conversations

connectivity

In Connectivity in the Australian Humanities Review Jessica K. Weir says that:

The need for profound change in our intellectual traditions is a part of the current re-examination of water management in the Murray-Darling Basin. The language of water management has changed to recognise the ‘environmental needs’ of the river, described as environmental water allocations or environmental flows...Vast extractions of water from the Murray River have only been achieved by water managers mobilising knowledge frameworks that narrowly perceive river water as a resource for human consumption.

Weir says that we need to push the current re-examination of water management further, and move the focus to our life-sustaining connections with rivers; this is what I am calling ‘connectivity thinking’. Connectivity is a way of being in the world and is intended as a conceptual framework that focuses on relationships, flows and connections. The basic premise is that we are unavoidably part of the world (and are, therefore, unavoidably responsible for it)

Deleuze, vitalism, ecology

A good question: How do Deleuze and Guattari help us rethink our ecological crises beyond the impasses of State-sanctioned resource exploitation and reactive environmentalism? I'm not sure of the answer even though I am sympathetic to Deleuze's biophilosophy which I have interpreted along vitalist lines. Now, as Leslie Dema observes in "Inorganic, Yet Alive": How Can Deleuze and Guattari Deal With the Accusation of Vitalism? in Rhizomes:

It is now typically considered an insult to call a philosophical position 'vitalist'. Implicitly, to call someone a vitalist is to accuse them of positing an unknowable factor in their explanation of life. Whether the witholding of this factor is attributed to the vitalist's mystical tendencies, her inability to distinguish between real and pseudo-science, or simply her intellectual laziness, the implication is always that she is sorely lacking credibility. Bracketing some aspect of the living as either intellectually or empirically unaccessible is considered unnecessary, because biology has for a long time been able to explain life in its own terms. Despite having fallen out of fashion, the historical importance of vitalism should be recognized fairly uncontroversially. Little more than two hundred years ago, 'life' was first posited as an ontological state that was unique from the inorganic. At its inception, and in order to gain independence as a unique discipline, biology asserted there was something 'vital' about life that was irreducible to the terms of chemistry and physics.

Dema says that this leads to the question I would like to investigate now: are Deleuze and Guattari relying on the discredited vitalist argument and claiming that there is something vital about life that is irreducible to the terms of contemporary science?

Deleuze and Guattari do embrace the idea that their philosophy of life should be considered to be a kind of vitalism. Dema says that Deleuze and Guattari use vitalism strategically.

This strategy can be broken down into four parts. They aim to: 1) break from one paradigm which defines life biologically; 2) argue that there is some important aspect of life that is being missed in the organic paradigm; 3) open a space in which new theories can gain independence without being required to be reducible to the pre-existing biological framework; and, 4) introduce a novel way of conceptualizing life though their theory of assemblages....In objecting to how the discipline of biology has appropriated life, restricting it within organisms, Deleuze and Guattari offer an alternate theory in which life pervades many diverse modes of existence. The organism is no longer the paradigmatic unit of life, nor is the cell, the genetic code, the population, the species, or the ecosystem.

whither photography

In 'Bette Mifsud and the matter of photography' in Photogenic Papers Sue Best takes up that tired old duality of painting versus photography and the narrative that photography killed painting. She says:

The rivalrous and indeed violent relationship between photography and painting has a very long history; stretching from the painter Paul Delaroche's legendary prognosis on the birth of photography that: 'From today painting is dead' ... to the slightly acerbic asides from more recent writers on painting, such as Norman Bryson, about the dearth of theoretical writings on painting in comparison to the amount of critical attention lavishly bestowed upon photography....[In this narrative] Photography.... is aligned with the mechanical, the industrial, and in some way has contributed to, or produced, what is variously referred to as 'the crisis' 'the end' or 'the mourning' of painting....It would seem that not only has photography challenged painting, and indeed gained ascendancy over painting (if one concedes, as Lyotard does, the technoscientific world has more need for photography than it has for painting), it has also, to add insult to injury, become the very model for painting to follow.

