Hello everyone,
Welcome to my blog. This is a blog
that is attempting to think about Dr. Greg Ulmer's Electric method in a
heuritic way. It's important to note that this is what Ulmer has denoted
as an experiment created in order for us to understand the new way that
the world is organized - not through literacy, but through Electracy.
The experiment consists of five steps, made into an acronym: CATTt.
C = Contrast [In our case, The Propensity of Things,by Francois Jullien]
A = Analogy [The Cinematic by David Campany]
T = Theory [The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan]
T = Target [The Internet]
t = tale [This blog - my Heuritic Experiment]
In
this blog, I attempt to construct a recipe of sorts so that whoever
happens upon this page can replicate it. It's scientific, but also not,
also artistic in a way because we are creating something.
A little bit about the process:
After
reading each text, we are to come up with a set of five instructions
from each book (this means that I will theoretically produce five blogs
for the CAT, equaling 15ish blogs). All of these instructions will be
thinking about the second capital letter T (the Internet). In fact, this
whole blog is thinking about the internet as a major part of Electracy.
Although Electracy started just as soon as the industrial revolution
did, since that denotes a major shift in history, science, literacy,
basically everything in our world, and the internet (I believe) is
another wave of that drastic shift.
I will combine,
pick out, remix 5 out of the 15 Contrast, Analogy, and Theory
instructions to create a kind of poetics that will further explain the
patterns that emerged out of the CAT. It is ultimately these last five
blogs that will allow me to create the master instructions list, a set
of 10 blogs, that will finally allow me to produce a final project, a
demonstration of the Electrate process at work (Hopefully).
After
I end each C-A-T, I will also blog a series of Reflections (and their
response from Dr. Ulmer) to introduce a little of my thought process
throughout this experiment.
A small note about the
chronology of the blog: I made sure to post them in such a way that they
were in methodological order. It was a little bit difficult to do this
because Blogger updates the time stamp every time I edit a post. That
means that, once I put the post in their proper order, I couldn't edit
or else I would have to re-order all of the posts. This is very much NOT
like WordPress, where the time you post a blog is "frozen" no matter
how many times you go in and edit. I thought Blogger was originally like
that, which would have made the process a lot easier, but it's not. It
was an interesting process though, in both Electrical terms and
otherwise.That means that this About post is the last post I posted
(when it should have been the first?). What I mean to say is that the
act of posting these blogs became an experiment of its own, one that I
obviously didn't anticipate, but which allowed me to think a lot about
Electracy from another point of view.
Anyway, that's that: I hope you enjoy. A least a little.
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Contrast (Jullien)
The Contrast allows us to see alternative, usually established, methods for structuring our world. In the case of The Propensity of Things,
Jullien utilized an ancient Chinese character -- Shi -- to illuminate
the Chinese vs. (a very general) Western ideologies. For us, this is of
particular importance since literacy as a process is something that we
assume came out of the west. To see the contrast of that in Jullien's
book was very exemplary - We not only had one contrast to work with, we
had two. Electracy is something that is both related to those literate
means, but, more importantly, it is attempting to develop something
quite different.
A small hint: It is important to recognize that this is the Contrast section. As such, the instructions harvested from Propensity might seem to be off-kilter with the other two texts. There isn't anything wrong, don't panic, this is just your Contrast speaking.
So that's that, and here we go.....
1. Manipulated
2. Scroll Painting
3. Zoom in Zoom out
4. Time Machine Propensity
5. Outside Over There
EMAIL 1[Jullien Email 1] - WWWeb
A small hint: It is important to recognize that this is the Contrast section. As such, the instructions harvested from Propensity might seem to be off-kilter with the other two texts. There isn't anything wrong, don't panic, this is just your Contrast speaking.
So that's that, and here we go.....
1. Manipulated
2. Scroll Painting
3. Zoom in Zoom out
4. Time Machine Propensity
5. Outside Over There
EMAIL 1[Jullien Email 1] - WWWeb
Analogy (Campany)
The Analogy section of the CATTt is highly important. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you had to skip every section of the CAT but one, that the Analogy section is the one that should be held on to. I say this because The Cinematic provides clear-cut examples that can directly directly (not theoretically or contrastingly) help us come up with a system, our a set of instructions.
What makes Cinematic so interesting is that it's not only Campany's view; instead, it is an anthology with many different types of analogies and examples to follow from multiple authors. It is helpful, too, that many of the authors of various chapters are themselves photographers or filmmakers. Their artistic focus (whether its a second or third or etc... focus along with their writing) allows us to get an example of HOW they did things, not only why. It is the how that we are most interested in because we are trying to create a how ourselves.
This is what we look to...
1. Still Movement
2. Reel Time
3. To Infinity
4. Photobombing
5. The Wind's Wind
EMAIL 4 [Campany Email 1] - My Life Flashed Before My Eyes
EMAIL 5 [Campany Email 2] - Electracy As Art
What makes Cinematic so interesting is that it's not only Campany's view; instead, it is an anthology with many different types of analogies and examples to follow from multiple authors. It is helpful, too, that many of the authors of various chapters are themselves photographers or filmmakers. Their artistic focus (whether its a second or third or etc... focus along with their writing) allows us to get an example of HOW they did things, not only why. It is the how that we are most interested in because we are trying to create a how ourselves.
This is what we look to...
1. Still Movement
2. Reel Time
3. To Infinity
4. Photobombing
5. The Wind's Wind
EMAIL 4 [Campany Email 1] - My Life Flashed Before My Eyes
EMAIL 5 [Campany Email 2] - Electracy As Art
Theory (Lacan)
Here be theory! Here be Lacanian Theory. A dangerous journey in its own right. In this text The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan offers us a model for which he talks about psychoanalysis that we can utilize to talk about Electracy. I think it's important to understand that Electracy is not exactly psychoanalysis, but that the foundation and formulation and the structure and scaffolding is similar, so that psychoanalysis might allow us to see a kind of blue print for what Electracy could be.
Check them out:
1. Gap
2. Repetition Re Petition Repeat tion
3. Lack/Unreal
4. Termination/Brushstrokes/Keystrokes
5. Gaze - The Libido For the Eyes
EMAIL 2 [Lacan Email 1] - The Circuitry of Language
EMAIL 3 [Lacan Email 2] - Boomerang
Check them out:
1. Gap
2. Repetition Re Petition Repeat tion
3. Lack/Unreal
4. Termination/Brushstrokes/Keystrokes
5. Gaze - The Libido For the Eyes
EMAIL 2 [Lacan Email 1] - The Circuitry of Language
EMAIL 3 [Lacan Email 2] - Boomerang
Manipulated (Jullien instruction 1)
In The Propensity of Things, the way of life, unknown to the Chinese people, is manipulated.
On page 69, Jullien notes: That logic also implies an inherent distrust of words, since words allow a kind of manipulation through rhetoric. But rhetoric involves turning towards other people so that they know what they are getting themselves into when they agree or when they reply in the negative. Rhetoric then also allows a person to be in conflict with what is being argued. They can rebel. This is where Greek democracy was born. Manipulation, not persuasion or rhetoric, is the way that the Chinese acted [it was an art], since it was both an individual and collective behavior towards others. But this pattern of conditioning is so pervasive and "natural" that it never has even become a theoretical discourse in China. They don't think anything of it, even if we on the outside can't help but observe it, because they accept it completely. No one ever thought to investigate its logic
In this paraphrase, I think it's important to note the actual contrast at play here: there is rhetoric and then there is manipulation. Dr. Ulmer mentioned rhetoric/persuasion several times during seminar. The thing is that you can have the most logical and persuasive argument ever, but you're going to keep saying the same thing over and over until you're blue in the face if the person you're trying to persuade won't be. In fact, persuasion will never work unless there is a small kernal of doubt to begin with.
The process of manipulation creates that kernal in the first place. It creates it and fosters it until it grows and there is no need for people going blue in the face. It becomes logic. This is done behind the owner's back, so to speak.
How can we think about this in instructional form? How does it, more importantly relate and allow us a contrast in our understanding of Electracy.
Here is an instruction: using some kind of photo manipulation program, take a "thin" celebrity's face or body and make them "not thin."
We are used to this type of manipulation, but in reverse. The resulting rhetoric is this: All these people are so perfectly shaped that it is causing a massive population spike of people who suffer from some kind of eating disorder. Reversing the mechanism totally by re-manipulation of the image, but backwards, in the opposite direction, will cause one of two reactions: "OMG, is blah blah blah got so (overweight/fat/obese/...)" or "That picture is NOT real. Someone made it like that." One feels the reality of the image and the other questions it, despite perhaps not questioning it when the celebrity is made to look thinner than they actually are.
Here is an interesting fact: In order to do this, one must use a tool called "liquify." I'll leave the implications to you.
On page 69, Jullien notes: That logic also implies an inherent distrust of words, since words allow a kind of manipulation through rhetoric. But rhetoric involves turning towards other people so that they know what they are getting themselves into when they agree or when they reply in the negative. Rhetoric then also allows a person to be in conflict with what is being argued. They can rebel. This is where Greek democracy was born. Manipulation, not persuasion or rhetoric, is the way that the Chinese acted [it was an art], since it was both an individual and collective behavior towards others. But this pattern of conditioning is so pervasive and "natural" that it never has even become a theoretical discourse in China. They don't think anything of it, even if we on the outside can't help but observe it, because they accept it completely. No one ever thought to investigate its logic
In this paraphrase, I think it's important to note the actual contrast at play here: there is rhetoric and then there is manipulation. Dr. Ulmer mentioned rhetoric/persuasion several times during seminar. The thing is that you can have the most logical and persuasive argument ever, but you're going to keep saying the same thing over and over until you're blue in the face if the person you're trying to persuade won't be. In fact, persuasion will never work unless there is a small kernal of doubt to begin with.
The process of manipulation creates that kernal in the first place. It creates it and fosters it until it grows and there is no need for people going blue in the face. It becomes logic. This is done behind the owner's back, so to speak.
How can we think about this in instructional form? How does it, more importantly relate and allow us a contrast in our understanding of Electracy.
Here is an instruction: using some kind of photo manipulation program, take a "thin" celebrity's face or body and make them "not thin."
We are used to this type of manipulation, but in reverse. The resulting rhetoric is this: All these people are so perfectly shaped that it is causing a massive population spike of people who suffer from some kind of eating disorder. Reversing the mechanism totally by re-manipulation of the image, but backwards, in the opposite direction, will cause one of two reactions: "OMG, is blah blah blah got so (overweight/fat/obese/...)" or "That picture is NOT real. Someone made it like that." One feels the reality of the image and the other questions it, despite perhaps not questioning it when the celebrity is made to look thinner than they actually are.
Here is an interesting fact: In order to do this, one must use a tool called "liquify." I'll leave the implications to you.
Scroll Painting (Jullien Instructions 2)
In the Chinese culture not only were the paintings infused with Shi, but the material the paintings were painted on were also infused with Shi.
Jullien makes it a point to note that the scroll was an important part of the painting process, especially since its unfolding allows for the necessary affect of time: the bottom part of a scroll is spring, the middle is summer, and the end is winter (138).
This movement in the painting can be seen in static form with images such as this one:
This is a static image. Sure, our eyes move in circles as the season changes, but we don't feel the actual motion of the season: There is no feeling of plentitude during the summer, for instance, that we would get as the scroll physically fills our hand as we are unrolling it.
