Truth (preliminary note)

Truth

1) is a practice.
The Eternal Wisdom has truth a great crystal to which we might ascend. Science, pop science at least, has it something to be approached asymptotically, better with each generation.
Truth is not a construct but the work of constructing, on one side the increasing elegance of its logic, on the other how persuasively it describes the tohu va bohu of the world. The most fascinating practices do both.

2) as legal category
The oxymoron 'formal agreement' is therefore a contradiction: a dialogue (can dialogue ever be exhausted?) that 'ends' in a formal (and performative) statement (guilty/not guilty). Motive (soft) and occasion (hard), testimony (soft) and evidence (hard) assimilated into a single unambiguous verdict.
Query: can ambiguity ever be true? Are some occurrences truly ambiguous.

3) factish, truthiness, post-truth
2018: truth is not to be disdained, even if it means defending institutions we have always criticised (media, intelligence services, judiciary). Is common sense – which is so easily identifiable with ideology – in crisis, eradicating the common in favour of embattled tribes? Or do a) clichés and truisms b) embodied knowledge, habit, know-how and c) 'truths widely acknowledged' still have currency, as common, as commons.

4) hypothesis, proposition, surmise etcetera.
There are subjunctive modes of truth to place alongside ambiguity, the former a trajectory, the latter a condition, not far removed from confusion and proximates like controversy. (Distinguish an ill-formed question that cannot be answered unambiguously or uncontroversially from a well-formed one that is too difficult or whose answer is too complicated. We expect truth to be simple. Is it?)

Reservations: Mathematical (Badiou) and quantum (Barad) ontologies do not much deal in truth in senses 1,2 and 3: concepts of void, multiplicity, intra-action and topology - of the foam of being/becoming – are not crystalline, though persuasively descriptive.
Response: this (descriptive) ontology clashes with (elegant) administration to produce the historical (persuasion, work) as performance of truth in hypothesis testing, verdicts to be picked over.

First diagram on truths

and their contraries.

[annotation: 'Belief' here describes phenomena like pensée sauvage, theology, the hidden hand of the market, certain forms of environmentalism: - a systematisable certainty that x is the case which provides the axiom(s) for a cathedral of thinking. 'Evidence' might perhaps better be expressed as 'Testimony']

a) Truth is a practice and therefore requires media through which it can be practiced: instruments for capturing evidence, means of storing and ordering arguments and beliefs, modes of transmission, persuasion, establishing.
b) therefore truth has a history. As a practice, truth therefore has a media history. The first diagram allows for histories of modes of proof and typologies of data, for example.

A≠A

A=A
is untrue because the A on the left is in a different place: it appears elsewhere (being-there) and for those of us who read left to right the second A appears later. There is a relation of equivalence, not of identity

The crucial part of the statement is then '='. The equivalence of two appearances states that they stem from the one being. To ascribe Being is to ascribe equivalence so that the sender and the receiver can be fixed in their different places, the '=' thus referring to the equivalence of the perfect message leaving the left A and arriving in the same form at the right A.

A≠A
"you can never step into the same river twice", but the river at the left A is still equivalent to its later appearing as the river at the right-hand A, except that the equivalence is under erasure. The '≠' thus indicates not only non-equivalence, but the oblique stroke of noise: a fourth party in the formula. The glitch in the equivalence emphasises the time the transmission from left to right takes, so emphasising becoming over being.

A=A is a necessary upshot of the transition from mediation to communication. Communication, which must divide the flux to secure survival, distinguishes sender from receiver (prior to subject/object, human/natural, male/female, colonist/colonised etcetera since all those distinctions require communication in order to be stated and enforced).

A=A imagines communication as perfect: left and right equal one another in the sense that they are equally informed, in this case minimally informed by the relation each enters into with the other. The content of the message '=' transmitted between the two 'A's is "the term on the left is equal to the term on the right".

'A≠A' imagines the communication as imperfect. The content of '≠' is not simply that the terms are unequal but that the message concerning their equality has been interrupted. Nonetheless, it transmits a message that connects the terms, whose content therefore is 'there is a relation between the two terms, but it is not a relation of equivalence'. (This is not startling to Lacanians, for whom the statement 'I think therefore I am' concerns two distinct and non-equivalent uses of the word 'I').

Translating '≠' as the statement of a relation other than equivalence can also be read as the statement 'the two terms are unequal'. It is impossible to tell, however, as in the master-slave dialectic, which of the two is the lesser. This is because the terms themselves are products of the initial non-identity that arises from the difference in relative location constructed by the sign of communication that divides them. This in turn is because the inequality is not inherent in either but rather in the oblique stroke which, in striking through the sign of communication between equivalents, achieves eminence over them both.

