About The Exhibition Publication Participants Alice Cretney / Barry Owl / Michael O'Rourke / Paul Harrison / Rose Butler / Samuel Blackwood Exhibiting Artists Ami Clarke / Ashley Holmes / Dries Depoorter / Eric Drass / Frederik Vanhoutte / Jan Vantomme / kAJA aNDERSON / Kit Keighley / Mario Klingemann / Matthew Plummer-Fernandez / Matt Pearson / Perce Jerrom / Sabrina Verhage / sARAH hILL & Ralph Pritchard / Siobhan Barr / Soraya Fatha / Sophie Jung / Tony Wallace & Aiden Green / will Kendrick / Yuki Kishino.
A pIxel Or Digit? The core premise and origin for this project 'A Pixel Or Digit?' is this ques on: how is digital wireless technology a ec ng how we understand the movement of images today? This exhibi on and collabora on encompasses a myriad collec on of interconnec vity and seemingly invisible physical processes that cons tute what we have named the Internet. The Internet or digital spaces have completely altered how we communicate or behave on a weekly basis furthering our need for a new understanding of arts posi on in the gap between materials and mediums. Thus ques oning both the postmodern no ons of the fatness of the screened image and the fragility or "nitude of the human being. An image of humanity over used or even counter-produc ve in crea ve discussion and ac vity today. Popular current discussions focuses on our rela on to digital space and it's characteris cs of immateriality and plas city. These digital devices allow us to interact within and with the Internet at di erent levels of speed; and thus di erent registers or percep ons are made possible. What we have created is an explosion of capabili es inherent in the increasing prowess and mobility a)ached to technology. This Exhibi on is intended to reveal the mechanics of what is arguably s ll a fairly new form of communica on which carries some unanswered ques ons, with many alterca ons and persuasions that can occupy or allude to various di erent contexts in todays very vocal world wide web. All the par cipa ng ar sts have been invited not on merit but from 'The Ar s c Community' at large. Therefore Turf Projects would like to express a big thank you to all who have supported and been involved in making the exhibi on happen. Thank you and have a great start to 2015!
Alice Cretney
Barry Owl Life in the 3D moment The age of the two-dimensional, the 'digital age', has brought with it a backlash against all that is 2at - it is somehow ar "cial, and not a legi mate representa on of reality – and a sen mental yearning for the three dimensional, in all its potent, visceral and largely imagined glory, as though it is some unsurmountable peak of 'realness'. On the other hand, we are encouraged to cut out the fourth dimension, to isolate a single impossible point on the axis of me and to 'live in the moment'. Such new age nonsense is deeply hypocri cal and or at least foolishly mistaken. To demonstrate this, I will examine Zeno's arrow paradox (some mes called 'the paradox of mo on'), and the phenomenon of stereopsis, by which we perceive our surroundings as three-dimensional. By drawing parallels between these examples, I intend to bring out the latent hypocrisy of this commonly accepted doctrine. Zeno asks us to imagine an arrow in 2ight. For movement to occur, it must change the posi on it occupies in space. However, for any dura onless instant in me, the arrow is neither moving to where it is (it is already there), nor to where it is not (no me elapses for it to move there). If me is composed en rely of instants, and at each instant no mo on is occurring, then mo on itself is an impossibility. This paradox dissolves when we consider more than one instant for which, in isola on, the arrow seems s ll. By taking two viewpoints in me and comparing them, we as humans can perceive the passage of me and, with this, movement, events and meaning. Stereopsis is essen ally the same thing, switched down a dimension; from the fourth to the third.1 Charles Wheatstone "rst explained stereopsis by sugges ng that '... the mind perceives an object of three dimensions by means of the two dissimilar pictures projected by it on the two re nÌ...' By interpre ng the subtle di erences in the two overlapping images captured by our eyes, our brain can perceive depth and distance, thus building up a three dimensional view
of the world. If I close one eye and remain completely s ll, there is no way of determining whether what I perceive is indeed shaped and contoured, or just an immaculately shaded 2at image.2 Similarly, what I shall refer to3 as 'chronostereopsis' can be de"ned as follows: '‌ the mind perceives an en ty of four dimensions by means of the two dissimilar states of a airs perceived by it at two separate instants in me‌' A state of a airs can only be perceived as part of an event, and thus as meaningful, if we have other similar (but non-iden cal) states of a airs with which to compare it. The moment I currently occupy, in this o?ce at this desk,4 only has any relevance or value if I examine other situa ons, other moments, leading up to this; if my chronostereop c capacity were to fail, my understanding of the situa on would completely collapse, all my learned responses would vanish and the notebook to my right would become a mangle of metal wires and pulped wood scrawled with dark chemicals, rather than the accumula on of months of thinking and working.5 Living in the moment deprives us of this capacity in much the same way as having only one eye deprives us of our stereop c sight - for experiencing the world in three dimensions without bobbing their heads like pigeons.6 It seems hypocri cal to focus in on an isolated three-dimensional state of a airs, ignoring the value which a wider four-dimensional view would lend to existence, while rejec ng as cheap or inauthen c the two-dimensional imagery with which we are now bombarded. As such, while we wait for this fad to pass, I would advocate living in the moments and seizing the days; keeping each instant as a stolen post-it note and pinning them all up along the axis of me with pilfered paper clips.7
1. Which I take here to be me, although this is of course not en rely uncontroversial in itself.
2. It has been suggested that this is why a dispropor onate number of ar sts lack the capacity for stereopsis; that is, because the view of the world they have access to is essen ally '2a)er' than that available to the rest of us, transla ng it into a 2at image in the form of a pain ng or drawing is perhaps simpler. Conversely, the one-eyed sculptor Dale Chihuley must rely on assistants to execute the designs of his three dimensional sculptures, because he lacks the delicate depth percep on required to do so. 3. Somewhat crea vely; I'm afraid my lack of knowledge of ancient languages lets me down a li)le at this point. I have long intended to take the me to learn them, but this looks increasingly unlikely. The future of languages is more likely to be HTML and Ruby than Greek or La n at any rate. 4. Where I am taking me out from doing actual work to write this on the sly and feeling thoroughly smug about it; the start of my two weeks no ce period has also heralded an increased risk of sta onary disappearance and an absolute rinsing of the franking machine. 5. Successfully 'living in the moment' is undoubtedly the fastest route to an existen al crisis I can think of. 6. Because the eyes of pigeons are placed on the sides of their heads, their "elds of vision do not overlap, and so to gain the mul ple, overlapping viewpoints necessary to perceive depth they must bob their heads fran cally as they move. 7. I cannot give such a wholehearted recommenda on for trying to physically, prac cally recreate this mental aItude. Doing so will lend the space you occupy the feel of a psychopaths lair, or that of the downtown apartment of an obsessive ex-cop who just cant let that last case go (but who was totally right in the end, obviously. Least twisty plot twist ever.)
The Concept of Non-Pho(ne)ography Michael O’Rourke Opening In the preface to his book The Concept of Non-Photography the French thinker François Laruelle (who is not a photographer and maybe not even a smart phone user) asks: Of what do these essays speak? Of photography in the !esh—but not the !esh of the photographer. Myriads of nega%ves tell of the world, speaking in clichés among themselves, cons%tu%ng a vast conversa%on, (lling a photosphere that is located nowhere. But one single photo is enough to express a real that all photographers aspire one day to capture, without ever quite succeeding in doing so. Even so, this real lingers right there on the nega%ves’ surface, at once lived and impercep%ble. Photographs are the thousand !at facets of an ungraspable iden%ty that only shines—and at %mes faintly—through something else. What more is there to a photo than a curious and prurient glance? And yet it is also a fascina%ng secret” (CNP, vii)1 Characteris%cally Laruelle will not go on to de(ne (in any precise way) what he means by non-photography (it does not have an entry in The Dic onary of Non-Philosophy2) but he does give us a provisional “de(ni%on” to work with: “’Non-photography’ [placed in inverted commas by Laruelle], above all, does not signify some absurd nega%on of photography, any more than non-Euclidian geometry means that we have to do away with Euclid” (vii). For Laruelle it is a ma9er of “limi%ng the claims of ‘theories of photography’ 1[ François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography (bilingual edi%on) trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011). HereaAer CNP followed by page number.
2[ François Laruelle (and collaborators), Dic onary of Non Philosophy trans. Taylor Adkins/Univocal (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013).
[also in suspension points] that interpret the la9er in terms of the world, and of bringing to the fore its human universality” (vii-viii) Insta(dia)gram #1: World3 Laruelle always capitalizes World which, for him, is analogous to philosophy (and capitalism) and is responsible for persecu%on. Laruelle’s non-philosophy sets out to defend the human-in-human who is determined as a subject-in-struggle by her radical vulnerability. The human or (wo)manin-person in order to reveal their capacity for immanent revolt or rebellion needs to be thought outside of philosophy which is englobing in its shape, always returning to itself. In Future Christ Laruelle writes: “In order to clarify the stakes and limits of rebellion we pose the problem outside of philosophical bad habits. Philosophy is always indiGerent to man or, though this isn’t very diGerent, too quickly compassionate. SuGerings and aliena%on exist in the necessity of revolt and one concludes from this that there is evil, and oAen evils, there too. Revolts are only ‘logical’ in this way—admirable vicious circle of uncertainty and the con%ngency of a desired rebellion in which no one believes”4. We can only think from the perspec%ve of the radically solitary vic%m and revolt is only possible from this posi%on of radical vulnerability and persecu%on. Laruelle says: “the theory of Future Christ makes of the being-murdered and the being-persecuted a universal but real criteria of the manifesta%on of Life rather than an absurd condi%on of historical fact” (FC 19). The Lived/life (le vécu), a key concept in Laruelle’s thought, is, as Katerina Kolozova tells us, “condi%oned by the sense of being persecuted and that brings forth immanence or inevitability of revolt and struggle. Persecu%on is by de(ni%on caused by ‘the world’ which in Laruelle’s
3] While this essay focuses mostly on Laruelle’s concept of non-photography I have inserted several insta(dia)grams which hope to illuminate some other important Laruellian concepts and the broader trajectories of his thought.
4] François Laruelle, Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. Anthony Paul Smith (London: Con%nuum, 2010), 5-6. HereaAer FC and page number.
terminology is analogous to philosophy—the universe of meaning” (94)5. The human-in-human here%cally struggles against the world and the orthodox universe of meaning which seeks to control, mould and subjugate her. “To struggle in an immanent way with the world”, Laruelle asserts, “is the theorem of the Future Christ. In the beginning was the struggle, and the struggle was with the world and the world did not know it” (FC 4). In Future Christ Laruelle calls forth the “Christ-subjects” who are in immanent struggle with the World. These are not, he cau%ons “doubles of the historicoreligious Christ, to whom they do however owe the material of his word, but his immanent clones, Christs determined-in-the-last-iden%ty as Man-inperson” (FC 19). Insta(dia)gram #2: The Human In a gorgeous essay “The Jus%ce of Non-Philosophy” Joshua Ramey reads Terrence Malick’s (lm Tree of Life alongside the tenets of nonphilosophy to reveal striking parallels6. In both we (nd the above-men%oned human essence that is ‘here%cal’ “in so far as it is perpetually persecuted, misused and ul%mately obliterated by the narra%ves that enforce the agenda of the World” (82). Laruelle’s mys%cism is, as Ramey notes, not about transcendence but, on the contrary, a9uned to the radical immanence of ordinary life, the stranger, the persecuted, the man-in-the-last-instance7. As Ramey writes: for non-philosophy, the persecu%on of the human is neither drama%c nor evenQul, but u9erly ordinary. For non-philosophy, a
5] Katerina Kolozova, “Of the Possibility of Immanent Revolt as Theory and Poli%cal Praxis”, iden es: journal for poli cs, gender and culture 10.1/2 (2013): 93-100.
6] Joshua Ramey, “The Jus%ce of Non-Philosophy” in John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith (eds) Laruelle and Non-Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 80-99.
7] François Laruelle, Non-Philosophical Mys cism for Today, trans. Ed Kazarian and Joshua Ramey (Palgrave, forthcoming).
concep%on of humanity persecuted, harassed, betrayed and murdered entails neither the radical passivity of the abject nor the radical ac%vity of the revolu%onary. Rather, persecu%on is simply the dis%nc%ve mark of that which is in con%nuous revolt against a World whose most basic form of violence consists in the u9erly banal a9empt to relate or correlate every struggle, need, or concern to a struggle, need, or concern with the World, such as it is. But for non-philosophy, the human struggle is a struggle precisely because it is not the struggle of the World, but separate from the World, in the last instance. It is the task of non-philosophy to speak from the posi%on of a subject separate from the World, a subject out of %me (83-84). That separa%on of the subject from the World will be key to any understanding of Laruelle’s concept of non-photography. Ini%ally, and here we have another par%al de(ni%on, the aim of non-photography is to delaminate photography from the World and the “principle of suRcient photography” or the “principle of suRcient aesthe%cs” (PF 29).8 Insta(dia)gram #3: The Principle of Su%ciency As with World Philosophy is always given a capital P in Laruelle’s wri%ng. This is because Philosophy is guilty of always referring back to itself, con(dent in its self-suRciency and sovereignty. So we have the “principle of suRcient” Economy9, Ecology10, Philosophy, Photography, Psychoanalysis,
8W François Laruelle, Photo-Fic on, A Non-Standard Aesthe cs (bilingual edi%on) trans. Drew S. Burk (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). HereaAer PF and page number.
9W François Laruelle, Introduc on to Non-Marxism, trans. Anthony Paul Smith (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, forthcoming).
10W François Laruelle, “The Degrowth of Philosophy: Toward a Generic Ecology”, trans. Robin Mackay in From Decision to Heresy, 327-349.
