Category: philosophy

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Nancy – ‘the political and/or politics’

Daniel Ross pointed, on twitter, to the text of a presentation by Jean-Luc Nancy in 2012 addressing the theme of ‘the political and/or politics’ – which ends with an interesting distinction or divergence between two versions of ‘co-‘ living: a co-mmunal and a co-llective ‘with’ (in the sense of ‘being-with’):

If, today the economic, judicial, religious and cultural spheres – and with these spheres the semantics of their names –, all together or each in its turn, are racing out of control in a way that is inflationary and even exorbitant and ruinous, it is because “politics” or “the political” harbors a discrepancy or an internal distortion between two values which are henceforth foreign to each other – let us say, an existential value and a social value or, in other terms, a value in accordance with the community and another in accordance with collectivity . To be clear , the tw o values are related and interdependent. Yet that difference of the values of the same co- – of that same “with”, which is the with of being, even more than a “being- with” – and thus that self-differentiation of the co- is precisely that which prevents it from coagulating into a mass and a destiny.

Worth a read, available here: Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities [PDF].

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Video > Anne Sauvagnargues talks through Deleuze on the composition of experience & meaning

This is an interesting and very rich video of Anne Sauvagnargues, at what must be a kind of postgrad workshop(?), talking through Deleuze’s (Simondon-ian) thinking concerning the composition of meaning and experience. It’s quite a master class! There’s so much in this that I can’t really offer a précis and its quite hard to hear Sauvagnargues because of persistent white noise but its definitely worth the effort of watching an accomplished exposition of a creative way of thinking:

Anne Sauvagnargues from Vasco Barbedo on Vimeo.

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Reblog > Deleuze in Southend-on-Sea (Tony Sampson)

In a very cogent performance of Deleuzian theory through a discussion of Southend-as-assemblage, Tony D. Sampson (author of, amongst other things, Virality) gave one of the opening talks of Club Critical Theory, a really lovely idea for bringing about public engagement with critical theory–resolutely beyond the ‘ivory towers’ (or concrete slabs in some cases) of academia. Definitely worth a read:

Deleuze in Southend-on-Sea

Applying Deleuze to Southend in the context a Club Critical Theory discussion is a doubly difficult task. To begin with Deleuze introduces a new vocabulary that sits atop of an already complex layer of philosophical debate. We will need to grapple with complexity theory and a strange incorporeal materialism. Then there are personal reasons that make this task problematic relating to my own situation here as a Southender. Deleuze, for me, represents an escape from certain aspects of my early working life in Southend at the local college and particularly my time spent in what we referred to then as the School of Media and Fascism. Deleuze was part of my escape plan from this horror, so returning to Southend with him in mind presents all kinds of problems, but let’s put those aside for a moment and see where Deleuze in Southend takes us.

Read more>>

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Stiegler – We are coming to the end of the Fordist model, we must move to a mode of contribution

In January (2014), a website concerned with proposing and advancing novel and alternative businesses and economic models called Without Model published an interview with Bernard Stiegler concerning his conceptualisation of the economy of contribution. Without Model describes itself as a community of ‘forwarders’, a kind of community of Tardean imitative amplifiers – which is interesting…

In the interview Stiegler reiterates some aspects of his argument for an economy of contribution made elsewhere but also reaffirms the links with an understanding of a libidinal economy. He also,  fairly explicitly highlights the constitution of an economy of contribution is no easy task – it requires some fairly hefty (macro-economic) structural challenges. In other words, Stiegler is not simply outlining an alternative business model for trendy ‘right-on’ companies or co-ops but arguing for something like a structural change to the economy, built from the ground-up. Elsewhere he has argued that this requires a rethinking of education, is contingent upon particular modes of infrastructure such as open data and requires a more holistic understanding of value. Quite an ambition then – but, as outlined in his Disbelief and Discredit series of books, Stiegler sees an immediate and urgent impetus to incite such change.

