READING DIARY: NOVEMBER 2021- TT SESSION 12: FORMED IN ENTANGLEMENT: KNOWING, WRITING, PUBLISHING- A WORK GROUP LEAD BY MARC HERBST WITH PASCALE IFE WILLIAMS, STEPHEN SHUKAITIS & CLAUDIA FIRTH- Readings 1-5
NOV21-READING 1. An Invitation to Live Together, Making the “Complex We”, Marisol De La Cadena
Anthropologist Marisol De La Cadena's linguistically complex An Invitation to Live Together, Making the “Complex We” deals with inherent issues within human classification systems. Seemingly she makes cases both for and against the “complex we”. First pointing out the problem of the shared condition from which “self” and “other”. Then she suggests that by "Displacing the anthropos through the “complex we,” the human may reemerge with what the anthropos self-severed from: with nonhumans, and thus, as in the already classic phrase, become “more than human,” with both bios and geos alike. It could also—and crucially—choose to emerge with that which exceeds those partitions (bios and geos) and the practice of classification from where they emerge. Hence it would become within the relational condition that I have speculatively conceptualized as the anthropo-not-seen-..."
She goes on, To continue my argument, a word about classification is in order, for which I offer two reminders. First: “A classification is a spatial, temporal, or spatial-temporal segmentation of the world. Second: Nothing comes without its world. Combining both reminders…I want to make a relatively obvious insinuation: the “order of things” that separated humans from nonhumans, life from nonlife, slotted the latter as geos, organized the former (bios) into species, divided them into animals, plants, and humans, and ordered the latter into hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, class, geography, education; all these came with a specific world: the world implicitly identified with “the anthropos.” %John Law calls it “the one-world world.” Of course, classifications are not inherently good or bad, and it can be said that “all worlds” classify. Yet a classification may impose itself on other classifications. And, today, what the assertion “all worlds classify” may be unable to hide any longer is that the anthropos granted to the classification that made its world the privilege to subordinate all other classifications (or worlds’ orders) and silence their worlding capacity.
De La Cadena argues that human classification systems are inherently anthropocentric, though she expressly states that classification systems are neither good nor bad, she does strongly suggest that the anthropocentric nature of 17th-18th C. European Enlightenment era systems, basically in still place, are not good… Undoing the hierarchies of race is important indeed—yet addressing the inequalities that this regime enabled might be insufficient for the ranking that race affected also imposed a homogeneous humanity onto divergent peoples whose worlds (and everything that made them) were made equivalent to each other (and thus the same) following their distance from nature (an imposed homogeneous condition relation as well.) With this consideration, scholarly practices that decenter the anthropos by bridging the divide between nature and humanity might also be insufficient if they continue the classificatory practices that trap, for example as species, what may be not only such because they may also become through practices that exceed nature or Humanity. My proverbial example is Ausangate, an entity that emerges as mountain and earth being.
Colleagues provide other examples: jaguars that are also persons, a hunter that is (also) not not-animal. These are excesses in many ways: as earth being Ausangate exceeds geos, the jaguar that is person exceeds animal, the not not-animal hunter exceeds human and animal. They all exceed species (and their required relations) even in its most oxymoronic emergence.
Basically, De La Cadena describes creating intellectual and psychic space for a de-anthropocentricized world where surrealistic becomes realistic, where dare I write, anthropomorphized creatures actually exist: ...Instead, if replete with monsters—those that cannot be—the “complex we” has the potential both to challenge the destructive imposition of sameness performed by the world that founded the anthropos and to be unafraid of the unknown that their emergence may inaugurate. This is the invitation that the Manifesto has the potential to issue.