Aesthe%cs, Sexuality11 and so on. But this self-suRciency does not lead to stasis. Nor is the non- in non-philosophy or non-photography to be construed as a nega%ve. As Anthony Paul Smith has explained in the context of Laruelle’s Introduc on to Non/Marxism his understanding of failure is produc%ve and Marxism holds poten%al as material for non-philosophy insofar as its failures in our current “conjuncture” become something to build with as Laruelle seeks to both de-divinize and de-mys%fy Philosophy and to de-divinize and de-mys%fy Capitalism, the two authoritarian forms of thought his non-Marxism is pitched against12. It is the twin pillars of World and Philosophy which are at stake in The Concept of Non-Photography. Smith explained that, for Laruelle, Marxism is simply not an%capitalist enough and, since World, Capital and Philosophy are synonymous in Laruelle’s thought, that Marxism is not an this World enough. It became obvious that the radical poli%cal and ethical stakes of non-philosophy have been present right from the very roots of Laruelle’s wri%ngs in the 1970s. Non-philosophy, Smith reminded us, begins with a poli%cal impetus with all non-philosophical texts being wri9en from the perspec%ve of the vic%m, man-in-person, the persecuted. Indeed what connects all Laruelle’s texts is their insistence on Philosophy’s foreclosure of the human/the ordinary (wo)man and his argument that you cannot think history or society without thinking it from the posi%on of the vic%m. This posture or stance which Laruelle takes up in all of his wri%ng is precisely what he means, as Smith showed, by “democracy-(of)-thought” and that is to say that non-
11W François Laruelle, “Gender Fic%on”, trans. Anthony Paul Smith,
foreword to Katerina
Kolozova, The Cut of the Real: Subjec vity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), ix-xvi.
12W Anthony Paul Smith, seminar on François Laruelle’s Introduc on to Non-Marxism, Basic Space Gallery and Studios, July 2014. You can watch it on your phone at h9ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKyNY0B8w6w
philosophy’s poli%cal undergirding is protec%ng the irreducibility of the human13.
The essays which make up The Concept of Non-Photography perfectly exemplify the ethical and poli%cal scaGolding of Laruelle’s democracy-(of)-thought since they were wri9en in 1992 but not published un%l much later in 2011. However, they straddle both early and later periods of non-philosophy since in 1992 it is preoccupied with ethics and theories of iden%ty and in 2011 we have already reached a point where Laruelle is referring to his non-philosophy as non-standard philosophy. This is due to the emphasis on terms borrowed from quantum mechanics in the later phase of non-standard philosophy. However, The Concept of NonPhotography is already using terms from quantum physics (superposi%on for example) in the early 1990s14. Coming back to the ques%on of separa%on Laruelle starts The Concept of Non-Photography by iden%fying Philosophy as inseparable from photography in its legend of itself as “!ash of the World” (CNP2). This
13S On non-philosophy as ‘human’ philosophy see François Laruelle, Philosophy and NonPhilosophy, trans. Taylor Adkins/Univocal (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013), 27-29.
14S Laruelle’s non-philosophy has been divided into (ve phases or stages. In From Decision to Heresy: Experiments in Non-Standard Thought (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012) Robin Mackay allocates The Concept of Non-Photography to Philosophy II alongside The Principle of Minority (1981), Biography of the Ordinary Man: Authori es and Minori es (1985), Philosophies of Di0erence: A Cri cal Introduc on to Non-Philosophy (1986), Philosophy and Non-Philosophy (1989) and Theory of Iden es: Generalized Fractality and Ar 3cial Philosophy (1992). However, it could also be placed in Philosophy V since it an%cipates many of the more explicitly quantumtheore%cal concerns of 2012’s Photo-Fic on, A Non-Standard Aesthe%cs and General Theory of Vic ms which was published in French in the same year. The most recent book to come out in Philosophy V is Christo-Fic on: Les Ruines d’Athènes et de Jérusalem (2014) which is forthcoming in a transla%on by Robin Mackay (Christo-Fic on: The Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem, Columbia University Press, 2015)
central asser%on will go under various names: Photographocentrism, AllPhotography, Logo-photo-centrism, the photographico-transcendental. We learn that “well before the inven%on of the corresponding technology, a veritable automa%sm of photographic repe%%on traverses Western thought” (CNP 2) Philosophy in its all-suRciency is nothing other than “a photography realized too quickly and presumed to be total and successful” (CNP 2). This self-belonging is “itself a sliding onto itself” (PF 45). “Philosophy” in this “legend” is “that premature thinking that will have cons%tuted itself, not through a mirror-stage but through a 8ash-stage, a darkroom stage, giving it a fragile being, a fragile basis, in this photographic mode, un(nished and too immediately exploited” (CNP 3). If philosophy can only ever appeal to the World, the object and the subject who perceives that object then this circular, englobing thought cannot escape making photography as “stance, as technique, as art” into a degraded “onto-photo-logical” essence of philosophy” (CNP 3-4). To !ee this viciously circular mode of thinking and to think the essence of photography Laruelle suggest we think from the stance of “the shot” which is “absolutely and right from the start divested of the spirit of photography” (CNP 4) Another “de(ni%on” of non-photography would be this very “concep%on of the essence of photography” and its prac%ces as well as its rela%on to Philosophy and the World, a rela%on which would be no longer impera%ve for thinking. What Laruelle seeks is an “absolutely non-ontophoto-logical thinking of essence” so as to think what philosophy “is” and “can do” (CNP 4). Non-philosophy too concerns the ques%on of what nonphilosophy can do, what use it can make of philosophy rather than being a theory of philosophy (which is why Laruelle puts ‘theories’ under suspension marks and non-philosophy’s being is its performa%vity and reiterability)15. The aim is to open up photography itself to the “experience” of nonphotography” (CNP 4) and its uses beyond an auto-encompassing
15X On the performa%ve dimensions of non-philosophy see John Mullarkey, “1 + 1+ 1: The NonConsistency of Non-Philosophical Prac%ce (Photo: Quantum; Fractal)” in Mullarkey and Smith (eds). Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, 143-168. See also François Laruelle, The Non-Philosophy Project (eds) Gabriel Alkon and Boris Gunjevic (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2012) especially “A Summary of Non-Philosophy” and “What Can Non-Philosophy Do?”
“photographism” (CNP 4). But non-photography does not set about photographing photography. Instead we are asked to consider photography as it thinks. A rigorous, experimental non-photography sets itself the task of suspending and bracke%ng out “radically and without remainder” all of “Western onto-photo-graphics” (CNP 4). It is from this posi%on which is not one of re-duplica%on (Laruelle calls it the photographic stance or vision force [CNP 11]) of the “nonphotographic instance [my emphasis] that we must ‘see’ photography anew”. (CNP 5).The project as Laruelle sees it is to develop an “abstract theory of photography” which would be non-Worldly, non-philosophical, non-phenomenological and “non-perceptual” (CNP 8). We must disar%culate photography from percep%on and “being-in-the-world” (a photographic decision in Laruellian terms) in order to foreground a scien%(c paradigm which would be “’abstract’” or ‘scien%(c’ in spirit”(CNP 11). The body of the photographer in the act of photographing is not, for Laruelle, reducible to the eyes (that perceive), the hands (that click) or the torso (that stands). Their posture, rather, is one that issues from the “most irre!exive depth of the body” wherein all corporeal and “psychic inten%onality” is renounced (CNP 12)16. The body of the photographer in this stance, this posture of “unobjec%va%ng vision” (CNP 12) is immanent rather than transcendent, naïve rather than decision-making, auto-impressionis%c rather than expressionis%c, a “self-inherence” of the body rather than of “being-in-theworld” (CNP 12). Non-photography then strips photography of op%cointen%onality (CNP 35) and auto-posi%onality so that the photographer can prohibit himself from “exceeding or surpassing his stance, his vision, his camera, his mo%f” (CNP 15). Photography is a “utopian” ac%vity (CNP 15) “unlimited by right rather than merely ‘open’ (CNP 25). Insta(dia)gram #4: Utopia and the Ordinary Man The utopian, futurality and messianity are predominant concerns of Philosophy V, the latest stage in Laruelle’s non-philosophy to which The
16Z
On stance and posture see John Mullarkey, “How to Behave Like a Non-Philosopher; Or,
Specula%ve Versus Revisionary Metaphysics”, Specula ons IV (2013): 108-113.
Concept of Non-Photography could belong17. In An -Badiou, Photo-Fic on and Christo-Fic on, all of which are in Philosophy V, Laruelle outlines and sketches a “generic science” or “human genre” of the ordinary man which has as its goal, as always, the delivering of thought from its on%coontological primacy. This science of the ordinary man (the stranger or vic%m are other names for this) which has been unthought by or foreclosed to philosophy is brought about through the conceptual deployment of what he calls “oraxioms” or more simply “the lived decisions of the generic subject opera%ng the science of philosophy” (AB 4)18. Non-philosophy invalidates or shears away the auto-epistemological hierarchy of being via a quantum superposi%on. What Laruelle means to do in making such a move is to replace the ontological with the prior-to-priority (without hierarchy). As he writes in General Theory of Vic ms “the vic%m is radically pre-predica%ve, or more precisely, prior-to-the-(rst” and the generic subject is “underdetermined” so that we may “escape from the philosophical pre-supposi%on of the vic%m as already given”19. This is an essen%al principle of nonstandard philosophy: that “radical immanence acts as uni-laterality or as Last Instance, non-commutable with any form of philosophical transcendence” (AB 5) and Laruelle accords to immanence a quasi-subjec%ve but generic func%on as non-egological last instance. In radically fusing science and philosophy, non-standard thought under-determines both science and philosophy, giving us a non-philosophy that is equally a non-science. Philosophy and science are uni-lateralized (in earlier works he would have said dualyzed20) via their under-determina%on, a sacri(cing of their
17W The utopian is most extensively addressed in Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy, trans. Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012).
18W François Laruelle, An -Badiou: On the Introduc on of Maoism into Philosophy , trans. Robin Mackay (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). HereaAer AB and page number.
19W François Laruelle, General Theory of Vic ms, trans. Alex Dubilet and Jessie Hock (Wiley, forthcoming, 2015). HereaAer GTV.
englobing suRciency to a quantum type superposi%on. In separa%ng philosophy from its double (the World) we get the Vision-in-One. The ethical commitments of this quantum superposi%on and underdetermina%on are highlighted in An -Badiou: “Philosophy’s libera%on from itself is the occasional condi%on for the libera%on of humans, but the libera%on of humans is the under-determining condi%on of philosophy” (AB 27-28). This is also discernible in General Theory of Vic ms when Laruelle cau%ons that the “vic%m is not an exemplary man or the correlate subject of an extraordinary event” and speaks of the “messianity of the vic%m”: “the vic%m returns as Christ” and this return is (gured as “a coming-under” (GTV). Non-Philosophy itself might be understood as a messianicity insofar as it is futural, an ongoing process in “the form of a series of oceanic swells” (AB 29), undulatory, a swarming of conceptual par%cles, a new wave21. These oceanic undula%ons are all in the service of a “radicaliza%on of the desperate situa%on of man in the world” (AB 31). Non-philosophy as messianicity, as weak thought involves the inven%on of an apparatus of generic thought that is non-scien%(c and non-philosophical, making use of philosophy and science as materials, but quantum means quantum without (nality or telos. Insta(dia)gram #5: The Vic+m Non-philosophy might be put in the place of vic%m given its own solitude and “its hesita%ons, the ins%tu%onal and editorial censure it has suGered since its birth and s%ll suGers today” (AB 30). This suGering puts non-philosophy in the best posi%on to mount “a defense in every case, of humans, and not of philosophy—of humans taken ‘in-body’ in their generic materiality … a universal defense of humans qua generic subjects, a principle
20_ See in par%cular François Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, trans. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 163-230.
21_ I prefer Derrida’s spelling of messianicity to Laruelle’s messianity unless I am quo%ng directly from his texts.
of minimizing the inevitable harm done to philosophy and to the modes of thought that are subordinate to it” (AB 32). As Anthony Paul Smith has explicated non-philosophy borrows its idea from the Marxist prac%ce of the transforma%on of the situa%on of humans in the world. Laruelle writes in An -Badiou that “the man-subject of philosophy is reversed into the generic subject-man; this is the displacement into prior-to-priority of man as generic, implying immanently the displacement of the transcendent ego, which is no longer at the heart of the lived but on its margins” (AB 54). The generic subject or science-subject is unilateralized, par%culate and unifacialized. In Laruelle’s quantum theory of the lived which is of the order of the means of man as Last Instance he is humanized but desubjec%vized, in the sense that he loses his principle predicates of consciousness and re!ec%on. This is what General Theory of Vic ms means by prior-to-3rst passivity. There Laruelle says that “the prior-to-the-(rst condi%on, in its non-ac%ng, is not an insuRciency, an involuntary or accepted weakness: weak force is not a lesser force against the force-offorce” (GTV). On the contrary weak force is a democra%c force-of-thought against philosophy’s narcissis%c omnivalida%ons: “there is no vicious circle as there is in philosophy, but a single superposed power of being vic m-andresistant, divided up on occasion” (GTV). Non-philosophy is, then, a scenario of the future, or what Laruelle calls futurality, as that which comes-under. This is where we see a shiA from All-Philosophy (or the Principle of SuRcient Philosophy) to the immanent messianicity of philo-(c%on as no longer determining but rather as philosophy’s radical coming-under. Laruelle asserts that “Being-foreclosed or non-ac%ng is deployed as ac%ng by the clone or resistance. In this resistance, Man-in-Person comes-under as messianity” (GTV). Non-ac%ng is the radically passive under-poten%alizing or under-determining of transcendence. In the wave/par%cle thought of Laruelle’s generic science (he even goes so far as to say this is a more precise name for non-philosophy) the par%cle manifests the suspended world, the hal%ng of suRciency. “Philosophy presents itself as Principle of SuRcient Jus%ce as if it suRced to philosophize the vic%m in order to do it jus%ce (GTV) he warns. But
immanent non-ac%ng underdetermines the weak act or the least act of transforming the philo-World into philo-(c%on (being for the world) which is “the only possibility leA to man” (GTV). Non-ac%ng is a “vector or resistance” and as Laruelle argues in An -Badiou the only weapon of the poor (the stranger-subjects, the lived-without-life, Christ-subjects) of those “stripped not only of all but once and for all of the All itself, is inven on. It will be a ma9er of passing from absolute poverty to radical poverty as nonphilosophical loss of philosophy” (AB 230). The Universal Photographic Fic+on The object of photography is to be found “In the body and in the photo” (CNP 17-18) and not in the World. Non-Photography as immanent process is without “ontological iden%ty, any co-propria%on, any common form” (CNP 18). From this principle Laruelle draws his concept of “photo(c%on” (elsewhere this will go under the name of hyper specula%on22) a space opened up where “absolute (c%on” is dis%nct from the World and from the object” (CNP 20). The photographic “appari on” (CNP 22) does not double the object but is purely immanent image without the empiricotranscendentalising decision or posi%on (CNP 42). The non-photographer makes use of the material supports of photography just as the nonphilosopher takes up the materials of philosophy: “the photographer (xes on the nega%ve-support, the a priori nega%ve or the possible, universal and non-the%c (lm, through whose medium, at least as much through his camera, he looks at or sees the World without ever framing it for himself” (CNP 23). The photo or art-(c%on “of thought and of wri%ng … takes photography as its model but … is itself not photographic in the technical sense” (PF 11). The photographic stance, the vision force, the iden%ty of the vision-in-One (CNP 118) “sterilizes the perceptual preten%on proper to the World” (CNP 23-24). On the contrary this sterilized photography has its own inten%on, essence and immanent-being: “it is that quasi-(eld of pure photographic appari%on, of the universal photographic Appearance or
22] For example, François Laruelle, “Experimental Texts, Fic%ons, Hyperspecula%on”, trans. Robin Mackay in From Decision to Heresy, 353-354.
