jean paul sartre driving a maehdrescher

Wolfgang Dieter Bauer. Via vvork

The worker who serves the machine has his being in it just as the employer does; and just as the employer reinvests his profits in it, so the worker finds himself objectively forced to devote his wages to the upkeep (at minimum cost) of a servant for the machine who is none Other than himself[...]But we must not be misled by this apparent symmetry: the machine is not, and cannot be, the worker's interest. The reason for this is simple: far from the worker objectifying himself in it, the machine objectifies itself in him. In so far as industrialisation and concentration determine the proletarianisation of a section of the rural classes, they constitute not only the opportunity for the new proletarians of selling their labour power, but also, in the field of practico-inert Being, a force of attraction which tears the peasant away from agriculture and puts him in a workshop before a loom.
[...]
Thus the machine defines and produces the reality of its servant, that is to say, it makes of him a practico-inert Being who will be a machine in so far as the machine is human and a man in so far as it remains, in spite of everything, a tool to be used: in short, it becomes his exact complement as an inverted man. At the same time, it determines his future as a living organism, just as it defines that of the employer. The difference is that it defines him negatively as an impossibility of living in the more or less long term. The machine does this not only through the counter-finalities which we have described (air pollution, destruction of the environment, occupational diseases, etc.), but also through representing, for him, in so far as it develops his being in the practical field of industrialisation, a permanent threat of reduced wages, of technological unemployment and of becoming disqualified.

- Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason

Badiou on Speculative Realism

Katie Paterson, "All the Dead Stars", Laser etched black anodised aluminium, 3x2M

A map documenting the locations of just under 27,000 dead stars - all that have been recorded and observed by humankind.




It's already making/has made the rounds, but Ben Woodard has posted a short Q&A with Badiou on the topic of Speculative realism.

[...]the fundamental affirmation of SR is an ambitious point of view, a new possibility for philosophy. A new vision. Philosophy can continue. In this sense I am happy that it is not merely a continuation of classical metaphysics nor an end of it. In this sense I am in agreement with the word realism. We are beyond the end of metaphysics and classical metaphysics with the term realism. The question of realism as opposed to materialism is not a crucial question today. What is important is that it is not correlationist or idealist. It is a new space for philosophy, one with many internal differences but this is a positive symptom.

a house for pigs and people

Recent posts by Nina and the Institute regarding H1N1 brought to mind Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel's collaborative work Ein Haus fur Schweine und Menschen (A house for pigs and people) that was presented in 1997 at Documenta X. It is a piece I had not thought about since, well, probably 1997 - and given the resurgent interest in pigs as of late I may have to track down the catalog.

While both artists still fascinate me, it is Höller who continues to hold more of my interest for a number of reasons, not the least of which being his "Laboratory of Doubt" project and the fact that he obtained a PhD in phytopathology with a thesis on olfactory communication between insects (even though he is probably more widely recognized for his slides that were installed at Tate Modern.)

Apparently, "A House for Pigs and People" was the piece at Documenta X. So much so that even the ever-so unlikeable Baudrillard was compelled to comment on it, providing this description:

... we still play-act representation. A good illustration of this modern hoax was provided by the Kassel documenta of 1997 with the ‘Pigsty’ Installation. Reaching up on tiptoe to see over a fence, spectators look down on a pigsty, while a large mirror opposite allows them to see themselves observing pigs. Then they walk round the shelter and park themselves behind the mirror, which turns out to be a two-way mirror through which they can once again see the pigs, but at the same time also see the spectators opposite looking at the pigs – spectators unaware, or at least pretending to be unaware, that they are being observed. This is the contemporary version of Velásquez’s Las Meninas, and Michel Foucault’s analysis of the classical age of representation
(via)

Hmm...Yes, well. This work was also, as I think the artists had intended, about the status of the animal in relation to the human - a persistent problematic even well after the ruination of Deleuze within academia. Most especially now given the play that the Badiousian Subject is getting. And for those who would criticise Badiou on this point (that he is 'hard on the animal') even Deleuzeans such as Eric Alliez have a knack for discerning the vitalist in Badiou when it comes to recuperating such elegant descriptions of a Subject as simply 'an upsurge within the enveloping animal'.

Concerning the animal, Daniel Birnbaum has written an article on Holler and Trockel's collaborative work that I think is worth citing:

Holler and Trockel's first collaborative animal project was Muckenbus (Mosquito bus), 1996, in which humans were to encounter mosquitoes inside a Volkswagen van to test whether sheer willpower alone could influence the insects' tendency to bite. Why is it that some people get bitten a lot, while others are completely spared? Does it have anything to do with the mind-set of the person in question? In the end, because of the risk of disease spreading from one visitor to the other, the project had to remain largely hypothetical. When the bus was finally exhibited, no mosquitoes could be seen, heard, or otherwise perceived (for the simple reason that there weren't any). But in later projects, the visual qualities have been much more emphatic, as in A House for Pigs and People, where the pigs and piglets appeared as part of some hyperreal tableau vivant. Actually, the whole setup could be seen as a piece of optical machinery emphasizing the eye of the spectator and the completely objectified animals that are not even allowed the opportunity to meet the gaze of the observer.

