In diverse hands, from Jacques Rancière to Derek Attridge, the literary has made a forceful return to literary studies.88 Jacques Rancière, Politique de la literature (Paris: Galilée, 2007); Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).View all notes But its return tends more to the event than the object, with an emphasis on the sorts of cultural and experiential effects that literary reading enacts. Literary value does not lie in a mummified canon with its eternal verities, but rather emerges through an affective encounter with alternative possibilities, an intimacy with alterity that is incipiently political. Attridge holds that ‘the particular value of literature (which it shares with the other arts at their best) lies in that event whereby closed thoughts, feelings and ways of behaving and perceiving, are opened up to that which they have excluded’.99 Derek Attridge, ‘Literary Experience and the Value of Criticism’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 249–62, 254–55.View all notes

Of course, the idea that the literary work enacts its own struggle with history and ideology, before the knowing critic comes along to helpfully point out the contradictions, is hardly new. The broad-brush caricature of critique that Felski needs for her polemic inevitably underplays the complexities and multiplicities of actual critical work. Political-minded critics have often worked with an attitude of attachment, rather than irony, reading with as well as against the grain of an artwork. These readers (and they include a figure like Frederic Jameson, often a target for post-critical advocates) tease out the instability and multivocality of texts not to expose their ideological collusion or self-contradiction but to see social critique anticipated in the work itself. This tradition of political reading, perhaps best represented by Theodor Adorno, demands a merging of critic with text, not the assertion of distance and difference.

The ebbing of the hermeneutic of suspicion is, therefore, exaggerated both by Felski and her detractors, not least because critique has always been contaminated with affirmative moments, just as post-critique is shot through with the negation it often ostensibly disavows. So critique has not run out of steam. But it may have to share the line with other trains. Felski sees it coexisting with other moods and approaches, as ‘one possible path, rather than the manifest destiny of literary studies’ (9). A wholly non-critical literary studies is impossible to conceive, but it would surely be a shudder-fest, the sloppy fandom that Felski’s detractors imagine. Or, worse, it would turn literary studies into a grimly positivist exercise, involving arid fact gathering and bloodless annotation. Neither approach would help define a disciplinary purpose: that would need some critical grit, some engagement with normative discourse, beyond mere taste or appreciation.

Happily, therefore, the post-critical moment is not a putsch but an extension of the franchise. Felski insists that she is redescribing rather than refuting, decentring rather than demolishing. There is nothing parricidal going on here, no reason for the critical minded to get upset. One reason presumably why she emphasises her project as an expansion rather than an overthrow is to escape the glaring accusation that could be levelled at her project: that hers is simply a critique of critique. That she is guilty precisely of that which she decries. And indeed, Felski’s polemic, like Latour’s, does often have a bracing sense of J’accuse. Even as she seeks to disarm critique of its tonal and attitudinal weaponry, it is hard not to notice that she herself is doing quite a bit of ‘debunking’, ‘exposing’ and ‘demystifying’. If symptomatic reading seeks to reveal hidden structures and assumptions in a text or literary work, then this is precisely what Felski does to critique, exposing its ‘repertoire of stories, similes, tropes, verbal gambits and rhetorical ploys’ (7). Like an assiduous critic, she exposes the tone and mood of the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’, running her finger around its discursive shape in a metacommentary that assumes the anterior perspective, that gets behind rather than in front. Even as they urge us to own our attachments and to disavow our irony, post-critique manifestos cannot but deploy an attitude of distantiation and debunking.

This seeming bind is inevitable – indeed at the end of her book, Felski tacitly admits the contradiction, claiming that she has sought, ‘through shadings of style and tone’, to lean ‘on the side of criticism rather than critique’ (192). Yet, Felski’s argument, even if it leads her into a performative contradiction, is all the better for its robust suspicion. Her point is that critique has investments and compacts that it represses, an evaluative attitude or disposition behind its knowing ironies. If critique has hidden affects, then, conversely, post-critique deploys the suspicious methods that it ostensibly decries. Critique and credulity are often twisted in the same braid, just as the critical and the creative often interfuse in both literary works and commentary upon them.

Critique is often leery about values and judgments, especially aesthetic ones. Values are there to be ‘interrogated’. Where do they come from? Whose power interests are served by them? Critique produces negation after negation, like a child continually responding ‘why?’ to every answer. The turn against critique emerges in part from exasperation at this tourniquet around evaluative language, including that of literary appreciation. However, even if, as Felski attests, the critical spirit has an ethos that manifests as ‘antinormative normativity: skepticism as dogma’, it does still have an ethos (9). Highly critical movements like Marxism, feminism or post-colonialism clearly have avowed and overt anti-oppressive politics. Though such political and ethical projects deploy critique as a cardinal tool, they also need the vigilance demanded when putting acid in a bucket or handling a Rottweiler. The critical spirit hungers for the anterior, seeks to get outside convention and unveil delusion. All normativity and value judgements are subject to exposure and unmasking by a critical eye, including those held by the watcher. The philosopher who most thought through this dilemma was Nietzsche. Paul Ricoeur, who gave us the influential handle the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, identified Nietzsche as well as Marx and Freud as the great triumvirate who founded the ‘school of suspicion’.1010 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 32.View all notes However, as Benjamin Noys points out, Nietzsche is often omitted by those advocating anti-critique ‘because although he can be read as a “master of suspicion” his orientation to an affirmative thinking provides one of the major sources of anti-critique as well’.1111 Benjamin Noys, ‘Skimming the Surface: Critiquing Anti-Critique’, Journal for Cultural Research, 21.4 (2017), pp. 295–308, 297.View all notes Noys might have pointed out, conversely, that it is Nietzsche who explores the philosophical path of negation most exhaustively. If the great theorist of nihilism reaches an affirmative, anti-critical conclusion, it is only by thinking through to its end the unchecked power of critique as the solvent of human value. Nietzsche spearheaded the genealogical method, but he saw that the will-to-truth would destroy the edifice of value and that it led to a recursive spiral into nihilism.

The most sophisticated thinkers of critique after Nietzsche – figures like Adorno, Foucault and Butler – have variously sought to grapple with versions of this dilemma, even as they recognised the pressing need to think the negative. What and where are the normative bases on which critical judgments are made? How can those judgments avoid reproducing contaminated abstractions from the given truth regimes? For Judith Butler, the solution to ‘these tears in the fabric of our epistemological web’ is precisely more intense critical thinking: ‘the very debate in which the strong normative view wars with critical theory may produce precisely that form of discursive impasse from which the necessity and urgency of critique emerges’.1212 Judith Butler, ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’, in David Ingram (ed.), The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy (London: Basil Blackwell, 2002), p. 215.View all notes Nonetheless, if critique starts out as being that which silences and shames cultural value, exposing its historical and social contingency, it can easily throw the basis of its own ethical premises into doubt too. Recent lamentations that post-structuralist theory tends towards evaluative enervation, too suspicious of foundation or normativity to muster a defence of constructive politics, pick up something of the winnowing of ethical judgment in the scorching glare of critique.