Fic on (that of the vision-stance)” (CNP 24). The universal photographic (c%on is utopian in that it !a9ens thought. Laruelle will call this a “new science” at the very heart of the photographic opera%on (CNP 30) and internal to its processes (CNP 39). Photo-(c%on is not suscep%ble to the overdetermina ons of philosophy (PF 19). Laruelle’s new science of photography does away with the dualisms “form/ground, horizon/object, being/en%ty, sense/object” rendering these terms indiscernible and “strictly iden%cal” (CNP 51). A photo makes everything idempotent, it “makes everything it represents exist on a strictly ‘equal foo%ng’. Form and ground, recto and verso, past and future, foreground and distance, foreground and horizon, etc. –all this now exists fully outside any ontological hierarchy” (CNP 52). This generic science is depowering or de-potent (PF 26). Insta(dia) gram #6: Coming-Under In Photo-Fic on Laruelle also makes a case for generic insurrec%on, indetermina%on or under-determina%on and this %me it is the nonphilosophical hal%ng of the “Principle of SuRcient Photography”. Again we have the vic%m as Christ returned, coming-under: “the photograph is the art of revival, of resurrec%on, but it is a weak art” as photo-(c%on “depoten%alizes logo-photo-centrism” (PF 83). The concept of nonphotography is less determinant than under-determinant: “it is a weakened or weakening causality that removes determina%on from the resul%ng image” (PF 18). The crucial ethics which follows from the development of a de-puissant photo (c%on is an “ethical safeguarding of humans within photo-(c%on” (PF 22)23. Later on Laruelle writes that “the generic photo is ethically people-oriented, in service of their defence, and passes from the posi%ve photo, devoted to narcissism of the world to the generic photo which is not that of subjects but rather objects” (PF 23) . Here the “quan%c model” works “via a futural retroac%vity” and this “model comes to sha9er the macroscopic schema of the doublet and introduces another schema that is messianic and chris%c in “quar%alising” according to the nega%ve quarter
23` See also François Laruelle, “Etho-techno-logy: Of Ethics in an Intense Technological Milieu”, trans. Alyosha Edlebi, Qui Parle 21.2 (2013): 157-167.
turn, the circle of %me or eternity. A quasi-Judaic dimension is reintroduced in a weak and non authoritarian mode without giving rise once again to the eternal return of the same…it is futurality in its messianic dimension” (PF 43). Similarly, in Christo-Fic on we witness a quan%c-oriented nonphilosophical exit from the Principle of SuRcient Theology. Philo-(c%on, photo-(c%on and Christo-(c%on are all resistant non-ac%ngs or underpoten%aliza%ons, immanent clonings or (c%ons which do not reproduce philosophy’s auto-con(rming truths. The radical Stranger, the vic%m revived “as under-determining” works at transforming the de(ni%ons of himself that he has received from the “dominant intellectual” and the “vic%mizing philosopher”24. If a subject can co-suGer in immanent revolt with other Strangers then he, she or it will have to be the poor generic subject, the human-in-the-last-instance and not the all-suRcient philosopher. To realize an ethics of the photography “one must look at the photograph with a non-globalizing point of view, as a photo-in-One or inimmanence, eyes (half) closed” (PF 83)25. Photo-(c%on is the dis-ontological decline of philosophy and photography’s auto-engul(ng proofs and aRrma%ons. Laruelle concludes Photo-Fic on by asser%ng that “the photograph is just a vector or a set of added vectors that no longer pass into existence and must occasionally receive or operate externally. From itself, it is added to the photosphere and enters into this ‘pleroma’. The photograph is the art of the revival, of resurrec%on, but it is a weak art and thus reduced to insurrec%on” (PF 85). Non-Photocracy
24Y See François Laruelle, Intellectuals and Power: The Insurrec on of the Vic m, trans. Anthony Paul Smith (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015).
25Y This idea also (gures in Laruelle’s “On the Black Universe: In the Human Founda%ons of Color” in Eugene Thacker, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Nicola Masciandaro and Alexander Galloway, Dark Nights of the Universe ([NAME] Press, 2013), 102-110.
Mohammad Salemy interprets the art of Aaron Gemmill as “!at” and here%cally non-onto-photo-logical in Laruelle’s sense26. Salemy writes that “Gemmill’s altera%ons of sidewalks, ci%es, and the globularity of earth in his work disparages its photographic materiality, emphasizing the !atness and fragility of the signifying surface of art”. Appealing to Laruelle’s thinking about luminosity and Alexander Galloway’s glosses on Laruelle’s concept of “pure luminosity”27 Salemy argues that “for Laruelle, it’s as if photography’s thirst for luminosity transposes the typhlo%c quality of light to its analogue and digital sensorial, an original sin rendering every photograph nothing short of an amphibological catastrophe. For him, photography, beneath its convincing surface, is a permanent blind spot covering human %me, which itself is only a !ashing moment within the deep astrogeological history of the universe. If the world’s concep%on by philosophy is nothing but an anthropic confusion and a feeble remedy for man’s chronic myopia, then the !at photographic surface, as the technological consequence of this ontological disorder, successfully camou!ages its own cause by bearing witness to and guaranteeing an externally eternal life for the world”. Salemy suggests that we must take ourselves out of this vicious circle of looking for the photograph’s ontological truths, its secret, because “it can’t represent anything other than its own photographicality”. This is because it “inherits and reproduces the limita%ons of human percep%on”. Onto-photo-logic is here renamed as “photocracy” which, on the one hand, captures the supposed power of logo-photo-centrism and, on the other, approaches the weak messianicity of coming-under “the long and never ending hegemonic rule of photo-logic over the western systems of knowledge and poli%cal order”.
26O Mohammad Salemy, “On Photocracy: Notes on Aaron Gemmill’s Recent Works and François Laruelle’s Concept of Non-Photography”, h9p://dadabasenyc.com/projects/aaron-gemmillunder-the-big-blank-sun/
27O Alexander Galloway, “Laruelle and Art”, con nent. 2.4 (2013), h9p://www.con%nentcon%nent.cc/index.php/con%nent/ar%cle/view/126; Galloway, “Ten Theses on the Digital” h9p://vimeo.com/48727142; Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Insta(dia)gram #7: Democrac+c Thought In his essay “Is Thinking Democra%c? Or, How to Introduce Theory into Democracy” Laruelle explicates the democra%zing impetus behind nonphilosophy: “Due to this necessary muta%on, we must (rst change the very concept of thought, in its rela%ons to philosophy and to other forms of knowledge [photography is subject to this muta%on in The Concept of NonPhotography]. This is an inversion that concerns a reversal of old hierarchies, but through a formula%on of a new type of primacy without rela%onships of domina%on; without rela%ons in general” (232)28. Anthony Paul Smith, John Mullarkey and Katerina Kolozova all agree that non-standard philosophy challenges anthropocentrism and that its project is the reorienta%on of thought. His non-philosophical project sets itself the task of re-vectoring our rela%on to the real, and to re-opening the concept of the human (or the human-in-person). As Mullarkey and Smith have argued, the reorienta%on of the philosopher’s orienta%on causes a muta%on which is to say that when philosophy engages with its object it mutates itself29. In Laruelle’s realism the real is the thing in itself in its actuality: one-in-one, human-in-human. This is the kernel—(rst outlined in The Principle of Minority30—of Laruelle’s !a9ened ontology, of his non-
28] François Laruelle, “Is Thinking Democra%c? Or, How to Introduce Theory into Democracy”, trans. Anthony Paul Smith in John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith (eds) Laruelle and NonPhilosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 227-237.
29] John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith, “Introduc%on: The Non-Philosophical Inversion: Laruelle’s Knowledge Without Domina%on” in Mullarkey and Smith (eds) Laruelle and NonPhilosophy, 1-18.
30] An excerpt of this as yet untranslated book, “Who are Minori%es and How to Think Them” has been translated by Taylor Adkins for the Specula ve Heresy blog (24 March 2013). It can be accessed on your phone here: h9p://specula%veheresy.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/transla%onof-laruelles-who-are-minori%es-and-how-to-think-them/
hierarchical approach. He advocates a !at ontology of objects and standard Philosophy is, for Laruelle, chauvinis%c insofar as some things appear as objects and others as subjects. This is a prejudicial error because for Laruelle everything is included. This is his Vision-in-One, his theore%cal pluralism. Nobody and no/thing is leA behind31. “A Thousand Photo-One(s)” The “horizontality-without-horizon” (CNP 52) of Laruelle’s !at thought is not caught up in the philosophic decision (we might think here of the way a photographer has to frame a shot, to cut, to de-cide as to what will be in the frame). Rather the immanent photographic process “lets things be, or frees them from the World” (CNP 55). This very “being-photo (of) the photo” is what philosophy in its auto-re!exivity and auto-scopy will a9empt to hierarchize, to reify; standard Philosophy will endeavor to “enclose the in(nite uni-verse that every %me, every single photo deploys…” (CNP 58). Laruelle terms this in(nitely !at uni-verse a “uni3ed theory of the photography of fractality” (CNP 72) a “generalised fractality” (CNP 73) or “uni-lateral” (CNP 80), the non-totalizing fractaliza%on (elsewhere he would say vectoriza on or onto-vectorial32) of a “thousand photo-one(s)” (CNP103). The photographer in freeing the photograph from the World is the “cause of the photo only in-the-last-instance, a cause that lets it be” (CNP 115). Nonphotography would be without hierarchy or pre-condi%ons, an “immanent ascender [up-rising]” an “onto-vectorial insurrec%on” (PF 31). Theory and science are unilateralized, uni(ed and rendered equivalent in an aRrma%on of the egalitarian which Laruelle insists on in his thought (indeed he insists that everything thinks and that all knowledges are equal, !at in principle). It is important to note that, for Laruelle, the up-rising, the onto-vectorial insurrec%on is passive, but radically so (PF 61), an under-prac%cing [sous-
31c I examine Laruelle’s !at ontology in greater depth in my “Quantum Queer: Towards a NonStandard Queer Theory”, iden es: journal for poli cs, gender and culture 10.1/2 (2013): 123134.
32c François Laruelle, “Towards a Philosophy Deemed Contemporary”, trans. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith, Liverpool Hope University, 30 June 2012.
pra quer] (PF 62) of (auto- or hyper-) philosophical language with all its over-transcendences and over-totaliza%ons. “The generic photo is ethically people-oriented [éthiquement orientée-hommes], in service of their defense” (PF 53). It is under- not over-determined (PF 71), immanently idempotent in its in-clina%ons. Non-Photography in-the-last-Instagram In the closing pages of The Concept of Non-Photography Laruelle begins to sketch out a “non-philosophical aesthe%cs” which he will then fully draw out in Photo-Fic on: a Non-Standard Aesthe cs. Laruelle writes that: the rigorous, non-circular, non-onto-photo-logical descrip%on of the essence of photography has obliged us to bracket out the set of possible philosophical decisions and posi%ons, of transcendent interpreta%ons of photographic phenomenality, that is to say, of that by which and of that as which it appears to itself to the visionforce that is engaged in the photographic process. Rather than in rela%on to philosophy, photography (nds its place between science and art—between what we call an absolute or transcendental science which explores and describes vision-force as ul%mate structure of the subject without borrowing in cons%tu%ve manner any of philosophy’s means; and an art that s%ll supposes the transcendence of the World and thus of philosophy, and their authority (CNP 141-142) In his essay “On Photocracy”, as we have already seen, Mohammad Salemy argues that “in the Laruellian universe, every photo can only be a photographic instant of photography” (my emphasis). In a more recent ar%cle “Instagram as Non-Photography” Salemy asks whether “we can iden%fy photographic social media, as an instance of François Laruelle’s nonphotography?”33 (TR) In response, and presumably this could extend to other photographic social media (Twi9er, Viber, Skype, What’s App, Picasa, Vine,
33b Mohammad Salemy, “”Instagram as Non-Photography”, The Third Rail 1 (Fall 2013), h9p://thirdrailquarterly.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/thirdrail_fall2013_12_msalemy.pdf. HereaAer TR.