[...]

In his 1997 catalogue essay "A House Divided," Richard Shusterman gives a political interpretation of Holler and Trockel's Documenta work: "There are also many human pigs in our social world: races and ethnicities that fail to gain our recognition because they are seen through the one-way glass of socio-cultural privilege. Very often such despised ethnicities are denigrated as swine, though Hegel, in denying the African's humanity, compared him not to a pig but a dog." All of this is no doubt true, but there are also millions of real pigs that live short and miserable lives in industrial confinement only to be sent to the slaughterhouse and made into cheap meals for the masses. One needn't see the work as an allegory to see its political dimension. "Can domesticated animals protest against us in any other way than by diseases (swine fever, mad-cow disease, cardiac infarct)?" inquire the artists. These days, when militant vegans in Europe bum down burger joints and sausage factories, when apocalyptic minds declare that mad-cow disease is divine revenge, and less dogmatic souls like myself actively avoid certain meats, Holler and Trockel's houses for humans and animals cannot be seen merely as amusing visual arrangements of various zoological specimens or as works about the incomprehensibility of animal behavior and nothing else. They're also about power. Indeed, the philosophical underpinnings of humanism itself seem to be at stake. Do we humans need constantly to reassure ourselves of our supremacy over other species through the exclusion of that which is not us but looks, smells, and acts a bit like us--i.e., the animal?

In an interview conducted in 1989 by Jean-Luc Nancy for Confrontations ("Eating Well"), a speculative and outspoken Jacques Derrida delineated a theory of the Western subject as an essentially meat-eating creature. Western humanity has defined itself through a violent exclusion, and incorporation, of the animal: "The subject does not want just to master and possess nature actively. In our cultures, he accepts sacrifice and eats flesh." The subject of power is essentially male and carnivorous, says Derrida, and he inquires, "I would ask you: In our countries, who would stand any chance of becoming a chef d'Etat (a head of State) ... by publicly, and therefore exemplarily, declaring him- or herself to be a vegetarian? The chef must be an eater of flesh."

[the "Porkgasm"]

Birnbaum would certainly seem to share some common ground with Mike Davis, whose recent article "Capitalism and the Flu" (hat tip to both IT and ICR) describes H1N1 as 'a genetic chimera probably conceived in the fecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatening to give the whole world a fever'. So after the media hysteria slows down, when panic is no longer the favored and aimed at response, they would still like for us to waver in the more ambient and subversive atmosphere of doubt - doubt as to the preparedness of countries, states and their hospitals, the economic repercussions of a still uncertain pandemic, or the actual fatality rate of something that was on its "evolutionary fast track" six years ago. There should even be doubt as to what name to give a virus threatening not only millions of people, but the irrational mass extermination of livestock as well...

But what matters more (especially given the continued threat of H5N1) is the larger configuration: the WHO's failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the stranglehold of Big Pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary catastrophe of industrialized and ecologically unhinged livestock production

- Mike Davis

HUO: What's the political side of doubt?

CH: Doubt becomes political when it is used beyond its usefulness. To further uncertainty and to establish a condition of no decision is a political weapon. Doubt is politically effective precisely because it is not against something, or is proposing "another" way, but instead admits confusingly more.

- Carsten Holler interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist

all clocks are labyrinths

Tacita Dean on JG Ballard in The Guardian:

It was the writer, curator and artist Jeremy Millar who became convinced Smithson knew of Ballard's short story, The Voices of Time, before building his jetty. All Smithson's books had been listed after his death in a plane crash in 1973 - and The Voices of Time was among them. The story ends with the scientist Powers building a cement mandala or "gigantic cipher" in the dried-up bed of a salt lake in a place that feels, by description, to be on the very borders of civilisation: a cosmic clock counting down our human time. It is no surprise that it is a copy of The Voices of Time that lies beneath the hand of the sleeping man on the picnic rug in the opening scenes of Powers of Ten, Charles and Ray Eames' classic 1977 film about the relative size of things in the universe.