‘Surface Reading’: Sharon Marcus and Stephen M. Best’s handle for the way we read now has gained much traction in the post-critical era.1313 Sharon Marcus and Stephen M. Best, ‘Surface Reading’, Representations 108.1 (2009), pp. 1–21. Further references in the text.View all notes According to Marcus and Best, interpretation has shifted to observation, a search for latent meanings in texts has given way to a concern with their manifest and obvious features. The shift is evident, they claim, in a range of reading practices, including formalism and empiricism, the growth in book history and the rise of cognitive criticism. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the phrase ‘surface criticism’ covers over a fundamental division in the contemporary critical scene.1414 ‘Rónán McDonald, ‘After Suspicion: Surface, Method, Value’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 235–48.View all notes It is not a new division, but it is one that has emerged anew with the ebbing of critique, like a previously covered fork in the road. I refer to the division between scientific and phenomenological methods, those dedicated to describing material objects and those geared to capturing experiential events or values.

As everyone knows, literary studies since its inception struggled for acceptance as a serious academic discipline, shaking off its belle-lettristic associations in various empirical or rigorous methodologies. One of the appeals of critique, one of the reasons for its success in the final decades of the twentieth century, is that it had the advantage, in institutional terms of allying intellectual tough-mindedness with ethical purpose, combining fashionable dissidence with soi-disant critical rigour, and thus by and large, passed under the methodological watchtowers of the modern university. The detachment and distance cultivated in critique imparted a sense of solid knowledge acquisition, a dispassionate and serious attitude that chimed with the protocols of the modern university. In other words, symptomatic criticism unified literary studies, offering both methodological rigour through hermeneutics and ethical seriousness through ideological critique. It tended towards convergent solutions and determinist causes to the meaning of a text.

The subsiding of the hermeneutic of suspicion has ended this compact and exposed anew the old split in the discipline between the hard facts that underlie philology and scholarship, as a form of Wissenschaft, and the more numinous and capricious dimension of literary criticism. The concept of ‘surface reading’ seeks to bring together the descriptive aspects of both sides, as if the affirmative dimension of post-critique could participate in a new empiricism. It cannot. Their distinction between ‘surface as materiality’ and ‘surface as an affective and ethical stance’ is too yawning (9,10). The literary phenomenologist, describing the experience of reading John Ashberry’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, is engaged in a fundamentally different task to a scholar researching transnational reading distribution in early modern Europe. These projects may both eschew critique, and perhaps both feel freed up in some way by post-symptomatic moment in literary studies, but they are engaged in fundamentally different sorts of knowledge acquisition, even different ideas about what knowledge is.

They do not need to be antagonistic, but we should hesitate before trying to unify them. The differences are of greater significance than that between surface and depth or between description and interpretation. The book history or brain mapping project is likely to sail more easily in institutional terms, explicable as it is to historians, sociologists and scientists. It offers a clear addition to knowledge, its outcomes and methodology are based on the falsifiable claims of empirical research and offer little scandal. I highlight these differences not to set the two approaches against one another or to claim one as more or less legitimate, but rather to identify the institutional difficulties that a non-positivist literary criticism is likely to face. These challenges need to be acknowledged in the wake of symptomatic reading insofar as critique was better equipped to elbow itself some room in scientific company. Whether affective or responsive criticism can do so in a university setting is more questionable. This criticism is not about providing solutions, whether the detective work of symptomatic reading or the factual explanations of scientific criticism, but rather about producing new meanings, about creating divergent values rather than convergent knowledge.

Is there a home in literary studies for that sort of approach? Is there room in university research for the cultivation of varieties of enchantment? Ultimately, the success of the post-critical turn in literary studies will be based on the efficacy of the new mood and method in critical writing (I hesitate to call it ‘research’). Felski et al have shown us the limits of writing against something, precisely by writing against critique. But the institutional challenges of making affective attachment part of the pedagogy and research of academic literary studies remain significant. Yes, there are individual scholars of stature, including those identified here, who have attempted to engage affirmatively with literature beyond the frames and tones of critique. But does the current institutionalisation of literary studies afford room for emerging scholars to write in this vein? Could writing about the effects and affects of one’s reading experience be a legitimate ‘research outcome’? Is this a research project that funding bodies are likely to support with the same enthusiasm as, say, a collaborative investigation into literary sociology or digital technology?

It might seem that this question has already been answered: Felksi has received a widely celebrated $4.2 m grant from the Danish National Research Foundation to pursue her work in the use of literature. Felski’s brand of skilful metacommentary will help build bridges between academic interests and a public who, unlike literature professors, have not had their literary loves trained out of them. But her success does not mean that research funding bodies, with their penchant for clear methodology and rational outcomes, are likely to start funding projects on literary enchantment, unless such experiences have a strongly scientific or empirical dimension. My hunch is that if projects on literary affect or aesthetic attachment attract grants, it will be when they are framed as scientific and instrumental research projects, within such fields as neurocriticism or the medical humanities. Subjective, responsive and evaluative criticism will continue to find its major home outside the university, on the internet and in small magazines.

Felski’s answer to the post-critical challenge, as already noted, is to deploy Latourian Actor Network Theory.1515 Felski co-edited a special issue of New Literary History on Latour and the Humanities in 2016. Vol 47, nos. 2–3.View all notes ANT is dedicated to breaking down divisions between the observer and observed, inside and outside, natural and artificial, science and humanities. The assemblages, affinities and networks of the social produce different institutions and ideologies where knowledge takes place. ANT parades its modesty, its recognition of the complex ecologies of knowledge within which it is enmeshed, and above all the relationality and mutuality of the actors within any system.

Yet, literary studies faces institutional challenges that require it to assert the distinctiveness of the literature, notwithstanding its involvement in the social and normative networks that make it visible. If the close, dense, affective, attached and responsive criticism that is celebrated by post-critique is to flower, then literary studies needs to delineate and defend the discrete mode of knowing that the reading experience offers. This knowing may be formed by networks of complex actors, it may have a social as well as singular side. But it also needs to stake out what it specifically offers to the humanities. Literary studies has been tremendously interactive with other disciplines, and has forged many links with the sciences in recent years. But in order to collaborate, it also needs to cohere. The idea that literature offers a profound and complex form of knowing, distinct from scientific knowledge, evokes the old two cultures debate that marked cultural wars from Coleridge and Bentham to Leavis and Snow. But the lack of a distinctive language of literary value during the theory years means that literary studies was ill-equipped to articulate cultural, as opposed to critical, value against the neo-liberal inflating of STEM subjects (and the implied downgrading of the humanities) within the modern university.

