“Get Rid of Yourself”

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Get Rid of Yourself from zoo on Vimeo.

Bernadette Corporation - featuring Chloe Sevigny and Werner von Delmont. (2003, 61 min)

Description:

Get Rid of Yourself is a video-film-tract addressed to those who anonymously embody the return of political activism within Empire. While its initial sounds and images were filmed during the riots in Genoa, 2001, these materials are pulled apart and recomposed in order to locate the intensity of a shared experience, rather than producing one more documentary version of the programmed and hyper-mediatized confrontation of the G8 counter-summit. Elaborating a complex and rhythmic form of address via sound/image disjunctions, cheap video effects and performance, the film declares its own exile from a biopolitical space-time where nothing ever happens. The crisis it announces is the sudden return of history, but this time without characters or a story, and of a politics without subjects.

Provisionally aligning itself with the so-called ‘Black Bloc’ movement – with the arrogance of its discourse as well as the force and style of their resistance – Get Rid of Yourself is an encounter with emerging, non-instituted or identity-less forms of protest that refuse the representational politics of the official Left. Edited in the aftermath of 9/11 – a period of doubt, reflection and heightened security measures worldwide – the film also attempts to measure the strange distance these events have crossed, and the increasing repression under which the feeling of ‘civil war’ has been buried in the meantime. A filmed essay that works by betraying its own form, Get Rid of Yourself tries to approach what is most open in an event, rather than capturing and completing it as something recognizable.

Sperber and Narvaez on Human Rationality

Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist. Sperber was trained in anthropology at the Sorbonne and the University of Oxford. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology and linguistic pragmatics where he works on an approach to cultural evolution known as the "epidemiology of representations". perber currently holds the positions of Directeur de Recherche émérite at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute.

Darcia Narvaez is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Collaborative for Ethical Education at the University of Notre Dame. Her research explores questions of moral cognition, moral development and moral character education. She has developed several integrative theories: Adaptive Ethical Expertise, Integrative Ethical Education, Triune Ethics Theory.

Bellow Sperber and Narvaez talk human cognition, animal intelligence and argumentative reason.

h/t DMF

DeLanda on Deleuze and the Open-ended Becoming of the World

Acknowledging the messy, mangled openness of the world is the sign of mature thinking. The multitude of agents and creeping potencies that commune to open whole worlds can only be ignored and explained away so long, as epistemology is secondary to the vicissitudes of ontic relation. Welcome to the wilderness of the real..

Deleuze and the Open-ended Becoming of the World

by Manuel DeLanda

The distinction between the possible and the real assumes a set of predefined forms (or essences) which acquire physical reality as material forms that resemble them. From the morphogenetic point of view, realizing a possibility does not add anything to a predefined form, except reality. The distinction between the virtual and the actual, on the other hand, does not involve resemblance of any kind (e.g. our example above, in which a topological point becomes a geometrical sphere) and far from constituting the essential identity of a form, intensive processes subvert identity, since now forms as different as spheres and cubes emerge from the same topological point. As Deleuze writes,

"Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle. In this sense, actualization or differentiation is always a genuine creation."

Deleuze criticism of nineteenth century thermodynamics should be understood in this context. By concentrating on the final, extensive form achieved once the intensive process is finished, thermodynamics failed to see that, before the differences in intensity are canceled, the final form (or more exactly, its topological counterpart) is already there, guiding (or acting as an attractor for) the morphogenetic process. In other words, seemingly abstract topological attractors have a perfectly real existence, as virtual entities, even before a given geometrical form becomes actual. And this simply emphasizes Deleuze ontological attitude towards the world: he is not only a realist regarding the actual, but also a realist towards the virtual...

The problem is now, of course, that we have made the world open at the expense of giving up its objectivity, in other words, the world becomes open only through human intervention. For some this relativism may not seem like a problem, particularly when the only alternative is believed to be a realism based on a correspondence theory of truth, a realism deeply committed to essentialism and rationalism. Clearly, if the idea of material objects independent of human experience is based on a conception of their genesis in terms of preexisting essences, then we are back in a closed world where all possibilities have been defined in advance by those essences. Similarly, if the world is pictured as a fixed set of beings to which our theories correspond like a reflection or a snapshot, then that world would be hardly capable of an open becoming.

Yet, the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze makes it clear that a belief in the autonomous existence of the world does not have to based on essentialist or rationalist views. It will be the task of this essay to make a case for what we may call Deleuze’s "neo-realist" approach, an approach involving a theory of the genesis of form that does away with essences, as well as a theory of epistemology that does not rely on a view of truth as a faithful reflection of a static world of beings. I would like to begin with a quote from what is, in my view, Deleuze’s most important work, "Difference and Repetition". It is traditional since Kant to distinguish between the world as it appears to us humans, that is, the world of phenomena or appearances, and those aspects of the world existing by themselves and referred to as "noumena". Deleuze writes:

"Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given…Difference is not phenomenon but the nuomenon closest to the phenomenon…Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned…Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity."

There are several things to notice in this quote. First of all, it is clear that for Deleuze noumena are not (as they were for Kant) beyond human knowledge. On the other hand, that which is beyond what is given to us in experience is not a being but a becoming, a difference-driven process by which the given is given.

Read More: Here

DJ Monk One's deep Gil Scott Heron revolutionary mix from WBAI 99.5 FM

from Ill Doctrine:

The Gil Scott Heron mix by jsmooth995

Harman on McLuhan and “technological determinism”

I have always thought of Marshall McLuhan as a quintessential assemblage thinker. Reading McLuhan started me thinking of technology and media as something 'weird', almost alien - as something that abducts our biology and hooks it up to the non-human. Of course, this thought leads to thinking about humans as primal technologies in our own right, or as extended mediums hooked to cellular communities that can't 'perceive' the effects we have on their capacities, just as we humans fail to perceive the effects our technologic assemblages have on our community until the technology has already become obsolete. McLuhan brings that and more into the mix.