Smithson understood the prehistory of his site. Beneath the Great Salt Lake was, for some, the centre of an ancient universe, and his jetty could have been an elaborate means to bore down to get to it. As if understanding this, Ballard wrote in the catalogue text: "What cargo might have berthed at the Spiral Jetty?" He elaborated later to me in a letter: "My guess is that the cargo was a clock, of a very special kind. In their way, all clocks are labyrinths, and can be risky to enter." The two men had a lot in common, and Ballard believed him to be the most important and most mysterious of postwar US artists. My interest in time, cosmic and human, future and past, as well as the analogue spooling of the now, has Ballard at its core.

art and professionalization

An interesting article by Dan Fox over at Frieze (HT Leisurearts) on the professionalization of artists and what our 'professions' might have to look forward to - or what they are symptomatic of - in a dire economy. He even cites Infinite Thought's "The Art World Is Not the World", which is well worth a read - though I would avoid it if you happen to be an independent curator, as it might make the blood boil. Nu-language, Nu-labor, financial meltdown, name-dropping as collateral...Magic 8 Ball says, "outlook not so good". From the article:

The art world is a little like a second-hand computer: its exterior a desirably minimalist, Jonathan Ive-designed casing with titanium curves and winking lights that suggests high-speed processors able to deliver any number of creative experiences at the touch of a button, its interior a mess of circuitry that has been rewired and crammed back into the casing so many times that no one can begin to understand it. And there’s no manual to tell you how it behaves – or how it ought to behave. Why there might be lacunae between expectation and experience in the art world is worth further thought. Read any mainstream newspaper or certain hand-wringing jeremiahs in the art press, and you’ll be told that market forces are to blame. Certainly money is a massive factor – capital, in order to keep itself liquid, needs to create plausible costumes in which to go about its business – but the art market does not tell the whole story. Even before the cold winds of recession began to bite, Sarah Thornton’s account of high-powered professionals in Seven Days in the Art World (2008) was felt by many to describe only a tiny part of the picture. As Sally O’Reilly wrote in her review of the book in Art Monthly: ‘To take [Takashi] Murakami as the subject of the studio visit chapter is rather like offering Turkish Delight as a typical foodstuff.’4 Only a relatively small percentage of the art world sees anything like the kind of money and glamour Thornton describes so breathlessly, and now her book seems, if not like ancient history, then at least a demonstration of how fragile the image of success built on cultural commodities can be, perhaps because she forgot that the art world also comprises audiences of all shapes, sizes and degrees of interest, producers and commentators who struggle to make a living wage, and individuals who work tirelessly in museum education departments, in community outreach programmes, in art schools, in academia or as technicians and fabricators.

the invisible commitee in translation

For anyone who has followed the developments of the tarnac9, or has even a marginal interest in Agamben, Debord, strategy, autonomy, communes, singularity, etcetera...there is a new translation of what will supposedly be the preface to Semiotext(e)'s printed version of The Coming Insurrection available here. Also, online versions of The Coming Insurrection are available here and here, with downloadable versions in French and English with footnotes. HT to rsg for the initial tip off on this one. I may be spending a lazy Monday reading these over.

politicians in my eyes

Soundtrack:

Death - Politicians In My Eyes

Tina Turner - We Don't Need Another Hero (live)

they say that the fires of revolt will spread everywhere: pre-terrorism and the fear of whatever singularities

At the time of my posting this, students are being forcibly removed and dragged from the occupied lecture hall of Nottingham University, and yesterday's BBC article cites a growing fear of the left in France (but "striking is like a pastime for the French"...). This 'growing fear of the left' has been pinned specifically to a threat of insurrection that extends beyond France's borders and would cut across into all of Europe, apparently:

A spokesman for the interior ministry, Gerard Gachet, told the BBC that the threat was real.

"The term 'ultra-left' was used by the interior minister to set this group apart from the extreme left who turn up for elections and keep within the parameters of democratic debate," he says.

But talking of more radical groups, he points to recent pamphlets and books published anonymously, but sometimes with a circulation of about 20,000, with titles such as How to Start a Civil War and The Insurrection That is Coming.

"They say that the fires of revolt will spread everywhere," he says, "and we see acts like damage to bank branches or state buildings and claims of solidarity with the Greek rioters.

While I would not be in the business of overtly linking L'Inssurection to Tiqqun pamphlets - as Alberto Toscano has done an excellent job in discrediting such assumptions, pointing to significant stylistic differences while also illustrating the merits and shortcomings of these books and texts - it is still no doubt apparent that this BBC article is in fact referring to, in its selection of poorly translated titles, such Tiqqun authored works as this particular piece and of others like "Organe conscient du Parti Imaginaire" and "Exercice de metaphysique critique"[pdf]. Works, it might be added, that were anonymously penned and so daringly distributed.

Collective living? The sharing of ideas and critique? Alternative modes of existence and experimentation with everyday life? It hardly takes much for one to fail seeing a problem with such things - a failure inevitably attributable for them to delinquency, terroristic impulses, perhaps even abnormality... In other words: not only should we quickly calm ourselves down so as to be model public opinion circulation experts who are well-behaved, acceptable and passive agents, it is also advisable to not think at all of solidarity or of alternatives to capitalism, and perhaps simply and most significantly: do not think.