Three possible solutions:
i) the '=' is not the sign of communication but, taken in isolation, the sign of mediation, denoting the primacy of interconnection. It only becomes the sign of communication when it is placed between and divides terms. The noise of the oblique stroke that undoes the equivalence of being would then be the mark of repressed primal mediation re-asserting the pre-eminence of mediation over communication. This form of noise has environmental origins like sunspots, cosmic radiation or electrical storms. It belongs to the Real.

ii) the oblique stroke arises as an affordance of the communicative, and denotes in its most primitive form Gödel's theorem: the statement 'A=A' is either incomplete or incoherent. In this case the source of the noise is the technique of mathematics. It arises from the functioning of the Symbolic and is systemic.

iii) The diagram of 'A=A' runs left to right. A second axiom is required to complete the feedback loop ('If A=B then it is also the case that B=A'). This secondary axiom however removes the temporal distinction of the original statement ('If A then A=A'), where the word 'then' or its synonyms ('it follows', for example) indicate a direction in time. If 'A≠A' reads only as 'there is a relation (other than equivalence) between left and right terms', there is no time involved. This would indicate that solution (i) is correct, and that the repressed primality of timeless flux has erased the temporality implicit in logic. It is also the case that the secondary axiom permits its own reversal, that is 'If A=A then A'. This reversal can then itself be reversed, so that the feedback mechanism introduced by the secondary axiom enters into endless recurrence. This repetition of the same then marks not the erasure of time but its measure in terms of repetitions of the same. This is abstract or clock time. Placing the '=' under erasure, by admitting the possibility that the two A's are not equal, makes it impossible to reverse the formula A≠A since one or other of these A's, we do not know which, is the greater. This inequality would could not arise from the return of the primal '=' without terms, since the terms remain, and remain distinct from one another (that is, the expression 'A≠A may be translated as ~ A=~ A, not-A equals not-A, in which case the modes of not-being-A on either side of the sign of communication might be entirely unlike one another). A≠A is then a double negation, undoing both the perfect communication of equivalence with its tendency to infinite repetition, and the timelessness of the '=' sign when it appears without terms. True, the '≠' might still be a technical glitch in the infinitely repetitive measure of time in feedback loops. However, this glitch must itself occur within the logic of time, that is as a historical event of interruption. Thus the third solution would be that what strikes obliquely through both primal flux and infinite measure is an event. Neither the perpetual motion of primal mediation nor the infinite recurrence of feedback permit events. Therefore a third mode of time emerges in the sign '≠'. This third mode of time, the time that permits events to occur, we call history.

The third solution belongs to the Imaginary: it is structured by the division of the self into the one that thinks and the one that is; by the experience of the mirror stage where the child misrecognises its ideal image in its reflection, more potent and coherent than it feels itself to be; and which enables the child to identify with other bodies beyond itself, the first building blocks of socialisation. History belongs to the social rather than the perpetual flux of the Real or the administered repetitions of the Symbolic. Non-equivalence, non-identity belong to events, and thence to the possibility of becoming, the possibility of changing the world, to potential and therefore to action.

(note added 16.10.18): syntagmatic/paradigmatic structures in logic: that 2+2=4 and 4=2+2 are not identical, though equivalent; that 4=3+1 indicates the identity of 4 with the previous statement but non-identical partition into a different set of components; thus too 4=4+0 and 4=5-1. The mediation matters.

The past and present beauty of Saturn

If beauty is to stand, the monument that outlast perennial bronze, then it is already posthumous at the moment of its birth.

The Imagist is a photographer and vice versa – the instant preserved, the pressed flower, is not a pledge to remember but the triumph of the future over the present. Then who will speak for and to the present of its own yearning to be wonderful and free?

Blinn's animations and Cassini-Huygens's telemetry are both in their ways reliable depictions of Saturn. Only the god escapes, who is also the father of all the gods.

But is it the case that either denudes the old-father of some sacred dignity? To the contrary, clothed in the glories of colour and movement, the imaged planet is as far from us as the old god, indefinitely removed, knowing we shall never clap eyes on him in the same room or in the fields or on the battlefield. The glamour 'that is upon him' of distance and time's absolute is not undone by codec and gamut: “that you do no work / and will live forever”.

It is enough to know that he exists. Our pictures are – expensive, compulsive – simple acts of worship.

And if these images of Saturn are at once beautiful and posthumous acts of worship dislodged from the co-presence that distinguishes natural from artificial beauty
(Beethoven, deaf, teaches that music in composition is its pure presence)
then observations of Saturn prove that the invisible and inhuman beauty of Saturn as he is Now that we infer from Saturn then, in imagination or by instruments, continuously graces what it is to be, this summer evening in a garden in England in fading light.

