TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

. . . art tries to represent nature. Not necessarily in a direct sense, like you paint a nice field and in that painting, you’ve represented it one to one; embracing that you’re capturing something very fundamental there.. But even in abstract painting and various forms of sculpture or digital art; that what you’re really trying to capture is a representation of the process of representation itself. That’s basically how Schelling discusses art. To say that art represents nature, you’re not saying that art represents a representation of nature in an image, but that an image is actually pointing to the processes within nature that creates not only what we would call natural objects – plants or animals – but also thought. So art in a sense, is thought’s attempt to capture itself as a creation of nature, as creation.

The Seven Propositions About The Global were written after the completion of Produktionsmittel III and were used as program notes for its first public interpretation, which took place at the Ryan Opera Theater in Evanston, Illinois on May 17, 2016. The propositions are incomplete conclusions. These are thoughts that surfaced after having finished Produktionsmittel III, but they require further examination and growth. They represent both the final and the first—in that order—stages of a holistic thought process that permeates a variety of fields of knowledge. One hopes that, while the propositions emerged from an artistically creative activity, they may be repurposed into other contexts, perhaps far from their ontological origin.

Originally published in English by Siegfried Zielinski as “Against psychopathia medialis — For normal schizophrenia”, in the APRJA Journal, issue1.2(2012): “In/Compatible Research.” This is the first of many Spanish language translations that we will be releasing on &&& open-access. Giancarlo Sandoval will be translating current Philosophy and Theory over the next few months in order to make important recent texts available to the Spanish-speaking world.

(Esta es una de las muchas traducciones al español que estaremos publicando en &&& y distribuyendo en open access. Giancarlo Sandoval estará traduciendo Filosofía y Teoría actual en los siguientes meses para que textos actuales importantes estén disponibles en el mundo hispano. Manténganse al tanto…)

The straight line, and everything it enables, such as right angles and regular geometric figures, is an astonishing invention. The straight edges of crystals might have been noticed by our stone tool making ancestors, and some grasses have straight stalks, but otherwise straight lines in nature are very rare. As I sit and look out at a human environment entirely built on straight lines and regular curves I can’t help but admire the imagination and will that has cut through the irregularities and digressions of nature to impose something new and unprecedented on the world… it is the very image of how human society has distinguished itself from everything else, to make a safe space for the body and a formative, limiting space for the mind… the speed of our labours is nothing compared to the rapidity of our thought. The speed of thought must have evolved to exceed the reaction time of animals—we could draw conclusions from observation, make plans and act before lunch got away— but the movement of our minds is on a completely other scale than any aspect of nature. The physical motion of living things is slower, the growth and development of any organism slower still, the capacity of the environment to neutralize all the toxins we’ve dumped into it yet slower, evolution still slower, and geological time massively slow, in proportion as its productions are also massive. Meanwhile the human mind can range from the Big Bang to the end of time in an instant.

. . . possibilities already rest . . . in the undead Marx. The challenge is to nurture them, develop them, and make them flourish. Our wager is that the undead can lead us toward a better life and that a post-capitalist future is not only desirable but necessary.

A portion of these notes were delivered as a guest lecturer for Diann Bauer and Patricia Reed’s “Art and its Reason(s)” class at the New Centre for Research and Practice on June 8th, 2015. I have since added to them and cleaned up the presentation. The intent of this material was to present a broad outline of Wilfrid Sellars philosophy and make suggestions as to how we might think of some of his positions in relation to problems with recent art practice, and in what ways it may help us reconsider certain positions on art. For the most part it remains focused on Sellars’s philosophy with a few suggestive remarks on how it may be applied to art which could surely be expanded. In composing these notes I relied not only upon Sellars’s own texts, but the indispensable commentary of the late Jay Rosenberg, Willem deVries and Tom Triplett’s reading of Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, Steven Levine’s insightful criticism of Sellars’s positions, and Johanna Seibt’s process ontology reading of Sellars.

The Laboria Cuboniks collective have just released their widely-anticipated “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation”.

Already, it is being lauded by such cultural critics as Mark Fisher for “definitively grasp[ing] feminism back from the… hands of the moralising-spiteful petit-bourgeoisie,” and indicating that “a new counterculture is emerging from the shadows.” Rejecting originary authenticity, affirming technological alienation, and firmly regrounding accelerationism in its cyberfeminist antecedents, the xenofeminist call-to-arms has unleashed an alien storm system from which terrestrial subjectivity will not emerge unaltered.