- image via Claire Fontaine

The state of the spectacle, after all, is still a state that bases itself (as Badiou has shown every state to base itself) not on social bonds, of which it purportedly is the expression, but rather on their dissolution, which it forbids. In the final analysis, the state can recognize any claim for identity - even that of a state identity within itself (and in our time, the history of the relation between the state and terrorism is an eloquent confirmation of this fact). But what the state cannot tolerate in any way is that singularities form a community without claiming an identity, that human beings co-belong without a representable condition of belonging (being Italian, working-class, Catholic, terrorist, etc.). And yet, the state of the spectacle - inasmuch as it empties and nullifies every real identity, and substitutes the public and public opinion for the people and the general will - is precisely what produces massively from within itself singularities that are no longer characterized either by any social identity or by any real condition of belonging: singularities that are truly whatever singularities.

[...]

The threat the state is not willing to come to terms with is precisely the fact that the unrepresentable should exist and form a community without either presuppositions or conditions of belonging (just like Cantor's inconsistent multiplicity). The whatever singularity - this singularity that wants to take possession of belonging itself as well as of its own being-into-language, and that thus declines any identity and any condition of belonging - is the new, nonsubjective, and socially inconsistent protagonist of the coming politics. Wherever these singularities peacefully manifest their being-in-common, there will be another Tiananmen and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear again.

- Giorgio Agamben, from "Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle", in Means Without End

let us be good sports

Let us be good sports. Philosophers at work! It is well worth going out of your way to have a close look at such a spectacle! What spectacle? Why, comedy. Bergson (Le Rire) has explained and Chaplin has shown that, ultimately, comedy is always a matter of a man missing a step or falling into a hole. With philosophers you know what to expect: at some point they will fall flat on their faces. Behind this mischievous or malevolent hope there is a genuine reality: ever since the time of Thales and Plato, philosophy and philosophers have been 'falling into wells;. Slapstick. But that is not all! For ever since Plato philosophy has been falling within its own realm. a second-degree fall: into a philosophical theory of 'falling'. Let me spell it out: the philosopher attempts in his philosophy to descent from the heavenly realm of ideas and get back to material reality, to 'descend' from theory and get back to practice. A 'controlled' fall, but a fall nevertheless. Realizing that he is falling, he attempts to 'catch' his balance in a theory of falling (a descending dialectic, etc.) and falls just the same! he falls twice. Twice as funny.


Let us be good sports. Philosophers make a lot of fuss about nothing. They are intellectuals without a practice. Far removed from everything. Their discourse is nothing but a commentary on, and a disavowal of, that distance. they try, at a remove, to grasp the real in their words, to insert it in systems. Words succeed words, systems succeed systems, while the world continues its course as before. Philosophy? The discourse of theoretical impotence on the real work of others (scientific, artistic, political, etc., practice). Philosophy: what it lacks in titles it makes up for in pretension. This pretension produces beautiful discourses. So: philosophy as pretension will figure among the fine arts. An art. We are back to the spectacle. This time it is dance: dancing so as not to fall.

Yes, we are going to fall flat on our faces. Note that scientists (like all men engaged in a real practice) can also fall flat on their faces. but they do so in a particular way: when they fall, they calmly register the fact, ask themselves why, rectify their errors and get on with their work. But when a philosopher falls flat on his face, things are different: for he falls flat on his face within the very theory which he is setting forth in order to demonstrate that he is not falling flat on his face! he picks himself up in advance! How many philosophers do you know who admit to having been mistaken? A philosopher is never mistaken!

Althusser describing philosophy's "negative pole" in his introduction to the 'Philosophy Course for Scientists' delivered in October-Novermber 1967 at the Ecole Normale Superieure, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists(Verso, 1990).

nice try though

"[...]philosophy works through the leverage of straw men and women."
- Simon Critchley

the debate between Tarde and Durkheim

Now this looks interesting.

Graham Harman and object-oriented philosophy

[Update: Graham has started blogging over at Object-Oriented Philosophy.]

Via Larval Subjects, Speculative Heresy has posted thirteen of Graham Harman's previously unpublished essays. Many thanks.

geometry lessons

Just re-watched this one. The soundtrack is excellent, and I think Bartleby the scrivner even makes an appearance...

New Metaphysics book series from OHP

Making the rounds in the blogosphere:

New Metaphysics

Series editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour

The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphysics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic-continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intellectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical "sound" from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main interest is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Please send project descriptions (not full manuscripts) to Graham Harman, graham@rinzai.com. Open Humanities Press is an international Open Access publishing collective. OHP was formed by scholars to overcome the current crisis in publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online through www.openhumanitiespress.org.

prolegomena to any future numerical materialism

Mathematical Logic from Peirce to Skolem

John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (History of Computing)

Category Theory (Lecture Notes in Mathematics), By M.C. Pedicchio, G. Rosolini


The Undecidable: Basic Papers on Undecidable Propositions, Unsolvable Problems and Computable Functions

Richard Tieszen, Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics

Handbook of the History of Logic, Vol. 3: The Rise of Modern Logic: From Leibniz to Frege