Community (version 0)

(in)dividual: the self is a crust laid over a swarm. Self as singularity (that is effectively as multiplicity) is a social product, not of or for all time. Communication is not only the fallen state of primal mediation but its overcoming in the form of a communicative community which we demand because we do not possess it. In parallel the dividual is the crushed detritus of a) the destruction of community but also b) of the destruction of self as desire + data (subject as source of its own becoming and as signified). After desire, this dividual remnant stands in need, . . . . of the common (methodologically: Ontology crumbles in the mind's hands as soon as they touch it. We reach out to time, and though it falls apart as concept, we do not believe any the less in its actuality proved by all things temporal, including the time it takes to think time's impossibility. Community is of an other order. Sociologically, after Tönnies, it is quite possible to believe that it no-longer exists, and quite easy to believe that since its no-longer existence is a trope of Western thought since the Odyssey at least, that its failure to exist, or to exist otherwise than as always already over, is in fact its peculiar ontology. In this crumbling in our or any conceptual fingers, community is of a kind with the video image which, in its increasingly minuscule operations, is even more prone to fail to exist than the analog moving image, whose composition as both image and moving depends on the constant eradication of the previous image. The scanned image adds to that ephemerality the fading of the first lines before the last has even been illuminated, a constant self-erasure paralleled by the geography of transmission that ensures that the image is never where its referent has been. The I that speaks from a Skype screen is not even the self-contradictory person that speaks and is signified face-to-face, now manifestly not even the source of the enunciation. But then again, it is only on condition of this imcompossibility that "I" exists in the age of communication, and only on this condition of post-Hegelian compound contradiction that the urge to find community becomes urgent. Community is necessary not because it is lost but because it is a need generated in the failure of supplementation to create a shell robust enough to contain the fragments of a self denuded of autonomy in the very hyperindividuation that consumerism required after the collapse of the nuclear family as core unit of consumption

formal abstraction

"Piet Mondriaan, 1930 - Mondrian Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow" by Piet Mondrian - [1]. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons - Wikipedia

at the very beginning of a new project on political aesthetics that at the moment concerns Truth, Beauty and the Good, with first steps into truth being made at seminars in Paris (INHA) and Oslo (Seminar of Aesthetics) trying out distinctions between truth to perception, to objects and to materials, the idea came along of

a further truth to feeling which might include (as it did for Kandinsky and Mondriaan as founders) truth to the Spirit as supra-personal subject of the cosmos. Abstraction abstracts from the perceptible its constituent elements – colour and form – in pursuit of an expression of truth pertaining to a human or super-human subject. Abstraction requires a subject to feel it. In one direction it tends towards truth to materials (Greenberg); in another it leads directly to the next part of the enquiry, beauty (where it will meet the concept from data visualisation of 'beautiful data')

Abstraction as formalism seems the least intimate, approximating to classicism (Apollonian). But consider the abstractions of spiritual arts - cathedrals, masks, groves, mosques. The anthropomorphic principle in natural religion meets the inhuman nature of gods, as of the one God as supreme abstraction. By removing the diligent approach to the extremely perceptible and enumerable world, abstract formalism can approach the noumenal, but in the guise of a subject who either is, is modelled on, or is marked by difference from the human.

The formal abstraction is close to the idea of symbol traced in the first iteration of Glitch as Labour: it is not a signifier locked into a system but a radical punctuation of semiotic structure by irruption from elsewhere (and in Beauty from else-when). Like a soul-catcher, formal abstraction arranges physical forces (masses, light) to attract divinity or other souls, to provide avenues to the noumenal beyond.

Truth to subject then because (1) it seeks out the truly immaterial (soul, self) (god, spirit) as a subject, capable of agency sufficient to complete the communication - an angelic bridge between subjects and the worlds they constitute as subjects; and (2) because the subjectivity evoked in the human maker and spectator/inhabitant is constructed in yearning for something more wonderful than all this stuff. Not therefore to be confused with the truth of science or perception (secular wonder) but of subjectivity extended to become the very principle of simultaneous inhabitance of this world and its (perfect) shadow or reflection

The form abstracted from ordinary perception is the form of the human, of the subject: and of the inhuman or otherwise-than-human, of the Subject.

Montage would fall under this description of formalist abstraction because it displaces unity into the perceiving subject on which it depends

The Quantum Crowd

from a chapter called "Defining the Public in Piccadilly Circus" for a forthcoming collection on public screens and transnational cultures edited by Nikos Papastergiadis and Scott McQuire.

The public that threatened in the early 20th century to become mass became instead the lonely crowd, and the lonely crowd in turn has become a circuit of managed desires no longer adding up to individuals. When Laclau (2005) describes the unit of populist politics as demands, he approaches an understanding of this new condition, where the units are neither social nor individual but desires in movement, unanchored from biography and mobilised in currents through the tides of quotidian human affairs. The process by which communities and extended families were reduced to the nuclear family of the classic consumer society of Keynesianism continued in the Bretton Woods era to produce as unit of consumption the atomised individual. Neo-liberalism, coinciding with personal computing, internet and mobile media, encouraged the break-up of the individual, just as the previous regime encouraged the break-up of the nuclear family in an epidemic of divorce. Now only unanchored desires function as sub-individual social particles. We have moved from the molecular family to the atomic individual and thence to the quantum dynamic of desire, at which point the art of managing desires takes over from politics as the conduct of public life.