This is, of course, not without risk – in Stiegler’s terms these new capacities for becoming (or in his terminology – transindividuation) are pharmacological, the particular ways in which they play out in the world can be both a ‘poison’ and a ‘cure’ (following Plato’s argument that writing is a pharmakon). Elsewhere, Stiegler argues that such an economy of ‘pharmaka’ is a therapeutic – it is possible to resolve the poison/cure relation either way – that is not dialectical (i.e. an opposition) but rather a composition of tendencies that emerge in the relations of a milieu.

I suppose the one criticism that might be immediately levelled at this version of Stiegler’s argument is that it sort of implicitly assumes that we must create alternative institutions to invoke such change, which of course needs to be ordered and civil, and so the very basis of change is potentially compromised by the inherent contradiction of needing to create another bureaucracy to get rid of the current, corrupt one.

As usual, I have added queries, clarifications etc. in square brackets and with a couple of footnotes. Also, all of the links within the text have been added by be for clarification of particular terms or concepts. I welcome comments and suggestions.

We are at the end of the Fordist model, we must move to mode of contribution

Bernard Stiegler is a philosopher and theoritician of the evolution of technical systems. He discovered free/open [source] models almost by accident while serving as the Director of the INA.

As the founder and president for the philosophical organisation Ars Industrialis, created in 2005, since April 2006 he has also directed the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI) at the Georges Pompidou centre.

[interview begins]

Q. Open, contributory and collaborative models are becoming more numerous and these forms of contribution extend into new territories – how do you interpret this evolution?

B.S. Before responding, it is a necessary precondition [of this conversation] to recognise that all of these models are not equivalent. Facebook is contributory, but in certain ways, it is a worse model [of operation] than its not contributory equivalents, I almost prefer the model of TF1. These mechanisms of the capture and distortion of data lead to a strong depersonalisation, a phenomenon that is exacerbated by ‘big data’. This is both exciting, because the data open up new possibilities, and dangerous.

It is for this reason that I discuss the pharmakon. In all technologies or systems, there are two simultaneous and opposing tendencies – one is good, positive and emancipatory, and the other is negative and predatory. We need to analyse the toxicity of these phenomena, for as they become better they also become more toxic. A pharmakon today necessitates a therapeutic: It must be a an organ of care [organe de soin 1] which like any medicine, if it fails, can kill the patient. It is thus necessary to conduct these analyses honestly and sincerely, in the same ways an accountant does with company accounts. The problem is that we do not have the perspective of hindsight, the training or the capacities [savoir-faire] for doing so calmly with contributory models.

Today, we need a typology of contributory models.

I work a lot with communities of hackers: until the ‘Snowdon crisis’ they did not see the pharmacological character of the net. In the last year things have changed, there is a kind of ‘net blues‘.

Q. How can one define the economy of contribution, for example how can one differentiate the market?

B.S. The economy of contribution is based on a re-capacitation: it augments the capacities of people more than it diminishes them. The term ‘recapacitation’ draws on Amartya Sen’s understanding of capabilities – a capability is a form of knowledge, life skills [savoir vivre], know how [savoir faire] or formal knowledge [savoir formel] – shared with other and which constitutes a knowledge community. Sen has shown that consumerism diminishes capabilities.

An economy of contribution is based in the development of the knowledge of individuals, and the sharing of these knowledges is facilitated by a shared ownership which does not prevent its circulation.

I am not against the notion of ownership [propriété], but it does not have to be proprietorial, at the expense of the collective value of knowledge. Rather than capacitation, the consumerist society is based on proletarianisation, even design is proletarianised.

The economy of contribution is an economy based on parity [parité] – peer-to-peer. In this economy, we often speak of emergent initiatives or the bottom-up, but the bottom-up does not exist alone, there is always an aspect of the top-down – which is to say that there is always an organisation that unites and valorises the bottom-up dynamics. Even when we believe that there is only the bottom-up, there is a hidden top-down that regulates emergence. The real peer is one who can explain the top-down to the bottom-up.