The reanimation of the ‘literary’ in the wake of critique may point a way for the humanities to articulate a non-positive value without collapsing into reflexive negativity and suspicion. In some cases, this project has deployed other intellectual tools, the harnessing of philosophical thinkers who can pressure positivism, or find ways of putting into a critical language the idea familiar from the poetry of Wallace Stevens, that the world is known through imaginative apprehension.1616 Charles Altieri, a key figure in thinking about value in literary study, has written about Steven from this perspective. Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Towards a Phenomenology of Value (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). His recent work has deployed Wittgenstein to think about literary and aesthetic values, Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).View all notes It is too soon to say for sure whether literary studies will accommodate the experiential approach that some post-critical advocates have been seeking, one open to subjective responses such as recognition, enchantment and shock, that will allow a richer variety of aesthetic experiences or allow such experiences as part of the remit of the field. Yet, if Anthony Cascardi is right in claiming that literary values are ‘proxies for the value of the humanities more generally’, then there does need to be an articulation of literary value as a distinct discursive space.1717 Anthony Cascardi, ‘The Value of Criticism and the Project of Modernism’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 13–26, 14.View all notes The subsidence of critique has allowed a concern with literary aesthetics to reappear, albeit rinsed with historical and theoretical awareness. Engaging with the literary, therefore, could also allow the values of the humanities to assert themselves outside the sciences, to choose their agendas and to demonstrate that part of their value resides, in circular form, in the recognition and generation of cultural and phenomenal good.

Notes

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 12. Hereafter cited parenthetically. Reviewed in Textual Practice, 30.4 (2016), pp. 787–90.

Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30.2 (2004), pp. 225–48, 239.

Elzabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, ‘Introduction’, in Elzabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (eds.), Critique and Postcritique (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 1.

Bruce Robbins, ‘Not So Well Attached’, PMLA, 132.2 (2017), pp. 371–76, 372.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy and Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 123–51.

Andrew Hadfield, ‘Turning Point: The Wheel Has Come Full Circle’, Textual Practice, 28.1 (2014), pp. 1–8, 5.

For example Cambridge University Press has published a number of ‘value of’ titles designed to encourage affirmative articulations of the point and purpose of a subject. They include Peter Boxall, The Value of the Novel (2015) and my edited collection The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas (2015).

Jacques Rancière, Politique de la literature (Paris: Galilée, 2007); Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

Derek Attridge, ‘Literary Experience and the Value of Criticism’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 249–62, 254–55.

Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 32.

Benjamin Noys, ‘Skimming the Surface: Critiquing Anti-Critique’, Journal for Cultural Research, 21.4 (2017), pp. 295–308, 297.

Judith Butler, ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’, in David Ingram (ed.), The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy (London: Basil Blackwell, 2002), p. 215.

Sharon Marcus and Stephen M. Best, ‘Surface Reading’, Representations 108.1 (2009), pp. 1–21. Further references in the text.

‘Rónán McDonald, ‘After Suspicion: Surface, Method, Value’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 235–48.

Felski co-edited a special issue of New Literary History on Latour and the Humanities in 2016. Vol 47, nos. 2–3.

Charles Altieri, a key figure in thinking about value in literary study, has written about Steven from this perspective. Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Towards a Phenomenology of Value (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). His recent work has deployed Wittgenstein to think about literary and aesthetic values, Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).

Anthony Cascardi, ‘The Value of Criticism and the Project of Modernism’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 13–26, 14.

#literature #critique #critique of critique #experience #post-critical #post-structuralism #academic reading #academia

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ordinarymediashitpost-blog · 6 years

Video

vimeo

David O’Reilly’s game Mountain begins quietly with the statement “You are Mountain. You are God.” As you are rendered in empty space, gaining a basic polygon structure and being covered in a grass texture, a blue sky and clouds materialize around you. Trees materialize on you. For a moment you can imagine an implied ground. “Please enjoy your time here.” It is evident, though, that you are rotating in an ungrounded space, and, once you perform one of the few interactions available to you by zooming out, you can see that you’re drifting alone through the depths of space. The atmosphere that surrounds you extends a short distance from your peak. Beyond that you can only extrapolate the vacuum of space, distant stars, and the occasional collision of drifting space trash in the form of comically a large baseball or other man-made detritus.

The view from your screen will ambiently drift outward from your rotating geologic self, making the reality of your alone, adrift existence unavoidable. There is little implied by your presence beyond the small amounts of life sustained on your surface, and the weather patterns that drift around you. While you are central in this space, it is immanently clear that the universe has other concerns.

Built into the quietness of Mountain is room for interpretation, and the game has elicited a spectrum of readings from industry games journalists to new media scholars. Arguments about whether or not Mountain is a game fell away shortly after its release in 2014. In this time the orientation of the game’s ontology has been addressed by authors Ian Bogost and James Hodge – with different arguments being made for how players relate to Mountain as a literal object, networked software, and/or thing of relation.

In Hodge’s discussion specifically, he utilizes Serres’ writing as the precedent for Bruno Latour’s mapping of the ‘quasi-objects’ and ‘quasi-subjects’ in modernity. Hodge positions Serres’ formative writing on the quasi-object as resonant with “Mountain” not just for the status of the mountain’s ontological opacity, but also for the nature of the game space it occupies.

Serres proclaims how the quasi-object opens onto the matter ‘the whole question”: namely, “being or relating.” The ‘quasi-object is not an object, but it is one nevertheless since it is not a subject, since it is in the world; it is also a quasi-subject, since it marks or designates a subject, who, without it, would not be a subject’(225). ...

Serres Illustrates the concept with reference to games and sports. In games such as the furet... or soccer, the movement of an object or ball orients collective forms of relationality. In its playful movement, the ball re-organizes sociality insofar as it becomes a quasi-object and its movement bestows upon the players the status of quasi-subjects. ...

Even in the absence of any rules of the game, it’s fun to spin the mountain like a top. When one spins the mountain, however it is not the mountain that spins but rather the visual perspective of the mountain. ... This is a curiously dizzy state of affairs, indeed, especially as it works upon the inaugural indistinction between subject and object announced at the outset: you are mountain. When the mountain, or, game perspective spins, it’s hard to know who is the subject and who is the object. Who is the quasi-object? and who is the quasi-subject?

