I suffered throughout the week, not eating, just drinking. · 5 December 06 by Ray Crowley
Extract from:
Henri Lefebvre on the Situationist International
Interview conducted and translated 1983 by Kristin Ross
Printed in October 79, Winter 1997
K.R: You even wrote an article entitled “You Will All Be Situationists.”
H.L: Oh yes, I did that to help bring about the replacement of Arguments by the Internationale Situationniste. Guy Debord accused me of having done nothing to get it published. Yes, it was Herval who was supposed to publish it. Lucky for me that it didn’t appear because afterwards they would have reproached me for it. But there’s a point I want to go back to — the question of plagiarism. That bothered me quite a bit. Not a lot, just a little bit. We worked together day and night at Navarrenx, we went to sleep at nine in the morning (that was how they lived, going to sleep in the morning and sleeping all day). We ate nothing. It was appalling. I suffered throughout the week, not eating, just drinking. We must have drunk a hundred bottles. In a few days. Five . . . and we were working while drinking. The text was almost a doctrinal resume of everything we were thinking, about situations, about transformations of life; it wasn’t very long, just a few pages, handwritten. They took it away and typed it up, and afterwards thought they had a right to the ideas. These were ideas we tossed around on a little country walk I took them on. With a nice touch of perversity, I took them down a path that led nowhere, that got lost in the woods, fields, and so on. Michele Bernstein had a complete nervous breakdown, she didn’t enjoy it at all. It’s true, it wasn’t urban, it was very deep in the country.
tags: debord, lefebvre, philosophy, process, theory
from Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction · 1 December 06 by Ray Crowley
VI
[..] as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.
tags: philosophy, photography, simulacra, theoryfrom Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange & Death (1976) · 1 December 06 by Ray Crowley
Chapter 2, The Order Of Simulacra
The Three Orders of Simulacra
There are three orders of simulacra, running parallel to the successive mutations of the law of value since the Renaissance:
1. The counterfeit is the dominant schema in the ‘classical’ period, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution.
2. Production is the dominant schema in the industrial era.
3. Simulation is the dominant schema in the current code-governed phase
——-
The Tactile and the Digital
[..]Digitality is among us. It haunts all the messages ans signs of our society, and we can clearly locate its most concrete form in the test, the question/answer, the stimulus/response. All content is neutralized by a continuous process of orchestrated interrogations, verdicts and ultimatums to be decoded, which this time no longer come from the depths of the genetic code but still possess the same tactical indeterminacy – the cycles of meaning become infinitely shorter in the cycle of the question/answer, the bit or the return of a minuscule quantity of energy/information to its point of departure. This cycle merely describes the perpetual reactualization of the same models. [..] Everywhere supply devours demand, the question devours the answer, either absorbing and regurgitating it in a decodable form, or inventing it and anticipating its predictable corroboration.
tags: digitality, philosophy, simulacraCurrent Reading List · 25 November 06 by Ray Crowley
Baudrillard, Jean. L‘échange symbolique et la mort, Englsih; translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage. 1993
Lechte, John. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers. London: Routledge. 1994
Lefebvre, Henri. Production de l’espace, English; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 1991
Zielinski, Siegfried. Archaologie der Medien, English; translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2006
tags: lefebvre, philosophy, research, space, theory, zielinskiIMKE course response: 5.10 Postmodernism · 11 October 06 by Ray Crowley
Mauri Kaipainen asks ‘What could follow postmodernism?’
post.postmodern worldviews might derive their absolute_truths through the swarming of individual opinions into a critical mass. The forces which give the swarms shape, direction and velocity may tend to derive energy from the corporate producers of the technologies which allow the virtual community to exist. These absolute_truths are the most efficient manifestation of the capitalist algorithm i.e. marketing & advertising become redundant because eachactant in the swarm feels empowered by making a ‘free choices’ with respect to his/her brand/tribe.
Mauri Kaipainen asks ‘What arguments are there against postmodernism?’
The question of the canon: postmodernism by its nature accepts any text or image as being worthy of equal value analysis. An analysis of Samuel Beckett’s dramatic techniques Vs. the semiotics of a McDonald’s Menu? The Aesthetics of Mondrian Vs. MTV branding. One might argue along the lines of Harold Bloom and George Steiner that the ‘public audience’ requires guidance with respect to what has cultural value in the interest of an developing of maturing society.
Mauri Kaipainen asks ‘How will interactive bottom-up media and new forms of participation change culture and philosophy?’
As can be already seen, the process of cultural production will continue to be devolved into the hands of the time-rich ‘prosumers’ (YouTube, Blogger, Flickr, YourGallery ). When this is combined with the continuing rise of internet based social-networking ( delicious , myspace) exclusive cultural worth and philosophical values may be generated solely through tribes thus making the agencies such as Public TV, National Press, Academics, Cultural Commentators, who were once perceived as semi-objective, redundant. It is worth considering that this uploaded cultural production may generate vast revenues for the providers of the distribution platforms such as Google, Microsoft & Yahoo and the soon to come Venice Project
tags: digitality, philosophy, theory