EPIPHANTOM

A Wee Thought

Here’s a wee thought, on a Thursday afternoon. Narratives presented to us by culture help us structure and give meaning to our lives - whether they be large cultural stories about the value we give to things like celebrities, personal appearance, sports teams, etc., or more literally, narratives such as those furnished by TV shows and films - but we seem not to care about the ontological status of these narratives. I think that religion has historically functioned as a narrative-provider, a progenitor of stories which inhabit the individual and collective human psyche and allow life to seem structured and meaningful - but religion is contingent on belief, which throws the question of “true or false” into a deeply important light. How has the significance of the ontological status of a narrative or narrative-provider shifted, diminished, or increased over the course of history, especially with regards to The Enlightenment?

I totally don’t have enough time to expand on this right now, but yeah! These are the kinds of things I think about at work. That and the watermelon puree/champagne cocktail I had at dinner last night. It was so good and I want one so hard, now. Just saying.

(((emma)))

Centralization of Social Networks, Capitalism, and Spirituality

Check out this excerpt from an article in The New Inquiry which confronts the issue of centralization of power in social media:

A decentralized network is flat; no single node on the network is able to control and dominate all the others, and every node is independent and can publish whatever information it likes. But this apparent diversity is sustained at another level by centralization: invisible protocols that govern the transmission of data within the network and which every node is required to implement in an identical way. The network is our unified God that lets us all believe that we are different.

My question regarding all this is: in what ways do social networks create the conditions for instances of personal subjectification/individuation of identity that support the capitalist system?

I have long held that taste, as a means of discernment and as it functions in the modern era is a tool of the capitalist system to sustain a vested interest in consumption – if what we consume (such as music, literature, clothing, all forms of media) is a direct extension of our identities, the continuity of ourselves over time is based on a cycle of purchasing and displaying our purchases to others. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which are basically centralized insofar as their technical operations are controlled by one group of people (in contrast with, for example, Diaspora*)), act on the assumption that people define themselves according to that which makes them different from other people. Even if their users are trying to relate to others with similar interests, this is still based on the assumption that what binds these two (or more) people together something that distinguished them from the rest of the herd – otherwise, why is the connection special?

The article from which this excerpt is pulled touches on religion and the use of God, specifically a Judaeo-Christian God, as a mechanism to transform human beings into perfect neoliberal subjects – people who identify themselves in relation to a higher Other, “offering a point of identification for the precarious worker and dignifying their situation.”

As one whose spirituality reflects a belief in a unified consciousness – something much closer to the tenets of eastern religions, specifically Buddhism and Hinduism – I am interested in the relationship between Judaeo-Christianity and capitalism - and that relationship as positioned against ideologies of unity, whether it be communism or Advaita Vedanta.

I plan on expanding this when I’m not super hungry and distracted by the music of The Clash, which is blasting in this coffee shop. This is rather unfortunate, although it is nice to be reminded of how brilliant “London Calling” is.

London is drowning and I, I live by the river…

You can find rest of the article here,

love,

Emma

An Oldie, But A Goodie (from “The Birth of Tragedy” by Mister Nietzsche)

Here is a portrait of Nietzsche that I made. And here is a quotation from The Birth Of Tragedy:

The beautiful appearance of the world of dreams, in whose creation each man is a complete artist, is the precondition of all plastic art, and also, in fact, as we shall see, an important part of poetry. We enjoy the form with an immediate understanding; every shape speaks to us; nothing is indifferent and unnecessary. For all the most intense life of this dream reality, we nevertheless have the shimmering sense of their illusoryquality: That, at least, is my experience. For the frequency, indeed normality, of this response, I could point to many witnesses and the utterances of poets. Even the philosophical man has the presentiment that under this reality in which we live and have our being lies hidden a second, totally different reality and that thus the former is an illusion. And Schopenhauer specifically designates as the trademark of philosophical talent the ability to recognize at certain times that human beings and all things are mere phantoms or dream pictures.

This is going into LE MANIFESTO but for now, I think this more than warrants a de-contextualized space in my internet-home.

And I am down one internet-home, now, having just anaesthetized my Facebook account (re: deactivated but not deleted). I just need a break from the abuse that website exacts on my consciousness.