Another interesting feature is this: The name of the scroll. In modern times, when someone says that word "Scroll" the first thing that comes to mind is the computer interface, not the ancient form of paper.
I find the idea of scrolling interesting in this respect, and with the respect of different cultures. Let me explain:
If I'm showing my parents something online and I'm controlling the mouse and they say "scroll down" what they mean is to go back to the top of the page. I'm not sure if you've noticed, you probably have, but the scroll bar to the right of the screen (usually) goes in the opposite direction of the page that needs to be scrolled. You move the scroll bar down, and the text moves up.
When I say "Scroll down" what I mean is move to the bottom of the page - I mean to go forward in the time of the text, but my parents (and others) mean to go backwards.
This is particularly interesting when it comes to comics and other forms of visual rhetoric (but especially comics in the digital age). When artists feel the freedom to create comic strips that denote movement, so that, for instance, as you move (forward in time) down the page, a character seems to be falling.
We are here presented with a contrast: Do Chinese people now read bottom to top, as if unrolling a scroll? I don't think they do, but how does that change (everything?)?
Of course, the blog format is also altering time in a way because we DO read present to past when we're reading blogs - the most recent post is on the top. This is telling of the subscription feature since no many people will go through most blogs and read every single post (past -> present).
The only time one could do it is in situations like this. For this reason, I am going to purposefully just draft all of my posts so that I can manipulate them spatially so that they adhere to the reader's time. This is a process, an experiment in time manipulation. But here is the instruction:
Instruction: Post something really long and then post it upside down. whether this is a series of photographs that you've taken, or just a random, simple/complex art project that you've done. Your first post should be the upside down one so as to disengage you from your original work.What does scrolling in basically two different directions do to your perception? Do you gain a different meaning from the different way that the "scroll was unraveled?"
Jullien makes it a point to note that the scroll was an important part of the painting process, especially since its unfolding allows for the necessary affect of time: the bottom part of a scroll is spring, the middle is summer, and the end is winter (138).
This movement in the painting can be seen in static form with images such as this one:
This is a static image. Sure, our eyes move in circles as the season changes, but we don't feel the actual motion of the season: There is no feeling of plentitude during the summer, for instance, that we would get as the scroll physically fills our hand as we are unrolling it.
Another interesting feature is this: The name of the scroll. In modern times, when someone says that word "Scroll" the first thing that comes to mind is the computer interface, not the ancient form of paper.
I find the idea of scrolling interesting in this respect, and with the respect of different cultures. Let me explain:
If I'm showing my parents something online and I'm controlling the mouse and they say "scroll down" what they mean is to go back to the top of the page. I'm not sure if you've noticed, you probably have, but the scroll bar to the right of the screen (usually) goes in the opposite direction of the page that needs to be scrolled. You move the scroll bar down, and the text moves up.
When I say "Scroll down" what I mean is move to the bottom of the page - I mean to go forward in the time of the text, but my parents (and others) mean to go backwards.
This is particularly interesting when it comes to comics and other forms of visual rhetoric (but especially comics in the digital age). When artists feel the freedom to create comic strips that denote movement, so that, for instance, as you move (forward in time) down the page, a character seems to be falling.
We are here presented with a contrast: Do Chinese people now read bottom to top, as if unrolling a scroll? I don't think they do, but how does that change (everything?)?
Of course, the blog format is also altering time in a way because we DO read present to past when we're reading blogs - the most recent post is on the top. This is telling of the subscription feature since no many people will go through most blogs and read every single post (past -> present).
The only time one could do it is in situations like this. For this reason, I am going to purposefully just draft all of my posts so that I can manipulate them spatially so that they adhere to the reader's time. This is a process, an experiment in time manipulation. But here is the instruction:
Instruction: Post something really long and then post it upside down. whether this is a series of photographs that you've taken, or just a random, simple/complex art project that you've done. Your first post should be the upside down one so as to disengage you from your original work.What does scrolling in basically two different directions do to your perception? Do you gain a different meaning from the different way that the "scroll was unraveled?"
Zoom in Zoom out (Jullien Instructions 3)
Aesthetic reduction, as Jullien calls it, is the act of stepping back from a work of art, of viewing its lifelines (95-6). I'd like to post a kind of quoted paraphrase of these two pages because I think they're important to the instructions.
Reading these two pages brings to mind artists like Georgia O'Keefe, whose highly zoomed in flower paintings incited a lot of different criticisms. In the age of photography and computers, this kind of O'Keefian style is highly achievable, especially now because our digital photographic technology is so clear. One wonders, however, or at least I wonder, when I look at O'Keefe's paintings, what dwells beyond them.
These instructions are two-fold.
Instruction Part 1: Take a picture of anything - a landscape, a flower, a cityscape - so that you can see a lot of it at once, the way that one's eye takes in what it's viewing. On the computer, zoom that picture to its maximum zoom potential and scroll through the enlarged image until something clicks in what you're seeing. This could be the colors, the shapes, the textures, a mixture of those three or something new. Take a screencap (and the crop the unessential window borders). You now have two images: the original and the highly zoomed in selection.
Instruction Part 2: Open both images in some kind of paint program (obviously separately) and take a black paintbrush (or some kind of contrasting color) and trace what you perceive are the lifelines of your images. Make sure that you are drawing a continuous line: Do not let your paint brush leave the surface of your image until you are finished drawing that lifeline. Do the same for the other image. Post your images side-by-side. Compare the lifelines. Are there any similarities? Did your Zoomed out lifeline intersect the portion of the image that you had zoomed in on?
The farther away you are from a painting the more easily you are able to take its contours. "Contemplating a landscape from afar, one grasps its lifelines (shi); considering it close up, one seizes its substance." From close up one enjoys the details, but they are unable to explore the vital tension of the landscape or the painted lines. Only from a distance could dynamism be expressed, rendering it more accessible to contemplation because it removes all the unessential things so that we can just focus on the essential lines of the piece. By exploiting the magical shortcut that painting provides us -- by allowing us to see vast distances on a short distance of paper -- the spiritual dimension is opened and we are able to transcend all the unreality of things.
Reading these two pages brings to mind artists like Georgia O'Keefe, whose highly zoomed in flower paintings incited a lot of different criticisms. In the age of photography and computers, this kind of O'Keefian style is highly achievable, especially now because our digital photographic technology is so clear. One wonders, however, or at least I wonder, when I look at O'Keefe's paintings, what dwells beyond them.
These instructions are two-fold.
Instruction Part 1: Take a picture of anything - a landscape, a flower, a cityscape - so that you can see a lot of it at once, the way that one's eye takes in what it's viewing. On the computer, zoom that picture to its maximum zoom potential and scroll through the enlarged image until something clicks in what you're seeing. This could be the colors, the shapes, the textures, a mixture of those three or something new. Take a screencap (and the crop the unessential window borders). You now have two images: the original and the highly zoomed in selection.
Instruction Part 2: Open both images in some kind of paint program (obviously separately) and take a black paintbrush (or some kind of contrasting color) and trace what you perceive are the lifelines of your images. Make sure that you are drawing a continuous line: Do not let your paint brush leave the surface of your image until you are finished drawing that lifeline. Do the same for the other image. Post your images side-by-side. Compare the lifelines. Are there any similarities? Did your Zoomed out lifeline intersect the portion of the image that you had zoomed in on?
Time Machine Propensity (Jullien Instructions 4)
In Chinese metaphysical thought, Jullien tells us that there is no ontological concept: They do not have a concept of the end.
This is quite unlike Western (really general) metaphysics, where ontology is alive and strong.
Can these two concepts be combined? Could we somehow construct an asymptotic moment where one never lands yet is always going towards [the end]? Would that allow Western or Chinese metaphysics to win out?
Some blogs allow for a programming structure called the continuous flow. In this way, what happens is that once you scroll to the end of the page, new blogs come up. This is the way that Facebook and twitter operate. This method of newsfeed, of going in the past, is interesting because it tries to remove ontology, especially since the blog format goes towards a beginning rather than an end.
There is also a website time machine that allows you to see different websites that no longer exist. The history of the internet, then, is interestingly archived so that history is not only a constant present, but also constantly in flux.
The other day, I made it to the end of a Facebook blog and it gave me an interesting message:.
Gifs are interesting in this way because they are inherently looped. There is no end to them. Many gifs however, obviously have a plot, a beginning, middle, and end. This is especially true if there are words running through them. But there are some gifs that seem to be never ending. It is interesting to see and observe them because they are sometimes very mesmerizing.
Instruction: Make a Neverending gif, and if there are words make sure they can continuously read so that there is not "beginning" or "end" to the sentence (more complexly: Make a never-ending photo gif, where only one element of the gif is moving. There quite a famous one of liquid being poured that just continues on and on.)
This is quite unlike Western (really general) metaphysics, where ontology is alive and strong.
Can these two concepts be combined? Could we somehow construct an asymptotic moment where one never lands yet is always going towards [the end]? Would that allow Western or Chinese metaphysics to win out?
Some blogs allow for a programming structure called the continuous flow. In this way, what happens is that once you scroll to the end of the page, new blogs come up. This is the way that Facebook and twitter operate. This method of newsfeed, of going in the past, is interesting because it tries to remove ontology, especially since the blog format goes towards a beginning rather than an end.
There is also a website time machine that allows you to see different websites that no longer exist. The history of the internet, then, is interestingly archived so that history is not only a constant present, but also constantly in flux.
The other day, I made it to the end of a Facebook blog and it gave me an interesting message:.
Gifs are interesting in this way because they are inherently looped. There is no end to them. Many gifs however, obviously have a plot, a beginning, middle, and end. This is especially true if there are words running through them. But there are some gifs that seem to be never ending. It is interesting to see and observe them because they are sometimes very mesmerizing.
Instruction: Make a Neverending gif, and if there are words make sure they can continuously read so that there is not "beginning" or "end" to the sentence (more complexly: Make a never-ending photo gif, where only one element of the gif is moving. There quite a famous one of liquid being poured that just continues on and on.)
Outside Over There (Jullien Instructions 5)
How can we think of being outside the box of the internet? Jullien states that people inside a certain metaphysics can't really see their the full extent of their metaphysics.... so how can we be outside the internet? It's become such an obvious part of life.
This instruction is a little bit different because it attempts to remove us from the way of life that we know.
It's another two-fold instruction.
Instruction Part 1: Do not use your computer/tablet for one week. This includes your (smart)phone for everything except phone function (that means no texting to let everyone who you usually text know ahead of time.). Every time you feel the urge to use the internet, your computer, the texting function, write (yes, with a pen or pencil) down a reflection entry trying to think about why you need to use it, what you would do if you didn't have it, and how it makes you feel. Try to analyze your situation. At the end of the week, write a larger reflection piece telling us the general role of the internet in your life and how you felt as the week progressed (more or less frustrated? More or less on the outside). Analyze the role of the internet in people's lives, especially now that you've lived outside of it. If you want to challenge yourself: Go a month or more without technology.
Instruction Part 2: We write differently when we're online or when we're texting. Attempt to write this way using traditional means - Basically, one of the things you would be doing would be writing in text speak on a piece of paper. Does it feel weird? How has our writing become less literate and more electrate?