Theodicy of Communication

In a talk at the Digital Aesthetic 3 exhibition in Preston, Peter Campus, speaking of the emergence of what Lévi-Strauss would call pensée sauvage, suggested that the world of primal mediation is hell.

Underlying this perception is the principle that mediation is indeed primary, and that communication is a special case of mediation. Mediation belongs to the concept that everything mediates: that mediating one thing to another is the nature of reality, the essential connectivity of everything. Communication builds out of mediation the nodes which we then learn to see as subjects and objects, as senders, messages, channels and receivers.

Mediation, the intimate ecology of everything, had to be ripped apart to constitute communication. Communication is thus at a first moment the means by which domination and expropriation are secured. At the same time, however, communication makes explicit, precisely by separating, the interdependence of people, but to the exclusion of things, of the environing world (techné and physis.

As automation expands from the factory (organisation of humans and ancestral intelligence) to the internet of things, it strives to complete the universality of the commodity form and probabilistic management of populations. But the vast statistical warehouse of indifferent data begins to yield to the specificity – irreducible and im-mense (unmeasurable) – of the anecdote: the reconnection of the riven parts, the new mediation – peer-to-peer no longer as property of population but as crowd, as particles aligned in the magnetic field of their shared and mutual desire.

Against the immanence of primal mediation, the emergent mediation has learnt from the disconnect of communication the absence of the object of desire. It is now that something more which the commodity always evoked in its false promise of satisfaction, but freed from its bogus anchorage in commodity exchange.

Anecdotal Evidence (first pass)

The dominant models of truth (and knowledge more broadly) in the 21st century do not include anecdotes. Anecdotal evidence is down-graded in common parlance, current affairs, and the neo-liberal university. Data (especially 'big data'), statistics and (with exceptions) models are more trusted. The anecdote, as the prized tool of humanities research, should not be cast as an inherited practice whose archives should be protected: it should be valued as a uniquely powerful method (and site) of analysis and interpretation. At some future date I want to do this properly, with chapter and verse from key concepts like Geertz's thick description, looking back to the vicissitudes of testimonio in Latin American literature, poring perhaps over the use of exempla in early modern literature, and the place of the anecdote among the ancients. Here just the beginnings of a thought.

In an earlier post on happiness, I cited Adorno's principle that 'the greater good' is always a means to defer, displace and deny the happiness of the here and now. We could also mention Derrida's idea that an ethical act only occurs when there is no code of ethics operating to instruct us: when, that is, we have to act on our own resources in the face of a specific situation. Whatever the place of rules (such as the laws of physics or the statistical likelihood of a utilitarian benefit), both happiness and ethical action occur in unique moments. Tolstoy's principle (Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way) should also reflect that happy families have their own uniqueness. Humanities research concerns itself, at least in part, with the unique constellation of happiness and unhappiness, and the unique moments of ethical action. My model here is Bresson's Au Hasard Balthasar.

In law, witnessing calls up the untrustworthy character of the witness. The anecdote must be told. It involves
the event observed
the observation
the recounting
and the situation of the recounting – its position in arguing a case

Thus there is a degree of performativity in the anecdote, at least as much as there is indexicality: its truth concerns both fidelity to the event and the observation, and to the account (the aesthetic form) and the situation of the account. The anecdote concerns the event, recasting an old event in terms of its importance to a new situation, one where an evaluation or decision is in process of being reached. The anecdote has the power to move through time – this is its ontological ground as fidelity.

We might be better thinking of photography – especially cinematography – as anecdote, rather than as datum.

We might be better placed considering a cultural moment (Geertz's example of a wink) or an artwork as an anecdote, whose meaning – whose relation to both past event and present situation – is not permanently fixed, not because there was no initiating event to be witnessed, but precisely because there was.

happiness

The eudaemonist believes in happiness as a good, indeed the Good. The judicious eudaemonist Aristotle weighted various claims and decided that the life of the mind was the greatest happiness. We might like to say: beauty, love, the contemplation or cultivation of plants, animals and landscapes . . . Our happinesses are idiosyncratic, but everyone recognizes that some are more trustworthy or (not necessarily the same thing) longer lasting. Things we buy rarely make us happy in the same way dappled shade or embracing your beloved do.

Politics should be no less than the quest for happiness, for the conditions of happiness. The US Constitution backs down here: the right to the pursuit of happiness is not the same as happiness as the pre-eminent goal of the polis.