– James J. Hodge, Sociable Media: Phatic Connection in Digital Art

This fluctuation, or reorientation, between (quasi-) object and subject gently flushes out the relational flux of Serres’ parasite/host/noise dynamic. Though Hodge’s own use of the quasi-object here doesn’t make mention of the preceding parasitic formulation, his reading of “Mountain” within game space lends itself well to an isolated mapping of the quasi-object away from Serres’ larger parasitic project.

This usual methodology for digital media and games criticism interrogates the reality materialized via the game, projecting as its mate a homogenized, typical ‘gamer’ who brings to the table a homogenized, typical perspective. In order to heighten a reading of Mountain through the lens of Serres’ work, I want to position mountain within a relationship with a depressed ‘gamer’ (’user’, ‘viewer’, ‘participant’) rather than the mentally normative individual invoked through a usual digital media discourse.

This reworking of the traditional games formula doesn’t radically remake the role of the game itself as much as it expands the dynamic in which the game is experienced within the context of a Kleinian depressive position. When Mountain is understood as an object within the depressive position, the unreadability contained in the distance one has from their mountainous self holds more significance than the simple opacity of mechanics presented by the game alone. The unreadability that surfaces within the depressive relation can then be thought of as equally contributed by both player and game, and the relationship between the two becomes the object of discourse.

“I don’t really know what I am. Is that weird?”

The moments in which the depressed person might want to sit in silence with another being are likely the times when their presence connotes both themselves and their depression. While many readings of Klein’s depressive position imagine it as something to be seen through, I’d like to reimagine depression as something to see with. When the depressive person arrives at their screen, they bring both themselves and their depression to the table (in whatever kind of entangled state they exist in at the time).

“I’m reminded of my childhood on this turbulent night”

The depressed person opens Mountain on either their computer screen or smartphone to sit with it, and in this moment they might project either themselves, their depression, or both onto the mountain that is them and theirs. When a small poetic thought arrives on the screen, Mountain speaks for the depressed person, or their depression, or perhaps both of them simultaneously. Who is producing the noise does not matter, so much as the noise is being produced via the line of text arriving on screen. As it comes from the mountain, it comes from themselves.

"I find myself lost inside this winter day"

When Mountain states in its inception that “You are Mountain.” it doesn’t simply qualify the mountainous self as a quasi-object. You are also the quasi-object, and with you, your mental states, affects, bodily sensations, and traumatic experiences. When your mountainous self is hit by an oversized pie, you receive a message reading, “You have been hit by a pie.” This pie stays with you as you drift through space, appearing with each revolution of your mountainous self as a reminder if the surreal happenings that can embed themselves in your projected (and lived) existences.

“I feel alive inside this pitch black night”

The game of mountain feels stable when it is in motion. It lacks a measurement of time beyond the qualities of daylight and night. Upon its inception, the mountainous self feels like it is a permanent fixture whose conditions, surface and affect may fluctuate, but whose bodily condition remains to be encountered. There will always be a mountain in “Mountain” to interact with, even if the game is reset. As the depressed person opens the software, they are less engaged with the premise of a game as much as they are engaged in a assured relation to their self-state.

“The world is random and therefore frighteningly meaningless”

The distance between the ego and the object in Klein’s depressive position can either be a product of the object’s movement away from the self, or the self’s construction of distance from the object. In either case, the distance is held and produces the space for a quasi-object and quasi-subject to arise of their own accord. This space is not orchestrated, it is perceived. The quasi-object and quasi-subject are not forced into their ontologies as much as drift away from the stability of known object/subject formations. When seeing the world with depression, the depressed person can construct the conditions under which any thing can become a quasi-thing in relation to themselves and their position. Mountain provides a canvas for that projection and a stability of some-thing to sit with in their distance.

“This just feels like a colossal waste of time”

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spatialanomalousmatter · 6 years

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Instrumental Vision

Introduction

Stereo-immersive “virtual reality” (VR) technology and its “geometry engine” immerses us in a simulated 3D environment. It is possible as it takes advantage of the human vision system’s innate capacity to see in “3D”. This makes us think of the “practice” of vision. How does vision have its own “materiality”? Did pictures come first, or being able to see pictorially?

Pictures can be thought of as “special” perceptible objects. There is a difference between perceiving pictorially and ordinarily (as in VR). When perceiving pictorially there is a dialectic “heuristic” brought on by the “duality of both a scene and a surface” (Gibson, 1978). Whereas in VR there is no such material artifact and hence no dialectical effort required. VR returns the perceiver to conditions of ordinary perception where objects appear solidly three dimensional but are actually virtual. The specifications of VR’s visuality is more important in understanding its effects on perception.

The Invisible Interface

Perceiving “environmentally”, such as in an all-encompassing VR scene, is different to perceiving in a “flat” or monoscopic way, such as through pictures. The ontological basis of a “reality” isufficient for VR immersion is grounded in vision itself rather than in virtuality; what one might call a “perceptual reality”.

Looking at how the perceptual system encounters realities (real or virtual) one can say that there are three aspects that must be present for it to be like an environment: the absence of a tangible interface, immersion in a 3D space amidst solid-looking objects (stereo-immersion), opportunity for observer to be mobile whilst immersed in the virtual space.

VR developers merge the affordances of visual perception into technical requirements of a simulated “realness”. Binocular stereo-acuity is the main feature VR developers use to achieve a harmonious reciprocal relationship between perceiver and environment. As an instrument our vision could become just an extension of the “geometry engine”. This is dangerous as we might lose the ability to see what is “valid” in our milieu.

In “Art as Technique” Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of “estrangement” or de-familiarisation states “perception is an end in itself and must be lengthened”. Lateral displacement of our two eyes is what produces disparity between our retinal images. Stereopsis or 3D stereoscopic vision results. Our visual system has a capacity for seeing things as something else.

Pictures “mediate” our perception of their content differently from environments. Pictures are a particular class of mediatory object, it “always specifies something other than what it is”.