I know, it's ironic that I'm telling you not to use the internet on something that you would never have seen had the internet not been invented, but go with me and I think everyone will get different results (at least slightly) that will allow us to separate ourselves from the internet culture we find ourselves in: we will begin, I hope, to see more of the metaphysics of the internet than we've seen before.
This instruction is a little bit different because it attempts to remove us from the way of life that we know.
It's another two-fold instruction.
Instruction Part 1: Do not use your computer/tablet for one week. This includes your (smart)phone for everything except phone function (that means no texting to let everyone who you usually text know ahead of time.). Every time you feel the urge to use the internet, your computer, the texting function, write (yes, with a pen or pencil) down a reflection entry trying to think about why you need to use it, what you would do if you didn't have it, and how it makes you feel. Try to analyze your situation. At the end of the week, write a larger reflection piece telling us the general role of the internet in your life and how you felt as the week progressed (more or less frustrated? More or less on the outside). Analyze the role of the internet in people's lives, especially now that you've lived outside of it. If you want to challenge yourself: Go a month or more without technology.
Instruction Part 2: We write differently when we're online or when we're texting. Attempt to write this way using traditional means - Basically, one of the things you would be doing would be writing in text speak on a piece of paper. Does it feel weird? How has our writing become less literate and more electrate?
I know, it's ironic that I'm telling you not to use the internet on something that you would never have seen had the internet not been invented, but go with me and I think everyone will get different results (at least slightly) that will allow us to separate ourselves from the internet culture we find ourselves in: we will begin, I hope, to see more of the metaphysics of the internet than we've seen before.
Caught in the WWWeb (Email 1//Jullien)
Hello Everyone,
Although
I am interested in the contrasts that Jullien elaborates in his text,
_The Propensity of Things_, I think what strikes me the most are the
moments when the Eastern/Western thought dichotomy tends to converge.
Although there are usually other factors working in consideration with
these rare connections, allowing the addition of contrast its
prevalence, I think it's also important to highlight these similarities,
as they might allow us a different track to understand and
arrive at some kind of electracal mode of thought.
The first time that I noted a
point of convergence was when Jullien discusses the "innovation" of the
Panopticon into the surveillance system of the West. Notably, he does
make sure to let us know that, while Western
thought did come to a conclusion about Surveillance similar to the
Chinese notion of Sovereignty, they arrived at this notion a lot later
than the Chinese had (56-7). Moreover, even though I accept Jullien's
statement when he says that the Panopticon functions
even if there is no guard inside, like the Chinese system, where "the
sovereign could continue to occupy 'his position' perfectly well even if
he left his palace," the Western Panopticon still
professes a visibility, I think, that I feel the Eastern Sovereignty has
occluded (56). I use, perhaps too naively about a place I
will not profess to know, an example of The Forbidden City. Upon initial
research, I note that though it did operate from the center of Beijing,
it was an immense palace of almost one-thousand
buildings that equality obscured the "guard" that the very-visible and
solitary Panopticon hinges its power on [there are two windows in the
circle of cells surrounding the Panopticon for a reason]. If the
Panopticon were to fall, so too would its power.
Despite these points of
contention, I still believe that the way-station that both modes of
thought arrive at are similar enough that they might enable us to
transport electracy, as a third rhetorical vehicle, to the
same station. These days, for instance and especially post-9/11, we have
seen an increase in the kind of Panoptic surveillance on the internet.
In fact, when teaching the Panopticon to students, utilizing the
internet as an example is helpful because it allows
for a visceral, immediate reaction that explains to them that feeling
they have of being watched. But I now think for a moment not about the
political implications of "being watched" that the post-9/11 era has
instilled in us [with various laws that allow for
that surveillance to occur], but instead on the more invisible - through
its apparent visibility - mode of surveillance that many internet users
have "accepted" as "just a part" of their internet experience:
Capitalism and, more broadly, the Economy (as mandated
and enforced by Search Engines that we depend on, like Google, Bing, or
whatever poison you choose [Yahooligans was the Gateway Search Engine of
my youth, for instance]).
As we use the internet, I
think right now of Facebook, the internet nudges us with ads that
reflect back what we are interested in [in Purchase/Commodity mode], so
much so that sometimes it appears to have the Clairvoyance
of a Chinese war strategist. I don't know if any one remembers this, but
years ago when someone made a search on Google the first link it gave
was whether you wanted to purchase an amount of [insert search word(s)
here]. So if I searched "The Revolutionary
War" Google would kindly let me know, in hyperlink form, that I could go
to whatever site if I wanted to purchase The Revolutionary War in bulk.
As Google worked on its Third eye, what it was doing became more and
more invisible to us, until we couldn't see
it no matter how opaque it was. Google still does this, but in a more
subtle-unsubtle way (go ahead and search something on Google,
it, at least, has a "storefront" for it if it doesn't literally
highlight it as the first result that comes up).
In that sense, the internet
operates on both modes of surveillance. On the one hand, we understand
that our work on the internet is being monitored [as I write this email,
certain words, at least, are being flagged
down for possible anti-government activity, like "anti-government" or
"9/11," (that's why our email drafts are constantly saved on servers --
it's nice, but it's also like when, during war, letters were read and
lines blacked out before it was sent, if it was
sent at all), and I see that as a way to filter/or not the kind of words
I use to write or the way I conduct any kind of research. On the other
hand, we have ways of surveillance in place so that we in no way, shape,
or form, feel like we can do anything about
how we are in most ways ruled by the internet economy and the archive of
facts it keeps on us. We are like the Fine-Beard, in a way.
How can we think about
Electracy as a metaphysics that aims to control, to persuade
or manipulate? Or does Electracy operate on a combination between the
two, on something totally new that's beside persuasion and manipulation.
These are my initial thoughts that I hope to continue thinking about as I
contemplate, plan, and write my blog posts, other emails, and future
projects. As of now, I believe I have written too much (or nothing at
all?).
Until next time,
Asmaa
P.S. As a side note, the
internet economy and the political one (that visibly aims to be
more Panoptically invisible) have, in that sense, followed a similar
historical timeline that the Eastern and Western modes have
taken, where the Eastern came first and the Western followed, long
after.
--------------------------------------------------------------Response
1) Good to include the Internet in our
considerations since it fills the Target slot of the CATTt (and blog as
tale). We are more or less assuming the Internet, or rather, Internet
Invention is our one "reading" invoking it. At the same time, we all
use it constantly so are "natives" of its "surround." The assignment
does not include a separate set of posts to inventory the relevant
features of the Internet, but they can and should be referenced in all
the categories (perhaps especially with Cinematics
as Analogy).
2) Your method advice is good also, to note similarity as well as
difference -- the very points of comparability between East and West,
even if they perform contrary or complementary versions of the feature.
We can think about "efficacy" as "style," for
example, and see that, as with surveillance, the West has taken a turn
more aligned with the Chinese decision and away from the Classical West
(even as the East swerves symmetrically towards the West). The insight
is that civilizations seem to overlap considerably
in potential, but actualize only some parts of what is available and
background others. 3) Jullien's insight about surveillance, and your point, are well-taken. The comparison is apparent in theories of ideology, which show that the Panopticon is a crude device indeed when compared with ideology. Foucault, as you know, explained the three forces at work in an episteme or set-up in our context: knowledge, power, subject. Societies are "disciplined," and at the end of his career he was most interested in how discipline is internalized and appropriated by individuals for themselves. Various French thinkers (Barthes, Bordieu et al), showed how ideology becomes second nature, is that which goes without saying, what Bordieu called habitus. That is the term Jullien used when he noted how absolute sovereignty becomes invisible by transforming into habitus. This form of control is not recent in the West, obviously. The challenge of any society as a political collective is how to get citizens to cooperate with order. Althusser talked about the difference between the police state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus. Ideology is far preferable in the sense that its violence is soft. The metaphysical question is the relation among necessity, freedom, and the manner of their interaction (covered in Kant's Critiques, for example).
Still Movement (Campany Instructions 1)
Bragaglia's translated piece about Photodynamism is interesting because of the "trash" potential of those pictures that we take and then delete because they are not focused. They are not sharp. They don't capture a perfect image. I think in this day and age when Autofocus technology is so precise there is something infuriating about producing a picture that's less than crystal-clear perfection.
But it happens all of the time, especially now when everyone is always carrying a camera in their back pocket.
Bragaglia says that "In this way light and movement in general, light acting as movement, and hence the movement of light, are revealed in Photodynamism. Given the transcendental nature of the phenomenon of movement, it is only by means of Phtodynamism that the painter can know what happens in the intermovemental states, and become acquainted with the volumes of individual motions ... Only with Photodynamism can the artist be in possession of the elements necessary for the construction of a work of art embodying the desired synthesis" (29).
What he says here often happens accidentally, but it can also happen quite deliberately in several ways. The instructions, then, are multi-parted.
Instruction 1: Put your camera's setting on the long-exposure (these are usually night-time settings, utilized in very very very steady mode that consists of multiple rapid-fire shots that layer on top of each other so that whatever light that's captured is multiplied onto the same image. Anther way that this works is that the shutter doesn't close, and thus attempt to capture, for as long as possible, the light. This is how people take pictures of the Milky Way). Now, not all cameras have a long-exposure setting, so I would read the instruction manual or Google your camera's ID number to check. What happens if you don't keep your camera steady (usually by not actually touching it), is it causes a highly blurred image, an image that appears to be moving. It works the other way too: If the camera is still, but the subject is not (remember, these long-exposure shots are usually used for taking pictures in the dark of objects that don't usually move: like the stars), the camera will take a Photodynamic shot. In this Instruction, I would like for you to keep your camera as steady as possible, and have someone, your subject (object?) move in some way.
Instruction 2: Attempt to take a moving shot, a blurry shot, of movement or laughter or talking, or etc... if it helps, turn your auto-focus off (this option is usually available in any camera, even cell phone cameras). Try to capture that moment of horror, as Bragaglia calls it.
Instruction 3: Manipulation of Photodynamism. On a photo editing program, place your image and then increase your blurring brush to the largest it can go. Swipe the brush once across the screen in an arched curving motion.
How are these products different? How are they the same? What do they tell us? What do they tell us about Photodynamism?
But it happens all of the time, especially now when everyone is always carrying a camera in their back pocket.
Bragaglia says that "In this way light and movement in general, light acting as movement, and hence the movement of light, are revealed in Photodynamism. Given the transcendental nature of the phenomenon of movement, it is only by means of Phtodynamism that the painter can know what happens in the intermovemental states, and become acquainted with the volumes of individual motions ... Only with Photodynamism can the artist be in possession of the elements necessary for the construction of a work of art embodying the desired synthesis" (29).
What he says here often happens accidentally, but it can also happen quite deliberately in several ways. The instructions, then, are multi-parted.
Instruction 1: Put your camera's setting on the long-exposure (these are usually night-time settings, utilized in very very very steady mode that consists of multiple rapid-fire shots that layer on top of each other so that whatever light that's captured is multiplied onto the same image. Anther way that this works is that the shutter doesn't close, and thus attempt to capture, for as long as possible, the light. This is how people take pictures of the Milky Way). Now, not all cameras have a long-exposure setting, so I would read the instruction manual or Google your camera's ID number to check. What happens if you don't keep your camera steady (usually by not actually touching it), is it causes a highly blurred image, an image that appears to be moving. It works the other way too: If the camera is still, but the subject is not (remember, these long-exposure shots are usually used for taking pictures in the dark of objects that don't usually move: like the stars), the camera will take a Photodynamic shot. In this Instruction, I would like for you to keep your camera as steady as possible, and have someone, your subject (object?) move in some way.