How are we to be happy? The question has two terms: who is this 'we'? And what is this common happiness (or should it be happinesses?)? I take from Adorno the principle that neither I nor we have the right to demand that anyone – not I, not we, not, certainly, they – should sacrifice happiness for some higher goal: there is no higher goal. We should suffer no unhappiness in ourselves or in others, no matter what pretense of greater or deferred good.

Happiness is not a right but a duty. Something we must strive for. Happiness as Agamben notes in his little essay on Magic (in Profanations) is never deserved or earned. It comes to us by luck or by magic, but it never comes if we – this still mysterious we – remove the condition of its possibility. One of the myriad ways we can do that is by destroying our environments, urban or natural, or for that matter cultural. A poisoned environment reduces the chances of happiness, and for that formal reason alone is to be fought against.

Happiness is not a personal goal. The persona is a mask, a performance for an audience – for mother, lover, child, boss, employee, student, teacher . . . Today we perform our multiple personae on blogs, microblogs, social media sites, SMS . . . each performing a facet and perhaps some kind of truth about our selves leaks out, but we know that in each instance we do not and cannot put out into the world everything we are, have been and can become. We are traversed by joys and fears that are not our own: a sporting win, a fiscal crisis. We are perpetually other than ourselves, and so cannot be selfish in looking for happiness.

Nor can we be happy in the presence of pain. Though we have inured ourselves to beggars, and learned to triumph at another's cost, the toy snatched form another child is always a poisoned chalice, and we scarcely know how to enjoy what we fail to share. If each of us is equipped with instinctual drives to survive, reproduce and shape the immediate environs to our comfort, we have learned that these ends are worst achieved alone: in this at least Hobbes was right. Our happiness is framed and formed in the need for the other, to make babies, prepare food, and build worlds, and as the necessary audience for our performances of self. Happiness is framed and formed again by our participation in the other's survival, reproduction, comfort and performance. The illimitable demand of the Other is not ethical, as Levinas stipulates, but political: the polis of the human that requires absolutely the happiness of others in order to find the happiness that is mine.

Our desires are not ours alone. Great tides of need sweep us up, sweep through our very veins and synapses. The same forces that make us individual make us social. Each of us is a nexus of the same needs and desires that forms and frames our fellows. This is that becoming-human which, severally and in unison, we embark upon with our first cries, and which maps out the task of the polis, of politics as conducting towards the Good Life, and the associations and movements we create in pursuit of it.

Alas. The institutional politics of actually existing polities are machines for defining exclusively the 'us' who deserve happiness. Since happiness cannot be deserved, this mode of polity – ours, based on wealth as privation (property as the right to deprive another of the enjoyment thereof) – therefore both destroys happiness and makes it impossible (because such polities pretend that happiness is possible only for an 'us' at the expense of a 'them'). Debt is the invention of a future absolutely dependent on the past. To that extent, our economic system is designed to kill the future as the open possibility of magic and therefore to kill the very possibility of happiness.

Happiness cannot exist in the abstract but only in the concrete, specific instance. We give only 'selves' to surveillance and to electoral politics: performances couched in clichés that lend themselves to management. Such selves and their efficient aggregations define human yearning, joy and suffering as norms and deviations. But we live in unique situations and events, not averages. Whenever the study of people takes on a scientific style (taxonomic psychologies, the pseudo-science of economics divorced from politics) it fails in its duty to happiness. The only truthful evidence is anecdotal, just as the only credible ethics is one that decides each act on its own conditions, not those of a rule.

Redefining the 'us' so that it includes non-humans redefines the human and the nonhuman, and happiness as what can only be achieved in common, in future, and in particular. We do not save a forest by starving its inhabitants; nor do we save the inhabitants by destroying the forest. Unlike freedom, which Mandela claimed to be indivisible but which is everywhere divided between the freedom of the rich and the debt-slavery of the poor, happiness is indivisible; but it is also (unlike freedom) multiple. As long as the happinesses of the forest and its inhabitants are mutually exclusive, we have failed.

This is where the real work begins

The Afterlife of Cinema

The "Death of Cinema" (DoC)is a theme addressed by several prominent film aestheticians (Rodowick, Mulvey, Balides and in a rather different tenor Doane among them). It's fundamental premise is that analog cinematography had a privileged relation ('indexicality') to the real which is no longer true of digital media

In a paper at the White Rose seminar hosted by York University, I argued a) the technical detail of the argument is deeply flawed b) there is no unified fied of practice, no essence, to "the" digital. The second half of the paper, which I didn't have time to deliver, starts off like this. I hope to write up the full argument: any comments very welcome


DoC is a humanism. Enshrining what analog cinema captures as 'reality', it sacralises the reality constructed in cinema as 'real' reality. So what is the real, really? To the extent that it can be captured in the relation of indexicality, it is a gesture on the part of symbolic activity – linguistic, mathematical or imagistic – to single out what is excluded from the symbolic domain. It is in this case what symbolization produces as its other. Just as the subject is "an effect of language" (and other symbol systems), so reality is an effect of alienation, that produces the object of the subject-object relation. It is a flaw in the flow of images and numbers. We might ask, for example, which contains more reality: a photographic landscape or a map? We set all sorts of nets and traps: reality is what evades them, the impossible object of our desire for knowledge, possession and the order of knowledge and command.