Her conclusion calls to mind various Ancient art historical images, and Modernist anthropomorphized animals, and various futuristic extraterritorial creatures. Images like:
Bird-Headed Deity, Artist Not Known, Calah, Iraq c. 885 B.C., limestone relief
Jean-Baptiste Deshays, Le singe peintre (The Monkey Painter), ca. 1745. Oil on canvas
ET from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (aka E.T.), Steven Spielberg, producer director, 1982, American science fiction film
NOV21-READING 2. The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben
The first etymological puzzle that Giorgio Agamben solves in his The Coming Community (Translated by Michael Hardt) chapter titled "Whatever" is that whatever, means exactly the opposite of how it is used and/or understood today. Ex. rather than being a statement of indifference or meaning "it does not matter", in Latin it actually means "it always matters". He goes on to discuss the structuralism of singularity and want: The singularity exposed as such is whatever you want, that is, lovable...Thus, whatever singularity (the Lovable) is never the intelligence of some "thing", of this or that quality or essence, but only the intelligence of an intelligibility.
Agamben begins his chapter "From Limbo" by reciting Saint Thomas' theological questions...Where do whatever singularities come from? What is their realm?, setting up a double deconstructive analysis of the state of limbo, which is one of four named Catholic hell states. (Medieval theologians of Western Europe described the underworld ("hell", "hades", "infernum") as divided into four distinct parts: Hell of the Damned, Purgatory, Limbo of the Fathers or Patriarchs, and "Limbo of the Infants" (the unofficial Catholic doctrine), the place where unbaptized deceased infant souls, too young to have committed actual sins, but not having been freed from original sin, permanently reside.
Agamben argues that "The greatest punishment- the lack of the vision of God -thus turns into a natural joy: Irremediably lost, they persist without pain in divine abandon. God has not forgotten them, but rather they have always already forgotten God…Like letters with no addressee, these uprisen beings remain without a destination. Neither blessed like the elected, nor hopeless like the damned, they are infused with a joy with no outlet."
My psychoanalytic brain segment asks, You mean these infant souls are in a constant state of arousal without the ability or opportunity to climax and/or relax...for eternity?... I find this alarming, but afterall, Agamben is quoting Saint Thomas, who was a Catholic Benedictine monk given the "grace of perfect chastity by Christ". (By now I am thinking both Agamben and Saint Thomas are not right.)
Then Agamben states, "This nature of limbo is the secret of Walser's world." And since I did not previously know of his work, I looked up Robert Walser, a Swiss born, German/French speaking, early-mid 20th C. writer who was fancied by Walter Benjamin, Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka and other famous 20th C. all of whom I have read. Walser's fictitious creatures have been described as what I think of as "pre-Kafka-esque", and while briefly researching,I found the pictured above 16th C. Italian G. Arcimboldo’s oil painting Water.
Agamben goes on about "Infant Limbo state" souls being irreparably astray, but in a region that is beyond perdition and salvation: Their nullity, of which they are so proud, is principally a neutrality with respect to salvation-the most radical objection that has ever been levied against the very idea of redemption. The truly un-savable life is the one in which there is nothing to save… I wonder if he agrees with this extreme and archaic Catholic position of no possible enlightenment/redemption for these souls?
Finally, in Example Agamben discusses in the most explicitly linguistic or post-structural terms The antimony of the individual and the universal has its origin in language. The word "tree" designates all trees indifferently, insofar as it posits the proper universal significance in place of singular ineffable trees…The fortune of set theory in modem logic is born of the fact that the definition of the set is simply the definition of linguistic meaning...
And he continues on with classifications, linguistic logic, and circles back to singularity, from his "Whatever" chapter, now citing it as "the example...(which) is characterized by the fact that it holds for all cases of the same type, and, at the same time, it is included among these…"
At this point I feel my head spinning in linguistic circles. And by the end of "Example", as I have a more than a hundred times in my adult life, I think of the (Western Christian) linguistics origins of John 1:1... "In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God." I think this because it is exactly where Agamben leads us..."This life is purely linguistic life. Only life in the word is undefinable and unforgettable. Exemplary being is purely linguistic being. Exemplary is what is not defined by any property, except by being-called…. Being-called-the property that establishes all possible belongings (being-called-Italian, -dog, -Communist) - is also what can bring them all back radically into question..."