Instruction 2: Attempt to take a moving shot, a blurry shot, of movement or laughter or talking, or etc... if it helps, turn your auto-focus off (this option is usually available in any camera, even cell phone cameras). Try to capture that moment of horror, as Bragaglia calls it.
Instruction 3: Manipulation of Photodynamism. On a photo editing program, place your image and then increase your blurring brush to the largest it can go. Swipe the brush once across the screen in an arched curving motion.
How are these products different? How are they the same? What do they tell us? What do they tell us about Photodynamism?
Reel Time (Campany Instructions 2)
For as long as anyone can remember, theater and film productions have not operated in real time. In fact, it is a rare moment when we see that happening. Sometimes, even conversations that, to us, last three minutes, three hours have passed. We are supposed to imagine that the conversation took a lot longer than that.
We see this conversely as well: Moments that would have actually lasted mere seconds slow down into the slow motion shot so that we can see that "SUDDENLY" moment, the moment of trauma or the punctum moment.
Tarantino states that there is anxiety present in these moments of real time. He says, "Neurotic anxiety has changed in our hands into realistic anxiety, into fear of particular external situations of danger .... we ask ourselves what it is that is actually dangerous and actually feared in a situation of danger of this kind" (34).
Hollis Frampton relates that there was a woman who wanted to video tape every moment of her life in real time. This is a production that will never be watched again in full, since it would take another person's whole life to watch this person's lived life, and that's really not fair. But for the moment, I would like us to attempt this. Multi-part instructions are below:
Instruction 1: Take a video that's sped up (May I suggest tutorial videos on youtube) and attempt to slow them down to real time. This may be difficult, of course, because many people choose those moments to cut their video, but attempt to do so. If there is a gap, attempt to put the gap in there.
Instruction 2: Videotape yourself doing something, anything. Washing dishes (like Jeanne Dielman), or driving to school, or whatever. Can you watch it all, start to finish? What does it mean that you can or can't? What happens if you speed it up? Slow it way down? What do you notice that you would not have noticed otherwise? Do you feel the time that it actually took to do whatever it was you did in the video (often, for instance, when we're waiting for something to happen, it seems to take forever)?
Gaensheimer states that "through the extreme slowing down of the movement, the greeting between the women seems to become divided up into a wealth of individual elements: each look, each movement, each fraction of a facial expression is released from the overall context of the story and stands out as meaningful," yet Miriam Rosen, in her interview by Chantal Akerman, states that, when she's filming, she doesn't want it to "'look real', I don't want it to look natural, but I want people to feel the time that it takes, which is not the time that it really takes" (71, 195). These are two different kinds of times -- of the many that can be looked at -- that I want to investigate here through these instructions. Ultimately, how might they relate to the bigger picture project of Electracy?
We see this conversely as well: Moments that would have actually lasted mere seconds slow down into the slow motion shot so that we can see that "SUDDENLY" moment, the moment of trauma or the punctum moment.
Tarantino states that there is anxiety present in these moments of real time. He says, "Neurotic anxiety has changed in our hands into realistic anxiety, into fear of particular external situations of danger .... we ask ourselves what it is that is actually dangerous and actually feared in a situation of danger of this kind" (34).
Hollis Frampton relates that there was a woman who wanted to video tape every moment of her life in real time. This is a production that will never be watched again in full, since it would take another person's whole life to watch this person's lived life, and that's really not fair. But for the moment, I would like us to attempt this. Multi-part instructions are below:
Instruction 1: Take a video that's sped up (May I suggest tutorial videos on youtube) and attempt to slow them down to real time. This may be difficult, of course, because many people choose those moments to cut their video, but attempt to do so. If there is a gap, attempt to put the gap in there.
Instruction 2: Videotape yourself doing something, anything. Washing dishes (like Jeanne Dielman), or driving to school, or whatever. Can you watch it all, start to finish? What does it mean that you can or can't? What happens if you speed it up? Slow it way down? What do you notice that you would not have noticed otherwise? Do you feel the time that it actually took to do whatever it was you did in the video (often, for instance, when we're waiting for something to happen, it seems to take forever)?
Gaensheimer states that "through the extreme slowing down of the movement, the greeting between the women seems to become divided up into a wealth of individual elements: each look, each movement, each fraction of a facial expression is released from the overall context of the story and stands out as meaningful," yet Miriam Rosen, in her interview by Chantal Akerman, states that, when she's filming, she doesn't want it to "'look real', I don't want it to look natural, but I want people to feel the time that it takes, which is not the time that it really takes" (71, 195). These are two different kinds of times -- of the many that can be looked at -- that I want to investigate here through these instructions. Ultimately, how might they relate to the bigger picture project of Electracy?
To Infinity (Campany Instructions 3)
"As the past is formed not after the present but simultaneously with it, therefore time must divide itself up into present and past in each of its individual moment ... By combining two one-minute videos .... projected one after the other in an endless loop, Rosemarie Trockel opposes the two forms of slowness which constitute the poles ... the representation of slowness by technically extending the moment, and the emergence of a consciousness of duration in the very process of perception" (77). Gaensheimer talks here about the strange way that time is perceived in film, and how it can be manipulated. The looping of films allows the viewer to be stuck in a present at the same time as they are stuck in the past. They have seen it, but they are seeing it still.
That looping mechanism is important to our understanding of time. And it is even more vital to our understanding of Electracy, I think, because time oftentimes doesn't seem like an element when we're thinking about the internet. Also, this kind of looping nature is inherent in the gif image type, where the the group of images that make up the seconds-long film loop constantly. There is time embedded into the gif when there is a sentence that runs through it that denotes the start and the end of the gif. And of course, it is obvious in most looping videos where the start and the end is.
A challenge, then, would be to make the gif in such a way that it would endlessly loop so that we really would not know where the start and the end is, so that the anticipation of a past/future/present can be eliminated. This is something that I think is really inherent in Electracy, and so this is what will make up this part of the instruction.
Instruction: Make an actual infinite looping gif. Remember, you must find a way that will subvert the idea of time. That means that this gif has to defy ontological expectations of some kind of an end.
That looping mechanism is important to our understanding of time. And it is even more vital to our understanding of Electracy, I think, because time oftentimes doesn't seem like an element when we're thinking about the internet. Also, this kind of looping nature is inherent in the gif image type, where the the group of images that make up the seconds-long film loop constantly. There is time embedded into the gif when there is a sentence that runs through it that denotes the start and the end of the gif. And of course, it is obvious in most looping videos where the start and the end is.
A challenge, then, would be to make the gif in such a way that it would endlessly loop so that we really would not know where the start and the end is, so that the anticipation of a past/future/present can be eliminated. This is something that I think is really inherent in Electracy, and so this is what will make up this part of the instruction.
Instruction: Make an actual infinite looping gif. Remember, you must find a way that will subvert the idea of time. That means that this gif has to defy ontological expectations of some kind of an end.
Photobombing (Campany Instructions 4)
When someone searches something on the internet, sometimes they
get some random results that don't have anything to do with each
other. That is part of what I want to call the montage-ablity of the internet. The internet automatically puts things together that we otherwise might not have thought to; it allows us to open up new roads for interesting projects. This is where such things as the Google poetry comes from.
Durand talks about a character who "suffers from a powerful mimetic compulsion that makes him crop up willy-nilly in all kinds of periods and situations, in all parts of the globe, like some ... parasite.... it is surely the consequence of never having read Moby Dick ... Not to have read this novel ... is ... to be condemned to floating around without the salutary ballast of a masterpiece ... is to run the risk of not being stabilized by the cohesive power of myth" (154).
I think it's interesting to think about the myth-making process that's involved with something like the internet, a place where objects that are comparable to American classics that are barely read by anyone might be floating. For instance, talk to anyone about Xanga and they might remember it, they might Google it and find it around, but I think a place like Xanga made up the building block of the blog community. To me, Xanga was the predecessor to popular blogging sites like, well, like this one.
Durand also talks about the movie Film Stills which recorded the filmmaker's life. I think this is important with regards to the quote about Moby Dick because it makes one think about the coorelation between having myth as some kind of a masthead that keeps one's life afloat but also anchored. What happens when one documents their lives and connect them to the lives of others: A genomic vs and individual reality (a la Stiegler).
Instruction: Make a video montage that combines four things: photos of your day, photos of your face at least once every day for a month, photos of random image searches of internet mythology or history or canon (perhaps Google maps), and photos of you imposed on these random images (you would essentially be photobombing these images virtually). These images, when placed together in your mini-film, should be randomized. What can you tell about your place in internet mythology? Are you like the character who hadn't read Moby Dick? If so, then so what?
Durand talks about a character who "suffers from a powerful mimetic compulsion that makes him crop up willy-nilly in all kinds of periods and situations, in all parts of the globe, like some ... parasite.... it is surely the consequence of never having read Moby Dick ... Not to have read this novel ... is ... to be condemned to floating around without the salutary ballast of a masterpiece ... is to run the risk of not being stabilized by the cohesive power of myth" (154).
I think it's interesting to think about the myth-making process that's involved with something like the internet, a place where objects that are comparable to American classics that are barely read by anyone might be floating. For instance, talk to anyone about Xanga and they might remember it, they might Google it and find it around, but I think a place like Xanga made up the building block of the blog community. To me, Xanga was the predecessor to popular blogging sites like, well, like this one.
Durand also talks about the movie Film Stills which recorded the filmmaker's life. I think this is important with regards to the quote about Moby Dick because it makes one think about the coorelation between having myth as some kind of a masthead that keeps one's life afloat but also anchored. What happens when one documents their lives and connect them to the lives of others: A genomic vs and individual reality (a la Stiegler).
Instruction: Make a video montage that combines four things: photos of your day, photos of your face at least once every day for a month, photos of random image searches of internet mythology or history or canon (perhaps Google maps), and photos of you imposed on these random images (you would essentially be photobombing these images virtually). These images, when placed together in your mini-film, should be randomized. What can you tell about your place in internet mythology? Are you like the character who hadn't read Moby Dick? If so, then so what?
The Wind's Wind (Campany Instructions 5)
Raul Ruiz says, "In front of my house, wind would move the trees. At a certain point the wind would blow with such regularity that one had the impression the trees were frozen in place, bent over in the same direction ... that moment of immobility gave the impression that movement and its opposite were not contradictory. ... This oscillation [between constant mobility and sudden immobility] gradually gave a new feeling to the scene: when everything moved about one only saw immobility, and vice-versa [sic]. I told myself this was a good way to photograph the wind" (140).
I quote this text by Ruiz because I think it says something both about the photograph (the media he is talking about in here) and film. Of course, filming the wind, it's constant movement and the way it changes the landscape) is a way to film something invisible (like how we film invisible men by the way the haystacks dent to denote his body). To think about the body of the wind in a photograph versus a film is interesting too.
Of course, a person who loves the wind, and as a person who utilized the wind in her Mystory when I talked about Pocahontas I think it's fascinating to try and signify something that is not visible to us. But what about the wind's wind?