Gibson’s Contribution

Space as a concept is not relevant to perception. A perceptual system (eyes, head, body in motion) evolved in response to an external environment or ecology of sensory information. Gibson sees visual information as immanent, embedded in the structure of ambient light. Information about direction, distance, orientation is perceptible though the behaviour of the perceiver. There is a reciprocity between perceiver and environment. It suggests an epistemological link between Gibson’s ecological understanding of visual perception and “instrumentalisation of vision” within stereo-immersive VR discourse. The animated display provides “continuous covariation in time” to the observer. The head mounted display and motion tracking sensors provide a “perceptual ecology” which depends on the ability to enter into what our senses perceive. The visual system doesn’t discriminate between “actual” and “virtual” sources of imagery. Realism and Realness

Pictorial perception and pictures are an ecology, where there is reciprocity between perceiving and making pictures. A notion of poeisis in and of vision emerges. Photorealistic or mimetic styles are related to the notion of “perfect harmony” in stereo-immersive VR where an illuminated environment, real or imagined, displays itself visually as a surface layout. Where or what is the surface in stereo-immersive VR? There is an emphasis on how visual structuring of virtual content in VR takes place rather than how the contents are depicted. Pictoral realism borrows from, but doesn’t try to recreate the world as a full reality. In VR though, objects and spaces appear perceptually, not pictorially, real and solid within a corporeal actual space, as opposed to a pictorial space. Instrumental Realities

Bruno Latour states laboratories “are now powerful enough to define reality”. An artificial, constructed reality has no immanent history and no future as it can be turned off or “crash” at any time. This makes a virtual environment a limited, transitory example of a seemingly real world.Motion of the observer helps reveal the layout of this world, the structure of environmental features which make other buildings and objects appear as solid objects. Translations of objects in our visual field confirm the object is real and occupies three dimensional space. The head-mounted display once put on confirms the world alters in accordance with head movements and the visual-perceptual faculty responds to the environment as if it was real. Any residual pictorality is overwhelmed by the perception that the objects it sees are volumetrically solid.

The origins of VR fits between “nature” and “the real”. Nature is idealised as the perceptual schema for “the real”. VR is Modernist. Nature has been re-made or re-presented synthetically. In Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” he critiques modernity as a manifestation of instrumentalising “technoscience” and sees technology as entrapping nature. Livingstone states that the eye is so so complex it is “used as an argument against evolution and in favour of a divine intelligence”.Penny states that the Cartesian coordinate grid, as derived from Euclidean geometry is “built into our culture and our perception” in such a way as to “structure” the way we think. Bruno Latour states that the undifferentiated becomes “real” as an object through some technique in the laboratory, and is represented and promulgated through technoscience. Conclusion

“Realism” is not the same as “realness” marking a difference between pictorial and real-world perception respectively. Virtual worlds change assumptions about what vision is for. VR gives observers temporary world substitutes.

#computational arts research and theory

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spamzineglasgow · 7 years

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(REVIEW) Strange Appetites: The Seductive Contemplation of Supermarket Poetics in Max Parnell’s _And no more being outdoors, And no more rain_

Text and illustrations by Maria Rose Sledmere (Review first appeared in Gilded Dirt issue #2, ‘Supermarket Verse’)

>In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Jack Gladney meets his friend Murray at the supermarket and takes note of the items in his basket. Murray describes the unbranded, plain-packaged items with typically extravagant grandeur as ‘the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock’. There’s a sparsity to Max Parnell’s pamphlet, And no more being outdoors, And no more rain that echoes this call of bold new forms. The plainness of language as language; as both material semiotics and evocative form. There’s everyday discourse stripped to its purer roots; a tone of childlike, sweeping sincerity (‘She loved the Western World’), contrasting with the ‘inscrutable meagreness’ of its subject: the meal deal.

>If material culture is a term we want to use, then Parnell practises it quite literally. He bought a selection of favourite meal deal items from a local Tesco Express, opened the packaging and slipped fragments of his poetry inside among the foodstuff, little white strips of text resting like sleepy insects upon a pasta salad or slices of apple. By some clever feat, he sealed the packaging up again and surreptitiously replaced the products on the shelves of the same supermarket, garnering undoubtedly a few bemused looks for so directly flaunting the rules of consumption in restocking the shelves from his bag. The result is a beautiful pamphlet, each spread a sparse balance of image and text--a gallery of raw, unedited photographs accompanied almost whimsically by a poem on the opposite page. The whimsy, however, does not undercut the compelling freshness of the language, its deceptive simplicity resonant with hidden depths of meaning, an implicit critique and celebration of contemporary supermarket consumption.

>The new sincerity and austerity often go hand-in-hand in the poems of writers whose work might be described as metamodern. Sam Riviere’s 81 Austerities reworks the casual quotidian of a New York poet to engage with the affective facets of contemporary Britain: a world overloaded with information; a world of pornography, abandoned picnics, knitwear and unlit cigarettes. A world of welfare cuts, jump-cuts and startling contrasts. The semiotics of consumer capitalism are somehow melted as each Riviere poem makes surreal juxtapositions of images, tricks of irony or incongruous reference, leading us somewhere unexpectedly profound: ‘this will probably sound cheesy and weird / but maybe we’re a couple of cartoons’ (‘What Do You Think About That’). Perhaps there is something about a childlike paucity of text that feels more sincere than an epic screed. Nevertheless, the self-awareness of such poetics grounds them in a certain wary irony, the ubiquitous awareness of self-presentation instilled in anyone raised on the internet.

>We might think of the supermarket meal deal (even as its supposed cheapness deceives us of value), as the poor man’s lunch (recalling that nostalgic phrase, the Po’ Boy’s Lunch, which is making its round of the hipster bars right now, harking back to the labourer’s working day of yore, or baby yuppies navigating through a pre-Starbucks universe). It’s perhaps the most everyday of supermarket purchases for some, representing the relinquishment of creative choice for a narrow decision between coronation chicken, egg cress or ham and cheese. The rule of the meal deal, of course, is that you get to pick three items: a sandwich/salad, a snack and a drink. Like a slot machine, you hope for the perfect combination. Many people stick to what works and eat the same thing every day, bearing their triplet of joy to yesterday’s identikit self-service checkout. Perhaps only some play the meta-game, listening to a hypnagogic James Ferraro number in their head as suitable soundtrack. Only when something is missing--out of stock already--is one forced to confront the meal deal as thing, to weigh up the relative value of different products. Parnell’s pamphlet takes this a step further, deconstructing the semiotics of product even as his poems supplement the food stuff with the trace of an art object.

>Food and paper, mixed together. You can peel the label off an apple and eat it just fine, but would you do the same with a strip of poem? Does Parnell’s sly, perhaps Situationist intervention in everyday commodity culture make the meal deal products inedible? As with Heidegger’s broken hammer, it is the object, the system’s failure, that reminds us that consumer goods are things in themselves. We confront them, suddenly, as present-at-hand. Imagine someone opening that pack of McCoys and finding their crisps coated in white paint with words stuck to them. You are forced to situate their presence in a manner beyond the normal. Foodstuffs no longer coexist as simple fuel--the ordinary objects that mark the time of day, the regulation of appetite. Their mode of being flashes before us and demands to be repaired, to be re-transformed back into the seamless product we expected. The point about meal deals is they are supposed to be the same on a daily basis; you know what you are getting when you peel away the plastic on your pasta salad.