N. Bourbaki, Elements of Mathematics - Commutative Algebra

Martin Davis, Engines of Logic (or The Universal Computer): Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer

Treatise on Analysis Volume IV, J. Dieudonne

Essays on the Theory of Numbers by Richard Dedekind


The Shaping of Arithmetic after C.F. Gauss

Figures of Thought: Mathematics and Mathematical Texts
By David Reed

John Stillwell: Yearning for the Impossible: The Surprising Truths of Mathematics

A Century of Geometry : Epistemology, History, and Mathematics (Lecture Notes in Physics)
By L. Boi, D. Flament

Neurophilosophy at Work By Paul Churchland

Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything, Joe Milutis

Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings

Sheaf Theory (London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series)
By B. R. Tennison

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic (Oxford Handbooks), stewart shapiro, ed.


Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics, Mark Balaguer

Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning
By A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov, M. A. Lavrent’ev

A Course of Pure Mathematics (3rd Ed.)(Cambridge 1921)
by G. H. Hardy

Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery

Hardy Classes on Infinitely Connected Riemann Surfaces

Zermelo’s Axiom of Choice: Its Origins, Development, and Influence (Studies in the history of mathematics and physical sciences)
by Gregory H Moore

wrd.wthn.wrd.wthn.wrd

Via The Fortunes of the Dialectic , images above come from the blog wrd.wthn.wrd.wthn.wrd. It is worth a look, and I will be spending some time in the near future exploring it and its sidebar further. The kinds of projects presented on the blog are making me nostalgic for some of my early excursions into poetics, like the image below, which is an old Speak&Spell that was circuit-bent by a friend of mine and then handed my way to be re-cased. It still works, I believe - though I haven't tried it in years. It has a few loop settings, pitch-shift, reverse, etc., and makes for a nice instrument if you like that glitchy brand of minimalist electronica...

it is sometimes better to do nothing...

- Mel Bochner

Excerpts from The Idlers Glossary

dizzy: It is every evolved person’s duty to culti­vate the voluptuous panic of vertigo, by staring into that void in which all the forms and norms of our daily lives are revealed as artificial constructs. As if that weren’t difficult enough, you’ve got to revalue your values in light of this terrifying insight, and advance boldly into a new style of life. The problem with dizziness, as Sartre noted, is not how to keep from falling over the precipice, but how to keep from throwing ourselves over it. See: avoidance, distracted, flighty, giddy.

do-nothing: In politics, a do-nothing is an anti-progressive reactionary; elsewhere, though, he may be a saint. Oscar Wilde described his life’s work as the “art of doing nothing,” and insisted that for the person living in a society that worships action, “to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world.” See: good-for-nothing, idler.

dodger: A dodger shirks his duties and evades his responsibilities neither for purposes of graft, nor out of fear, but simply out of an overwhelming distaste for labor. Think of Henry Miller ditching his career and family because he believed that “work . . . is an activity reserved for the dullard.” Dodging can be an artful form of idling, and dodgers can be an inspiration to us all. However, the dodger who never quits the job or situation that she detests is, finally, not an idler but a slacker. See: bartleby, kill time, skiver, slacker.

shopping and fidelity

In the end, a generic procedure of fidelity is like some kind of inordinately fussy but endless shopping list in which the products to be bought have not even been made yet.
- Oliver Feltham, Alain Badiou: Live Theory

Indeed.

the timeless lumpenness of radical cultural life

I've been thinking a lot lately about art's relationship with philosophy (as well as politics) - whether that be art as, art vs., or art alongside/within philosophy. There is also this post at Fragments, or: which is very much worth reading.

Here is a short text by Art & Language, UK that I take from my oft perused Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology

The Timeless Lumpenness of Radical Cultural Life

...The timeless lumpenness of a radical cultural life; the gangrenous excrescence, stylishly exposed in the quiet salons. The market for the dry delicacies of pretentious gentility, the overfed opinion, the corpulent choice, the leisured appropriation, "society" and society in harmony are an objective condition of the class struggle. The privileged low-life of high culture is the massification of the people, is the enemy of inquiry, is an insult to, and sometimes an egregious product of, the achievement and goals of working-class movements, a denial of the real objectives of the working-class movement. It is not, however, the life of the unwitting fool. It has its own agencies.

The conditions of the production of high culture an not somehow apart from these machinations in brutality...and the artists are not exempt from the charge of connivance at the proliferation of force, violence: the barbarism of imperialism. Their "status" as an economic ,hors concours, serves the aim of the ruling classes in their continuing domination. It avails no one of a glimpse of "freedom." It is a status which allows a parvenu sincerity, the treachery of the successful product, to be deified in a fideism of "culture," a fideism in the interests of the ruling class.

Don't think that artists are somehow the victims of an underdetermined predestination: their attempts to fix forever their relations with "the rest of the world," irrespective of social change, are the last defensive gasps of an entirely static instrument of capitalism: empty-headed, it parasitized the ectoderm of social change in the effort to be the better fed by its masters.