In the movie Stay, a film kind of about a mentally distressed artist who can somehow predict future events, the artist is sitting in his lecture class listening to an art historian talk about some Goya paintings. The art historian says that although one cannot paint the wind, one can paint the wind's wind. I always thought that was an an awesome analysis, not only because it made sense, but also because it didn't make any sense at all. There is, for me, something uncanny about it.
We can see the wind's wind when we observe the way that smoke flows, for instance, as the art historian says. But there comes with this phrase a desire to think about a double invisibility: If one cannot photograph the wind, how can one photograph the (logically twice-removed) wind's wind? This is where Ruiz's process along with a kind of time-lapse comes into play, I think, to get us closer to the answer to this question.
Stimson stipulates that "in the first attempts to use serial photography to capture motion and narrative sequence, the aim was not to reproduce life as experienced in time but instead to see what cannot be seen by the naked eye, to see what can be seen only when time is stopped ... the camera was brought in to give visual testimony to what the eye on its own could not see by disarticulating the sequence of events, by breaking the narrative apart" (95).
This quote leads us to the instruction for this blog because it highlights the way that time lapse sequence photography allows for the invisibilities, for the gaps, for the stains of the wind and the wind's wind to show through somehow. This process, unlike but also so much like Ruiz's photographic methods, allows us to get closer to our desire to see the wind (so we can paint with these colors that Pocahontas sings about -- because we can sometimes actually see the wind in the movie).
Instruction: For this part, you need two cameras (one has to have the ability to take videos). Turn your flash off because that usually slows down the process of fast action photography. Put your camera's settings on the "sports" feature - since sports are often filled with fast-action movement, the sports feature allows for a very fast shutter speed that captures someone in motion (a little bit opposite of photodynamism). Some cameras or camera apps allow for sequence shots to be taken by just the click of one button, some cameras you have to keep clicking the button for the camera to take a series of photographs. Figure this out on your individual camera setting. Then, either wait for a windy day or utilize the power of an electric fan to simulate the wind, and take action shots at the same time that you take the video. Analyze the video side-by-side with the sequence shots: what can you see that you couldn't before?
Bonus instruction: Take the photographs out of sequence and then look through them again. What changes have occurred? Do you notice something different?
I quote this text by Ruiz because I think it says something both about the photograph (the media he is talking about in here) and film. Of course, filming the wind, it's constant movement and the way it changes the landscape) is a way to film something invisible (like how we film invisible men by the way the haystacks dent to denote his body). To think about the body of the wind in a photograph versus a film is interesting too.
Of course, a person who loves the wind, and as a person who utilized the wind in her Mystory when I talked about Pocahontas I think it's fascinating to try and signify something that is not visible to us. But what about the wind's wind?
In the movie Stay, a film kind of about a mentally distressed artist who can somehow predict future events, the artist is sitting in his lecture class listening to an art historian talk about some Goya paintings. The art historian says that although one cannot paint the wind, one can paint the wind's wind. I always thought that was an an awesome analysis, not only because it made sense, but also because it didn't make any sense at all. There is, for me, something uncanny about it.
We can see the wind's wind when we observe the way that smoke flows, for instance, as the art historian says. But there comes with this phrase a desire to think about a double invisibility: If one cannot photograph the wind, how can one photograph the (logically twice-removed) wind's wind? This is where Ruiz's process along with a kind of time-lapse comes into play, I think, to get us closer to the answer to this question.
Stimson stipulates that "in the first attempts to use serial photography to capture motion and narrative sequence, the aim was not to reproduce life as experienced in time but instead to see what cannot be seen by the naked eye, to see what can be seen only when time is stopped ... the camera was brought in to give visual testimony to what the eye on its own could not see by disarticulating the sequence of events, by breaking the narrative apart" (95).
This quote leads us to the instruction for this blog because it highlights the way that time lapse sequence photography allows for the invisibilities, for the gaps, for the stains of the wind and the wind's wind to show through somehow. This process, unlike but also so much like Ruiz's photographic methods, allows us to get closer to our desire to see the wind (so we can paint with these colors that Pocahontas sings about -- because we can sometimes actually see the wind in the movie).
Instruction: For this part, you need two cameras (one has to have the ability to take videos). Turn your flash off because that usually slows down the process of fast action photography. Put your camera's settings on the "sports" feature - since sports are often filled with fast-action movement, the sports feature allows for a very fast shutter speed that captures someone in motion (a little bit opposite of photodynamism). Some cameras or camera apps allow for sequence shots to be taken by just the click of one button, some cameras you have to keep clicking the button for the camera to take a series of photographs. Figure this out on your individual camera setting. Then, either wait for a windy day or utilize the power of an electric fan to simulate the wind, and take action shots at the same time that you take the video. Analyze the video side-by-side with the sequence shots: what can you see that you couldn't before?
Bonus instruction: Take the photographs out of sequence and then look through them again. What changes have occurred? Do you notice something different?
My Life Flashed Before My Eyes (Email 4//Campany1]
Hi Everyone,
It's
a cliché phrase, "My life flashed before my eyes," one that we're all
familiar with as an instant highlight replay reel that apparently plays
at moments of death or near death. But if we place it next to Pier Paolo
Pasolini's conjecture about montage and death, I think that it starts
to mean something else, something more. This chapter of The Cinematic also really highlighted the other texts
for the CATTt and for the semester, most particularly Ulmers' Internet Invention and Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ulmer's
Mystory construction is, I think, an apt example of a montage. It
reiterates patterns, even as
it continuously presents us with something different. Moreover, I
remember one week when Ulmer stated that our Mystories wouldn't ever be
complete until we died (meaning, of course, that if no one was there to
complete them, they would essentially never be
complete). This, of course, is for the same reason that Pasolini says
that "an honest man may at seventy commit a crime ... (that) modifies
all his past actions ... so long as I'm not dead, no one will be able to
guarantee he truly knows me" (Pasolini 86).
The present will always filter out the past, which means that the past
is in constant flux mode always, until our last breath. Oddly, this is a
depressing – a lonely – notion, that no one, not even I, will ever know
who I am, except maybe until that last moment
before I die (if I'm even conscious enough to watch it). Though, at that
point, I become a "was" and not an "am," essentially insuring that no
one will ever know who I [present tense] am. Our timeline's convoluted
and tangled Persistent Presentness, simultaneous
as it is, is just as oddly comforting: "It's not over until it's
over," as another cliché goes.
I
want to think about the importance of time to our current project. What
does time do to, how does time affect, Electracy? To think about this,
we
must first go back an excerpt to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's piece (page 83).
He says that we have to first understand that "the knowledge of
photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the
use of the camera as well as of the pen," before we can realize that
a series of photographs can be as potent as a weapon or as tender as a
poem (83). These days, I think that his position about the camera/pen
equilibrium/dichotomy is very valid. Of course,
our writing these days is less through a pen than through a keyboard
(this email is a case-in-point), but for the moment, I will allow myself
to think that the pen is any machine that allows for a written language
to be transcribed or translated for later use
(such as a computer, or a phone). It is quite fascinating to find that,
currently, one machine that allows us to write is also the one that
allows us to take images (the phone/tablet). It is just as common to
take a picture of a product, video tape a recipe,
take a picture of a written recipe, than it is to write it down.
But,
with Electracy, we're not trying to take the rules of writing and
change them to fit an Electracal platform. We're trying to make our own
instructions
for Electracy. I think this is where Lacan's and Pasolini's input about
the montage is the strongest. It's difficult to find montage in writing
(that's not saying that it doesn't exist in some forms, perhaps
something Joyce-ian). But it's strong in visual language.
A camera can make a montage quite easily, especially with the use of
apps that allow for montages to be constructed on the spot. For
instance, I have an app called PicCollage that allows a person to pick
random (if they want) images from their gallery and mesh
them together. This kind of surrealism enables a situation where
a "single picture loses its separate identity and becomes a part of the
assembly, it becomes a structural element of the related whole which is
the thing itself" (Moholy-Nagy 83). This brick-laying,
rather than tent-unfolding, to try and ironically use
paradoxically-static architectural terms, is what gives movement to a
piece, to a life.
How
can we think about montage and time in terms of Electracy; how does
Electracy provide that foundation for montage? I think the important
thing to
note is that montage is a way that supersedes the idea of linear time,
in a way. If a single picture loses its singular identity when put in a
sequence, although that perhaps is not always a montage, that's a
similar position to Pasolini's, where he says that
a life is made up of these images that are "non-symbolic signs" when
looked at from the present tense -- until they are put in a montage, at
which point they become the past. This simultaneous idea of present and
past is confusing. But at the same time, it's
not, because we are living with it all the time, and because time is
never linear.
I
will bring into play my idea of drafts again. Especially with Gmail,
whenever one saves a draft, a completely different link is provided.
What that
means is that there exists, simultaneously, a sequence of urls that
denote different changes that one has made to their email messages.
These are past drafts, yet they exist at the same time always. Now, I
don't know if they recycle these urls (probably, they
do), but for the time that they exist, they are singular and individual
in their incompleteness, and they aren't, because they lose
their uniqueness if put next to the rest of the urls.
Therefore,
when we say or think, since that experience (if it's real) is a cliché
because of film, and it is usually only in film when we really hear
people saying that (or having the time afterwards to say that), about
our life flashing before our eyes, it immediately becomes a finished
work, a singular work made up of many other tiny singular works that
make us a "past." It is an anthology of things that
have become our canon. But what can we do with this construction in the
mean time. You know... while we're still alive?
These different ideas about montage and time are definitely worth looking into further, and I am planning to do so in a blog.
Again, I apologize if I made no sense at all.
See you soon,
Asmaa
----------------------------------------------------------Response
Of course you made (no) sense! Or rather, you
are a HEUretic. We are inventing, and part of the interest of the
email as back-channel is what each one selects and puts forward as
worthy of attention. Pasolini is hugely interesting in his own right,
and
I suppose the downside of a collection is that most of the individual
pieces leads away to wonderful riches. On the positive side as I noted
is the accumulation expressing the propensity of the argument (regarding
cinematics in this case), from which we may
derive some confidence about the terms of our experiment.
Pasolini is one of the best representatives in the collection of
the other major scene of instruction for electracy, along with training
analysis in Psychoanalysis. Pasolini was an auteur, as you no doubt are
aware, and original even in that select group
(thinking of the French New Wave, who invented the idea, but also
Italian Neorealism). He was a major poet to begin with, and also a
significant theorist of semiotics, in addition to being an important
filmmaker. The argument touched on in our collection
is worth extracting for further attention, as you have done. Pasolini's
term was the "image-sign," (im-sign), by which he meant that the
world is already coded, such that photography (film) "writes with the
world." You will recognize here my point about
popular culture being to electracy what native Greek (and its culture)
was to literacy. The "code" supposedly missing from photography
(according to Barthes, for example) is actually there, as ideology (as
Barthes himself showed in his mythology). What auteurs do, Pasoline said, is develop a particular vocabulary specific to them, which turns out to be close to mystory. A commonplace of discussions contrasting word and image is such points as that "dog" as concept is a transcendent abstraction, but a picture of a dog has to be particular: it must be a spaniel, a terrier... and some dogs are doggier than others (a concept is distributed from center to margin, with German Shepherds near the center and Pekinese on the margin). Auteurs replace both universals and generic particulars with singular elements of their personal circumstance. Lacan would call this peculiarity "sinthome" (archaic symptom), to say that it is irreducible, and ultimately must be embraced as the core nonsense of being.