>Forcing our attention back on the products as objects in themselves is one thing, but what to do next? Parnell’s poetry teases out the affective experiences of daily life in the encountering of things. Sometimes he addresses the supermarket itself, as if in the temple of some deity: ‘You say that everything is very interesting / “New improved flavour” / Yet it makes me feel very simple / (I hate all that crap) / But I am terribly hungry!’. This is a gesture that refutes the ideological hailing performed daily by advertising and branding, the kind that fits us into certain camps (the organically concerned, the cool kids, the Healthy). It admits the seduction of the object, the brand, even as it places its slogans under cool, sardonic erasure. We allow our bodily desires, ultimately, to purchase the product which temporarily will sate the appetite. But of course, being ‘terribly hungry’ is the perpetual state of consumer capitalism, from its constant arousal of insatiable desire to the literal starvation caused by global inequalities, or more localised austerity measures.

>It’s not all negative, however. The beauty of this pamphlet is its metamodern attentiveness to the joyful, affective experience of consumerism at the same time as ironically expressing the shallowness of such common exchanges of capital--the short lifespan of pleasure offered by such goods. Parnell’s poems defamiliarise everyday conventions and ritualistic practices, admitting a certain mystical quality to the products with which we structure our day—or, more specifically, our lunchtimes. There is an emphasis on the things themselves, from the checkout machines to the packet of sushi; Parnell’s poetics evince a very much objected-oriented ontology. These are poems without titles, poems to drift through; their mode of enframing is the image rather than the contrived and anthropocentric literary artifice of a title. The tone is sometimes exuberant, often urgent: ‘Quick! / I have in my hands / Only pennies… / And it were as if / The machines / Heaved a sigh.’ The supermarket experience is suddenly re-orientated from the perspective of the machines themselves, rather than the shoppers. I cannot help but think of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory here, as every item becomes its own actant in a complex system of relations. Yet often the relations taper away and the things themselves rise, shining, from darkness. Images deliberately obscure the thing itself: ‘I stare / Into the cauldron of hideousness’. Profundity mixes with certain emotional or bodily urges: ‘I wanna stay drunk’, ‘my tired red eyes’. These words aren’t just disembodied, clinical flarf collected from the dust of the empty shelves at the end of the day; they are lyric poems, whose vibrancy arises as much from the speaker’s voice as it does from the matter surrounding him.

>With subtle devastation, everyday encounters with objects become part of a broader emotional framework. ‘Secretly, I shall / go to drink / instant coffee / “Full Rich Taste!” / It’s drawing me in. / Is it the sole heat on earth? / I may freeze to death / Without her.’ Allured by the object, we are not sure if the ‘her’ refers to the coffee itself (anthropomorphism), or an actual woman--another lost ‘object’ in the speaker’s minimal stratosphere. The slippage from ‘it’ to ‘she’ casually equates love with the cheap physical comfort of an instant coffee, while allowing this equation to stand stark with the sadness of any impoverished supplement.

>Moreover, as Daniel Miller reminds us, shopping itself is a kind of ‘making love’. As he puts it, selecting the ingredients for something and choosing one’s food products involves negotiating various value-based implications: from the global resonance of ethical, organic and local to the more ambiguous questions of morality and sensibility; a ‘cosmology’ of daily actions in the public sphere. The ‘she’ of Parnell’s poems--who kookily thinks of ‘adding a little tomato paste’, whose presence is only a projection--is a ghostly thing, the rippling silhouette of desire that eludes the speaker. He is often standing alone, observing: ‘Everyone’s out eating’. We are reminded of our own individualised role as consumers, placed in the position of voyeur who gleans vague scraps of voyeuristic joy from the habits of others. Occasional bursts of frustrated statement--‘It’s so meaningless to eat!’--bring a generalised nihilism to the picture, comprising just one reaction to the sheer excess of signifiers on display when you start teasing apart meal deal semiotics.

>As a rearrangement of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, these poems bear the semblance of fleeting thoughts: the kind of fragmentary, stream-of-consciousness dialogue you might have with yourself while lingering over the meal deal counter on a daily basis. Like O’Hara, Parnell’s speaker is a casual observer whose lines are strewn with bursts of acute insight into the complex, affective relations that structure our everyday experience with material things. There’s an emphasis on time, on the compressed space of a lunch hour (if you are lucky enough to even get an hour; lunch breaks today aren’t quite the boozy extravagance they were in the days of Don Draper). The pamphlet ends with ‘One eats as one walks. / Back to work, I guess.’ The ‘I guess’ is not just the hipster idiom of conversational filler, but a genuine hesitation that leaves us pondering on the threshold of recreational and work time. Has the subject left work at all? Is our daily jaunt to the supermarket merely an offshoot of the work of daily capitalism, the implicit labour of consumer existence? Is the ‘I guess’ in fact a mournful hesitation, a longing for that brief jouissance of excessive choice that unfurled in the space of a moment? Parnell allows for both. Many of these items are reduced, discounted in price, thus implying the collection documents several moments of meal deal purchase across different times in the day. That sense of deferral, a riff on O’Hara’s idle browsing: ‘And the stores stayed open awful late…’.

> Sometimes reading And no more being outdoors, And no more rain feels a bit like looking over a series of old tweets made in the heat of a certain moment. Maybe they don’t make much sense anymore, but when you read them back in a sequence an emotional narrative unfolds. What does it mean to be ‘never […] mentally sober’? If the state we live in is one of constant arousal, wired to our screens and bleeps, flushed with sugar-fuelled brain fog, the supermarket perhaps offers the comforting stasis of quotidian repetition that the rhizomatically endless territory of the internet displaces. Often Parnell’s poetics feel meditative, even haiku-like; they are a deliberate, focused lingering on the object, the moment, the profound possibilities of relational connection both physical and symbolic in the exchange of capital. They restore a certain peace to our day, even as they preserve an unsettled sense of longing, of curiously surreal or impenetrable imagery, of desire misplaced in the webs of perception. Reality shifts. There is something of the Eliotic, confused flaneur in some of the poems; especially the first, with its anaphoric loop, ‘And no more rain’ drawing us endlessly to the supermarket as sheltering temple--the speaker’s ‘perilous steps’ uncannily erased even before we have settled inside. I’m reminded of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, where the street lamps address the speaker with strange nostalgic poetry. Parnell’s speaker treads the laminate floors of the Tesco Express, held in a strip-lit version of Eliot’s ‘lunar synthesis’ as he leaves his identity at the door, ready and open to the world of signs.