And radical artist produce articles and exhibitions about photos, capitalism, corruption, war, pestilence, trench-foot and issues, possessed by that venal shade of empiricism which guards their proprietorial interests. Most people laugh easily at old fools' hack aestheticism; the by now undifferentiated mass of presence and piety. It is similarly easy to avoid debate with the serious anorexic autohagiographers who've shoved (?) and wheedled their way into the (what?) praxis of a ludicrous and equivalent "specialism." The air (and the ether) is toxic with the confident exhalations of their apprehension. Club-foot-Ph.D.-standards-as-style is nothing new in the global sales-pitch. American football helmets and meaningless photos are serious objects of contemplation (and...) if you happen to be obsessed by your career as the nexus of historiography. Heaven knows, anything must go; and it even goes against the sanction imposed by the appropriate Lebensphilosophie: the manieres of "semiotique: and the manieres of "social purpose' even sell that short. The artist, the bourgeois ideologist without "virtue," is just like anyone else without "virtue:" his "terror" is gratuitous and ultimately suicidal.

Critchley on Obama

Via Jodi, Simon Critchley's essay What's Left After Obama?. Nevermind that it appeared on the Adbusters website...

in the events of the late evening of November 4th: as I walked to the subway at about 10 p.m. a vast United States flag was being unfurled in Union Square; there were spontaneous parties in the streets of my part of Brooklyn, and many others can testify to much more exotic, collective experiences. This was a moment when people, no longer cowed by the power of the state and held in check by the police, suddenly become aware of their power and the power of their activity, which is nothing less than the activity of liberty. At such a moment, no force can stop them and a demonstration or street party erupts into being. This is collective joy. There is the potential for a political moment here, but it is a potential whose actualization is denied by the very representative process which is being celebrated. At the moment when people become aware of their power through the activity of the vote, they are simultaneously rendered powerless by the representative process. Liberty slips from the hands of those who have suddenly become aware of its power. In the face of such human fireworks, it is not surprising that Obama cancelled the firework display planned to accompany his victory speech. The message is clear: ‘The victory is yours. But when you’ve finished celebrating, dancing and crying, return to your homes and be quiet. Thanks to you, the business of government is ours and we will take it from here. We’ll let you know how it goes. P.S. Please don’t take popular sovereignty too literally’.

Tariq Ali and others on Obama

I suspect Zizek might be the next member of the Left to post something on the web. There are some pre-election thoughts from Mike Davis, Howard Zinn and more, one from Judith Butler, and a response from Bifo that I would have to translate to read, alas. Here is a snippet from Tariq Ali:

If change means that nothing changes and all we have is imperialism with a human face, then those who have put Obama in the White House might decide after a few years have passed that a progressive party in the United States has become a necessity.

It seems many people, myself included, are still soaking all of this in. My neck of the woods on election night reminded me a bit of WTO - except that people were smiling, and there were no rubber bullets or tear gas:

Leninade

Tomorrow might be a good time to drink some of this in what would no doubt be a horrid cocktail (though as it reads on the label, a taste worth standing in line for). Time to get hammer and sickled!

And if anyone needed further evidence that Obama is in fact a capitalist and not a socialist, watch the Oct. 28th episode of The Colbert Report. Aside from the brilliant exchange between Colbert and Sherman Alexie, it features a brief 'interview' with Brian Moore, the official presidential nominee of the Socialist Party USA.

Among the many things currently on my mind are this post from Shaviro (whom I hope is proven wrong regarding the outcome of this election), and an older piece of Badiou's from which I draw the following:

The reason for the paradoxes of the vote are well known: its technical rationality means the result is gotten from a pure count, which authorises the infinite attentions of sociologists and political scientists -- as concerned with numerical details and variations as the specialists of climactic history -- and works to cover over massive irrationality. For why would number have political virtue? Why would the majority, modifiable at will thanks to the ruse of infinite modes of balloting, be endowed with the attributes of a norm? Such approximations are simply not tolerated in other domains where human thought is at stake. Great scientific creators and innovative artists have been right contrary to dominant opinion. Even violent amorous passions affirm themselves against mediocre social judgement. Is politics, and it alone, to be condemned to the conservatism of numerical means? Everything indicates that this is not the case. Since each time a capital political decision is to be taken, by everyone in their own name, the partisans of the just and the true are initially entirely in the minority, indeed, electorally insignificant. The résistants of the 1940's, those of the 1950's opposed to the sordid colonial wars, the "leftists" of the 60's and 70's: all of them were absolutely in the minority just as are those who today see imperialistic ambitions and the spirit of servitude hide beneath the mask of "humanitarian interventions", or the "war against terrorism". And, basically, everyone knows that number, the majority, won as it is from blind lists upon leaving the ballot box, has no real meaning.