She adds that that photography is now drawn into the dialectical field exemplified by the painterly avant-garde. Photography, like painting before it, can pose the question of its identity only because it is now relatively autonomous - photography no longer serves an end that is foreign to it. According to Lyotard the State now has greater need for data, know-how and wealth; photography's imaging of the world has been superseded. Baudelaire's prescribed role for photography as mere hand-maiden to art and science has thus been negated.If photography is indeed now part of the dialectical avant garde then it is perhaps because, as Victor Burgin suggests, the rise of the computer has raised the question of the end of photography.
Sh then asks:

But how does this place photography vis-à-vis painting? Is photography continuing the essentialist urge of the early avant-garde, asking about its identity in order to discover its irreducible essence, while painting enters the next phase: the end of the end, that is the end of the essentialist urge - its deconstruction..... This would tend to suggest that photography remains modernist in a thoroughly Greenbergian manner; exploring its 'intrinsic capacities' as outlined by John Szarkowski : detail, frame, thing itself, time, vantage point.

perception as convention

Erwin Panofsky, in Perspective as Symbolic Form, says that what we see in linear perspective pictures is not the visual imitation of the spatial structure of our visual experience, but the "expression" of a particular "view of space," and a particular "conception of the world".

His argument is that we have differing views correlating with modern and antique uses of perspective. Perspective is a structure or schematism and in linear perspective we we are meant to believe that we are looking through [a] window into space beyond. It structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time." In other words, linear perspective eliminates the multiple viewpoints that we see in medieval art, and creates an illusion of space from a single, fixed viewpoint -- and that suggests a focus on the individual viewer.

If the perceptual schema of each historical culture or epoch is different, then linear perspective by no means conclusively defined as visual reality, rather that it was only a particular constructional approach for representing pictorial space, one which happened to be peculiar to the culture of the Italian Renaissance. Linear perspective would pass away as had all earlier artistic conventions...it was destroyed by modernist art ythat aimed to explore the essential nature of its own medium.

Aesthetics of Decay

In the introduction to The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason Dylan Trigg says that he criticizes the claim that reason is the guarantor of progress. He quotes Paul Feyerband thus on reason, who says that a benefit of reason is its lack of content:

since, it enables special groups to call themselves ‘rationalists,’ to claim that widely recognized successes were the work of Reason and to use the strength thus gained to suppress developments contrary to their interests”.

Trigg adds that Feyerabend’s comments correctly identify what is fundamental to reason: firstly, the my thological lineage, which implicitly testifies to a once unified perspective. Secondly, the supposed legitimacy reason confers upon thought and praxis. Thirdly, the absence reason creates in its fall from certainty. That the reality of the myth has now eroded does nothing to lessen the enthusiasm of “rationalists.”

Trigg says that his book undertakes the task of reaffirming the decline of reason, so exploring the space deserted by this decline. The point of departure is that progress is compatible with the absence of rea-
son and that the supposed antithesis of progress—decline—is the means by which a critique of progress is possible.

Trigg asks: How will this possibility be realized? He replys thus:

Since reason, after Kant, has sought to be essentially placeless in its universality, depending, as it does, on formal rather than particular properties, placing reason in a spatial and temporal context will establish the conditions under which the ambiguity of reason gives way to the clarity of its absence.

Urban Re/inventors

The Urban Re/inventors has a Flickr stream and an Online Urban Journal, which is conceived as a collection of writings, commentaries, reportages, photographic galleries, films and videos on urban topics. In the Introduction to the first issue of the journal Alessandro Busà, the Chief Editor of The Urban Reinventors, says:

The notion of "Urban Reinvention" addresses a set of political strategies of urban redevelopment implemented by entrepreneurial local administrations within the growth-oriented and competition-driven framework of urban governance of the post Fordist-Keynesan era after the mid 1970's. If the term "urban regeneration", as Neil Smith (2002, New Globalism, New Urbanism, Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy) argues, tends to insinuate that such strategies are the outcome of physiological or natural processes, and the much used term of "renaissance" seems to hint at spontaneous and endogenous processes, the more appropriate notion of reinvention suggests a conscious strategic action undertaken by those in charge - in our case, the entrepreneurial local administrations.