. . . . The 'reality' of cinematic depictions is not merely an illusion (the reality effect), not just the guarantor of the subject as subject to and of Reality as a given (and so of the ideological apparatus of cinema) but what proves to the imaginary collective subject of Humanity that it is not the author of the reality which depiction creates for it. In this process, however, there is a displacement: authority cannot reside in Humanity, because subjectivity is posed as an effect of Reality (and so not, for example, as effect of language or political economy). Authorship, and with it authority, must therefore be displaced: onto a relation between nature and the technologies that mediate it. This denial of human authorship actively excludes the human, as subject or as polity, society or culture. Thus the construct Reality can finally function as the object to which, individual or collective, the subject is subject. For Negri, in this displacement is revealed the fundamentally human quality of the world (Art and Multitude 36), because this interaction of nature and technology is the human itself. It is this illusion that the DoC thesis exists to defend and, if possible, restore to its throne.

Medium Extremely Specific

Midway through the 20th century, in the age of MacLuhan and Greenberg, modern media industries like film and the press seemed stable, technically and institutionally. Theories of medium-specificity, based on the stability of film run on sprockets or of painting as a practice involving pigment on canvas, made sense then. Rosalind Krauss's attack on this conjuncture, and her proposal of a 'postmedium condition', is understandable: the era when print, paint and film were utterly separate is over. The kind of binary oppositions between analog and digital that are voiced in film studies are a naive reworking of the Greenberg-MacLuhan theses. Krauss would be right - if she did not ignore the critical feature of new media formations, especially in artistic practices: that media are remade in more and more specific constellations, in order to be used in unique ensembles. If on the one hand there is a tendency towards software standardisation, on the other there is radical divergence in technique, and radical innovation in technologies and their assemblage into new apparatuses. These developments must drive us to pay far more detailed attention to the materiality of artworks now than in the recent past, when what a work was made of scarcely signified, since most works were made of the same things as all the others.

Vector Politics and the Aesthetics of Disappearance

From a chapter drafted for John Armitage (ed) Virilio Now

To build a new future is the greatest of challenges. When Virilio forces us to look into the abyss of final catastrophe, he makes us consider not only what is at stake, but how we might address it. In his pioneering work on ecological politics he demonstrates how much depends on how we see ourselves in relatiuon to the world. Today, as the terrains of 'immaterial labour' and the physical infrastructure of the network coincide, Virilio, in common with feminist phenomenologists of digital media like N. Katherine Hayles (1999), Margaret Morse (1998) and Michelle White (2002), argues against the mind-body split that informs the cyber-visionary desire to leave behind the crumpled, painful 'meat' of the body. Instead, Virilio argues, we have to understand that the general accident is not just a technological flaw, as in his insight that the inventions of the train, the airplane, nuclear power, internet and bio-engineering are always simultaneously the invention of the train crash, the plane wreck, meltdown, information crash and genetic time-bomb. The condition is however more general and formative than that: Virilio notes that 'the production of any 'substance' is simultaneously the production of a typical accident (Virilio 1993: 212). As Jussi Parikka observes of this passage, 'An accident . . . is not in this context intended to mean the opposite of absolute and neccessary, as Aristotelian metaphysics has maintained. Instead, accidents are an inherent part of an entity' (Parikka 2007: 4). This might recall Adorno's praise of disappointment, and perhaps also signal the danger attendant on construing the future not as risk management but as unknowable other. In other words, Virilio points us towards an aesthetics of failure: of the inherent risk that any object – and phenomenologically therefore any subject – runs of failing to continue to be. It comes down then to a duty of care, for the planet, and consequently therefore also for the people who inhabit it. It seems then that Virilio is correct: a putative vectoral network, one that is not self-identical, that evolves without notice, that plunges into accident and disappointment, and in which machines have as much say as humans is a terrifying risk. But it may also be the only way to escape the stifling grid of destruction which is the military, economic, political and cultural standoff of a present which denies hope to the mass of humanity and the planet itself.