Tronti and Badiou on the financial crisis

Hats off to IT for posting Badiou's piece on the crisis. It was co-translated by her and Savonarola, who has independently translated the Tronti piece over at Institute For Conjunctural Research.

I would also like to wish IT a happy belated Birthday. I understand she has recently turned 30. Me too. Go read the review of Virno's Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation that Infinite has published over at Mute.

Collapse Volume V

In the inbox today:

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce that Collapse Volume V, entitled The Copernican Imperative, will be published on 15 December 2008. The volume will be available to order in advance from www.urbanomic.com from mid-November. As usual, the volume will be printed in a limited numbered edition of 1000.

The volume will include contributions from: Julian Barbour, Nick Bostrom, Gabriel Catren, Milan Cirkovic, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, Nigel Cooke, Alberto Gualandi, Iain Hamilton Grant, Paul Humphreys, Immanuel Kant, James Ladyman, Thomas Metzinger, Carlo Rovelli, Martin Schönfeld, Conrad Shawcross, Keith Tyson and Damian Veal.

Copernicanism tore asunder the fit between the world and man's organs: the congruence between reality and visibility.
- Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World

In his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo proclaimed, through his mouthpiece Salviati, that he could 'never sufficiently admire the outstanding acumen' of those early advocates of Copernicanism who, 'through sheer force of intellect' - that is, without even the benefit of a telescope to confirm the theory observationally - 'had done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sensible experience plainly showed them to the contrary'.

Since Galileo published his work in 1632, recognition of the deeply counterintuitive nature of scientific findings has become virtually commonplace, and the 'explanatory gap' between the 'manifest' and 'scientific' images of reality has long been a central concern for philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists alike. In this volume of Collapse, we bring together samples of the most intellectually challenging contemporary work devoted to exploring the philosophical implications of 'Copernicanism' from a variety of overlapping and complementary standpoints.

As in previous volumes, the involvement in Collapse V of several major contemporary artists alongside groundbreaking philosophers and prominent scientists is designed to open up new perspectives and new directions for thinking outside disciplinary constraints. From multiple philosophical and artistic perspectives, and from scientific fields as diverse as theoretical physics and cosmology, biology, mathematics, cognitive neuroscience, and astrobiology, the volume addresses the issues of the 'deanthropomorphisation' of reality initiated by the Copernican Revolution, the relation between scientific and philosophical (Kantian) 'Copernicanism', and the enduring gulf between the spontaneous image of the world bequeathed to us by evolution and that revealed by the physical sciences in the wake of Copernicus.

With several of the contributions in interview form, Collapse V: The Copernican Imperative will be an accessible and thought-provoking volume exemplifying that characteristic blend of speculative audacity and scientifically informed insight which has always been the hallmark of 'Copernicanism'.

Contents of Volume V will be as follows (some details subject to alteration):

In 'Anaximander's Legacy', theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli (co-founder of Loop Quantum Gravity and author of Quantum Gravity) charts the historical dynamics of science's ever more radical overturning of the commonsense image of the world from Anaximander through Copernicus to the 'unfinished revolution' of twentieth-century physics - a revolution which, suggests Rovelli, challenges us to find a way of understanding the world in the absence of the familiar stage of space and time.

Rovelli's question 'Can we think the world without time?' is one which has preoccupied renegade theoretical physicist and historian of science Julian Barbour (author of Absolute or Relative Motion? and The End of Time) for the best part of five decades. In our interview 'The View From Nowhen' we discuss the nature of his radical rethinking of the foundations of physics, his arguments for the non-existence of time and change, and the influence his ideas have exerted on contemporary quantum gravity research from outside the halls of academe.

In his contribution to the volume, Turner Prize winning artist Keith Tyson - well known for his intricate and provocative artistic displacements and extrapolations of scientific ideas - presents his own unique take on the enigma of Copernicanism.

In our interview with Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (authors of dozens of ground-breaking popular science books, including their co-authored works The Collapse of Chaos, Figments of Reality, and What Does A Martian look Like?), we discuss with them the continuing collaboration between mathematician and biologist; the key conceptual innovations of their co-authored works; their trenchant criticisms of what they see as the overly conservative and unimaginative nature of contemporary astrobiology; and their positive programme for a new science of alien life, beyond astrobiology, which they call 'xenoscience'.

In 'Sailing the Archipelago of Habitability', cosmologist and astrobiologist Milan Cirkovic provides a sophisticated defence of anthropic reasoning (understood in terms of 'observation selection effects') against the charges brought against it by the likes of Cohen and Stewart as part of an ambitious project of laying the 'philosophical groundworks' of the nascent science of astrobiology.

In 'Where Are They?', philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom (Director of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, author of Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy) revisits Fermi's Paradox, employing probabilistic 'anthropic' reasoning to motivate the conclusion that, far from being a cause for celebration, the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would in fact augur very badly for the future of the human race.