The city is reinvented by use of the strategies of the "reinvention of memory" and the "staging of the future", which play equal parts in a bigger political strategy of manipulation of the image of the city. Busà goes on to say that urban reinvention:

also highlights the preponderant role played by creativity in the strategies implemented...In responses to the accelerating retreat of the Fordist economy, local administrations are increasingly seeking for local revenues in order to promote growth and provide services.Within this framework, cities are experimenting with new social policies, innovative pilot projects and workfare programs, and new creative strategies, through often controversial public-private partnerships with new local or extra-local private actors. Cities are entrepreneurial and act as corporations, competingwith each other for growth and for tax revenues (that is, seeking to lure citizens, especially middle class taxpayers, within the city boundaries). As a result of this shift to entrepreneurialism, cities increasingly try to "market" themselves in the global economy.

The role of the local administrations or city councils has changed from being the (more or less redistributive) local arm of the welfare state, to acting as a catalyst of processes of innovation.Entrepreneurial urban policies try to reposition the city, and in particular the inner city and its renewed downtown, within the geography of consumption, and this through three different spheres of reinvention.

Firstly, entrepreneurial municipalities race on the global market attempting to attract major global corporations creating central business districts and vibrant downtowns in answer to the demands of the so-called "creative class" (Richard Florida, 2004, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's
Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life) and by providing a "business friendly"
environment......

A second tool is gentrification, consciously promoted by local politics as a strategy of growth and as a mean for social change which may bring benefits to the wider city through increased tax revenues.

According to Neil Smith (2002, New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy), "the process of gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint and local anomaly in the housing markets of some "command-center cities", is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy hat takes over from liberal urban policy […] The strategic appropriation and generalization of gentrification as a mean of global interurban competition finds its most developed expression in the language of "urban regeneration" and "urban renaissance"".....

As wealth expands, gentrification in successful cities pushes up prices for housing, making access for lower income households much harder, and ultimately pricing out of its boundaries the same informal creative forces the city was trying to appeal in the first instance.

Thirdly, so-called “creative” strategies make claims of anti-bureaucratic management and innovative holistic approaches to urban policies, including marketing strategies, image-making policies, and strategies of festivalization of the public space.

On the wave of the recent debate concerning development- and growth-strategies of the “entrepreneurial city,” in the last two decades a wealth of literature has developed on the subject, proposing experimental instruments of urban revitalization (see for instance the works of Michael Landry, 2000, The creative City, and John O. Norquist, 1999, The Wealth of Cities: Revitalizing the Centers of American Life). Under the banner of "urban renaissance" or "urban regeneration", architects, urban planners and politicians have worked to create strategies for the redevelopment of central downtowns, of deserted urban business districts, and of declining suburbs, in an attempt to restore the historic downtown its role and prestige and to halt the middle class flight to the suburbs.

new maps for old

Caroline Bassett in New Maps for Old?: The Cultural Stakes of '2.0' in Fibreculture makes reference to Harry Jenkins book Convergence Culture a sequel to his 1992 work Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Both books examine participatory media, that is, a popular culture that directly involves fans in the defining of the culture. This convergence isn’t about technology—one screen (or one box) to rule them all—but rather about the way that the bright lines separating content creators from content users are becoming increasingly fuzzy. A convergence of creators and users-as-creators.

Convergence refers to two principal trends: the tendency of modern media creations to attract a much greater degree of audience participation than ever before, to the point that some are actually influenced profoundly by their fanbase, becoming almost a form of interactive storytelling; and the phenomenon of a single franchise being distributed through and impacting a range of media delivery methods. These two trends go together, making it very hard to pull them apart and examine them separately.

This review says that Jenkins' best illustration of all aspects of convergence is his discussion of the Matrix phenomenon.