Electracy As Art (Email 5//Campany 2)
Hi everyone,
For my last email, I'd like
to think about the whole semester... as a whole CATTt (let's say),
instead of just amputated parts like a puzzle. I want to instead focus
on the propensity of this class, to think about
it as a work of art in its own right. To do this, I want to focus on
everything that made it what it was, our paint and canvas, our Shi, our
weapons fired from afar and from close up. Four books, a room with
computers inside a room with computers, .... and
that small whistling noise that happened often during the end our
sessions (was it a bird?). Also, did you notice the camera mounted on
the wall, that we are constantly being photographed/filmed for three
hours a week (and obviously more, but I'm talking about
specifically in the context of this class)?
For a painting to be painted,
or for a picture to be taken, the artist needs several things to work
in her favor. The light has to be just right, and for that to happen,
the dark has to be just right too. When we're
creating our system of poetics, we're obviously choosing our materials
very carefully. The path that we choose to take, whichever that will be,
will lead us to different ideas, different experimental outcomes. This
is where our process looks like possible time
lines, branching off into a multitude of different directions: do we
choose the yellow paint or the green? It will change the picture.
If we think about this
process as photographic, or filmic, I think it allows for us to realize
even more things about Electracy particularly, since the translation
from photography to Electracy (is translation needed?)
is smoother. The process is like a photograph when we choose
a single shot to represent the event of the Heuritics of Electracy. In
this sense, our blogs are pictures. Each blog is one picture, like the
mystory where we ended up with a resulting wide image
(not wide imageS). These days, although people obviously did this before
as well, photo manipulation is also quite easily done. As we saw in my
band presentation when Anastasia showed us the inverted images that
totally transformed the picture into something
Other than either of the two kinds of photographs that Thierry de Duve
talks about, this manipulation is unique to the computer age, early
computer age. In fact, early film experimented with this style often -
an image would suddenly become its inverted self.
This shift in the film form is jarring of course, because dark things
become light and light things become dark. The contrasts are startling:
the once-real becomes a total hoax, a fiction. But a fiction that tells
us something.
If we aim to think about the
world in an Apophatic way, then inversions are necessary. Inversions
too, help one see where something is missing in their painting. Here is
an experiment: Color something in, with an actual
paintbrush, on MS Paint, and then invert the image. You will have
probably missed a spot. I think that's one of the things that Electracy
does: it allows us to see the missed spots. And the best way to
exemplify this is through art. It's hard to think about
"missing spots" in photography, but inverting photography allows us to
find parts of the picture that we otherwise missed.
These missing pieces and
inversions make me think of ink blots, and of Lacan. One of Lacan's
arguments in his text is that analysis, the process of the analyst and
the analysand, the painting, the coloring in sessions,
reveal things in an inverted fashion: The analysand might not only
understand himself, but he might retroactively understand his
psycho-analyst better too. In Electracy, we see this kind of thing all
the time with the idea of the gaze. The gaze is always (perhaps)
an inversion. In our poetics, it is essential, I think, to focus on this
concept of the gaze, because we are the gazers here: We are walking
through the city and picking out windows to stare into, to see ourselves
from and through, to make ourselves transparent
and empty, to soak in a kind of opaqueness. To change our focus (we have
the ability to do that with our eyes and with our ears - remember the
mysterious whistling noise in our classroom, how can we think about that
in electrical terms, how can we use it).
I have gone on too long, I
fear, so I will end with the idea that our seminar can be seen as a work
of art, perhaps a dance rather than a painting or a photograph.
Something thought out and choreographed with space
for constant spontaneity. Are we all then taking pictures, screen
caps, of the event? Do we function in the same way that the Instigram
video we watched last week function, together capturing the
apparent whole of the semester (in the notes we take)? What about
the camera that's constantly filming...? Does it matter?
Peace,
Asmaa
------------------------------------------------------------------Response
A thoughtful reflection on process and time...
You identify a feature of Electracy that we have not discussed in any
detail, which is that its fundamental outcome and purpose is
"well-being." The complexity of this purpose is evident in the
historical
lesson that every apparatus seeks "well-being" in its own way (through
salvation, or through empirical truth, for orality and literacy
respectively). But now Electracy turns upon this dimension itself, not
to address it indirectly, but to consider how or in
what way a body thrives. Commentators on Aristotle will tell you that
when the Greeks discussed well-being they did not promise happiness
(that may be an accident of translation) but "thriving," measured more
in terms of surface or worldly excellence rather
than a state of mind or an intimate satisfaction.
Holistically, what does Electracy require? You gave us one good
example that may be generalized. The temporality of electracy (as
readers of Avatar Emergency know) is Moment Against Now (to invoke a
forumla). The formula gestures towards the heterotopia
already discussed-- against Cartesian Cogito, the fact that I am not
where I think, and think where I am not, meaning that my being is
dispersed and the best we can do to gather it is an assemblage without
unity let alone good form. The new dimension opened
to ontology is that of "nonsense," so to speak, of the sort Joyce penned
in Finnegans Wake, of the sort explored in the non-figurative, abstract
art experiments of the vanguard. It concerns just the dimension of
style, ornament, decoration, formerly marginalized
and now foregrounded as the dimension of manner, style, concerning just
intensity or quality of experience. The promise of the apparatus is
that this sort of quality may be captured, enhanced, extended, shared
(the Hadron Collider of jouissance).
We noted that another scene of apprenticeship of Electracy
besides Training Analysis in Psychoanalysis, is Auteurism is film. How
may an auteur be detected? not so much in story or even discourse, but
style (here is the import of Russian Formalism
and its immense influence on textualism). The other temporalities of
orality and literacy persist (cyles and lines). The temporality
specific to electracy, beyond "history" (needing to reoccupy the
abandoned bunkers of historiography to find new answers),
is Moment (click). What does that mean in practice, as comportment in
the world? (how should I behave). That there is an ethics following
from an aesthetics of our meetings Wednesdays at 4:05, Spring semester
2014. Well-Being is here now there then.
Gap (Lacan Instructions 1)
In the gap is the non-realized. In Lacan's text The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, he talks a lot about the space in between the things that we can see. It is that that is the crux of a lot of his arguments, that limbo space. The space between the lines that's a chasm of understanding, as long as we can see, or attempt to see, what's there. The idea of something that is not realized is hopeful, because it denotes a hopefulness: It is not realized yet. It has a potential, even if it never is realized. In the gap, Lacan states, something is oscillating. The moon causes the tide, but what is it... where is that chain that pulls the water that leads to the moon?
For Lacan, the Unconscious is the place where we can see the gap. It is a door that leads to the gap. But if neurosis fills the room where the gap is, out of it comes a scarring of the unconscious. To continue with my metaphor: the door becomes rusted, sometimes even rusted shut. For Lacan, the psychoanalysts who were coming after Freud wanted to sew the gap away, to stitch it shut instead of trying to understand it. The refusal is what allowed for the scar to happen, a scar that has made it difficult and often detrimental to open back up, and so we have forgotten about the gap that the unconscious leads to.
I think the gap is an interesting place to think about Electracy because so much of what we do in Electracy is comparable to the moon pulling the ocean, there is a line that we don't see that allows what we do to be translated to the screen. That is something that's amazing, I think, and I think it's important to maybe try to see where the gap is here and what it does.
So much of what we see is the cause and the effect, but the steps towards something could, perhaps, open up that door just a little bit so that we can see the place where the gap is in terms of Electracy.
Instruction: Try to find the string that's pulling the ocean, so to speak. Think about the steps that it takes for something to appear from a keyboard to the screen. If you can, document the steps it takes for something to happen. For instance, if you're uploading a video, for instance, how does that happen - can you screencap the steps that it takes to get there. What about your drafts, save every draft of something that you're doing and them compare the drafts. Can you see where the gaps are? Why do you think you saved there and not some other place?
Think, also, about your Mystory: Where are the gaps there, and what does that tell you.... what can you see in the gap, if you can see anything at all.
For Lacan, the Unconscious is the place where we can see the gap. It is a door that leads to the gap. But if neurosis fills the room where the gap is, out of it comes a scarring of the unconscious. To continue with my metaphor: the door becomes rusted, sometimes even rusted shut. For Lacan, the psychoanalysts who were coming after Freud wanted to sew the gap away, to stitch it shut instead of trying to understand it. The refusal is what allowed for the scar to happen, a scar that has made it difficult and often detrimental to open back up, and so we have forgotten about the gap that the unconscious leads to.
I think the gap is an interesting place to think about Electracy because so much of what we do in Electracy is comparable to the moon pulling the ocean, there is a line that we don't see that allows what we do to be translated to the screen. That is something that's amazing, I think, and I think it's important to maybe try to see where the gap is here and what it does.
So much of what we see is the cause and the effect, but the steps towards something could, perhaps, open up that door just a little bit so that we can see the place where the gap is in terms of Electracy.
Instruction: Try to find the string that's pulling the ocean, so to speak. Think about the steps that it takes for something to appear from a keyboard to the screen. If you can, document the steps it takes for something to happen. For instance, if you're uploading a video, for instance, how does that happen - can you screencap the steps that it takes to get there. What about your drafts, save every draft of something that you're doing and them compare the drafts. Can you see where the gaps are? Why do you think you saved there and not some other place?
Think, also, about your Mystory: Where are the gaps there, and what does that tell you.... what can you see in the gap, if you can see anything at all.
Friday, May 2, 2014
Repetition Re petition Repeate tion (Lacan Instructions 2)
"Repetition demands the new," Lacan declares (61). Seemingly, this sentence is a paradox, since repetition is inherently the Not New. But this sentence also speaks of a desire, a lack for something new. What then, keeps us in a process of repetition? What is holding us back from that shift to something new?
How does this all relate to Electracy?
I think that, with the advent of Electracy, the idea of repetition is something that is both less thought about and also more, for lack of a better word, repeated. Let's think about the keyboard, for instance, where we have a few repeated keystrokes that allow us to "copy/paste" the same text over and over again. There is a complication here because there are two things that are repeating: The action of pressing ctrl+c/ctrl+v and the act of whatever it is that's being copy/pasted being repeated. There is a double repetition here that I find interesting because it complicates the idea of repetition. Even more interesting is the concept of a mistake, something that often happens in the copy/paste function. "Whatever, in repetition, is varied, modulated, is merely alienation of its meaning," Lacan states (61). This need, this demand, for the new is also interesting because Lacan also states that repetition is related to memory, so even as we demand the new, we also need the memory to be there.
But repetition does something else, a consequence, a side effect, that we might not be aware of when we first start to repeat. It imposes newness on its own. Even if there are no alterations to that which we are repeating, the meaning of that repeated practice, word, image, starts to get lost, starts to change.
In an episode of Grey's Anatomy there was a woman who had lost her ability to speak: Her speaking went into her blog where other people who were diagnosed with silence were. But the interesting thing is what her husband said. In order to communicate with him, she made post-its with the most commonly used phrases (thank you, yes, no, I love you, etc...). Her husband, when asked about this process, asked to relate how awesome it was, says that when things like "I love you" are flashed at you they start to lose their meaning. I think here is the crux of repetition: It always washes itself of meaning and starts imposing its own self on us. A meaninglessness, perhaps.