Time & Televisual Intersubjectivity, McLuhan’s idea of globalized presence as the prehistory of telecomputation. The 1960s was the decade in which satellite technology was introduced to the television world via a series of live broadcasts. However, with the active participation of 46 stations, BBC’s Our World (1967) was undoubtedly the most globally far reaching of them all. Conceived around Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the communicative global village, the special program took full advantage of satellites to both reach a truly global audience and use the occasion to announce the dawn of globalization and what living in a small and thoroughly connected world would mean for its inhabitants. Prominent in the broadcast was the program’s Canadian segment, which aired right after the introduction and included Marshal McLuhan interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and broadcast from their studio in Toronto.

. . . the #Accelerate Manifesto, both in form and content, is also indicative of the limited utility philosophy might have in a crisis situation like that of 2008 and on, hence, the need for a full-fledged turn away from speculative philosophy towards proper political economy. However, it is important to note that this political turn was filtered mostly through speculative realism, on the positive side, because of their shared emphasis on materiality & the place of technology, and on the negative, through SR’s spectacular failure in offering a new epistemology and the accelerationist demand for one. And yet, SR did offer a way out of Continental theory loops, via the works of Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani, mostly through their defense of the idea of Enlightenment and reason or what later was called neorationalism . . . their brand of realism offers a new way of thinking about the political that is not overdetermined and therefore limited by Western anarcho-Marxist cynicism towards government institutions and social planning, or the dominant discursive politics of poststructuralism or the Latourian hegemonic hyper-relativism that insists everything is a network.

So, how do we move beyond the past? How do we move past the phallocratic traditions and its subjective invariants? In the aftermath of emancipatory politics and within a current age of media deliriums, where we are all allowed to scream and cry our outrage and become the users and producers of media and the illusions and dreams of detournements of Debord have been given to us all within the virtual-actual spaces of social networks; or at least, keeps us chained to a Freudian unconscious (a Freudian Robot). The question, Ex Machina then brings to the forefront, is more than a simple question of Feminist emancipatory politics, it’s a position outside of striving perhaps to take on the compulsion of consumption today: the consumption and compulsion to Identify, to share Identification, and to consume Identity. Then, how can we begin to grasp a capacity to think within the ever-changing landscape today in a manner where we take up a mode of consumption that would be akin to a capacity and novel mode of thinking within our current landscape of post-digital culture?

The philosopher Gilbert Simondon states in his work that the machine or robot in relation to its human creator, takes on a position that in the past was granted to the slave or foreigner or stranger. That is, the machine takes on a position whereby humans try to not identify completely with it, and seek a distancing from technologies they have created. Simondon, however also thinks that monikers and conceptions of technology that refer to machines as separate from human, that is, as autonomous robots and the like, are an erroneous way to envision them. For Simondon, machines are extensions of the human. If Ex Machina had another chapter, perhaps Ava, if she followed the hopes Simondon strives to set forth in his book, On the Modes of Existence of Technical Objects (see part one or this in-progress translation for English versions), would recognize her position as an extension of the human, as a care-giving machine and a negentropic, stabilizing part of humanity.

I think that photography is digital – if you understand photography in the classical sense – and that it has always been digital. Such a position only holds if we accept the previous definition of the digital, which has to do with subscribing to a fundamental rivenness of the world. Photography must reflect on or orient itself toward an object or toward the world. The viewer (or the camera as a ‘viewer proxy’) is already divided, or apart, or opposite from its subject. The viewer is inside the world of course, but the structure of immanence is not in effect. Rather, a structure of distance, difference, relationality predominates. If the dominant structure is distance, difference, relation, etc., it’s digital as far as I’m concerned. But that might not be a very satisfying answer!

The drone appears as the weapon of choice of the coward, he who refuses to show himself. It requires no courage; it deactivates combat. This provokes deep crises in terms of military values. But the military needs justifications.

Were the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists reckless? Yes, but this word has two meanings, that are more or less easy to disentangle (and, of course, some subjectivity on my part enters the picture here). Contempt for danger, hunger for risk, some would say heroism. But also indifferent to the potentially disastrous consequences of a healthy provocation – in this case the humiliation of millions of people who are already stigmatized, making them vulnerable to the manipulation of organized fanatics.