NOV21-READING 3: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhucene, Martha Kenney
In her interview of Feminist Cyborg Scholar and Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Donna Haraway, the two discuss topics of art, craft, environmentalism, feminism, and feminist science fiction, and more than once, Haraway's favorite topic of tentacularities...like Navajo/Diné string figures called Na’at’lo and Euro-American cat’s cradle, and tentacularitism, ex. Medusa, who Haraway makes the most engaging points about:
Then there is Medusa, whose head is tentacular and snaky. Medusa is a Gorgon, of whom there are three and only one is mortal—Medusa. And she is killed in a murder-for-hire instigated by Athena. Medusa’s body is decapitated, her head drips blood, and out of that blood sprang the coral gorgone reefs of the Western Sea, onto which the ships of the hero-explorers are dashed. So, her blood generates the coral reef—- Eva Hayward pointed that out to me. From her decapitated body springs Pegasus, the winged horse, and of course feminists have big stakes in horses. So I’m interested in the figure of Medusa as a tentacular, Gorgonic figure full of feely snakes, who threatens the children of Zeus, most certainly including the head-born daughter of Zeus, Athena. The head-born daughter is not a feminist—quite the opposite.
The Gorgons are also ambiguous about gender. They are earlier than, or other than, Chaos. Gaia/Terra are offspring of Chaos, and they don’t really have a gender, despite their iconography as goddesses; Bruno Latour emphasizes this. Gaia is not he or she, but it. They are forces of generativity, vitality, and destruction. But the dreadful ones are even more powerful. The Gorgons are dreadful—the word gorgones translates as dreadful. I think the abyssal and elemental dreadful ones are the figures that we need to inhabit in these moments of urgency which we tried to sketch at the beginning of our conversation, this living in a time of excess mass death, much of it human-induced.
Also interestingly, Haraway concludes the interview...You could say... about techno-humanism: that we make ourselves the enemy when we enslave ourselves to the heroic-tragic man-makes-himself story. When we cut ourselves off from our collective, our becoming-with, including dying and becoming compost again. When we cut ourselves off from mortality and fear death, we become our own worst enemy in this relentless story of making ourselves in the image of death. These are the lived stories of the Anthropocene as Capitalocene. But there’s a third story, or actually myriad stories. The Chthulhucene probably won’t catch on because not enough people know the word. But the Chthulhucene would be truer. I am resigned to the term Anthropocene; I’m not going to be abstemious, and I’m not going to play purity games here. But, if only we had not started with that term… What if we had started instead by renaming our epoch, even—especially—in the Geophyiscal Union, with sym-poietic power, to signal the ongoing and non-Euclidean net bag of the Chthulhucene, a story of SF, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, scientific fact, string figures, so far? This unfinished Chthulhocene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.
NOV21-READING 4: The Medium of Contingency, Edited by Robin Mackay, is a collection of writings by economists and philosophers that includes Reza Negarestani's piece Contingency and Complicity. Negarestani, an Iranian "rationalist inhumanist" philosopher, e.g. "...concept of the human is under-explored and is a matter of theoretical and practical investigation, the results of which will lead to a thoroughgoing new conception of the human that stands in opposition to classical versions of humanism and human essentialism. He is known for "pioneering the genre of 'theory-fiction' with his book 2008 Cyclonopedia, listed as one of Artforum's 2009 best books."
Reza Negarestani initially discusses the artistic medium of contingency as a kind of "incidental expense" to the artist, but eventually I gather his underlying concept of contingency is more likely the philosophical one that is "the absence of necessity; the fact of being so without having to be so." He also discusses materiality in the metaphyscial sense that is as a "state of embodiment" and capacity.
Difficult for me is that throughout his extremely theoretical piece, Negarestani gives neither concrete/explicit nor abstract examples, but instead stacks idea upon idea so I am forced to understand his as an explicitly post-structural or open-ended writing. Given this, accurate or not, I gather he argues that the artistic medium of contingency (dictionary definition: "a provision for an unforeseen event or circumstance") is based on materiality, or on one's being, or on one's mental capacities...that is one's presence of mind and its ability to comprehend or understand itself as an active (co-)creator (aka artist) of immediate and/or distant realities or futures.