Try it: Say a phrase over and over and over again. You'll start to hear it become different if you say it out loud.
Instruction: Go online and keep doing the same thing over and over again. Whether that's always clicking the same numbered link or watching a video over and over again (I would recommend that one, especially a video that's short and perhaps funny). As soon as it loses its meaning stop watching it. How long did it take? Was it a gradual loss? Did you become annoyed, relaxed, etc...? Using a funny video helps because when you stop being amused, or when you've had enough, is usually a great indicator.
How does this all relate to Electracy?
I think that, with the advent of Electracy, the idea of repetition is something that is both less thought about and also more, for lack of a better word, repeated. Let's think about the keyboard, for instance, where we have a few repeated keystrokes that allow us to "copy/paste" the same text over and over again. There is a complication here because there are two things that are repeating: The action of pressing ctrl+c/ctrl+v and the act of whatever it is that's being copy/pasted being repeated. There is a double repetition here that I find interesting because it complicates the idea of repetition. Even more interesting is the concept of a mistake, something that often happens in the copy/paste function. "Whatever, in repetition, is varied, modulated, is merely alienation of its meaning," Lacan states (61). This need, this demand, for the new is also interesting because Lacan also states that repetition is related to memory, so even as we demand the new, we also need the memory to be there.
But repetition does something else, a consequence, a side effect, that we might not be aware of when we first start to repeat. It imposes newness on its own. Even if there are no alterations to that which we are repeating, the meaning of that repeated practice, word, image, starts to get lost, starts to change.
In an episode of Grey's Anatomy there was a woman who had lost her ability to speak: Her speaking went into her blog where other people who were diagnosed with silence were. But the interesting thing is what her husband said. In order to communicate with him, she made post-its with the most commonly used phrases (thank you, yes, no, I love you, etc...). Her husband, when asked about this process, asked to relate how awesome it was, says that when things like "I love you" are flashed at you they start to lose their meaning. I think here is the crux of repetition: It always washes itself of meaning and starts imposing its own self on us. A meaninglessness, perhaps.
Try it: Say a phrase over and over and over again. You'll start to hear it become different if you say it out loud.
Instruction: Go online and keep doing the same thing over and over again. Whether that's always clicking the same numbered link or watching a video over and over again (I would recommend that one, especially a video that's short and perhaps funny). As soon as it loses its meaning stop watching it. How long did it take? Was it a gradual loss? Did you become annoyed, relaxed, etc...? Using a funny video helps because when you stop being amused, or when you've had enough, is usually a great indicator.
Lack/Unreal (Lacan Instructions 3)
"Sexuality is established," Lacan posits, "in the field of the subject by a way that is that of lack" (204). I know that sexuality is not something that is very obviously relatable to Electracy, but I think that this phrase speaks to that process too. If we can think about Electracy as established through a desire brought on by lack, I think it produces interesting results. For instance, Lacan further iterates his ideas about a lack by talking about Aristophanes and how he "substituted the myth intended to embody the missing part, which I called the myth of the lamella. This is new and its important because it designates the libido not as a field of forces, but as an organ ... This organ is unreal. Unreal is not imaginary. The unreal is defined by articulating itself on the real in a way that eludes us" (205).
I want to think further about what this lack means in correlation with an unreal organ. If we can impose an Electrical filter to Lacan's position on lack, I believe that it will produce interesting results. For instance, understanding what Aristophanes has to do with Lacan's argument about lack can help us to understand. The basic premise of the argument is this: Aristophanes' fable relates the fact that the human was at first created, by the gods, as a doubled being. This means that every person had two heads, to bodies, to appendages, two (different) sexual organs, all stuck together. But the gods grew jealous of their creations' completeness, so they separated the one doubled being into two singled beings. This is where the initial lack comes from, the idea that we are essentially missing half of ourselves. We seek this other half through sexual reproduction, apparently, through coupling. We wax poetic about finding our other half, as if we are constantly searching for that part of us that was split.
This is a creationist myth that I think is interesting with respect to places - like China - where creation myths, according to Jullien, don't exist. But putting that aside for a second, putting aside the idea that perhaps a creation myth also doesn't exist for Electracy, I still want to try and work out what is unreal about it. What is unreal but that we still feel as real and that is why it feels unreal. And many people feel this way, they feel like they have to find their second half, and many fill that "lack" with something else. Lacan states that "one of the most ancient forms in which this unreal organ is incarnated in the body, is tattooing, scarification" (205-6). I posit that it is in the area of tattoos of scarifciation where we can really get somewhere. If we can just find the scar, or denote in some way, that we are missing something by making it physical, making it painful, putting that scar or that artwork on our skin to somehow pay homage to the separation between the two bodies, or even somehow pointing the way to that other body that we're missing, I think that that pain might be, perhaps, easier to deal with.
Let us move towards our other halves in Electracy. To do so, I will use an example that makes it easier to connect the two: Tattoo QR codes. Many people these days are doing them. Tattooing the codes that not only signify a lack, but that lead to where that lack is articulated in ways that can't be attached, prosthesis-like, to our bodies. QR codes are similar to fingerprints. Electracal style fingerprints. But what the QR codes are really leading to is our virtual selves. And herein lies my point: If we can have virtual selves, can these selves function as our other halves? Essentially, that would mean that not only are we filling in the void that the lack has created by getting that other half, it also means having the ability to create that other half. Have we found a way to not have a lack at all?
Instruction: I'm not sure if you have any tattoos or not, but think about a tattoo that you might get that would somehow signify that lack that everyone is supposed to feel, that unreal organ of the libido that one has, and then articulate it in some virtually Electrical way that doesn't have to do with your actual body. How would you go about doing this?
I want to think further about what this lack means in correlation with an unreal organ. If we can impose an Electrical filter to Lacan's position on lack, I believe that it will produce interesting results. For instance, understanding what Aristophanes has to do with Lacan's argument about lack can help us to understand. The basic premise of the argument is this: Aristophanes' fable relates the fact that the human was at first created, by the gods, as a doubled being. This means that every person had two heads, to bodies, to appendages, two (different) sexual organs, all stuck together. But the gods grew jealous of their creations' completeness, so they separated the one doubled being into two singled beings. This is where the initial lack comes from, the idea that we are essentially missing half of ourselves. We seek this other half through sexual reproduction, apparently, through coupling. We wax poetic about finding our other half, as if we are constantly searching for that part of us that was split.
This is a creationist myth that I think is interesting with respect to places - like China - where creation myths, according to Jullien, don't exist. But putting that aside for a second, putting aside the idea that perhaps a creation myth also doesn't exist for Electracy, I still want to try and work out what is unreal about it. What is unreal but that we still feel as real and that is why it feels unreal. And many people feel this way, they feel like they have to find their second half, and many fill that "lack" with something else. Lacan states that "one of the most ancient forms in which this unreal organ is incarnated in the body, is tattooing, scarification" (205-6). I posit that it is in the area of tattoos of scarifciation where we can really get somewhere. If we can just find the scar, or denote in some way, that we are missing something by making it physical, making it painful, putting that scar or that artwork on our skin to somehow pay homage to the separation between the two bodies, or even somehow pointing the way to that other body that we're missing, I think that that pain might be, perhaps, easier to deal with.
Let us move towards our other halves in Electracy. To do so, I will use an example that makes it easier to connect the two: Tattoo QR codes. Many people these days are doing them. Tattooing the codes that not only signify a lack, but that lead to where that lack is articulated in ways that can't be attached, prosthesis-like, to our bodies. QR codes are similar to fingerprints. Electracal style fingerprints. But what the QR codes are really leading to is our virtual selves. And herein lies my point: If we can have virtual selves, can these selves function as our other halves? Essentially, that would mean that not only are we filling in the void that the lack has created by getting that other half, it also means having the ability to create that other half. Have we found a way to not have a lack at all?
Instruction: I'm not sure if you have any tattoos or not, but think about a tattoo that you might get that would somehow signify that lack that everyone is supposed to feel, that unreal organ of the libido that one has, and then articulate it in some virtually Electrical way that doesn't have to do with your actual body. How would you go about doing this?
Termination/Brushstrokes/Keystrokes (Lacan Instructions 4)
Lacan relates the story of Matisse's reaction to a film that was taken of him painting. He says that it was a "strange slow-motion film in which one sees Matisse painting. The important point is that Matisse himself was overwhelmed by the film. Maurice Merleau-Ponty draws attention to the paradox of this gesture which, enlarged by the distension of time, enables us to imagine the most perfect deliberation in each of these brush strokes. This is an illusion ... what occurs as these strokes, which go to make up the miracle of the picture, fall like rain from the painter's brush is not choice, but something else" (114). As a person who paints, I know that brushstrokes are not always the choice of the painter. There is a randomness (which perhaps isn't random at all) to how the painting comes about. Sometimes it has to do with the size of the brush, sometimes with the contours of the subjects on the canvas. But to think about the slowed down brushstrokes of a Matisse painting is interesting because watching people paint seems to have the opposite effect these days. These days, on youtube, people's brushstrokes are sped up so that the viewer can get to the end of the painting as quick as possible. There is no hyper slowing down of the film production of a person painting. I think that would be fascinating. It is especially fascinating when one considers something that Matisse said and my art teacher related that has always stuck with me: "I don't paint things," he said, "I only paint the difference between things." The unsettled way that he feels, I think, points to that. He is watching himself paint the in between, the limbo, and watching himself bring something back out of that limbo.
Lacan says, "Let us not forget that the painter's brushstroke is something in which a movement is terminated. We are faced here with something that gives a new and different meaning to the term regression---we are faced with the element of motive in the sense of response" (114). This termination and regression allows us to see things that we may not have otherwise. Perhaps that is why art historians study the great painter's brushstrokes, why people who can detect reproduced paintings can somehow tell that a masterpiece is real or just a fake copy. I think this is an interesting process to think about, also, when trying to understand Electracy. Instead of brushstrokes, we have people's methods of scrolling, and people's keystrokes. In fact, one can figure out someone's identity by understanding their specific type of keystrokes (at least this is what I've heard), something that's always present: "This terminal moment is that which enables us to distinguish between a gesture and an act. It is by means of a gesture that the brushstroke is applied to the canvas ... the gesture is always present ... All action represented in a picture appears to us as a battle scene, something theatrical, necessarily created for the gesture" (114-5).
Instructions: Take a video of yourself typing and using your mouse. Try painting on a simple program like MS Paint, and record your painting's progression and the way that you move your fingers on your track pad or use your mouse. What happens when you misspell a word? Do you delete the whole word or do you actually use the mouse to go to the problem area? How slow do you type? Fast? How often do you stall as you're typing up a word or sentence? Remember to slow down your video. Do you feel strange watching yourself type?