Snap Chat), he adduces Instagram as symptoma%c of Laruelle’s theory of art/aesthe%cs. As we have heard, at the beginning of The Concept of NonPhotography, Laruelle refers to “myriads” of photographic nega%ves “speaking in clichés among themselves, cons%tu%ng a vast conversa%on, (lling a photosphere that is located nowhere” (CNP vii). As Salemy no%ces Laruelle could very well, even though these essays were wri9en in the early 1990s, long before the speci(c digital and technical media became available to mobile and smart phone users, be talking about Instagram here. Instagram photographs are indeed “speaking in clichés among themselves” and generate vast (if mostly pha%c) commentary and conversa%on. Their limitlessness and emp%ness sees them belong to a “photosphere” which is precisely nowhere (and everywhere), a non-place (or every-place). Salemy proposes that Instagram’s autonomy of produc%on can clarify some of the arguments Laruelle makes about photography, technology and essence (and also bears on the stakes of Laruelle’s broader ethico-aesthe%cal project). He writes that: the essence of Instagram is neither technological nor has it much bearing on photography and how it has been inten%onally burdened, to use Laruelle’s words, ‘with a whole set of ontological dis%nc%ons and aesthe%c no%ons imposed on it by the Humani%es, with the help of philosophy, which celebrate photography as a double of the world’. If aggrandizing photography with philosophy and burdening it with transcendental tasks produces, as Laruelle suggests, ‘a principle of suRcient photography’, then perhaps the metaphysical insuRciencies of Instagram as a photographic tool incises the medium like a knife from all things meaningful and worthy of transcendence (TR). The “universal photographic (c%on” we have already talked about is, for Laruelle, not freighted with a “representa%onal content” but in its “own essence in a non-specular manner … re!ects vision-force without ever reproducing it” (CNP 27). If we interpolate Instagram in the closing lines of the opening chapter of CNP it would read: “We will say that Instagram represents it [essence] ‘only in the last instance’ and that that which Instagram describes in this non-philosophical mode of descrip%on is
necessarily always an iden%ty, the iden%ty ‘in itself’ of vision-force, of the subject as vision-stance. In a word, and to bring together this (rst analysis into a formula: in its essence all Instagram photography is ‘photo-ID, iden%ty-photography—but only in the last instance; this is why Instagram is a (c%on that does not so much add to the World as subs%tute itself for the World” (CNP 27). As we now know Laruelle’s uni-verse is one where we discover a “uni3ed theory of the photography of fractality” (CNP 72) and a “generalised fractality” (CNP 73) a “thousand photo-one(s)” (CNP, 103). Salemy sees Instagram as belonging to this non-photographic universe given its generalized fractality: “Instagram doesn’t merely show or verify the fractalbeing of photographic objects; rather, it is in itself a fractalogical machine for the propaga%on of non-photography” (TR). He goes on: “The concept of non-photography helps us recognize Instagram not as a machine that generates a mul%plicity of photographs through which a complex and eloquent image of the world can arise, but as an apparatus for reducing all pictures, genres and styles of photography, even photographers, into a single generic en%ty” (TR). If photography is a “de(cient” mode of percep%on for Laruelle (CNP 8) then Instagram exposes this “realist illusion” (CNP 8) by occupying a “radical abstrac%on that photography perhaps does not realize fully in itself, but in rela%on to which it can be situated and interpreted afresh” (CNP 9). As Salemy says Instagram in its radical abstrac%on is “absolutely non-worldly and non-perceptual” (CNP 8). He makes very clear that Instagram is not “against” photography but rather that it ought to be “recognized as a medium for a long-awaited downgrading, not only of photography but also of the philosophies of nega%on, percep%on and being” (TR). While he is understandably cau%ous about the insurrec%onary poten%al of Instagram to corrode what, as we saw elsewhere, he calls “photocracy” with its a9endant ipso-phallo-logo-centrisms (aAer all most photographs on Instagram are “sel(es” and the autos, the ipse remains unchallenged), Salemy does point out that “at the very least, we need to understand how, and perhaps why, photography is beginning to fail its ul%mate philosophical obliga%ons in the encounter with its own networked and digital self, in the fractalogical mirror of Instagram” (TR). Analogue or Digital?
On the ques%on of the digital Salemy returns to the beginning of Laruelle’s Concept of Non-Photography which, we may recall, discusses the “origins” of philosophy and photography in illumina%on and withdrawal (CNP 2). This confusion that Laruelle iden%(es between philosophy/photography and the World is one which Alexander Galloway believes founds digitality and the division of all ones into twos34. Salemy brings all three—philosophy, photography, digitality—together and asserts that if they all lead to the estrangement of being from its picture, then one can argue that by obsole%ng the human hand and eyes as the mi%ga%ng instruments of this separa%on in both arts and sciences, analogue photography was always already digital. One can also see why chemical-based photography didn’t just foreshadow the arrival of its digital extension. By func%oning as an apparatus for the mechanically automated separa%on of the world from its visible surface, photography succeeded in extending the logic of standard philosophy through conceiving of thought as a facsimile of the World. This is the process that Instagram, through its opera%onal logic, is in the process of overturning” (TR). The photographic stance or vision-force of the Instagram photographer is non-phenomenological, non-Worldly, non-perceptual and does not par%cipate in the all-suRciency of the philo-photographical decision. Salemy reminds us that Instagram operates “outside of the mechanical logic connec%ng ordinary analogue or even digital photography to the photographer’s body and the World” (TR). Even if it is the case that Instagram users “have an immediate rela%onship with the smartphone” (TR) their rela%onship to the phone is untethered from their percep%on and “being-in-the-world” (CNP 12). The corporeality of the Instagrammer in the act of photographing would not, in Laruellian terms, be simply reducible to the eyes, hands or torso. Indeed the immediacy of their rela%onship to the smartphone is renounced, as Salemy tells us, because “the Instagram camera is only one of a limitless number of uses for this hardware. The
34Y Alexander Galloway, “Theses on the Digital”.
mul%func%onality of the smartphone abstracts the camera’s physicality, reducing it to a condi%onal electronic interface, itself a !at pixelated image” (TR). If the camera is only one func%on of the smart phone then Instagram would strip photography of its op%co-technico-inten%onality and autoinherence in the World. Instagram users are with each click of their camera further separated from the World they are claiming to represent. Salemy ends his ar%cle by postula%ng that oversatura%on, super(cializa%on, and mathema%za%on of photography via the non-diGeren%able fractalogics of Instagram destabilize both photography and philosophy as the twin technologies of Western knowledge produc%on. By mass-telemanaging the fabrica%on of photographs and by se_ng a new precedent for the medium’s accessibility, Instagram dismisses the photograph’s approxima%on of reality and refutes the medium’s historically guaranteed claim to the truth of Being” (TR). Instagram, we might say, is futurality in its messianic dimension (PF 43).And, Non-photography, in-the-last-instance, is a crea%ve process, a generic science which invents new logics, concepts, vocabularies, grammars, programs, an “installa%on of new genres” (PF 4).
Ghost Card (On Phantasmophotography) Michael O’Rourke JD Card I have long been fascinated by Jacques Derrida’s telephone(s). He writes in so many of his texts about the telephone; he talks on the telephone (to Hélène Cixous every day; to interviewers, in Ken McMullan’s )lm Ghost Dance); he writes about the ear (“Tympan”, Otobiographies:The Ear of the Other) and hearing; he talks about the voice, speech (in so many places) and the tongue; he writes about hands (Heidegger’s, Cixous’, his own). It is as if he had wri-en on nothing but the telephone. In the short essay “Le Monde (On the Telephone)” from 1982 Derrida has the )c4onal editor of the newspaper say to him: “you have indeed been speaking to me about language and it’s clearer than what you usually write. I’ll give you some advice: dictate your books over the telephone”1 And, of course, as Nicholas Royle astutely observes, this is just what Derrida does. All of his work is ‘over the telephone’. As he demonstrates, in a series of texts over many years (I am thinking for example of all the phone calls, including the apparent hoax phone-call from someone called Mar4ni Heidegger, in the ‘Envois’; the connec4ons between Derrida and Freud, and between telephony and telepathy, in the text called ‘Telepathy’; the telephonic network of voices in the essay on apocalyp4c tone; the explora4ons of telephone, being and voice in ‘Ulysses Gramophone’; or the insected intersec4ons with Hélène Cixous in ‘Ants’ or again, in H.C. for Life), the telephone par4cipates in a deconstruc4ve transforma4on of the’ ques4on of the subject’, of no4ons of auto-a@ec4on and hearing-oneself-speak, dis4nc4ons between public and private, conscious and unconscious, and the 1
Jacques Derrida, “Language (Le Monde on the Telephone) in Points … Interviews, 1974-1994 (ed.) Elisabeth Weber (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 174.
nature of being as such. Derrida’s descrip4on of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses thus opens onto a more generalised theory of being: Bloom’s being, we are told, is ‘being-at-the-telephone. He is hooked to a mul4plicity of voices and answering machines’. There is what Derrida calls ‘a telephonic interiority’: ‘before any appliance bearing the name “telephone” in modern 4mes, the telephonic technē is at work within the voice’. It is this ‘mental telephony which, inscribing remoteness, distance, di,érance, and spacing [espacement] in the phonē, at the same /me ins4tutes, forbids, and interferes with the so-called monologue’2. Everything Derrida had to say, then, could have been on, at or over the telephone. In my telephantasies all reading and all wri4ng is telephonic, a reading and wri4ng blind, a reading and wri4ng with the ears, a seeing of voices. All of Derrida’s text are in e@ect telephonic since they answer a call from, a solicita4on by the other. Always with an aIrma4ve yes, yes to who or what will arrive. To pick up the phone is already to have said yes. Another telephantasy: I have always thought a lot about Derrida’s own telephone. It is, we assume, the one we hear him write about speaking on (most frequently in the switchboard of texts wri-en to and for Cixous). It may be the one we see him talking on in the )lm Ghost Dance. But, I always wondered whether Derrida had a mobile phone. That was un4l I heard Nicholas Royle speak about it, on it, in Portsmouth in 2006. As Royle tells it: I recall a sort of interrupted, interminably disjunc4ve conversa4on I had with him [Derrida] shortly aMer the ‘Autoimmunity’ dialogue, on 10 November 2001. This was on the occasion of a seminar at the University of Loughborough en4tled life.aMer.theory3. On the morning of the seminar Sarah Wood, Christopher Norris and I were having breakfast at the hotel when Jacques came in to join us. He 2
Nicholas Royle, “Jacques Derrida’s Language (Bin Laden on the Telephone)” in In Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 94-95. Both quota4ons are from Derrida’s “Ulysses Gramophone”. 3
The conference was organized by John Schad who has a book tellingly entitled Someone Called Derrida.
was due to give the lecture that morning, a version of the text later published as ‘”Le Parjure”, Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying (“abrupt breaches of syntax”). He appeared, as he oMen did before giving a lecture, rather nervous and agitated. He said good morning to us and then: ‘Bin Laden may have a nuclear device’. There was nothing about this in the Bri4sh newspapers in the hotel that morning. He had heard about it via his mobile phone from Paris [my emphasis]. Later he delivered his lecture, the usual two or more hours’ remarkable performance, and then before lunch, amid the hundreds of people milling around, he was on his mobile again. He then came towards me. I asked: ‘Any more news of Bin Laden?’ What was I thinking? Or not thinking? Was I fearing or expec4ng him to say calmly, yes, Paris has been a-acked? He looked at me directly and said simply: ‘I am not in personal communica4on with him, Nick”4.
So Derrida did have a mobile phone. Now, another telephantasy: I wonder what ever happened to it and to what was saved on its SD card. Will it have been stored in the archives at the University of California, Irvine so that any prospec4ve researcher can open a box marked “Derrida’s telephone” and siM through his text messages, listen to his voice mails, go through his gallery of photos? What would it mean to have Derrida’s private phone, his text wri4ngs, his photographs, become public? He himself wondered in Archive Fever how immeasurably di@erent the history of psychoanalysis as a discipline would have been had Freud and the others had access to emails, mobile phones, the internet (although even Derrida could not have an4cipated the technological advances in mobile technology since he wrote that text in 1995 or even since his own death in 2004)5. If Derrida never threw away a scrap of paper then we can imagine that he kept, archived, every single text message (sent and received). What would the future or the archive of deconstruc4on look like if we had access to Derrida’s mobile 4
5
Royle, “Jacques Derrida’s Language”, 105.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
phone, to his SD card? If Derrida says in 1995 that “electronic mail today, even more than the fax, is on the way to transforming the en4re public and private space of humanity, and )rst of all the limit between the private, the secret (private or public), and the public or the phenomenal”6, then we ourselves might ask, twenty years later, just over ten years aMer his death, what Derrida’s mobile phone would transform about both the past and the future of deconstruc4on, its archiviza4on, and its publiciza4on (the S in SD card stands for “secure” aMer all). If Derrida worried in his )nal interview that nothing would survive even a couple of weeks aMer he was dead then we are en4tled to wonder if and whether his mobile phone has survived him (I believe Avital Ronell was given his computer) and what this might mean for the legacy of deconstruc4on7: Today, the accelera4on in the forms of archiviza4on, though also use and destruc4on, are transforming the structure, temporality, and dura4on of the legacy. When it comes to thought, the ques4on of survival has taken on absolutely unforeseeable forms. At my age, I am ready to entertain the most contradictory hypotheses in this regard: I have simultaneously—I ask you to believe me on this—the double feeling that, on the one hand, to put it playfully and with a certain immodesty, one has not yet begun to read me, that even though there are, to be sure (a few dozen in the world perhaps, people who are also writer-thinkers, poets), in the end it is later on that all this has a chance of appearing; but also, on the other hand, and thus simultaneously, I have the feeling that two weeks or a month aMer my death there will be nothing lef. Nothing except what has been copyrighted and deposited in libraries. I swear to you, I believe sincerely and simultaneously in these two hypotheses8.
6
Derrida, Archive Fever, 17.
7
Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). 8
Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 33-34.
If Derrida’s mobile phone has not been deposited in his archive or copyrighted then what will have been lost? Buried? Inhumed? In the remarkable sixth session of the second volume of The Beast and the Sovereign seminars Derrida is, yet again, preoccupied with burial, crema4on, being buried alive and survival. It is worth quo4ng at length: Whoever professes inhuma4on, whoever votes in favour of inhuma4on, for self or for those around him or her, is telling him or herself a story [it is worth men4oning that this seminar is centrally concerned with sexual di@erence and that Cixous refers to sexual di@erence as DS which would be SD in transla4on] and yielding to the phantasm (and there is a phantasm where the place of nonknowledge is leM vacant by science itself, in the place where I do not know, as Robinson Crusoe says, I have no certain knowledge whether or not there can be spirit, spectral survival in the living dead or aMer death, what the state of death is, and what a “corpse” means, what the word “corpse” means, or even what the corpse itself s4ll means (veut dire: wants to say), the one that holds, rightly or wrongly, to be a corpse: the dead person, says Levinas, is not annihilated but is what no longer responds and thus no longer wants to say anything to us)—whoever, as I was saying, professes inhuma4on, whoever votes in favour of inhuma4on, for self or for those around him or her, is telling him or herself a story and yielding to the phantasm according to which all is not over and in which moreover so-called death does not consist in an end, does not have the last word, and in which one’s story is not over, there is room either for some survival that looks like a secular resurrec4on or else for some glorious and supernatural resurrec4on. These two resurrec4ons do be-er with a body inhumed in its integrity than with a body annihilated and reduced to ashes. What do I mean by secular resurrec4on? Well, that horrible thing that consists in waking up inside a sealed coIn, a closed grave, a sealed tomb, and having to cry out in the impotence of su@oca4on in order to call on the other for help. And you know about those maniacs who demand that they be buried with a telephone, a more or less mobile telephone [my emphasis], in order to tolerate the idea that
they might thus be buried alive. In Ulysses Gramophone I quoted and re-inscribed in a broader seSng this passage from Joyce’s Ulysses which says “have a gramophone in every grave” and imagines the grandfather waking up in his tomb and beginning to speak … Faithful departed. As you are now so once we were. Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. AMer dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old great-grandfather Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeragain hellohello amarawf kopthsth9.