Below is Graham Harman riffing on the mistaken view that McLuhan was a "technological determinist". He wasn't. I'm excited to see/read what Harman and company do later this year, and next, with McLuhan's work. No doubt something strange this way comes.

"McLuhan’s chief idea is the overwhelming power of background conditions over any conscious surface content. The content of television shows is no more important than graffiti on an atomic bomb, and so forth. We see this idea not only in the signature phrase “the medium is the message,” but also his praise of rhetoric and grammar in the old Trivium over dialectic, as well as his greater interest in formal than in efficient causation.

However, unlike Heidegger (another thinker obsessed with the greater importance of the background than the surface), McLuhan is in no way an advocate of passive awaiting. While it is true that the background medium is all-important for McLuhan, he also thinks it is well within our power to change the background medium. For McLuhan unlike Heidegger, it’s not Being itself that sends epochs. It’s primarily artists, but ultimately anyone else who generates new media."

Read More: Here

The Ideological Crisis of Western Capitalism

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001), and is the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists") and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

From Truth Out:

The Ideological Crisis of Western Capitalism

by Joseph E. Stiglitz

Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology – the belief in free and unfettered markets – brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980’s until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world. Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year.

Moreover, output growth in the United States was not economically sustainable. With so much of US national income going to so few, growth could continue only through consumption financed by a mounting pile of debt. I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government. Alas, that has not been the case. On the contrary, a resurgence of right-wing economics, driven, as always, by ideology and special interests, once again threatens the global economy – or at least the economies of Europe and America, where these ideas continue to flourish.

Read More: Here

George Lakoff on The Political Mind

George Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is most famous for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society. He is particularly famous for his concept of the "embodied mind". Below Lakoff discusses concepts from his book, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain:

American politics explained

Sometimes polls work. Here is all of modern American politics explained in a single handy chart. From Mother Jones:

Wendell McShine

Today I discovered the work of the brilliant young multimedia artist Wendell McShine. McShine’s artistic output mixes the harsh textures of street culture with unique blends of Caribbean and Mexican sensibilities. His vast body of work might be described as both political shamanism and mystical realism.

The videos below showcase two separate collections of work McShine put together a few years ago. Here is how Wendell describes the first:

There is a natural synchronicity, in Mexico referred to as “Mayan Timing”, that connects my latest body of work, “La Puerta Abierta” (The Open Door) and Sheldon's song “Prosper”. The coming together of our work in this special animated music video can be seen as an emotional out pouring of healing words and visuals stitching together the delicate fabric of the human condition and Trinidadian nationalism.

Prosper - Wendell Mc Shine


Prosper from wendell mc shine on Vimeo.


The Offering - Wendell Mc Shine


THE OFFERING from wendell mc shine on Vimeo.

Technology, Modes and Marxism: Some Cursory Notes

Technologies are not neutral and never innocuous. We prioritize, focus, value and engage very different aspects of the world depending on our particular technic extensions and technological orientations. These life-priorities are framed (structured) and unfold in relation to our infrastructural conditions and the resultant cognitive skills and technical procedures.

Heidegger talked about the ge-stell to describe what conditions come into being when technology arises and how certain technic configurations frame (or enframe) what we do, think and how we relate. McLuhan was pretty clear about how technology extends and augments human life. And several people, not the least of which Braudel, Serres and Foucault, have laid bare the power relations involved in acquiring and maintaining certain technological regimes.

We could talk about all this in terms of ‘modes’: modes of production, modes of communication, modes of semantic evaluation (cultural schema), modes emotional regulation (habitus), modes or energy utilization (extraction and deployment), etc., etc. The key is that any change in a particular mode can affect the overall configuration of modes. So if we change particular technic modes there is a change in certain cognitive modes (skills, assumptions, values, etc.).

Supplemental to this point, if different modes of being or social assemblages generate different aesthetic-existential relations, and therefore ways of understanding the world, then particularly dominating modes of being and becoming foreclose the possibility of honoring and incorporating beneficial instances of alterity. That is to say, the sprawling technical regimes of late capitalism (“the machines”) have proven to be brutal interventions into so many intrinsically valuable – although never completely positive or healthy - life-ways that have existed on this planet. The vicious expansion of capitalistic technic modes have decreased the diversity of modes in general and therefore decreased our capacity for recognizing and generating alternatives.

Moreover, Marxism, broadly conceived, is a paradigm that also originates from within the matrix of brutal ethnocentric technical and cultural assumptions. Evidence of this comes from Marx’s own writing on India and his denigration of non-urban, non-industrial life. And Marxists of many variations have continued to denounce different modes of being as mere “backwardness”. This, coupled with Marxism’s metaphysical faith in technology and the progressive dialectic of history, is in many ways both a reaction to and continuation of historically dominating techno-cultural modes of being. Marxist imperialism is still imperialism it would seem.

But we need not bow down to the master narrative (religion?) of Marxist doxa, in order to be against capitalism or against brutalizing modes in general, but, instead foster an openness for hybrid narratives and more complex understandings on the way towards materially instantiating more mutualistic modes of being.

A reinvigorated revolutionary stance, then, would interrogate the assumptions and ontology of existing paradigms and modes, and open itself to minor revisions viz. alternative (non-western, non-phallocentric) ways of knowing, being and relating. Far from being an “unthinking”, a pluralistic ethical and practical assessment of oppression and politics would be a conscious and multi-rational projekt of reflexivity and praxis that attends to the most appropriate and pragmatic practices and insights of all available modes.