Lacan says, "Let us not forget that the painter's brushstroke is something in which a movement is terminated. We are faced here with something that gives a new and different meaning to the term regression---we are faced with the element of motive in the sense of response" (114). This termination and regression allows us to see things that we may not have otherwise. Perhaps that is why art historians study the great painter's brushstrokes, why people who can detect reproduced paintings can somehow tell that a masterpiece is real or just a fake copy. I think this is an interesting process to think about, also, when trying to understand Electracy. Instead of brushstrokes, we have people's methods of scrolling, and people's keystrokes. In fact, one can figure out someone's identity by understanding their specific type of keystrokes (at least this is what I've heard), something that's always present: "This terminal moment is that which enables us to distinguish between a gesture and an act. It is by means of a gesture that the brushstroke is applied to the canvas ... the gesture is always present ... All action represented in a picture appears to us as a battle scene, something theatrical, necessarily created for the gesture" (114-5).
Instructions: Take a video of yourself typing and using your mouse. Try painting on a simple program like MS Paint, and record your painting's progression and the way that you move your fingers on your track pad or use your mouse. What happens when you misspell a word? Do you delete the whole word or do you actually use the mouse to go to the problem area? How slow do you type? Fast? How often do you stall as you're typing up a word or sentence? Remember to slow down your video. Do you feel strange watching yourself type?
Gaze - The Libido for the Eyes (Lacan Instructions 5)
The gaze that Lacan talks about is very similar to the concept of libido. This is why I think it works in an analogical statement. Libido is to genital organs like gaze is to ocular organs. It's important, I posit, to understand the idea of desire that stems from the implications of that statement.
I think it's also important to note the power that the gaze has over the one being gazed at. For instance, the gaze has the power of transference. There is always something colonizing about being gazed at because that person is imposing themselves on your without you knowing.
The gaze reduces and annihilates the subject. But if the gaze is the underside of consciousness, how can we try and imagine it since it's always eluding us in some way. How can we think about the gaze when we think about Electracy? What is the underside of the consciousness here, is the layer between them the screen?
And if someone sees the eye that is gazing at them then the gaze disappears. What happens, though, if someone sees themselves seeing them self? There is a past tense in Lacan's statement that allows for a shift in time, for a measurement to be made. There is here too an annihilation. But is it the annihilation of the gaze or the annihilation of the gazed at gazing back? How can we think about the camera or the telephone or just the simple act of Googling something? Lacan talks about the stain of the gaze. He says, "If the function of the stain is recognized in its autonomy and identified with that of the gaze, we can seek its track, its thread, its trace ... We will then realize that the function of the stain and of the gaze is both that which governs the gaze most secretly and that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consciousness" (74). There is then an invisibility of the gazer gazing or staining in this situation. I want to ask, finally, the same question that Lacan asks: if "the gaze is that underside of consciousness, how shall we try to imagine it" (83).
The instructions for this blog is either easy or difficult, depending on how far the experimenter is trying to capture the gaze, but the implication that Sartre states is important to it: "In so far as I am under the gaze, Sartre writes, I no longer see the eye that looks at me and, if I see the eye, the gaze disappears" (84).
Instruction 1: Take a picture of yourself projected on your screen. This can be your phone screen too if that is where you spend most of your time.
Instruction 2: Think about non-reflective surfaces (like the Kindle Paperwhite edition), and how a gaze might be discerned from that.
Instruction 3: Construct a series of Google poems, these can be Haiku or not. Who is writing these poems, you or the person/thing that is gazing at you through the screen?
I think it's also important to note the power that the gaze has over the one being gazed at. For instance, the gaze has the power of transference. There is always something colonizing about being gazed at because that person is imposing themselves on your without you knowing.
The gaze reduces and annihilates the subject. But if the gaze is the underside of consciousness, how can we try and imagine it since it's always eluding us in some way. How can we think about the gaze when we think about Electracy? What is the underside of the consciousness here, is the layer between them the screen?
And if someone sees the eye that is gazing at them then the gaze disappears. What happens, though, if someone sees themselves seeing them self? There is a past tense in Lacan's statement that allows for a shift in time, for a measurement to be made. There is here too an annihilation. But is it the annihilation of the gaze or the annihilation of the gazed at gazing back? How can we think about the camera or the telephone or just the simple act of Googling something? Lacan talks about the stain of the gaze. He says, "If the function of the stain is recognized in its autonomy and identified with that of the gaze, we can seek its track, its thread, its trace ... We will then realize that the function of the stain and of the gaze is both that which governs the gaze most secretly and that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consciousness" (74). There is then an invisibility of the gazer gazing or staining in this situation. I want to ask, finally, the same question that Lacan asks: if "the gaze is that underside of consciousness, how shall we try to imagine it" (83).
The instructions for this blog is either easy or difficult, depending on how far the experimenter is trying to capture the gaze, but the implication that Sartre states is important to it: "In so far as I am under the gaze, Sartre writes, I no longer see the eye that looks at me and, if I see the eye, the gaze disappears" (84).
Instruction 1: Take a picture of yourself projected on your screen. This can be your phone screen too if that is where you spend most of your time.
Instruction 2: Think about non-reflective surfaces (like the Kindle Paperwhite edition), and how a gaze might be discerned from that.
Instruction 3: Construct a series of Google poems, these can be Haiku or not. Who is writing these poems, you or the person/thing that is gazing at you through the screen?
The Circuitry of Language (Email 2//Lacan1)
Hello everyone,
Before I even started reading Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, I had already imposed a filter on the text: a kind of excavatory reading that would help me determine how to uncover the
[T]heory needed for our Electracy project. While doing so, I of course wanted to continue to think about Jullien's The Propensity of Things,
since one cannot have a CATTt without the C or a T. But before I delve
into a discussion about that, I want to
first think about the start of Lacan's text and how it allowed me to
relate what he's talking about with what we're trying to construct as a
class.
The initial epiphany occurred
right at the start of the book, when Lacan is relating the reason why
he's in the situation he is, why he's writing and how he came to lecture
in front of this particular audience. When
I was reading it, I felt a parallel experience - a sense of deja vu - to
the experience I felt not when I was working on my own Mystory, but
when I was listening to everyone else present their Mystories to the
class. It was the combination of relating something personal
-- on different levels of personal and intimate -- and connecting it to
academic work (the Career portion of the Mystory is what I saw happening
with Lacan's text). In a way, it was as if Lacan was constructing his
Mystory, letting us know why he was doing
the things he was doing. What his world view about the psychoanalytic
organization was when he started his lectures.
He begins with a conversation
about excommunication. Apart from the religious implications of the
word, I think it's important to think about the more literal meaning of
the word. Ex/communication is realized through
the removal of a communication link from one person to another. This
definition, for me, highlights an essential necessity of language: it it
"pointless" to create a language if you are the only person on the
planet since the linguistic system is a system of
connections between at least two points. Excommunication is meant as a
warning issue: a cease-and-desist from thinking in a particular kind of
way. Lacan was unable to communicate in his home venue, so that is why
he lectures in the present venue. Because of
this warning, excommunication makes an object out of a subject and
elucidates the system of human deals. It is in his explanation -- one
that he denotes as very relevant to his text, that he's not
just rambling on -- that we are able to understand his world
view. Lacan's world view is that of excommunication, betrayal (he
states that "There was nothing particularly exceptional, then, about my
situation, except that being traded by those whom I referred to just now
as colleagues, and even pupils, is sometimes,
if seen from the outside, called by a different name" -- it is
important, then, that he utilizes ex-communication and doesn't even
denote that other name), and elusive stability of subjectivity or truth
(Lacan 5). These are things that not even the master can
avoid.
It is the act of
communication, or language, that I think really allowed me to think
outside the realm of psychoanalysis and into the realm of Electracy. I
find the link between language and psychoanalysis to be a
fascinating technique that one can use in order to gleam, at least a
little, of what Electracy is all about. My understanding of language as
it paralleled psychoanalysis started right away from the beginning of
the text, as I think Lacan intended for it to.
Lacan says, "When the space of a lapsus no longer carries any meaning
(or interpretation), then only is one sure that one is in the
unconscious. One knows. But only has only to be aware of the fact
to find oneself outside it. There is no friendship there,
in that space that supports this unconscious. All I can do is tell the
truth. No, that isn't so--- I have missed it. There is no truth that, in
passing through awareness, does not lie. But one runs after it all the
same" (Lacan vii). It is here that the elusive
system of semiotics is illustrated.
Langauge systems exist, at
least in Western thought, always as symbolic (up for interpretation) and
always as a path towards something Real: the Real meaning. This divine
Real greatly mirrors that religious, teleological
Real or End or Infinity that one aspires to but can never achieve. As
with psychoanalysis, then, it is somewhat more simplistic to attribute
language with a kind of religion than with a science. This question of
the science of language or of linguistic systems
is something that I would like to think about in the future, but for now
I think the first step would be to think about the religious-like
characteristics of Electracy. That also poses two inquries. I do not
want to dismiss what art means in language systems
(Statues as representatives of Greek deities come to mind). I also wish
to think about what Jullien presented for our Contrast: in the Chinese
system of art/calligraphy/writing, there is no Real because the elusive
structure is already built into the system.
The idea that one can never hold on to truth is truth itself, in a way.
So how can we think about all of these together and make use of them for
our understanding of Electracy?
That is what I am trying to figure out, and what we are all trying to figure out, I think.
But I fear I have gone on for
much too long. I will close this email with an additional piece of the
puzzle; this is a discussion that Lacan had about a blind man and the
light that he could not see. He says, "the
blind man would be able to follow all our demonstrations ... We would
get him, for example, to finger an object ... We would teach him to
distinguish, by the sense of touch in his finger-ends, on a surface, a
certain configuration that reproduces the mapping
of the images" (93). Although I may be understanding his point in a
different way than he intended, because of the filter I have on my
comprehension, I think the utilization of the blind man is in a way
reminiscent of the bat analogy in the beginning of the
text (page 3). We have a person who is able to use various other senses
to determine meaning; however, the meaning he receives, though the
circuitry of his position, through the connection of one point to
another, and through the vibrational resonance he collects
is always already in the past. He is never in a present moment of truth,
which is exactly what light provides: a truth removed from its position
in reality. How can we think not only about the circuitry of the
language system, but about the circuitry of the
Electracal system so that we can better understand what exactly
Electracy means and how we can utilize it to create?
See you guys soon,
Asmaa
------------------------------------------------------------------Response
The discussion of how the blind experience space
and light connects
with fundamental metaphysical questions, having to do with the relation
of people to world: space, time, causality as three of the most
important themes. Did we review the history of conceptual categories?
The Greeks assumed the categories were in the real
proper, discovered at work there, in the outside given conditions.
Kant's "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy was to shift the relation
to argue that the categories are not in the actual external given world
but are functions of human capacity that make
experience possible. That is why it is not possible in Kant's view to
access "things themselves" -- one knowls only by apprehension,
phenomenal only. Epistemology and ontology merge in that version.
With Lacan, as noted, the relation of sensorium to apprehension
-- epistemology and ontology -- is approached through the erogenous
zones, the correlations among the organs directed by desire and
sexuality. The blind experience gaze in the same way as the sighted,
since it is distinct from the eye.
In any case, the posts this round gave much attention to the opening
of the Seminar. This attention perhaps is justified, though certainly
not the most useful material for our project. One important fact
related to it is that psychoanalysis is precisely
an institution, with the various administrative, bureaucratic
"discipline" that goes with it. This institutional setting apart and
constituting, invention and authorizing of a practice, is relevant to
apparatus theory, marking a part of philosophy most useful
for the new apparatus, while leaving behind the baggage of the
tradition.
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