Negarestani discusses "the embracing of contingency through a rigorous and twisted mode of closure" or by complicity (the act of helping someone else behave inappropriately or illegally)...with implied "commonalities." But then he proverbially draws that post-linguistic circle, and states that "...contingency entertains no commonality with anyone."
Next he speculates, If we consider the "contigency effectuations %(which are generally defined as a form of reasoning or problem solving which assumes the future is largely unpredictable, but that it can be controlled through human action) as traumas..." I interpret that he suggests we essentially create our own realities based on patterns of intrusions.
The very funniest thing that Negarestani writes is, ...when it comes to the thought of contingency, the artist must recognize herself as the conspiracy theorist of her materials. But we must first realize that the work of contingency is neither horrific nor suspenseful; it is subtly twisted...one can think of a continuum where everyday superficiality, horror, reason, comedy, suspense, and seamless uneventfulness are all fuzzy gradients of the same contingent universe that might be brought in and out of focus without respect to any necessity whatsoever.
And the most serious call Negarestani makes is in his summary, which concludes, closure calls for a new philosophy of experimentation- for it is not merely a recipe for art-making or writing, but a vector toward an ethics of humiliation and a science of openness. I note that in this writing, Negarestani certainly achieves this end.
NOV21-READING 5: The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Issue 11
During my reading of this online journal, I highlighted what I think are the most relevant and interesting aspects of the 2019 call for (creative) newsletter-as-cultural-artifact submissions:
Opening Statement
Corona, Fascism, Climate Break-Down. Headlines all, and very real crises felt everywhere– things whose concerns work over situations at every scale of possible experience.
...This issue’s aim was to facilitate such work in intimate places, to do so, this issue serves primarily as a compilation of autonomously produced and locally distributed newsletters aimed at situating non-fascist thought and/or avant garde culture… it reflects our understanding that despite serious critical and creative work occurring from the center to the far left, liberatory and cosmopolitically open enlivening politics are not advancing.
...Overall, our submission call demonstrates how the issue has two theoretical anchors, new municipalist, small “d” democratic praxis and de-colonial thinking... All we asked was that contributions be; 1) collectively edited to make sure each project was more than one person’s ambition 2) locally distributed in hopes that a situation would drive content beside whatever ambition 3) and oriented along avant-garde or anti-fascist ends…
...This issue explores the concept of "culture beside itself"…What we mean by "Culture beside itself”. We see a contradiction in the utilization of the word "culture"…At the embrace of this contradiction is the situation of "culture beside itself."
Newsletters, as cultural and political expression
...If "cultural" things are comprehended as unique objects- singular paintings, dances, books, newsletter- then we wonder how those unique expressions exist as if they had the autonomy that Western thought gives to individual (male, white) humans. We wanted to listen to printed words as though they might vary or fluctuate as though they had their own (own) being.
On Newsletters in site and place
...if the practice of concerted and conscious cultural work is to be taken seriously, it insists that considered work does have its own effects on the things it relates to...For us, a newsletter represents the sustained efforts of a people within a place to maintain a focused and yet also almost mundane relation to both the community and their habitus…
...Non-fascist or avant-garde practice vary-ingly pushes against power's logistics.
...As this issue's Out of the Woods and Tools for Action discuss, such practices develop from and can develop towards innately radical ways of being different; because they find no compulsion to explain to authority who and why they are.
For me the most helpful and insightful aspects of The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest's newsletter project parameters and objectives are the establishing of the political and/or avant garde nature of submission content, and the collaborative and local requirements.
As long as I have had this website ginadominique.com/home.html c. 2009, I have intended but failed to create a quarterly newsletter linking to it. Prior to commencing the Transart/LJMU program earlier this year, I had for the many years, inconsistently used the blog as a poor substitute. (Note: a blog is definitely different than a newsletter.)
I consider now that if I had established even one of the The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest listed parameters, ex. collaborating with an editor partner... how practical, helpful and motivating it would have been. And the practice of establishing a theoretical, ex. creative and political aim, is also useful.
Ultimately and in large measure because of the collaborative parameter and theoretical basis for The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Issue 11, the call itself is inspired and inspiring.