Innocence

To paraphrase Arendt (Responsibility and Judgement, 111), the greatest evil is committed by no-one. Today the Good has vanished and we live in the era when evil is opposed only by innocence. But innocence is only the alibi of of a systemic evil for which no-one takes responsibility, of which no-one is agent. Each of us 'needs' a car, 'has no alternative', respects the 'rights' of shareholders. At every level the alibi persists, while millions die – innocently. Only if they protest, with arms, against their deaths, do they lose their innocence and become either victims or evil. Innocence is so deeply ensconced – from the paedocracy of television (Hartley) to the construction of paedophilia as the ultimate evil – that we are come to the idiot moment where all of us claim to be either children or villains. For the children among us there is only wide-eyed surprise at the results of our inaction – for lack of action and action without consequence is the prerogative of infants – while the handful of genuine villains confront their own despair, as did Saul. A world in which we must be either nietzschean aristocrats or Eichmanns is not a world

Democracy and affect

Democratisation would appear to imply standardisation: for everyone to enjoy luxuries, they have to be mass produced. The secrets of the great masters remain safe (Rembrandt's blacks, memling's azure), as they always were, the proprietary knowledge of an arcane guild system. Such too remains the case, as I learned in conversation with Elaine Shemilt, in the field of silk-screen printers' inks, and such may well be the case with with certain digital photographic printing techniques.

A different case holds for something like Rhythm 'n' Hues' fur algorithm: available for the use of only the top-end productions (Narnia, Kong), but as end-product democratically available to anyone who cares to watch the movies featuring it.

Democratisation means we all get a taste of luxury, but a luxury which travels in two directions and is devalued in each. In one, we plebs get access to the RnH fur algorithm in KK and Lion Witch; in the other, high culture loots the supermarkets of the popular, and discovers in varieties of pop and neo-pop (Paolozzi, Koons, yBa) only an inauthenticity.

What happens now – 2008 – is something like this.
A: migrants and the reserve army of the un- or/ marginally employed suffer the precariousness of life at the edge, and develop cultural forms to see them through the experience
B: a parallel experience occurs - but with far less risk of loss of life or liberty - as old professionals and skilled working class are managerialised, and as older patronage systems are replaced by markets
C: in this new displacement, not only does the old bourgeois culture no longer offer the same securities; but subjectivity, which has always been its its key product since the invention of the novel, evaporates as a centring repository of experience
D: At this juncture the newly managerialised "precariat" upload the cultural forms of the truly disprivileged]

The lost authenticity of experience among the cosmopolitan elite, as the social fraction which most feeds the cultural system of the newly managerialised, is replaced by the loot from the underclass: suburban boys listening to hip hop. This falsely assumed authenticity, which in its assumption becomes ironic and inauthentic, becomes the new high culture. That high neo-pop aesthetic is then democratised back to those from whom it was expropriated in the first place.

The evacuation of subjectivity is a result of its invention, in Romanticism and the 18th-19th century novel, and its industrialisation in Hollywood and Tin pan Alley. This triumphal subjject, theorised in depth from hegel to Husserl, is the terminus ad quem, the end to which experience tends, the locus therefore of truth. But it is the under-remarked fact that this subject had to be invented, and more specifically the social consequence sof its invention, that eventually betrays those who have bought into it most deeply: the middle class and the labour aristocracy. These were the ones who had the deepest buy-in to colonisation, as Wallerstein argues, but also into a worldview which their masters did not need to believe, merely to promulgate. This was the class or social fraction that bought in to subjectivity without irony, and as a result are the most betrayed by its collapse when it becomes clewar that they are not valued for their subjectivity but for their functions. This is the class that receives and delivers Gauri Viswanathan's Eng Lit, Angel Rama's myth of the enlightened mestizaje.

The myth of subjectivity is premised on its initial construction. Whatever raw materials pre-exist this modern subject, their construction as that subject turned out to be the very ones required to turn it into a commodity, or rather to be the terminal point for the consumption of subjectivities, which could now be manufactured on demand, and in increasing numbers, but according to only a most primitive roster of affective states. It is these states that are the nub of the standardisation of democracy as surrogacy and as inauthenticity. Perhaps the most alluring of all such states is the most intrinsically contradictory: the popularisation of the aristocratic attitude that Wyndham Lewis ascribed to Nietzsche. Today that emerges as the democratisation of elitism, where elitism is the state of mind that looks down from a height on the little people, a vantage which is promulgated through the worst and best of our fictions, from Troy to The Wire.

Crisis in the meaning of meaning

Meaning was the once-natural sequence of being, knowing, interpreting, judging, willing and acting . It is this sequence which no longer operates as it did in earlier times.

The nature of being is de-natured when things are no longer simply themselves but monetary values, signs, status symbols.

Knowing is no longer definite but probabilistic.

Interpretation depends on knowledge, but when knowledge is subsumed into data, it is no longer known but, like data, processed.

True judgement occurs when I take responsibility for my action but that responsibility is removed when my every action has been modelled for its statistical likelihood.

Willing requires individual agency, but that agency dissolves in the mass-modelling of scenarios and the management of lifestyles.