In his (2006) motion-sculpture Binary Star artist Conrad Shawcross gestured 'Beyond Copernicanism', simulating the experience of life in a solar system where there is 'no such thing as one'. In his contribution to the volume Shawcross investigates the relationship between his work and the philosophical trope of Copernicanism.

In an interview charting the journey 'From Copernicanism to Nemocentrism', Thomas Metzinger (philosopher of neuroscience, author of Being No One) discusses his 'self-model theory of subjectivity', the potential social and cultural ramifications of the findings of contemporary neuroscience, and responds to criticisms of his radical eliminativist position with regard to the existence of 'selves'.

In his 'Thinking Outside the Brain', philosopher Paul Humphreys (author of Extending Ourselves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method) proposes that computational science is fast displacing humans from the centre of the epistemological universe, speculates on the possibility of a 'science without humans', and presents his proposals for a radically non-anthropocentric empiricism.

The paintings of Nigel Cooke present a philosophically-informed meditation on the continual displacement of the author-subject in the history of thought and artistic representation. His contribution in the form of a series of drawings, 'Thinker Dejecta', contributes to a thinking-through of the consequences of Copernicanism from this perspective.

In our fourth and final interview, 'Who's Afraid of Scientism?', James Ladyman (philosopher of science, co-author of Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalised) discusses the forlornness of contemporary analytic metaphysics and the prospects for a radically naturalised metaphysics which would fully take on board the most counterintuitive findings of contemporary physics, finally dispensing with the habitual ontology of 'little things and microbangings' which continues to hold sway in contemporary 'pseudo-naturalist philosophy'.

In his 'The Phoenix of Nature' Martin Schönfeld (artist and philosopher of nature, author of The Philosophy of the Young Kant) presents us with a vivid picture of Immanuel Kant profoundly at odds with the recent popular characterisation of him as a conservative, anti-Copernican thinker, via a stimulating exploration of his early cosmology. Here we are presented a radically anti-anthropocentric, anti-Christian, naturalist, speculatively audacious Kant who pushes 'Copernicanism' to its limits; who abolishes the hand of God from, and introduces a history and evolution into, the Newtonian cosmos; and who as early as 1755 strongly anticipates the fundaments of what became the Standard Model of modern cosmology only in the 1930s.

To accompany his piece Schönfeld also contributes a new translation of Immanuel Kant's 'Concerning Creation in the Total Extent of its Infinity in Both Space and Time', an extended excerpt from his 1755 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens in which this astonishingly prescient cosmology of 'island universes' and the birth and death of 'worlds' is most magnificently and perfervidly portrayed.

Tackling the great philosophical 'Copernican Revolution' head-on, Iain Hamilton Grant (philosopher, author of Philosophies of Nature after Schelling) examines the 'Prospects for Dogmatism after Kant'.

In 'Copernicanism, Correlationism, Critique' Damian Veal (philosopher, editor of the volume) critically re-examines the question of the meaning of 'Copernicanism' for philosophy, providing reasons for rejecting the idea popular amongst recent 'speculative realists' that a proper philosophical assimilation of the findings of the modern sciences demands a thoroughgoing break with the Kantian critical legacy.

In 'A Throw of the Quantum Dice Will Never Overturn the Copernican Revolution' Gabriel Catren (Director of the project 'Savoir et Système' at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris) presents what he calls a 'speculative overcoming' of recent influential quasi-Kantian interpretations of quantum mechanics. Rather than being limited to a mathematical account of the correlations between 'observed' systems and their 'observers', or pointing to the inherent 'transcendental' limits of physical knowledge, Catren argues that quantum mechanics furnishes a complete and realistic description of the intrinsic properties of physical systems, an ontology which exemplifies the Copernican deanthropomorphisation of nature.

In 'Errancies of the Human: French Philosophies of Nature and the Overturning of the Copernican Revolution', Alberto Gualandi (philosopher, author of Deleuze and Le problème de la vérité scientifique dans la philosophie française contemporain) indicates the features common to certain speculative philosophies of nature in 1960s France and problems facing contemporary evolutionary biologists.

Collapse V: The Copernican Imperative
December 2008
Eds D. Veal, R. Mackay
450+pp tbc
Limited Edition 1000 Numbered Copies
ISBN 978-0-9553087-4-1
£9.99

Žižek on the financial crisis

I had been wondering when Žižek was going to have something to say regarding the financial crisis. Dow was down 600 points and G7 members were just driving through the gates when I checked the news about an hour ago. From the London Review of Books, "Don't Just Do Something, Talk":

The real dilemma is not ‘state intervention or not?’ but ‘what kind of state intervention?’ And this is true politics: the struggle to define the conditions that govern our lives. The debate about the bailout deals with decisions about the fundamental features of our social and economic life, even mobilising the ghost of class struggle. As with many truly political issues, this one is non-partisan. There is no ‘objective’ expert position that should simply be applied: one has to take a political decision.