>These are poems with a shelf-life, products destined for the trash at the whim of a consumer, or the directive of an employee or use-by date. Like snowflakes, they’ll melt into the generalised excreta of capitalism’s cold waste pile. There is a deliberate beauty here, a rift prised open between subject and object, consciousness and product. Ephemerality, the sense of drifting; disappearing in the condensed rhythms of desire’s abyss, its stunting concatenations of excess, the ‘And / And / And’. Parnell’s artefacts aren’t so much grandly apostrophised as they are collected, pondered over and recirculated into the feedback loops of capitalist relations. They’re found objects, certainly, but not appropriated into art objects. The poems are supplements which draw out the gaps, the secrets of the things in themselves, the strangeness. Here’s Ben Lerner’s narrator from 10:04 , speaking of the minimalist art of Donald Judd’s 100 aluminium boxes:

‘I believed in the things [Judd] wanted to get rid of—the internal compositional relations of a painting, nuances of form. His interest in modularity and industrial fabrication and his desire to overcome the distinction between art and life, an insistence on literal objects in real space—I felt I could get all those things by walking through a Costco’

>The hypermarket, Costco, does all the affective job of an art installation. It’s all about how we perceive things. Lerner’s narrator is able to position himself as this flaneur, open to the impressions objects and their spaces make upon him. Parnell does this too, though in a more condensed and fleeting manner. He subtly unfurls the nuances of form through close-up photographs and fragmentary, sensual details: the ‘glistening peanuts’ and ‘old and dirty’ angels. I can’t help but think of memes when I read these poems: like a meme they are deliberately recirculated into the public sphere, in a very material way. Like many memes there is a re-appropriation of advertising discourse which unpicks the shallow veneer of its message, while exposing the often surprising or even tragic ideological fault-lines within. These poems are compressed, easily digested; written in the tone of pondering over explaining. There are gaps to be filled.

>To use a Barthesian term, the Mythemes of contemporary culture are to be found in the supermarket aisle. A whole mythology of capitalism, identity and weird ontology is to be found if you peel back the packaging and wait for the magic. Happily, Parnell’s pamphlet does that for you, although its surreal array of intransitive words and objects deserves its own space: a metamodern exhibit of a bewildered contemporary whose structure of feeling is as strangely spiritual and sincere as it is ironic or blasé—an art object whose aura flickers with the persistent light of those late-night Tescos. In White Noise, Murray declares that he likes being in the supermarket, because ‘It’s all much clearer here. I can think and see’. In the aisles, with the cool tones of the refrigerators and the bright lighting, the ideologies underpinning the structures of daily life are ripe for the picking.

And no more being outdoors, And no more rain can be bought here for 4GBP.

#review

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fatehbaz · 5 years

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Hello, I hope you're well. Do you have any recommendations about where to start with decolonization theory? I've heard a bit about it but nothing substantial.

Hey, thanks for the question. Before I start rambling, I’ll just give a really short, blunt response: Despite all the jargon-heavy academic content written about decolonization, especially as a trend in the past 15 years, I think that the way to learn about decolonial thought and practice is to read the work of people living in the Global South; the work of marginalized environmental activists and agricultural workers, especially in the Global South; and the work of Indigenous scholars, knowledge holders, and activists who are explicitly willing to share their knowledge with non-Indigenous people. That said, I’m not too well-versed in technical decolonial theory per se, and instead I try to read more of the ecological/environmental, social/anthropological, and activist writing of Indigenous people and people from the Global South, what you might call decolonial thought. Rather than focusing on the technical theory and writing of wealthy Euro-American academics, I prefer more radical decolonial writing that integrates local/Indigenous cosmology, environmental knowledge, and ecology alongside the social and political aspects of radical anticolonial resistance. Something that I’m really interested in, regarding decolonial thought, is the importance of Indigenous and non-Western cosmology (ontology, epistemology, worldviews) because these ways of knowing actually provide frameworks that stand in contrast to extractivist thinking, suggesting alternatives that could be implemented. So, below I’ve listed just a couple of the most accessible authors that I’ve been reading recently, and I’ve split recommendations into four categories: (1) Indigenous authors writing about sovereignty and ecological consequences of colonialism; (2) technical decolonial theory and Indigenous resistance; (3) decolonial theory and ontology; and (4) synthesizing technical decolonial theory with writing on Indigenous worldviews and environmental knowledge. This definitely isn’t meant to be an extensive or definitive list of resources; and I know other people might have some better or different recommendations to make. But I hope this helps, if only a little bit, as an introduction!

Y’know, I think there’s a tendency among a lot of Euro-American academics to make the concept of decolonization much more mysterious, obtuse, and complicated than it needs to be; there’s an awful lot of discourse about metaphysics, ontology, and other intellectualized aspects of decolonization that are probably less important right now than concrete actions like reforestation and revegetation projects; healing soil integrity, health, and biodiversity; dismantling monoculture plantations; ending industrial resource extraction; ending de facto corporate control of lands, especially in tropical agriculture; allowing local Indigenous autonomy; preserving and celebrating Indigenous languages and ways of knowing; etc.

So, I’m not all that knowledgeable with technical decolonial theory. Instead I mostly just try very hard to read the environmental, anthropological, activist, etc. writing of Indigenous and minority communities, people from the Global South, and Indigenous traditional knowledge holders. Often, this kind of writing doesn’t always take the form of “theory.” A lot of decolonial theory - that I’ve seen, at least - is concerned with discussing trends/currents in academia and Euro-American discourse about the Global South. (In other words, a lot of decolonial theory written by white authors seems more concerned with talking about what decolonization means for academia and discourse, rather than actually exploring the worldviews of Indigenous peoples and the Global South.) Instead, the kind of stuff that I try to read explores Indigenous and non-Western resistance, community-building, and ecology; and so the resources that I recommend might not qualify as decolonial theory but they are decolonial, if that makes sense?

In my experience, some of the works that best demonstrate or embody decolonial thought are not works of theory, but are instead works of social history, nature writing, natural history, or works that explore bioregionalism, food, and local folklore. I also like to note that there is a trend among activists and scholars in Latin America to use the term “anticolonial” instead of “decolonial” or “postcolonial.” These latter two terms might imply that existence or identity in the Global South is doomed to always be defined by its relationship to Europe, the US, or imperialism generally. However, “anticolonial” might connote a more active role; you may still suffer the effects of imperialism, but you’re also an active opponent of it, living and thinking outside colonialism, with a unique worldview that exists autonomously rather than being defined always in reference to colonial actions or standards.