Action is in crisis as a result of the sheer scale of the tasks facing us in a globalised network. And probability and complexity disrupt the foresight on which we can plan the effects of acting.

The immersive spectacle of the early 21st century is a response to these changes. So too is the development of the lo-res solution, in which the illusion of individuality and individual agency is imposed through the isolation of the individualised interface in order to produce a normative and mass replication of noise. Like Reality TV, whose selection of idiosyncratic and eccentric contestants is there to demonstrate that after all we are all individuals, mobile media divide in the interests of maintaining the fictive individual as the basic unit of consumption and social aggregation. Slack-jawed submission to blockbuster effects from Las Vegas to the Sydney Olympics substitutes for having a place in a world. Our fragile, ephemeral communities of contact lists are meant to substitute for the complex networks of kinship and locality that we have lost.

It is ironic that in this new age of biopolitics, we no longer hear the hundred-year old discourse about the crowd, and that, at the moment at which meaning evaporates, we devote ourselves to . . . psychology!

Wallace Stevens

"A fortunate powem or a fortunate painting is a synthesis of exceptional concentration (that degree of concentration that has a lucidity of its own, in which we see clearly what we want to do and do it instantly and perfectly)"

A perfect experience.

royksopp - remind me

Michael Dieter turned us on to this as exemplary data visualisation from You Tube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBvaHZIrt0o

Syriana

Under conditions of 'the abyss of total freedom' among the datastreams we used to use for meaning-making, what of representation?

It has moved from depiction to data-gathering. Scientific and socio-technical apparatus collects such m,assive quantities of data, the significance of the individual datum shrivels to insignificance. Swamped by statistical likelihood and trends, the datum itself is without significance, without meaning, meaningless. Picturing remains, but lives a sad afterlife. Its ideological function today is to try to persuade us that it is possible to picture experience, and that experience matters

The irony is that it does: experience matters to the extent that it is the residual real omitted from the circulation of data. This residue is that element of embodied life that escapes regimes of health, fitness, education and programmed entertainment. Its poverty is precisely that it is embodied, in an era in which each body is rigourously demarcated as the boundary of the personal, so that the best we can hope for is the interpersonal, never the social.

It is the social that forms the true boundary of a system which comprises the binary of data and experience: information and embodiment are two sides of a single coin. The real relations between people today appear to them in the fantastic guise of a relation between data systems and irreducibly individual experience.

It remains to make apparaent the lost relations of the real. At first this art will take the form of tragedy, the tragedy of coincidence – though that is an oxymoron. Coincidence because causality can oly reduce the social to conspiracy; tragedy because conspiracy and coincidence alike are experienced as fate.

How might realism re-emerge as intimation (making intimate) of the social, without presenting it as something already fated? How reverse the trend, apparent since the end of privacy in the era of cookie technology, towards the publication of intimacies? How to imbue the intimate with pubicness?

on freedom

The problem dogs Western philosophy. Kant's moral philosophy for example rests on an antinomy between the laws of nature on the one hand, and freedom as the ability to instigate an action which is not caused by them, even though the act itself and its consequences must abide by those laws as well as their own motivation. Thus Kant can argue that freedom is rooted in causality; that both abject obedience to nature and absolute freedom would produce chaos; and that order depends on the restraining power of freedom over the blind determination of physics. Commenting on these antinomies in his lecture series of 1961 (2000: 71), Adorno notes that the resulting rigour of the categorical imperative derives from Kant's embrace of freedom, so defined, to the exclusion of all other contenders for the title of 'the good'; and that as a result, perhaps, Kant's reason is condemned to being 'reasonable', to the exclusion of contradiction. So much so, indeed, that Arendt could argue, with reference to the categorical imperative, that it is 'as though the one and the same imperative , "Thou shalt not contradict yourself" is axiomatic for logic and ethics' (Arendt 2003: 153). For Kant natural causes will always be 'subaltern', says Adorno, which is a contradiction firstly because both causality and freedom are 'unmoved movers', that is absolutes, despite the fact that natural causes are supposedly subaltern, and yet freedom is obliged nonetheless to obey them. Moreover, as Adorno observes, Kant may be right to see the infinite regress of causes as an absurdity; but diminishing each natural cause to subalternity doesn't leave enough causation to cause everything. In Marx, we might feel constrained to add, the proletariat's historical destiny acts like a law of nature, and one with enough causality to produce the social; but that it is the freedom of the bourgeoisie that paradoxically stops its from effecting its goals. I start with this problem of freedom because it is far from clear that freedom is a Good in the moral sense, and that it may be neither source nor goal of the aesthetic. In fact, to the contrary, I take it as axiomatic that communication, which I take to be the central issue at stake in the relations between aesthetics and power, is both subject to the laws of nature and is in many respects a law of nature itself.