Most are familiar with the trilogy of movies, but casual viewers perhaps do not realize that they are seeing only part of the story. To fully experience the Wachowski brothers' epic, one must also collect all issues of the comic book; explore the web site; view the anime cartoon; and play the video game. These interlocking parts do not, as one might expect, merely tell the same story in different formats, but rather make their own unique contributions to a single unfolding macro-narrative, and reference one another freely. There are aspects of the later movies, for instance, that make no sense unless one has read the comic or played the game. Jenkins attributes much of the lukewarm reception of the second and third films among the mainstream media to this: "Many film critics trashed the later sequels because they were not sufficiently self-contained and thus bordered on incoherent" (96). Meanwhile, the true fans presumably nodded knowingly during the films and laughed at the hopelessly clueless critics. Jenkins argues that the Matrix is an example of a brand new kind of trans-media storytelling, one which we do not have yet have a critical framework in place to really assess.

Jenkins argues that struggles over convergence will redefine the face of American popular culture. Industry leaders see opportunities to direct content across many channels to increase revenue and broaden markets. At the same time, consumers envision a liberated public sphere, free of network controls, in a decentralized media environment. Sometimes corporate and grassroots efforts reinforce each other, creating closer, more rewarding relations between media producers and consumers. Sometimes these two forces are at war.

How do we situate fan fiction relative to the content created or licensed by the originating authors of say Star Wars? Jenkins sees it (p.255-56) this way:

We might think of fan fiction communities as the literary equivalent of the Wikipedia: around any given media property, writers are constructing a range of different interpretations that get expressed through stories. ... [M]ass media has tended to use its tight control over intellectual property to reign in competing interpretations, resulting in a world in which there is one official version. Such tight controls increase the coherence of the franchise and protect the producers’ economic interests, yet the culture is impoverished through such regulation. Fan fiction repairs the damage caused by an increasingly privatized culture. ... Fans reject the idea of a definitive version produced, authorized, and regulated by some media conglomerate. Instead, fans envision a world where all of us can participate in the creation and circulation of central cultural myths.

surrealism revisited

The Hayward's 2006 exhibition on Surrealism is more than twenty years after its critically acclaimed venture into surrealist territory titled Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978), also curated by Dawn Ades, head of the Centre for Surrealism and its Legacies based at Essex University. Undercover Surrealism revisits surrealism by focusing on its 'undercover currents' - that current having the name of its most infamous figure, the French excremental philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962). Bataille was surrealism's self-confessed "enemy from within" whose subversive input injected a good dose of ambivalence into the rather contrived - and not so marvellous anymore - surrealism defined by André Breton.

In this review of Undercover Surrealism: Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille in Drain Olivier Chow says that Bataille took surrealism to its very limits, defacing the marvellous by promoting the anal sadism of the formless, a notion that collapsed traditional differences between form and matter, inside and outside, life and death.

The Hayward show is entirely based on Documents; it is Bataille's view of the world. The short-lived Documents magazine, edited and produced in Paris by George Bataille from 1929-30. Bataille,styled himself as an ‘enemy within’ the surrealist movement. Challenging the idealism he identified in the approach of André Breton and other leading figures, he urged surrealist artists to explore darker territory. Described by Bataille as ‘a war machine against received ideas’, Documents was a suitably jarring collision of ethnography, archaeology, art, popular culture and assorted other concerns. Its focus on traditional art from non-European cultures reflects one of the era’s major preoccupations, though Bataille used juxtaposition of ‘primitive’ ideas with modern, Western content to discredit notions of cultural superiority.

public spaces in a digital world

In New Urban topologies: The Desire for Public Place in the Age of Virtual Geography in Drain Michael Jenson says that the:

emergence of new technologies (telegraph and railroads) in the last century has heralded a new type of spatial structure that varies from the more traditional, urban one found in the cities of the day. A structure was based, not on traditional spatial configurations of the square and the street found in many American and European cities, but on the notion of the vector, the Cartesian grid and the point. These attributes ignored landscapes and were constituted specifically to allow for communication over great distances. It was a spatial structure built solely for the purposes of commerce

With globalization we have defining technologies such as computers, miniaturization, digitization, satellites and a virtual web in the form of the Internet have replaced the symbolic “walls” of the Cold War period with “expansive webs and networks”. Jenon says:

As one system is “deterratorialized” or “comes undone”[24], and the process of “reterratorialization” by another system begins to emerge with the radical social changes that occur within such a context, the uncertainty created facilitates the romantic urge to gravitate towards perceived fixed and stable conditions/ideologies.