Revolution Earth Playlist

in honour of the publication of Revolution Earth on Kobo to back up the paperback and Kindle versions from Amazon, reposted here from lambertnagle.com
REVOLUTION EARTH PLAYLIST
1.Tracy Chapman – Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution
2. The Clash – London Calling
3. The Mutton Birds – Dominion Road
4. The Mutton Birds – Anchor Me
5. Finn Brothers – Won’t Give In
6. Blur – Song 2
7. Midnight Oil - Beds are Burning
8. Yothu Yindi – Treaty (Remix)
9. B-52s - Revolution Earth
10. Gurrumul Yunupinga – Djarimirri

Visible Time

scraps from a talk I'm giving in Zagreb at the Broken Time symposium this weekend

Time is the medium of change. For that reason, it is necessary to control it. Calendars are more ancient than Stonehenge or the Pyramids. They shape time, sculpt time, order time, and seek control over the monstrous ocean of change that threatens to engulf each human life and all human societies. Humans are the historical animals: time is more for us than the cycle of the seasons. We seek greater orders across ancestral centuries. We recall a golden age, and look forward to another. There was an Old Testament and a New, and there will be a Second Coming. We seek such order because we are driven to it. Freud almost knew this when he described thanatos, the death instinct, the drive to decay and entropy. That is one extreme of the drive to order. The other is totalitarianism. We tidy the corners of the world where we live to keep the monstrous tides of pollution at bay, sometimes sweeping up dust, sometimes driving out strangers. The struggle, as Mary Douglas names it, between Purity and Danger (bigpdf here), structures lives and makes art an essential process of walking the boundaries between them, drawing in life from the chaotic margins to replenish what would otherwise become the sterile taxonomies of organization.

. . . There is a leakage at this level of the tiny fragments of time, a leakage of those even smaller fragments. These cannot be caught by sampling at ever more extreme rates. What is lost in any sampling regime, anything working on the fragment as such, is the puzzle of continuity first posed in Zeno's paradox 2500 years ago. To measure out life in units is to fail to understand the disintegration of integers. That lack of self-identity that troubles the totalizing self-presentation of the image as presence is the same dialectical negation that pulls apart the stability of the pixel. At the same time, the remnant of each division of time into units is a mark not of a near-enough approximation but of the failure of division to grasp the unstill gesture of motion as a trajectory, not a plot of points. Time is a vector, or more properly a scalar product of the multiplication of many vectors: in each case, a motion with direction and therefore marked by and as change.

. . . The time of the glitch, the time of the dead pixel, the time of laborious attention to the world and its pictured ordering: these are the particularities, the unique instances of suffering and joy that refuse universal history and its diary. They are instruments of hope and, I hope, pledges of the beauty that escapes.

Origins of Phenomenology in the Enclosures

Whatever else it is, place (as Arturo Escobar notes, page 7 of the remarkable Territories of Difference) is the site of embodiment. Phenomenology emerges as a philosophical movement at the moment of Western Europe's loss of place, necessitating a re-imagination of the body as the last remnant of place lost in the processes of enclosure and colonialism. Today the body itself becomes territory and therefore subject to enclosure, colonisation and primitive accumulation, on the basis of a Cartesian dualism itself first experienced as the exile and deracination of the military camp where Descartes wrote the Discourse on Method. Posited as universal, the body can be extrapolated and exploited as commodity, the universal par excellence of modernity. That universality, applied to land as pure territory (terra nullius), is a rational account of expropriation which in its universality excludes the particularity of indigenous and later mestizo thought. In plce of place, modernity constructs the existential condition, a condition unthinkable in indigenous traditions.

18 Jan 2013

odourless and silent snow
the white of all we do not know

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.

Net.control, climate politics and a defense of angels

Isn't it wonderful what goverments can do when they set their minds to it? The UK govenrment (Tory wing) are stumbling over their dif for net surveillance while the BRICK countries move once more to get the ITU to take over the running of the internet (ITU being a UN body is responsible to nation-states; but given the deregulation of telecoms is now also subject to the will of corporate members). For some details check New Scientist, the daring if clumsily named WCITleaks and internet governance consultants nxt who have published the restricted documents from the discussions. Avaaz have also started a petition, and there are more links from their site. So there is always the possibility of getting political movement when enough power is brokered through UN agencies. But what about issues where nation states don't want top change? The Doha meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change just broke up with almost nothing to show for istelf: a pitifully small fund, marked by foot-dragging in actual payments, for poor regions devastated by weather whose probabilities are reckoned to be increased through emissions from the welthy. And, er, that's about it. The Irish Times has a suitably downbeat account from one campaigner: “We lobby and campaign so hard to move things forward, but all we get are crumbs from the table.” Apparently more US citizens believe in the existence of angels than accept the reality of climate change. They may have something there. The internet may not be the engine of wisdom we once hoped it might be; but an internet censored by the Saudis will be an engine of stupidity. We might need some angels: our politicians are clearly failing at anythng useful, wise or good.