…

Happy Monday,

Emma

From “Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations,” Baudrillard on Symbolic to Productivist Societies

“In all societies prior to modern society, exchange is conducted through a series of symbolic transactions not yet coded as ‘value’. Value emerges only with capitalism which distinguished between use value and exchange value in its system of political economy. This system constitutes a fundamental rupture with the complex system of symbolic exchange and inaugurates and exchange of good according to the laws of the market, governed by quantitative measures of exchange. Political economy thus replaces the concreteness if symbolic exchange with the abstractions of exchange value in which money and a market economy constitute a new realm of value. Henceforth, value is determinded by the laws of political economy and as the system of political economy expands, the entire world is rationalized and functions in accordance with capital accumulation. Thus abstract values - money, capital, exchange value - rule society and reduce complex systems to the nexus of the cash register and its quantitative measures. Within the system of political economy, value is articulated as use value (utility of objects), exchange value (monetary worth, commercial value), and statutory value, or what Baudrillard calls ‘sign value.’

To Marx’s distinctions between use value and exchange value, Baudrillard adds an analysis of sign value, whereby commodities are valued by the way they confer prestige and signify social status and power. Baudrillard claims that Marx champions use value as the utopian other to exchange value, without realizing that use value itself is a construct of the system of exchange value, which produces a rationalized system of needs and objects that integrate individuals into the capitalist social order. Marx’s ‘radical’ theory for Baudrillard thus simply reproduces the logic of political economy. Baudrillard attempts to undo the opposition between exchange value and use value where use value serves as the ‘alibi’ of exchange value insofar as it is posited as the ahistorical outside of historical systems of exchange, rooted in natural, unalienated human needs. On Baudrillard’s scheme, it doesn’t matter that needs are true or real, and that labour is free or unalienated, since such concepts are locked within productivist logic. The genuine revolutionary alternative, as espoused by Baudrillard, is a symbolic exchange the breaks with all utilitarian imperatives and revels in the Dionysian energies of festival.

-Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. Italics added.

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I love this. Do you love it?

Happy Monday,

Emma

The Manifesto (Continuation) (This Is Going To Take A While)

We are all familiar with the concept of performance. A performer, or a group of performers, behaves in a certain way for an audience, so as to evoke or bring about an experience which in some way deviates from that of quotidian reality, or non-performance.

The most obvious medium of performance is that of theater: in theatrical events (plays, movies, TV shows, etc.), humans (or anthropomorphized beings) are the performers, and the performance takes place within a space concretely localized in physical space and time. If it isn’t solidly contextualized - e.g., if the setting is metaphysical - that quality is usually brought to the forefront of the audience’s attention as something strange or unusual.

Less-obvious media of performance include visual art and music: here the performer is not so easily identifiable. If we are to consider concerts within the realm of “theatrical events,” then the musicians themselves would be the performers. Whom, or what, are the performers inside of a piece of recorded music? An abstract painting - especially, one with no reference to an artist? I would say that the performer is the sound or the visual image itself. Abstract art and instrumental music provide the best cases for demonstration of my greater point, here, because they remove all but a faint trace of the human element within their scope. It is not the artist or musician who performs: it is the tangible sound or image, unbound to an origin. The performance space is  constituted by the audience - a person, the consumer of the work - and the performer. The presence of an originary point is not only unnecessary, but (I would say) is dangerous insofar as it runs the risk of undermining the work’s performative qualities - stealing the spotlight, so to speak. For example, I’d argue that it’s more meaningful to  view a famous film - Citizen Kane, for example - without knowledge of the meaning of “Orson Welles.” Orson Welles is not the performer in Citizen Kane; Beethoven is not the performer in his ninth symphony, and Picasso is not the performer in Guernica. In each instance, the content operates freely from its progenitor.

This principle is complicated by the concept of language and writing. The complication arises from the fact that language seems inextricably bound to an originary point: meaning. Each word has its definition - this is not true of each sonic frequency, brushstroke, or subtle gesture of the actor’s brow. Meaning will always be the father, so to speak, of language, except in cases of nonsensical or made-up words. Right?

Well, somewhat. Of all the written arts, poetry disrupts meaning to the greatest extent. Still, one gets the sense - or at the very least, one is taught to have the sense - that poems try to convey something beyond itself in some way. A love poem in which no direct reference to a beloved, in which no word explicitly related to love, is ever displayed, for example. 

Writing As Performance Art: The Beginning Of A Manifesto

Renee Magritte’s La Trahison Des Images (The Treachery of Images) features a tobacco pipe, beneath which are displayed the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”). This famous painting has intrigued and confounded no small number of people in the eighty-three years since its creation. What is the brown object which attends the text, if not a pipe? 