Another telephantasy: In H.C For Life that is to say… Derrida places himself on the side of death and Cixous on the side of life10. For Cixous, she herself explains, “death is past. It has already taken place” while in the case of Derrida, on his side “death awaits him …he is expec4ng death in the future”11. However, it is not quite so simple. In a very late interview, a spoken dialogue—a telephone call even—where the voices of both HC and JD are to the fore, “From the Word to Life”, Derrida states that “C’est pour la vie means at once a faithful and unfailing friendship, ‘forever’, ‘for life’, but also the pour la vie which is for her an aIrma4on, a taking sides with life which I have never been able to share. I am not ‘against life’ but neither am I ‘for life’ like her. This discord is at the heart of the book—and of life”12. Cixous 9
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and The Sovereign, Volume II, trans. Geo@rey Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 163-164. 10
Jacques Derrida, H.C, For Life, that is to Say… trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 11
Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Wri/ng (London: Routledge, 1997), 82.
12
Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Alie-e Armel “From the Word to Life: A Dialogue
quickly retorts that “you are against death and )ercely for life. But otherwise. Dis/quitedly” (7). And in those Wee4ng sentences you have it all, the divivaci/es of Cixous and Derrida, but you have to listen carefully for the coded and veiled sexual/textual/corporeal ero4cs, the aIrma4ve televivaci4es which are quietly secreted at the heart of their books and their lives, for each other (the telephone is also a heart, before and beyond sexual di@erence). Those vivaci4es are best explained through the )gure of the telephone, the “living telephone”. It (he/she/it) is never, for Cixous, a )gure of death, always, on the contrary, the phone is a )gure of and for life. Rather than )guring death the telephone is non-death, that which does away (away-- a perfectly Cixousian word) with death, that which goes around death, periperforma4vely, crowds it out, interrupts death, halts it. The telephone is friendship’s (Cixous would say love’s) ally against death. Derrida and Cixous, especially the Cixous of Hyperdream, in which she wishes for Derrida to take “a leave” from being dead13, are forever, “in)nitely” hanging on and to the telephone. On it, the telephone they so frequently apostrophize, they “interrupt death”, keep the conversa4on, the future open (the à-venir, the to-come, if you read with your ears, is sugges4ve of “having an ear” for who or what will come). I also wonder, with all this talk of death, survival and remains whether the SD or memory card in Derrida’s mobile phone (if it has indeed survived) would be biodegradable or not. I would guess not. In an essay wri-en about Paul De Man, “Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments”, Derrida writes “the ‘biodegradable’ is hardly a thing since it remains a thing that does not remain, an essen4ally decomposable thing, des4ned to pass away, to lose its iden4ty as a thing and to become again a non-thing”14. He asks if everything that a-aches to words is biodegradable. Would “a publica/on, for example, a problema4c but very strict no4on that I am between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous”, trans. Ashley Thompson, New Literary History, 37:1 (2006) 7.
13
Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009).
dis4nguishing provisionally from the text in general” (815) be biodegradable? What about the survival of “the support (paper, magne4c tape, )lm, diske-e, and so on)”? The SD card of a mobile phone (which is supposed to be non-vola4le) is perhaps another support (a diske-e?) for wri4ng—so, is it erodable, degradable? Will it consume itself and its archive? What, then, will remain? What will be given to be remembered? Let’s turn now back to James Joyce and to Derrida’s text “Two Words for Joyce” where this ques4on of memory and a kind of Joycean SD card is conjured up: As for the other greatness, I shall say, with some injus4ce perhaps, that for me, it’s like Joyce’s greatness, or rather that of Joyce’s wri4ng. Here the event deploys such plot and scope that henceforth you have only one way out: being in memory of him. Not only overwhelmed by him, whether you know it or not, but obliged by him, constrained to measure yourself against this overwhelming. Being in memory of him: not necessarily to remember him, no, but to be in his memory, to inhabit a memory henceforth greater than all your )nite recall can gather up, in a single instant or a single vocable, of cultures, languages, mythologies, religions, philosophies, sciences, histories of spirit or of literatures. I don’t know if you can love that, without resentment and jealousy. Can one pardon this hypermnesia which indebts you in an advance? In advance and forever it inscribes you in the book you are reading. One can pardon this, this Babelian act of war only if it happens always, from all 4me, with each event of wri4ng, thus suspending each one’s responsibility. One can pardon it only if one remembers too that Joyce himself must have endured this situa4on. We remember it because he )rst wanted to remind us of it. He was the pa4ent of this situa4on, it’s his theme, or, I prefer to say, his scheme. He talks about it oMen enough for there to be no simple confusion between him and some sadis4c demiurge, seSng up a 14
Jacques Derrida, “Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments”, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Cri/cal Inquiry 15 (1989), 813.
hypermnesic machine, there in advance, decades in advance, to compute you, to control you, forbid you the slightest inaugurable syllable. For you can say nothing that is not programmed on this 1000th-genera4on computer, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, compared with the current technology of our computers and our microcomputerized archives and our transla4ng machines remains a bricolage, a prehistoric child’s toy”15. Perhaps Derrida’s wri4ng too has set us such a “prac/cal challenge” and “coun4ng the connec4ons, calcula4ng the speed of communica4ons or the length they travel, would at least be impossible, de facto, so long as we have not constructed the machine capable of integra4ng all the variables, all the quan4ta4ve or qualita4ve factors. This won’t be happening any 4me soon. In any case this machine would only be the weighty double of the ‘Joyce’ event, the simula4on of what this name signs or signi)es, the signed work, the Joyce soMware today, joyceware. No doubt it is being built, the worldwide ins4tu4on of Joyce Studies, James Joyce Inc. is working on it, unless it already is it” (25). Derrida is dreaming up here, in 1984, a JD card (a Joyce Device) which would be downloadable on your computer or even on your mobile phone. Almost a decade later, in 1993, Geo@rey Bennington a-empted to build a machine (a JD card, a Jacques Device) which would calculate the speeds, connec4ons and communica4ons of the then already vast Derrida event, the body of Derrida’s work, his corpus. Bennington called this soMware, this derridaware his “Derridabase”. He explains that G.B undertook to describe, according to the pedagogical and logical norms to which he holds, if not the totality of J.D.’s thought, then at least the general system of that thought. Knowing that there was to be text by J.D. in the book, he saw )t to do without any quota4on and limit himself to an argued exposi4on which would try to be as clear as possible. The guiding idea of the exposi4on comes from computers: G.B. would have liked to systema4ze J.D.’s thought to the point of turning it into an interac4ve program which, in spite of its diIculty, would in principle be accessible to any user. As what is 15
Jacques Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce”, trans. Geo@rey Bennington in Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote (eds) Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts (New York: SUNY Albany Press, 2013), 2425.
at stake in J.D.’s work is to show how any such system must remain essen4ally open, this undertaking was doomed to failure from the start, and the interest it may have consists in the test, and the proof, of that failure16. It would be impossible (as both Derrida for Joyce and Bennington for Derrida acknowledge) to construct a machine capable of signing or counter-signing the work. This would inevitably be doomed to failure. But we can s4ll imagine a JD card today or an app which we can download to our mobile phones which would be the slim double of the weighty event of Derrida’s work, of his hypermnesic machine, to which we must try to do jus4ce, to be in memory of him. Among the many photographs reproduced in Bennington’s book is one of Derrida siSng at his computer at his home in Ris-Orangis while Bennington is behind him standing and poin4ng (11). This replicates the “photograph” of Socrates siSng at his wri4ng desk while Plato stands behind him poin4ng. This photograph is, of course, the cover of Derrida’s The Post Card and both photographic scenes (Bennington and Derrida, Socrates and Plato) are, I would suggest, telephone calls. The telephone is always a dorsal technology, we are behind the other, never face to face. But this is where—as in Derrida’s wri4ng, in literature—we “see” voices, and we see them from behind. It is, as Cixous, reminds us “a kind of magic” insofar as the telephantasy of the phone call makes you feel that you see17. Literature, the book is always seeing a voice at a distance, a magic or animism in which literature or wri4ng addresses the distant reader, the reader to-come. This inven4on, coincidence of the telephone between Derrida and Cixous has much to do with their shared love of psychoanalysis, which as Freud acknowledged is a kind of telephoning. The pa4ent/analysand does not see Freud, the analyst, who is always behind his back, a transmi-er. This is like the telephone call between Socrates and 16
Geo@rey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 1. Hélène Cixous, “A Kind of Magic”, Paragraph 36:2 (2013):161-188.
17
Plato, Plato’s tele-visor e@ect, his seeing but not being seen by Socrates. Freud does not face the pa4ent on the couch and this is how we are when we are on the phone. It is, in a sense, a way of being with the other without the other being there. And this telephone call between Socrates and Plato is also a photograph: “Socrates wri4ng, wri4ng in front of Plato, I always knew it, it had remained like the nega4ve of a photograph to be developed for twenty-)ve centuries—in me of course”18. Both the call for those to construct Joycemachines or Derridamachines in the future and the photograph of Socrates and Plato which took twenty )ve centuries to develop are Nietszchean teleiopoe4c phone calls: “Nietzsche renews the call; he puts it through—from a di@erent place—this teleiopoe4c or telephone call to philosophers of a new species. To those of us who are already such philosophers, for in saying that he sees them coming, in feigning to record their coming … he is calling, he is asking, in sum, ‘that they come’ in the future”19. Phantasmoskiaphotographies Derrida could not have an4cipated the social media technologies for photographing that have emerged since his death yet there is much in his wri4ngs about photography which pre)gures Instagram, Vine, Snapchat and the “sel)e”. In “Aletheia”, his long essay on the Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama, Derrida ruminates on “photography as skiagraphy, the wri4ng of light and the wri4ng of shade”20 and he concedes that “however extraordinary and irreducible the modern event might be, photographic muta4on belongs, like all technique, to physis; it marks the di@erence of the rela4on to self in a physis that looks at itself, at herself, one, unique, alone with herself, she who comes and moves away from herself in the 4me it 18
Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 9.
Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 34-35. 19
Jacques Derrida, “Aletheia”, trans. Pleshette DeArmitt and Kas Saghafi, The Oxford Literary Review 32.2 (2010): 171. 20
takes to see herself and thus blind herself to herself—and who loves herself … All Alone [toute seule] ,yet with herself, she )gures (the) truth: of photography. Photography, these are the two points and everything that they suspend: incessantly, without wai4ng, like a nega4ve in suspension, but by an instantaneous snapshot e@ect [un e,et d’instantané] (173). Photography is teleiopoe4c: “Imminence is of photography, of the photographic snapshot, the imminence of the shot as well … she awaits photography, the photography that makes others wait for it … some4mes worried, ques4oning, 4mid, reserved, a-en4ve, welcoming, this wai4ng without horizon, this wai4ng that does not know what is coming to surprise her, but which she prepares herself to want, this is the imminence of the photographic acts” (175). Instagram or snap chat as arrivance in which the photographic act metonymizes “all possible acts (in the sense of the event and of the archive that records [prend acte] and preserves memory): the acts and cer4)cates of love, birth, marriage, and death. More precisely, this metonymy in ac4on [en acte] describes the imminence of these acts (love, marriage, birth or death) while it at once freezes movement in a snapshot … Each is also the )gure of the other, what at the same 4me links, carries along, and nulli)es all possible narra4vity. This recounts the ‘instantaneous’ story [une histoire ‘instantanée] of a series of ‘snapshots’ [‘instantanés’] or paradoxical instants, of these impossible instants … whose decisive force interrupts but also makes possible the story and history” (175-176). The phantasm [phantasme] is, of course, a kind of light. And Derrida gives us the syntagm “no phantasm and thus no spectre (phantasma) without photography—and vice versa” (177). The distance between us, he says, “will never be surmounted” (178), just as in a telephone call. Tele-phonē means, literally, to speak at a distance. Telephoning, photographing is auto-heteroa@ec4ve, a self-touching, or as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it a “self-touching you” (un “se toucher soi). In On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy Derrida speaks about this “very moment when ‘I’ makes its entrance … it signs the possibility or the need for the said ‘I’ (as soon as it touches itself) to address itself, to speak to itself, to treat of itself (in a soliloquy interrupted in advance) as an other. No sooner does ‘I’ touch itself than it is itself—it contracts itself, it contracts with itself, but as with another … I self-touches spacing itself out,
losing contact with itself, precisely in touching itself”21. Again, there is a ghostly revenance (phantasma) at the heart of self-touching. No photography without phantasma, no phantasma without photography: “The revenant, between life and death, dictates an impossible mourning, an endless mourning—life itself. Barely visible scene of this mourning: it pertains to a spacing that is irreducible or even heterogeneous in rela4on to an ‘extensio’ from which, however, one should not dissociate it” (35). Touching touches the heart “and on the heart” of the other “but inasmuch as it is always the heart of the other” (273). No surprise, then, that we send each other hearts with our text messages and instant photo-images. Because “even self-touching touches upon the heart of the other. Hearts never belong, at least there where they can be touched. No one should ever be able to say ‘my heart’, my own heart, except when he or she might say it to someone else and call him or her this way—and that is love. There would be nothing and there would no longer be any ques4on without this originary exappropria4on and without a certain ‘stolen heart’” (273). Self-touch is always interrupted, disar4culated, spaced, syncopated, like the tele-phonē call or the photograph22. The voice, in a telephone call, touches at a distance, “like the eye” (On Touching, 112). Derrida speaks of the “telephonic caress, if not the (striking) phone call” which would be saved on its memory card: (Imagine: lovers separated for life. Wherever they may )nd themselves and each other. On the phone, through their voices and their inWec4on, 4mbre, and accent, through eleva4ons and interrup4ons in the breathing, across moments of silence, they foster all the di@erences necessary to arouse a sight, touch, and even smell—so many caresses, to reach the ecsta4c climax from which they are forever weaned—but are never deprived. They know that they will never )nd ecstasy again, ever—other than 21
Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Chris4ne Irizarry (California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 34. 22
See Catherine Malabou, “’A Self-Touching You’: Derrida and Descartes” in Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emo/onal Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
across the cordless cord of these entwined voices. A tragedy. But intertwined, they also know themselves, at 4mes only through the memory they keep of it, through the spectral phantasm [my emphasis] of ecsta4c pleasure—without the possibility of which, they know this too, pleasure would never be promised. They have faith in the telephonic memory [my emphasis] of a touch. Even if the shore of a “phantasm” [my emphasis] precisely, seems to have more aInity with phainesthai [Derrida’s emphasis], that is, with the semblance or shine of the visible (112-113). The telephonic caress with its phantasmal pleasures stored in the telephonic memory is a kind of spectral photography (phainesthai/phantasm) an appari4on (a spectral app) which can be sericita4onally23 saved, stored, archived, downloaded on the tele-phono-eroto-photo-graphic apparatus24. Photography is the “medium” of the departed. “I like the word ‘medium’ here” Derrida admits. “It speaks to me of spectres, of ghosts and phantoms, like these images themselves. From the very )rst ‘appari4on’ it’s all about the return of the departed. It is there in black and white, it can be veri)ed aMer the fact. The spectral is the essence of photography”25. The photograph is always a kind of tomb, a monument, a cenotaph (or cenatograph). Even the instagram, the instantaneous shot (in 1985 in Right of Inspec/on it is the “instama4c”, the Polaroid) has to be seen “retrospec4vely or phantoma4cally [en revenant] for all that only reproduces or inverts, that is to say precedes another scene, at a previous 4me within memory, within whose memory one cannot tell”. You must speculate “on all the possible developments, give yourself over to phantoma4c or phantasma4c reconstruc4ons. Phantoms and phantasms,
23
On series, cita4on and recita4on see Jacques Derrida’s “Pregnant with Meaning”, trans. Andrew Rothwell, ColeEe Deblé (Leeds: The University Gallery, 1998). 24
I thank Dragan Kujundžić for poin4ng out the connec4ons between the photographic apparatus and the appari4onal to me. 25
Jacques Derrida, Right of Inspec/on, trans. David Wills (The Monacelli Press, 1998). The images Derrida is wri4ng about are by the Belgian ar4st Marie-Françoise Plissart. Not paginated.