Indigenous authors writing about sovereignty and ecological consequences of colonialism:

So here are a few Indigenous scholars that I read, who write not just about decolonial thought, but also about place-based identity, environmental knowledge, and how decolonial theory can often be Eurocentic:

– Zoe Todd: Metis scholar and environmental writer, who famously criticized academic discourse about decolonization for itself being Eurocentric and colonial; here’s a nice interview (from 2015) about decolonial theory, where Zoe Todd criticizes Western academics and the ontological turn in anthropology.– Kyle Whyte: Potawatomi scholar, who writes about Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous food systems, colonization, contrasts between Indigenous and Euro-American worldviews, and preservation of Indigenous enviornmental knowledge; here’s a list of Whyte’s articles and essays, most available for free.– Robin Wall Kimmerer: Potawatomi ecologist, bryophyte specialist, and educator, who discusses contrasts between Indigenous and Euro-American ways of knowing; here’s one of my favorite interviews with Kimmerer.

Technical decolonial theory and Indigenous resistance:

And here are two recommendations on more technical anticolonial/decolonial theory. These texts are both a bit dense:

– Boaventura de Sousa Santos wrote a wonderful work of decolonial/anticolonial theory and thought, titled Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (2014). This work is a bit technical but very interesting and thorough, and explores how a major function of imperialism is to deliberately dismantle Indigenous worldviews, ways of knowing, and environmental knowledge, to replace Indigenous ecological relationships with “extractivist” and “industrial” mentalities.

– Arturo Escobar wrote a good work of anticolonial theory in direct response to de Sousa Santos’ work; Escobar’s text is called Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South (2015).

Both of these texts and authors explore the Global South’s active resistance to industrial/extractivist worldviews; they both also largely focus on Latin America and reciprocity, communal relationships, agroecology, and active resistance in Latin American communities.

Decolonial theory and ontology:

The ontological turn in anthropology is kiiind of a manifestation of decolonial theory, though it’s kind of problematic and often Eurocentric, popular among wealthy academics. The Metis scholar Zoe Todd, referenced earlier in this post, has written about the problematic aspects of the ontological turn. The ontological turn was big news in academia around 2008-2012, happening alongside the rise in popularity of Mark Fisher, “capitalist realism,” and Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology. Basically, I guess you could summarize the ontological turn as an effort to decolonize thinking in anthropology departments of Euro-American universities, to better understand the the worldviews/cosmologies of non-Western people. Here’s a summary by environmental scholar Adrian Ivakhiv, which references the role of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Phillipe Descola, two anthropologists working adjacent to decolonial theory.

Synthesizing technical decolonial theory with writing on Indigenous worldviews and environmental knowledge:

– Phillipe Descola: A renowned anthropologist whose work inspired much of the decolonization trend in US anthropology departments and the ontological turn in anthropology; Descola’s work deals with epistemology and ontology (so it’s often pretty dense) and takes a lot of cues from the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the Brazilian anthropologist who popularized the study of Amazonianist cosmology. Other Euro-American anthropologists who write about technical decolonial theory: Bruno Latour (kind of problematic); Isabelle Stengers.

– Eduardo Kohn: An anthropologist focused on decolonization and Indigenous worldviews; Kohn also takes cues from Viveiros de Castro and Descola. Kohn authored How Forests Think, which is a study of Indigenous Amazonian worldviews and how Amazonian people perceive nonhuman living things and the rainforest as a community. You can look up interviews with Eduardo Kohn

– I don’t know if you saw this post I made recently, but it shares a fun publication called The Word for World is Still Forest, which is an exploration of the cultural importance of forests from decolonial and Indigenous perspectives, and it’s a good example of decolonial theory being explored by visual artists, geographers, poets, anthropologists, and activists.

So, these are just the first examples that come to mind. I’m sure other friends/readers/followers might have some better recommendations. [ @anarcblr ?]

Often, I feel like a lot of technical decolonization theory is written by white professionals and academics, and I, personally, don’t think it’s important to have a white academic acting as a “middle man” whomst “translates” the thinking of Indigenous theorists and people from the Global South. In my experience, there’s a lot of “decolonization theory” content in journals, books, etc., over the past 20-ish years, mostly written by white academics who seem to have just recently “discovered” the “utility” of decolonization theory for “improving their field” or something. Discussing the “utility” of Indigenous knowledge is itself a kind of colonialist way of thinking, since it sees the knowledge as profitable or valuable or something to be employed like a machine, a way of thinking that is itself extractivist. (I’m not anti-intellectual, and anti-intellectualism is a problem, especially in the US. But I’ve not really found academics willing to just straight-up say radical things like “capitalism has to be confronted if we’re going to be serious about decolonization.”)

Like, they write about decolonization as if it’s major benefit is its practical/pragmatic application to improving science, metaphysics, conservation, or climate crisis mitigation. One example of this behavior is a huge amount of headlines in mainstream US news sources and environmental magazines, from late 2018 and 2019, that say some version of “Indigenous knowledge may be the key to surviving the climate crisis” or “planting trees might be the single best defense against global climate collapse, and Indigenous peoples’ knowledge can help us implement it” And this just doesn’t sit well with me. Firstly, because it frames Indigenous knowledge as an inanimate resource to be “tapped,” appropriated, employed, “put to use.” And secondly, because this not news. This - the role of vegetation and healthy soil microorganism communities in mitigating desertification, biodiversity loss, and local adverse climate trends - has been well-known to Indigenous peoples for centuries or millennia, and has also been very well-known to Euro-American environmental historians and academic geographers for decades.

I guess I’m saying that the current Euro-American discourse of decolonization has a lot of issues.

Anyway, the theory that I personally like best isn’t too academic or jargon-heavy; I like the work that which synthesizes human elements (anticolonial; anti-imperialist; anti-extractivism; anti-racist) with ecology (cosmology and folklore; traditional environmental knowledge; place-based identity), since ecological degradation and social violence and injustice are inseparable issues, and this is an interconnected relationship that decolonial theory and Latin American worldviews seem to understand very, very deeply.

And, I guess another element to the kind of decolonial writing that I enjoy is the importance of Indigenous and non-Western cosmology (worldviews, epistemology, ontology, ways of knowing) to providing alternatives to imperial, colonial, and extractivist mentalities. This is how decolonial thinking is not just about finding ways to defend against further imperial violence, but also proactive in promoting healthier alternatives that can be implemented.

I hope that some of these recommendations are useful!

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