Until I did a bit of research, before which I assumed the work’s title was the same as its infamous phrase, it did not occur to me that Magritte was actually commenting on the nature of imagery and representation. The sentence “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” indicates the difference between an image and the thing it represents. The object in question is not, in fact, a pipe: it is the representation of a pipe.

I would like to hereby open this manifesto by revealing a secret: this is not a manifesto. 

It is, rather, the representation of a manifesto, the performance of one as such. Like an actor assuming the guises of a character, this piece of writing is going through the motions, adopting the qualities and mannerisms of a manifesto. But, just like that actor is not actually the character he or she plays, this text is not actually a manifesto.

Please keep in mind as you read this manifesto that it is only a performance . However…

the value of the performance is at least equal to the value of that which it represents, so perhaps the word only should be omitted from this explanation. It is a performance, a performance whose truth value or “reality” is completely irrelevant to its function in the world. In other words, it should be treated exactly as if it were a living, breathing, “real” manifesto. 

When one watches a play, one must suspend their disbelief in the reality of the play in order to fully enjoy it: for the hour or so in which the performance occurs, one must forget that the stage is a place of unreality, the characters are not acting out real dramas, their clothing items are merely parts of a costume. So this “manifesto” must be treated as a manifesto - sans the quotation marks which indicate that it is not real. My goal in writing this manifesto is to explore the liminal space between performance and reality, and in doing so, explain how writing can be regarded as a form of performance art, and also how the concept of performance is of critical value in considering the current state of art across all media. 

And the time will come …

Life is so much better when I remember that we’re all one being. #Fuckyeahunifiedconsciousness

…but seriously, believing myself to be a distinct entity, one with significant qualitative differences from other people, just feels so wrong. Everything becomes more fun, playful, and light when I fully embody the principles of Hindu Vedanta in my thought and mannerisms. 

Just putting this here as a reminder to myself.

emma

Of Performed Minds: Jean Baudrillard and Marshall McLuhan (A Juxtaposition Of Borrowed Thoughts)

Great bit about Baudrillard and hyperreality, the source of which has been lost, unfortunately.

Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Baudrillard borrows, from Jorge Luis Borges’ “On Exactitude in Science” (who already borrowed from Lewis Carroll), the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyperreal. Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality was heavily influenced by phenomenology, semiotics, and Marshall McLuhan.

And this, from an interview with Marshall McLuhan, the thinker noted above whose work I am just beginning to explore:

…all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous system appears to institute a self-protective numbing of the affected area, insulating and anesthetizing it from conscious awareness of what’s happening to it. It’s a process rather like that which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression. I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.

This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension. The fact that he has not done so in this age of electronics is what has made this also the age of anxiety, which in turn has been transformed into its Doppelgänger — the therapeutically reactive age of anomie and apathy. But despite our self-protective escape mechanisms, the total-field awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us — indeed, compelling us — to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious, toward a realization that technology is an extension of our own bodies. We live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible for society at large. Until the present era, this awareness has always been reflected first by the artist, who has had the power — and courage — of the seer to read the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner world.

You can find the rest of the interview here. 

Happy Wednesday! Keep it hyperreal.

Blanchot-Inspired: On Language and Reality

Words and stories have no seminal root in the explicable, in what we might identify as the real. This is because they are the real, and they are unrooted in anything beyond themselves - words are self-signifying insofar as they are the basis for human knowledge. Words categorize and qualify experience; in doing this, they create experience. I believe that to use language effectively is to use it in a way such that one’s words of choice can only be described by their own reproduction. This is the metric of true efficiency and grace in writing: the ideal is to discern what words, characters and structures are as functionally suggestive of a subject matter that, ultimately, can only be represented, as opposed to being presented. As the element unit of human thought, language codifies experience and emotion into communicative material to others and to ourselves. Language is the medium of translation of experience to our individual consciousness, an appraisal of reality which is subjective but which seeks to rationalize according to objective external standard such as those established by ethics and other normative features which are, ultimately, rooted in a consensual, synthetic understanding of right or wrong action. The key here is that all ethics are founded on the idea of consequences and causality of action - but if language has consequences or effects beyond itself, it is only in the realm of its own interpretation. This might then be used as a rational basis for action, but that is entirely dependent on interpretation, a human tendency to rationalize unauthorized by language itself.