always the wri4ng of appearance, of appari4on and of semblance, the brilliance of the phainesthai and of light, photography”. Phantasmoskiaphotography: phantoma4c, luminous wri4ng of appari4ons. Ph: photograph, phone, phantom, phanesthai, phenomenon, phantasm. Photography and deconstruc4on, as we can already discern, share, among other things, a concern with ques4ons to do with presenta4on, transla4on, techné, subs4tu4on, deferral, dissemina4on, repe44on, itera4on, memory, inscrip4on. But most importantly, Derrida’s wri4ngs about photography take death, mourning, memory and loss as their most insistent and recurring themes. His best known essay on photography would have to be “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” and his text devoted to the photographer Jean-François Bonhomme, Athens, S/ll Remains turns around the cryp4c phrase “we owe ourselves to death”26. We have already seen that in his )nal interview Derrida frets about the disappearance of his work and memory of it. In a much earlier interview, “Dialanguages” he says that: If there were an experience of loss at the heart of all this, the only loss for which I could never be consoled and that brings together all the others, I would call it loss of memory. The su@ering at the origin of wri4ng for me is the su@ering from the loss of memory, not only forgeSng or amnesia, but the e@acement of traces. I would not need to write otherwise; my wri4ng is not in the )rst place a philosophical wri4ng or that of an ar4st, even if, in certain cases, it might look like that or take over from these other kinds of wri4ng. My )rst desire is not to produce a philosophical work or a work of art: it is to preserve memory27. We should be reminded here of Bennington’s “Derridabase” given Derrida’s struggles against and with loss and the loss of memory. “It is not at all by chance”, Bennington says “that Derrida talks of Joyce’s books in terms of 26
Jacques Derrida, Athens, S/ll Remains: The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme , trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 27
Jacques Derrida, “Dialanguages” an interview with Anne Berger in Points, 143-144.
supercomputers, nor that this should communicate in an essen4al way with certain discourses on so-called ar4)cial intelligence. Nor that we should have conceived this book a li-le on the model of a ‘hypertext’ program which would allow, at least in principle, an almost instantaneous [my emphasis] access to any page or word or mark from any other, and which would be plugged into a memory [my emphasis] containing all of Derrida’s texts, themselves simultaneously accessible by ‘themes’, key words, references, turns of ‘style’ etc (which our list of references simulates for be-er and worse), and then to a larger memory [my emphasis] making accessible, according to the same mul4ple entries, the texts quoted or invoked by Derrida, with everything that forms their ‘context’, therefore just about the (open) totality of the universal library, to say nothing of musical or visual or other (olfac4ve, tac4le, gusta4ve) archives to be invented”28. Deconstruc4on works to archive, preserve and conserve traces, marks, inscrip4ons for be-er or worse. In “Videor”, a li-le known text on the ar4st Gary Hill, Derrida calls “the history of an ac4ve, vigilant, unpredictable prolifera4on that will have displaced even the future anterior” and this vigilance would amount to “another mode of reading … without destroying the aura of new works whose contours are so diIcult to delimit”. Those new works “are delivered over to other … modes of produc4on, of ‘representa4on’, archiving, reproducibility, while giving to a technique of wri4ng in all its several states (shoo4ng, edi4ng, ‘incrusta4on’, projec4on, storage, reproduc4on, archiving, and so on) the chance for a new aura”29. In Derrida’s absence it is even more pressing for us, as readers, to preserve, conserve and create mnemonic open and reiterable archives which would lend his works the chance (with all the a-endant risks) for a new aura. In Memoires for Paul De Man, in the wake of his recent loss of his own friend, Derrida makes a call for teleiopoe4c memory work. He says there that:
28
Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida, 314-315. During the )lm Unpacking Derrida’s Library (Slought Founda4on, 2014) Hélène Cixous contributes to that gusta4ve archive by reading Derrida’s “universal library” as a larder on which he gorged. 29
Jacques Derrida, “Videor”, trans. Peggy Kamuf in Robert C. Morgan (ed) Gary Hill (Bal4more: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 25.
the very condi4on of a deconstruc4on may be at work, in the work, within the system to be deconstructed; it may already be located there, already at work … par4cipa4ng in the construc4on of what it at the same 4me threatens to deconstruct. One might then be inclined to reach this conclusion: deconstruc4on is not an opera4on that supervenes aferwards, from the outside, one )ne day; it is always already at work in the work … Since the disrup4ve force of deconstruc4on is always already contained within the architecture of the work, all one would )nally have to do to be able to deconstruct, given this always already, is to do memory work30. Photography too works to conserve, preserve, memorialize that which is about to disappear (but which always returns). Both deconstruc4on and photography bear witness to the impending death of the subject, and the poten4al loss and preserva4on of memory as well as life. In “Aletheia” as we saw earlier, Derrida allies death and survival, destruc4on and mourning, birth and departure. In Counterpath Derrida and Malabou include one image from the book Athens, S/ll Remains which cap4vates Derrida. It is of a “photographer on the acropolis” who has fallen asleep before his camera tripod. In his thanato-photo-graphical reWec4ons on this striking image Derrida sees an an4cipa4on of death which is, of course, unan4cipatable. It is therefore a scene of “advance mourning”31. Derrida’s a-en4on to the image is worth lingering over at length: I retrace the steps of the photographer. In advance, he brings mourning to Athens, mourning for a city that is owed to death, and two or three 4mes rather than a single one, according to di@erent temporali4es: mourning for an ancient, archaeological, or mythological Athens, no doubt, mourning for an Athens that has disappeared and that shows the body of its ruins; but also mourning for an Athens that he knows—because he has photographed it, in the present of the instants of his shots—will 30
Jacques Derrida, “The Art of Memories”, trans. Jonathan Culler in Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 73. 31
Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills (Stanford, California, California University Press, 2004) 106.
disappear tomorrow, is already condemned to expire, and whose witnesses (the Adrianou Street Market, Café Neon on Omonia Square, the Street Piano) have in fact disappeared since “he took the shot”; and )nally, third an4cipated mourning, he knows that other photographs have captured spectacles that are s4ll visible, today, presently, at the moment the book appears (Athinas Market, Meat Market, Fish Market), but which will have to be, “ought” to be, destroyed tomorrow. A ques4on of debt or of necessity, of economy, of the “market”, the landscape of these streets, cafés, markets, musical instruments having to die, owed to death. It is the law. They are threatened with or promised to death. Three deaths, three instances, three temporali4es of death in sight of or in the business of photography … ,three “presences” of disappearance, three phenomena of the “disappeared” being: the )rst before the shot is taken, the second from the perspec/ve of [depuis] the shot, and the last later s4ll, tomorrow, but it is imminent, afer the appearance of the print. But if the imminence of what is owed to death suspends the moment it falls due, as does the epoch of all photography, at the same 4me as it signs its verdict. It con)rms it and seals it with an ineluctable authority: it will have to die, it is assigned to residence and the date is set [la mise en demeure est en marche], the countdown has begun, there is simply a delay, 4me to photograph, but no one dreams of escaping death, and nothing will be saved. I think of Socrates; death, of the Phaedo and Crito. Of the incredible reprieve that holds o@ the fatal day of so many days aMer the judgment. They were wai4ng for sails to appear, for them to appear in the distance, to come into the light, at a precise, unique, and inevitable instant, as fatal as the click of a shu-er32. No photograph, whether taken on a camera or a smartphone, can avoid the inescapability of advance mourning, of the an4cipa4on of death. In the precise moment of the fatal release of the shu-er or click on the phone, death is an4cipated, mourned, and guarded against, watched over. There is mourning in the three temporali4es of the before, during and aMer the “shot”. Every photograph mourns death and survival, disappearance and 32
Derrida and Malabou, Counterpath, 107-108.
living on, erasure from and inscrip4on—skiagraphy or shadow wri4ng in the memory33. In fact, Kas Sagha) writes, “there would be no photography without spectres. In every photogragh there are spectres. What survives or lives on in a photograph, thanks to the photographic process, is the survival of the dead or of ghosts”. Photography is “an inscrip4on or a wri4ng, in light and shade, of phantoms (a phantasmaphotaskiagraphy). Those who look at photographs, then, are being looked at by ghosts”34. The photographer’s look embalms, spectralizes. But what if it is the cat which looks? In “The Animal that Therefore I am” Derrida confesses his shame as he stands naked in his bathroom before his cat35. This scene where his cat regards, freezes him is haunted by mourning and spectrality. In this instant Derrida an4cipates and advance mourns the unique moment of his death: snap/chat. He is “spectralized by the shot, captured or possessed by spectrality in advance”36. Bernard S4egler asks in “The Discrete Image” what it is that we fear in the analogico-digital photo or the digi4za4on of the analog photo. His answer is that “the digi4za4on of the analog destabilizes our knowledge of the this was, and we are afraid of this. But we were afraid of the analog, too: in the )rst photographs, we saw phantoms”37. Phantom as we know preserves a reference to phainesthai, “to appearing for vision, to the brightness of the day, to phenomenality” (115). With the digital photo, the light no longer emits from the day, and what we are afraid of is this “night light” (152) which “comes from Hades, from the realm of the dead, from underground: it is an electric light, set free by materials from deep within 33
Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversa/on on Photography, trans. Je@ Fort (Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2010), 15. 34
Kas Sagha), Appari/ons—Of Derrida’s Other (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 93.
35
Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” in The Animal that Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 36
Jacques Derrida and Bernard S4egler, Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002) 117. 37
Derrida and S4egler, 152.
the belly of the earth. An electronic, that is to say, a decomposed light” (153). It is digi4za4on which blurs the transmission of the photograph and renders “phantoms and phantasms indis/nct… photons become pixels”(153). Derrida worries, is afraid that mnemotechnical devices may well close o@ the future rather than open it up: The impression that the horizon is closed, that there is no future, etc., may just as well be a sign of the power of archiviza4on as the contrary. Of course, the power of or drive to archiviza4on may open to the future, to the experience of the open horizon: an4cipa4on of the coming event and of what one will be able to keep of it by calling it in advance [my emphasis]. But, by the same token, this increase, this intensi)ca4on of an4cipa4on may also nullify the future. This is the paradox of an4cipa4on. An4cipa4on opens to the future, but at the same 4me, it neutralizes it. It reduces, presen4)es, transforms into memory [en mémoire], into the future anterior and, therefore, into a memory [en souvenir], that which announces tomorrow as s4ll to come. A single movement extends the opening of the future, and by the same token, by what I would call a horizon e,ect, it closes the future o@, giving us the impression that “this has already happened”. I am so ready to welcome the new, which I know I’m going to be able to keep, capture, archive, that it’s as if it had already happened and nothing will ever happen again. And so the impression of “No future” is paradoxically linked to a greater opening, to an indetermina4on, to a wide-openness, even to a chaos, a chasm: anything at all can happen, but it has happened already. It has already happened; death has already happened. This is the experience of death. And yet, like death, the event, the other, is also what we don’t see coming, what we await without expec4ng and without horizon of expecta4on. To be able to an4cipate is to be able to see death coming, but to see death coming is already to be in mourning for it, already to amor4ze, to be able to start deadening death [à mor/r la mort] to the point where it can’t even happen anymore. It can’t even happen anymore, and everything has happened already. This double
experience, which belongs to the structure of an4cipa4on, to the structure of the horizon, to the structure of mourning, too, is not new, of course. We didn’t have to wait for the machines we’re talking about in order to have this experience, but they gave it such a powerful boost that we are s4ll stupe)ed by it (106) Perhaps it is to inven/on that we must paradoxically turn so as to keep the future open. In “Psyche: Inven4on of the Other” Derrida makes the surprising claim that inven4on is both a )nding, as if for the )rst 4me, and a calling into presence of that which it )nds. When we are being watched, gazed at, photographed, we are subject to, before the law but the other is not suscep4ble to the law of inven4on. Derrida writes here in many voices which has the feel of a telephone call: The other is indeed what is not inventable, and it is therefore the only inven4on in the world, the inven4on of the world, our inven4on, the inven4on that invents us. For the other is always another origin of the world and we are to be invented. And the being of the being of the we, and being itself. Beyond being… … The coming of inven4on cannot make itself foreign to the repe44on and memory [my emphasis]. For the other is not the new. But its coming extends beyond this past present that was once able to construct—to invent, we must say—the techno-onto-anthropotheo-logical concept of inven4on, its very conven4on and status, the status of the inven4on and the status of the inventor … The Other, that’s no longer inventable. What do you mean by that? That the other will have been only an inven4on, the inven4on of the other? “No, that the other is what is never inventable and will never have waited for your inven4on. The call of the other is a call to come, and that happens only in mul4ple voices”38. 38
Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Inven4on of the Other”, trans. Catherine Porter in Psyche: Inven/ons of the Other, Volume 1(eds) Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Ro-enberg (Stanford,
The call of the inventable other can only happen in mul4ple voices (or gazes), and those voices must remain unknowable, hauntological, spectral. “Let’s say that our rela4on to another origin of the world or to another gaze, to the gaze of the other, implies a kind of spectrality. Respect for the alterity of the other dictates a respect for the ghost [le revenant] and, therefore, for the non-living, for what it’s possible is not alive. Not dead, but not living. This is where I try to begin in the book on ‘Marx’s specters’ when I ask myself how to ‘learn how to live’ and what ‘learning how to live might mean’. There is no respect and, therefore no jus4ce without this rela4on of )delity or of promise, as it were, to what is no longer living or not living yet, to what is not simply present. There would be no urgent demand for jus4ce, or for responsibility, without this spectral oath … Respect would be due to the law of the other, who appears without appearing and watches or concerns me as a specter”39. No jus4ce without deconstruc4on, no deconstruc4on without jus4ce; no photography without spectres, no spectres without photography; no deconstruc4on without spectres, no spectres without deconstruc4on; no photography without deconstruc4on, no deconstruc4on without photography. As we saw in Right of Inspec/on the spectral is “the essence of photography”. So, if the call of the other is spectral, then the essence of photography might just be a certain experience of the impossible, the “experience of the other as the inven4on of the impossible” and “the only possible inven4on”40.