This troubles me because I see language as the substantive matter of human reality. Interpretation of literature to have ethical implications - or anyimplications in the real world ( the world beyond the textual world ) even by virtue of the fact that some literature ignores ethics (and would be, therefore, unethical) implies that that language is always a signifier of logically understandable phenomena. It places writing into an inescapable system of standardization of thought, enforcing external factors into what would otherwise be a space of absolute creative freedom which answers to nothing but itself. The assessment of literature as either “ethical” or “unethical” restricts the possibility for literature to have no relationship to normativiy whatsoever; after all, normativity is as much a human construct as language itself is. Ethics constricts the possibility for writers to invent something entirely new out of language, insofar as it assumes reference points based on theoretical grounds that established prior to the creation of a new work. Blanchot’s take on writing implies a sort of magic to it; I believe he would say that the art of the writer is the art of conjuring original figures of thought from thin air, from nothingness. That, to me, is the closest we might get to the existence of the supernatural in the physical world. To infuse literature with any real-world concerns divests it of its magic, of its function as a space for experimentation of thought and transmutation of the ineffable and metaphysical into the effable.

To search for something more profound than itself, a signified “other” to which language refers, is to be compelled to follow a path with no reward in the form of the desired logical end - the signified content. I would say that we take pleasure in the search for the meaning of literature. If we are, however, to believe categorically that the search must come to a logical end - “now I understand it; my work with this text is done” - we aid a mindset that devalues the illogical and that which has no rational function or purpose beyond the immediate pleasures it offers. This is a Spartan and wonderless approach to the world of literature, and it implies that literature must conform to the concept of a purpose or deeper function. I care to read the kind of literature I do because it does not hide the fact that its subject matter eludes rational understanding, along with the ability to be translated into language and shared between people. Works by Borges, Blanchot, Calvino (and so many others) are suggestive of the unknowable nothingness from which their subject matters comes and toward which it speaks; this might be the real character of infinity, which no mind can parse, or the potentiality of what literature can do, possibilities made real by the act of imagination, an act unchained by the constraints of rationality or explicability of function and meaning. 

I would say that the interpretation of language (and the according search for messages or ethical features within a text) is an exercise in the functions of self-delusion: we might tell ourselves that we understand a poem, a book, or something whispered in our ear late at night; what renders this understanding “real”, however, is the fact that we believe this to be so. The act of belief is a leap of faith over the fact that there is no truth more profound than the offerings of the surface of language; anything that seems more “deep” than that is filled in by expectations, desires, and other subjective factors contained within the mind of the individual who wishes to know the truth of what they read or hear. 

The form of the literary narrative allows for the creation of worlds that are as remote and impossible to reduce to precedented experience as the experience of dying and the reality of death. Blanchot’s novel Death Sentence plays with this idea; the ultimate nature of literature is embodied by his experiences with death and loss of consciousness. As death transports the dying person to a realm in which language loses functional meaning, literature transports the reader to a world incapable of being communicated beyond its immediate experience. There is a difference between the words in a book and the reader’s experience of being inside of it; the mind of the reader is absorbed by its language, but the nature of this language’s function can only be communicated by the words and structures of the language itself. Ultimately, this language exists in a space of absence of meaning, of a space devoid of depth. This depth exists in the immediate subjective experience of reading, an experience that cannot be wrought in words and interpretative gestures. An entrance into world of the text is an escape from both - it is an excursion into a world that is pleasurable because it is is remote from ours, because it expands the circumscription of reality by rational understanding, because it is a world of the unrestrained spirit, a world where rationality does not reign supreme and ethics has no function.

Epiphantom: The New New

Hello, all!

I’d like to make a formal, public gesture declaring my commitment to this website as a space for theoretical writings. This blog post is that gesture.

I have created a custom domain for what was formerly tinyspirits.tumblr.com. You are currently looking at writings.epiphantom.com (the parent website, epiphantom.com,  is intended as a display of the things I do and make, and the things the people I love do and make, spanning all forms of media, although at present it’s nothing more than a nascent ambition).

Welcome to EPIPHANTOM  In the weeks that follow, I plan on restructuring all prior content according to the express mission: this website is to serve as a place for writing. There’s no need for another image-based site in my web experience or yours. My desire is to promote diversity on the internet, instead of adding another layer of the same sort of paint to be absorbed into the homogenized grayness into which most image-based websites are eventually subsumed.

I hope people will be interested in transmissions from the center of the universe, Missives about writing, art, and… well, a lot of other things, like robots, the internet, social media and organization, and the woods. I adore the woods. I live in the woods.

I also live here at this website. Welcome to my home.

Love,

Emma