California: Stanford University Press, 2007), 45-47. 39
Derrida and S4egler, 123-124.
40
Derrida, “Psyche: Inven4on of the Other”, 15.
Paul Harrison The Viral Complexi es Of Art's New Media. In the descrip on of his personal project the video loop, Virtual Ampli"ca on (2011). Edgor KraL has wri)en down an interes ng sentence, 'Each new mouse click takes us away from an answer and ques on just as each following step of development of media environment and virtualiza on moves us further from the understanding of what is an authen c realityi.' Such a sentence incubates and galvanizes contemporary thinking around new forms in art's produc on and consump on. KraL's work immediately illustrates what one want's to ar culate. One "nds that the circular narra ve of this video loop evoke's the symmetry/asymmetry, inside/outside, of life. Post-web 1.0 an internet that was also referred to as an 'informa on portal', an environment that one could only read from. However we are now interac ng with a newer version and are awai ng it's next evolu on. Art has been a ected by these movement's and we have witnessed large amounts of crea vity. That use new digital media in the world of data, soLware, and networked communica on. This short essay comment's on these new forms through two methods. Firstly, by using the word viral to envision the behaviour and a ect new media is having on art. Secondly, giving impetus to incorpora ng new concept's into the cri cal vocabulary we use when discussing these ma)ers, materials, and poli cs. In the essay Recycled Electrons George Boole, an academic and logician, recollect's his "rst encounter with the internetii. He say's that, 'the globe's me and space had been instantly redrawn' and that, 'it's trunk/branch/twig structure is an underlying framework that has become part of our very mode of thought'. If this is true then one believes new media art is virally complex precisely because it now serves as an 'underlying framework' for cri cal insight on arts place within capitalism. Another way of ar cula ng this is that NMA is for today's 'art world' what Karl Marx saw as the Proletariat (the
workers), the "rst and only class. Sugges ng a naive reality whereby new media ar sts have spawned a revolu on, and the means of produc on the ownership of markets and wealth. Is as the internet should compel, equally redistributed amongst a community. Staying with the Marxist terminology in addi on to KraL's and Boole's word's, the viral impact of media can be prac cally explored. Just observe the fact that in 2008 the online community Anonymous in reac on to the treatment of Wikileaks, disrupted and nulli"ed the stalwarts of capital. MarsterCard, Visa, and Paypal, where stopped in their tracks by a community in2uenced by the behaviour of online crea vity and it's circula ng images. A fe shism dormant in the movements of a memeiii? The Visual Meme's (ideas, styles, or behaviours shared within a culture) on the website 4Chan, shows how an image can become a virus, muta ng so quickly, that it gave birth to an en rely new culture and community. To understand the relevancy of this to art one could choose to see these changes, as what the ar st and media theorist Victor Burgin, saw as an 'absence of presence'. Wri ng under the same tle he explores changes fuelled by postmodernism and conceptual art. Burgin, whilst referencing Michel Foucault's metaphor of fe shism as 'capillary ac on', and describing Freud's ar cula on of fe shism as Disavowal (which is a spliIng between knowledge and belief)iv. Seemingly embodied in the then art establishment's very rela on to history. Yet "nding this spliIng is very rewarding and should demand that those that are concerned with the openness of art. Need only turn and see new forms of media that have an unequivocal an -capitalist metabolism. Even Foucault's metaphorical use of 'capillary' lend's itself to media art's virus like body. If you are s ll doub ng the accuracy of the viral narra ve one is considering, and how Burgin's 'absence of presence' is relevant. Then look at recent events at the Barbican in London, one exhibi on in partnership with Google: Digital Revolu on (2014). Claiming to be a comprehensive account of digital art, Google's corporate presence (DevArt) spawned a cri cal counter exhibi on. Hack The Art World is a completely digital online exhibi on which was originally geofenced (only available in that loca on) to the Barbican. It
resembled for the art cri c Jonathan Jones an exhibi on in Paris in 1863, the Salon des Refuses, showing art rejected by the o?cial Salonv. So are these exhibi ons and ar sts demonstra ng yet another form of disavowal? Maybe, but the lead ar st of the group behind the show Jan Vantomme made a very valid point. When he stated that tech giants should help start legi mising digital ar sts by buying and collec ng their work. The way the art in this show was used directly to illustrate this point should be seen in an extremely posi ve light. The demand of these ar sts was legi mate and posi oned so as not to detract from the work of the ins tu on. Or from the ar sts in the physical exhibi on, instead it did something more important. It show's that resistance need not be completely dismissive or demand full blown opposi on. So another angle, perspec ve, point of view is necessary to decipher a way in which we can harness these aforemen oned antagonisms – the material ques on is one of dissemina on. Like the no on of the meme a one cell thick lining of the capillary, art can now be microcirculated. Trapped in a world terraformed by our technology and it's numerical dominance in data or informa on. A global conversa on contaminated by the axis of encryp on/decryp on, either infec on or defec on? One way of framing these issues is brilliantly elaborated in an essay by writer Lori Wike. Wike bring's together the thought's of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes on absence, presence, and temporality. In doing so interrogates the link between an image and a word – however it seems that it's actually Barthes words in this text that are more be"Ing to our contemporary digital crea vity, 'the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existen allyvi'. This statement by Barthes can be witnessed in the blossoming of digital a ects, anima on, and image manipula on due to computers. Today we unconsciously me travel through a mul dimensional sphere of representa ons, every single one of them manipulated. A process which is already pre-des ned to increase – ar sts and cultural bodies need not fear these changes. Especially if like Derrida they embrace the a ec ve enthusiasm of their parasitology, their 'virus being many thingsvii'.The bene"t's of being prone to infec on are like a real immune system, art will develop new forms of isotope ones with an iterability, such examples can be
seen in recent projects. No Ghost In The Shell (1999) the reanima on of a Japanese anime character by Philippe Parreno and Peirre Huyghe. Low Animal Spirits (2014), at Banner Repeater, London. A collabora on resul ng in a live algorithmic score derived from the loss of the referent (presence) in both economy and language. Thirdly, Dark Velocity (2014) which underlines the main topic that warrants the complex metaphor of this text. Brilliantly summarising, 'The invariability of contemporary art's commodity form makes object-ownership hold crucial leveraging power in the "eld thereby overshadowing the poten al for "nancial diversi"ca onviii'. One see's the separa on between knowledge and belief in psychoanalysis, "rmly rooted in the modernist ques ons of 'why?', and 'how?'. As not en rely outdated in deciphering the above dilemma, the aforemen oned overshadowing of diversi"ca on, has in this author's opinion culminated in but one op on. Media art and philosophy now have the unenviable task of ar cula ng 'what?' and 'when?', as ques ons which will most strongly in2uence current and future culture. So staying with the le)er V as the root linguis c pathogen we can glimpse yet more rela ons, associa ons, and paths to discuss. Moreover, art's complexi es will grow with strains and concept's found in: virtuality, vitalism, and plas city. Conceptually a)aching themselves to the current 'discipline' of new media art's? 'Discipline is no longer imposed on the body through the formal ac on of the law – it is printed in the collec ve brain through the dissemina on of techno -linguis c interfaces, inducing a cogni ve muta on ix.'
_
I . Edgor KraL, Virtual Ampli ca on, Personal Project, Video Loop, 01:20, (2011) <h)ps://vimeo.com/23609366> [accessed 26th October 2014] ii. Rod Stoneman, Seeing Is Believing: The Poli cs Of The Visual – Recycled Electrons, Black Dog Publishing, London, p.169, (2013) iii. Brian Knappenberger, We Are Legion: The Story Of Hack vist's, Documentary Film, Luminant Films, (2012) iv. Victor Burgin, The Absence Of Presence, 1965 to 1972 – When A9tudes Became Form, Ke)le's Yard Gallery, Cambridge, & Edinbrugh, p.17-24, (1984) [Art In Theory 1900 – 2000: An Anthology Of Changing Ideas, Blackwell Publishing, USA, p.1071, (2003)] v. Jonathan Jones, Hack The Art World: The Dissident Techies Tackling Google, Gaurdian, UK, Monday 21st, 16:30 BST, (2014) <h)p://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/jul/21/hack-the-artworld-digital-revolu on-barbican-protest>[accessed 1st November 2014} vi. Lori Wike, Photographs And Signatures: Absence, Presence, and Temporality In Barthes And Derrida, In[]visible Culture: An Electronic Journal For Visual Studies, Rochester.edu, (2000) <http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/wike.htm>[accessed 2nd November 2014] vii. Jacques Derrida, Posi ons, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, p. 95–6, (1981) viii. Victoria Ivanova, Dark Velocity: Leveraging Ecological Vola lity, DIS Magazine, New York, 28th October, (2014) <h)p://dismagazine.com/dystopia/68095/dark-velocity-leveraging ecological-vola lity/> [accessed 2nd November 2014] ix. Franco Berardi (Bifo), Prolifera ng Futures, Vol 1 #4, Winter/Spring (1996) [Proud To Be Flesh:, Mute Publishing/Autonomedia, London/New York, p.41, (2009)
Rose Butler Making the Invisible Visible; examining disembodiment through digital media. We are currently experiencing very rapid, signi"cant and immense technological change, and are demonstrably exploi ng its poten al. However, we are also encountering and a)emp ng to understand the uncertain and 2uid psychological, ethical and poli cal implica ons of this accelerated period of behavioural change. This developmental shiL has been described by Erik Bryn jolfsson and Andrew McAfee as an in2ec on point – the point at which there will be astonishing progress. (Bryn jolfsson and McAfee 2014) As proli"c users of technology we generate, distribute and share huge amounts of data in many di erent digital arenas. We exploit its capabili es whilst making ourselves vulnerable and subject to its use. The example below illustrates a physical and psychological disembodiment, the resul ng poli cal, moral, ethical and unde"ned complexi es we enter and a transi on from visible to invisible. In Hito Steyerl’s new video; How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didac c Educa onal .MOV File, the video features and is set, at the site of photo calibra on targets in the California desert. These charts resemble giant pixels on the ground and were used as targets for analogue aerial photography to test the calibra on or ‘vision’ of airborne cameras. Like a metaphorical optometrist's chart, this cons tuted a precursor to drone development.
- Image 001: Hito Steyerl, Three Tri-bar targets at Cuddeback Lak. Photo: CLUI.
- Image 002: (Taken from h)p://notabugsplat.com)
With similar inten ons, a collec ve of ar st ac vists #NotABugSplat from Pakistan and the US, installed an image that was large enough to be seen by drone operators at the scene of one of the a)acks. The image was of a child who lost her family in one of the US drone a)acks last November in Pakistan: â&#x20AC;&#x153;..It has the power to startle an enemy for a moment and perhaps even render him incapable of using his weapon aLerwards. In the medium- to-long term, the enemy may su er from impaired judgment and, in some cases, be neutralised. The device is a picture of his vic m.â&#x20AC;? (Benedictus, L. 2014)
Considering these two examples of drone visualisa ons, both examples intend to reveal what cannot be seen. But whereas the analogue target chart is a device to assist, test and develop visibility it is clear that the popula on on the ground believe that unmanned drones rely on invisibility. This is not an invisibility denied to the operators due to the limita ons of technology, rather it is an invisibility deliberately enabled and essen al to the perpetua on of control through operatorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; disembodiment and disassocia on with the subject of their gaze. This me the calibra on image was being used to recalibrate consciousness rather than resolu on and it is perhaps the astonishing development of resolu on, of digital technology and its e ects, which makes this recalibra on necessary. The concept of resolu on shiLs through digital technology and new understandings of visuality begin to emerge. The ar sts on the ground present a challenge to their invisibility, and reverse their posi oning from observed to observer. Tonje Hessen Schei's new "lm Drone examines the recruitment of young gamers into the CIA who discuss the emo onal burden of remote warfare. (Hessen Shei, Tonje. 2014) In this example disembodiment begins to extend further into ethical considera ons of emo onal burden and further again through disassocia on into moral accountability and further again through invisibility into poli cal accountability as it emerges that the US air force are actually carrying out
these a)acks. (Woods 2014) Digital media has given analogue process a new currency allowing frame by frame interroga on of temporality, space and mo on and an altera on to our experience and expecta ons of point of view. Christopher Townsend, discusses a philosophical disrup on of accepted modes of history and progress in response to the Muybridge exhibi on at Tate Britain: “we no longer have "lm as material model of me in rela on to space but we s ll reference the print of its frame in our imagina on, just as me codes and frame rates are applied to digital media in order to sustain the order of realis c movement”. (Townsend, C. 2010)
Just as non linear digital edi ng has visually challenged our no on of me, 3D anima on and gaming alongside soLware such as Google maps, satellite data or imagery of wars generated by drone technology, has shiLed our expecta ons of point of view. This shiL in perspec ve enables us to adopt the posi on of a view from above or a Gods Eye View. It enables a detachment from a point of view we might more commonly associate with tradi onal perspec ve or of having our feet on the ground. (Steyerl, H. 2009) Key References: Leo Benedictus, ‘The ar sts who are giving a human face to the US's 'bug splat' drone strikes’, (2014) [Online], Available: h)p://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/apr/07/ar sts-give-human-facedrones-bug-splat-pakistan [25 April 2014]. Ian Bogost. The Atlan c, Hyperemployment or the Exhaus ng Work of the Technology Worker, (2013) [Online] Available: h)p://www.theatlan c.com/technology/archive/2013/11/hyperemployment-or-theexhaus ng-work-of-the-technology-user/281149/ [25 April 2014]
Brynjolfsson, & E. McAfee. The Second Machine Age, Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, London, New York, W.W Norton and Company. (2014) Jonathon Crary. Techniques of the Observer; On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, London, MIT Press. (1992) Laura Mulvey. Death 24x a Second, London; Reak on Books Ltd. (2006) Notabugsplat.com. (2014) ‘A giant art installa on targets predator drone operators [Online], Available: h)p://notabugsplat.com [26 April 2014]. Director Tonje Hessen Schei, Drone, Film. Norway. (2014) Rebecca Solnit, London Review of Books: Vol. 35 No. 16, pages 32-33. (2013) Rebecca Solnit. Mo on Studies, London; Bloomsbury. (2003) Hito Steyerl. The Wretched of the Screen, e-2ux journal; Sternberg Press. (2009) Christopher Townsend. ‘Muybridge Marey Duchamp’, Art Monthly, Issue 341. (2010) Chris Woods. ‘CIA's Pakistan drone strikes carried out by regular US air force personnel’ (2014) [Online] Available: h)p://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/14/cia-drones-pakistan-us-air-forcedocumentary [30 April 2014] Exhibi ons: Mark Boulous: All That is Solid Melts into Air. Where Art Imitates Real Life, Berlin Biennale (2008) Time and Mo on; Rede ning Working Life, FACT (2013) Hito Steyerl: How Not To Be Seen. A Fucking Didac c Educa onal .Mov File. ICA, (2014) Images: Image 001 - (h)p://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/may/31/hito-steyerl-how-not-to-beseen/)
Image 002 - (Taken from h)p://notabugsplat.com)
Samuel Blackwood She eld based ar st! - h p://sblkwd.tumblr.com
Exhibiting Artists
Ami Clarke
'@LowAnimalSpirit Twi+er Feed' Live Twi)er Feed. From the exhibi on Low Animal Spirits' at Banner Repeater, London, (2014). Ami Clarke is an ar st who also runs the project: Banner Repeater, a reading room and project space on Pla_orm 1, Hackney Downs train sta on. Her prac ce con nues to develop alongside facilita ng Banner Repeater, which has become a unique research model informing her prac ce, in a working train sta on environment. Her work is concerned with structures of meaning, and the semio cs of everyday life, and what kind of representa on could possibly ar culate the complexi es and contradic ons of life working as an ar st today. - h)p://www.amiclarke.com
Ashley Holmes
'My Ghe+o Frame Of Mind Makes Me Prone To Hos.lity' Video Art, 'My Ghe+o Frame Of Mind Makes Me Prone To Hos.lity' Video Art, 02:30, (2014) Ashley Holmes, born in 1990, Luton, studied at Fine Art at She?eld Hallam University and currently lives and works in She?eld. Holmes' is also codirector of Plenty Vibes, a pla_orm interested in our experiences & interac ons with music, technology & art - both online & physically. Recent exhibi ons include The Common, The Midas Touch, Luton (2014); Power Up! Salt & Powell, York (2014); I DUNNO SHIT, Cactus @ Rogue Projects, Manchester (2014); S1 Introduces, S1 Artspace Bursary Award Exhibi on, She?eld (2014) 'Using techniques including video and sound edi ng, with interests in more tradi onal methods of sculp ng and pain ng within a digital space, Ashley Holmes' art prac ce compiles a wide range of visual languages that use repe on and focus on form to develop a catalogue of references. My
G h e )o Frame O f M in d M ake s M e P ro n e To H o s li t y. ' h)p://ashleyholmes.co.uk
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Dries Depoorter
Just Lines
Frederik Vanhoutte
Hexadine h)p://www.wblut.com 'Crossing beams on a daily basis... '
Jan Vantomme
My name is Jan Vantomme and I run a small design studio Cloudswimmers in Ghent, Belgium. I write articles about the everyday things that move me as a designer. http://janvantomme.com http://www.cloudswimmers.com
kAJA aNDERSON
A Short Organum For IOS, Kaja Cxzy Anderson, who is based in New York, similarly isolates Facebook’s overlooked elements and transfers them to another space—in her case, her Tumblr, which confusingly looks like a dystopian version of Facebook. Anderson is interested in 2ee ng Facebook “moments,” like when a par cularly bizarre ad pops up to the side of your feed, or when you change your rela onship status from “in a rela onship” to “single.” Anderson obsessively screenshots them all, and compiles them on her Tumblr page whe re they 2o at aro und like spe cim e ns o f vi rtua l junk. h)p://cxzy.tumblr.com
Kit Keighley
Fire In Her Eye 'I'm 35, into graphic design, gaming, and design for a digital age.' h)p://cargocollec ve.com/kitkeidesign h)p://kitkeidesign.wordpress.com
Mario Klingemann
h)p://www.quasimondo.com h)p://incubator.quasimondo.com 'This (^) is my collec on of computa onal craL, experiments and sketches. There will be mes when I add one item in a month and other mes when there's a new piece every day. Depends on the viscosity of the crea ve juices. About re-using my ideas or algorithms: unless noted otherwise in the descrip on of a work or its sourcecode please contact me in case you want to use my work in a non-commercial or commercial project or are interested in an adap on.
Matthew Plummer-Fernandez
Searching For Beauty - h)p://www.plummerfernandez.com British/ Colombian Artist and Designer Matthew Plummer-Fernandez makes work that critically and playfully examines sociocultural entanglements with technologies. His current interests span algorithms, bots, automation, copyright, 3D -les and -le-sharing. He was awarded a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for the project Disarming Corruptor; an app for disguising 3D Print -les as glitched artefacts. He is also known for his computational approach to aesthetics translated into physical sculpture.
Matt Pearson
h)p://zenbullets.com/thumbs.php
Perce Jerrom
'Drowned', Video, 04:10, (2014) Perce Jerrom graduated from his BA at Oxford Brookes University in 2009. Since then he has exhibited his mul disciplinary prac se in a variety of contexts. Presen ng pieces in a tradi onal gallery seIng (Modern Art Oxford, Phillips, Departure Gallery and Stour Space) involving himself in collabora ve projects (Food Face, Blip Blip Blip), being incorporated in online edi ons (Conduire) and having his work featured in a live TV broadcast (Superla ve TV Prime Time). He has been long listed for the Dazed and Confused Emerging ar st award and short listed for the Bal c 39 | Figure One open call. He also gained a residency posi on at ESARQ (Escuela Superior de Arquitectura) in Guadalajara, Mexico, along with being awarded a studio at Departure Gallery. Perce currently lives and works in London. - h)p://percejerrom.com
Sabrina Verhage
Un.tled http://www.sabrinaverhage.com 'I AM AN ARCHITECT AND INTERACTIVE MEDIA DESIGNER BASED IN AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS. MY INTERESTS ARE FOCUSED ON DESIGNING IMMERSIVE INTERACTIVE ENVIRONMENTS AND ENGAGING EXPERIENCES.'
sARAH hILL & Ralph Pritchard
'Sarah & Ralph Film_006', Film, 04:10, (2014).
Sarah Hill is an ar st and curator based in the North West. Originally from Loughborough, she moved north in 2008 to study English Literature and Drama at the University of Manchester. Whilst there I made my "rst "lm, devised performance, developed my interests in photography and regularly designed for theatre. Shortly aLer she conceived and founded Video Jam, an ongoing series of experimental events which seek to explore the rela onship between moving image and live music. She has co-directed the collec ve since 2011, in which me I have completed residencies in Ibiza (CANVAS) and Falmouth University and worked as a curator with over 300 ar sts including Jeremy Deller, Phil Solomon and Dieter Moebius.
- h)p://www.sarah-hill.co.uk Ralph Pritchard is a "lm director/ar st based in London. He also is a freelance video journalist. Who shoots and edits all of Novara Media's video content. His "rst feature "lm, a collabora on with cri cally-acclaimed theatre company Cut String is currently in post-produc on. The video art he makes has been exhibited numerous mes at Video Jam, a popular experimental video/music night hosted in Manchester. I also direct the music videos for indie-pop band New Manha)an. - h)p://www.ralphpritchard"lms.com
Siobhan Barr
'welshwizad1970' Screen capture/Appropriated video, 03:10, (2014)
'Sit_Back_And_Enjoy_The_Show', Video Art, 04:53, (2013). Siobhan Barr’s work surveys the obscure, murky corners of the Internet. As a self-confessed internet addict, her ar s c lexicon is drawn from her personal web adventures, as well as extensively researching and accumula ng indicators about how others interact with the Internet. U lising Spam, autocomplete algorithms, social networking, as well as going undercover by adop ng mul ple personae on niche forums, she brings together darker themes of loneliness and internet use to playfully explore the concept of Internet Abuse - an addic on characterised by cycles of dependency and withdrawal symptoms marked by disturbances in daily rou nes, a preoccupa on with cyberspace, and using the internet to alter mood and escape the stress of “real” life. Siobhan Barr (b. 1983, lives and works in Winchester and London) received a BA in Fine Art from Winchester School of Art in 2006. She has exhibited widely, both across the UK and interna onally, including her solo exhibi on “Hello Friend” at WW Gallery, London, London Art Fair, and par cipated in a collateral exhibi on at 54th Venice Biennale. Recent group exhibi ons include “The Lights Are On” (Fox Court, London, 2014), “Fresh is More” (APG Works, She?eld, 2014), "London Gallery Day", WW Gallery, London (2014); "Salon Zerp", ZERP Galerie, Ro)erdam (2013-4); "Click+Spill", Artemis Project Space, York (2013) and "Barbican Artworks Open", Artworks Project Space, London (2013). - h)p://www.siobhanbarr.com
Soraya Fatha
'Beep' (Don't cha know that the pussycat dolls climaxed in 2009?) Video & Film, 14:22, (2014) Soraya Fatha combines video, soLware, sculpture and found objects to create immersive mul -media composi ons that exist in both digital and physical environments. Her bold use of tangents, associa ons and analogies help simulate disjointed narra ves replica ng the rhythms of online browsing. It is Fathaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fragmented love a air with instant connec vity that is executed in her informal "lm and web aesthe c. She documents her personal journeys of rapid behavioural transi ons between loss, humour, passion and loneliness. Fatha oLen uses mul ple screens to exaggerate the tangibility of a portable device augmen ng the in mate physical control given by the familiar interac on of a touch screen, computer mouse, headset or microphone. Fatha creates a heart-felt parody of a coming-of-age post-modern digital landscape.
Soraya Fatha combines video, soLware, sculpture and found objects to create immersive mul -media composi ons that exist in both digital and physical environments. Her bold use of tangents, associa ons and analogies help simulate disjointed narra ves replica ng the rhythms of online browsing. It is Fathaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fragmented love a air with instant connec vity that is executed in her informal "lm and web aesthe c. She documents her personal journeys of rapid behavioural transi ons between loss, humour, passion and loneliness. Fatha oLen uses mul ple screens to exaggerate the tangibility of a portable device augmen ng the in mate physical control given by the familiar interac on of a touch screen, computer mouse, headset or microphone. Fatha creates a heart-felt parody of a coming-of-age post-modern digital landscape. - h)p://www.sorayafatha.com
Sophie Jung
'Hepworthy', Video Art, 03:04, (2014) Sophie Jung (b. 1982, Luxemburg) studied at the Folkwang in Essen, the ZHdK in ZĂźrich, the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and is currently doing a part- me MFA at Goldsmiths, London. Her prac ce addresses representa on and its pi_alls, both culturally as a system of disguised and shiLing signs and personally as a way to track and record life. She regularly nego ates between form and a ect, pragma sm and romance, between scru nizing accuracy and magical a w e .â&#x20AC;¨ She has a deep trust in temporary de"ni on, plays with concepts and no ons packed into words, objects or facial expressions, shiLing their assumed meaning from work to work or sentence to song. Her posi on is on the apronproscenium, the pre-stage, as a 2uid messenger between recep on and produc on of melined Purport. Her work is strict, slick and
abstract as well as emo onally involved, performa ve and overly literal; the intersec on of form, structure and rhythm with the messy, whimsical, perturbed and oddly sen mental is the underlying tone in her work, be it video, performance, sculpture, text or photography. Sophie Jung lives and works in London and Basel. - h)p://www.sophiejung.com/441984
Tony Wallace & Aiden Green
I Just Want To Be Like The Waltons, Video/Film Loop, 04:39, (2014) Toni Wallace is a student at Croydon School Of Art, and Aiden is her son. This work is a collabora ve e ort!
will Kendrick
'Datadrip', Screen capture, video art, 05:17, (2014) - h)p://willkendrick.co.uk Will Kendrick grew up in the Northern sea side town of Blackpool and is convinced the city leL him with ‘an obsession with colour and kitsch’; the ‘neon lights, amusement arcades and nightclubs’ of Blackpool have informed his aesthe c vision. Kendrick moved to Bath for his BA in Fine Art, during which he began using resin to cast sculptures. Kendrick used copying processes to reproduce and alter found objects; his process involved pouring resin over shop mannequins, leIng it dry and removing the brightly coloured resin form. - h)p://willkendrick.co.uk/images/Interview_sarah_will.pdf
Yuki Kishino.
'July 20', Digital anima on & video, 06:32, (2013) Yuki Kishino, born in Japan, is currently studying "ne art at St채delschule, in Frankfurt am Main. He writes autobiographical stories, which consist of loosely intertwined narra ves based upon his own experiences and memories. Visual informa on of these stories are generated through various performa ve media (eg. Desktop recording) and in turn, these recorded processes become a tool for examining the e ects of the post digital era as well as tradi onal forms of "lmmaking. His work has been shown at Oriel Mostyn Gallery (UK), OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich (UK), LICHTER Film Fest Frankfurt Interna onal (DE), and ONE NIGHT ONLY Gallery, UKS (NO). - h)ps://vimeo.com/yukikishino
Turf Projects www.turf-projects.com Croydon School Of Art http://www.croydon.ac.uk Croydon Tech City http://www.croydontechcity.com F/O/R/C/E http://www.f-o-r-c-e.org.uk 50/50 Limited Edi on ŠTurf Projects 2015 Publica on for the exhibi on A Pixel Or Digit? At the Par") Gallery, Croydon School Of Art. Croydon, London, United Kingdom. Supported by: The Arts Council, Grants For The Arts Bryden Johnson: Chartered Accountants & Business advisors 02 Big Think Thank You: Simon Jay, Claire Donnelly, Neil Harrison, and Sam & Leon Read for your assistance in loaning us your spare Iphones.