Q. Why is it more important today than it was 20 years ago or will be in 20 years time?

B.S. We are entering a new stage of automisation, of a different nature to that which has taken place thusfar. It is the continuation of what began 200 years ago, but automisation has shifted register. In many sectors, manual labour is no longer necessary, or will be superfluous very soon. Amazon has recently announced it is working towards this, the elimination of all of its jobs and their replacement by machines.

Currently, the elements are in place for automisation to move into a new stage, only the cost of robots limit its progress. One could suppose that when actors such as Amazon announce that they are tackling such a problem that the industrial ecosystem would produce economies of scale that make robots less costly than humans. When that happens, the Fordist model is dead. For without jobs, or purchasing power there will be nobody to buy what the robots produce. It will be a major, violent and systemic crisis. If we do not change regulations now we will have great difficulty coping.

Q. It can be noted that these models are being developed and that there are many initiatives but one often has the impression that they are struggling to sustain or develop themselves – what might be the reasons?

B.S. It is true that the precariousness of contributory models and the high failure rate of these initiatives raise questions.

There is an explanation, it lies in the ecosystem, the macro economy. At the level of the micro (individuals and organisations) these initiatives emerge and spread. We can see that without a macro politics they cannot prosper. When I speak of the macro economy I refer to the labour laws, taxation, social security, and territorial infrastructures. All of these elements do not favour an economy of contribution. Unless they [the macro economic elements] can be changed there is no chance of it [an economy of contribution] developing. Or, perhaps, it is a certain kind of contributory model that can succeed, such as Facebook.

This is the economic project and contemporary politics that we must change. The debates about the minimum subsistance income are interesting in this regard. I prefer to speak of a contributory wage. For me, the contributory wage should be based on the minimum subsistance income but it should not stop there. The contributory wage should be designed to promote the involvement of individuals in contributory projects. It should encourage contributions in order to create social enterprises, they can be monetised businesses but they do not have to be.

Q. Beyond the [structural] systems and the macro-economy, what sort of levers are available to develop contributory logics?

B.S. It is necessary to develop a contributory culture and and education, such that individuals engage in one way or another with contributory projects, making it more and more likely for them to do so. In developing such a culture we would develop the capacity of individuals to detect the toxic aspects of the pharmakon that is the economy of contribution.

On another plane, designers have a major role to play. They are called to become the visionaries and forerunners of contributory systems. A fablab cannot function only with the building and the machines, it functions because there is a social architecture of contribution, this is the work of the designer.

Research will also enable progress, if it becomes more contributory. The pace is so fast, the level of complexity is so pronounced that it is necessary to cooperate in order to understand and analyse [anything]. To open research to those beyond its immediate originators today would allow us all to keep abreast of the latest advances.

Q. You often talk about the libidinal economy when you talk about the economy of contribution, how does Freud come into models for contribution?

B.S. I have a Freudian vision of the economy. The libido is a social link, it is the capacity to channel the [base] drives [pulsions] into what Freud describes as a social investment of desire. Drives function positively when we are able to defer their satisfaction. To defer reaction is to make an action. The libidinal economy is the idealisation (in Freud’s sense) and the sublimation of drives. We can say that free and open source software [logiciel libre] is nurtured by this [kind of] sublimation, in other words by this striving beyond ourselves [ce dépassement 2].

Notes

You can find the interview in the original French on the Without Model website here.

1. I have translated organe de soin rather literally because it speaks to Stiegler’s conceptualisation of organs in the mode of technics and the ‘organon’ (in Greek – tool, instrument, prosthesis, organ) – a supplement to the body, through which it (the organ) and the individual are co-constituted. In his philosophical project, Stiegler has proposed a ‘general organology’ that articulates bodily organs (the viscera), artificial organs (instruments, tools and so on), and social organs (groupings ~ organisations).

2. There isn’t really a direct translation of what is written in the final sentence – dépassement means ‘overtaking’, which I have taken as a metaphor for a moving forward beyond ourselves and our present by channeling desires through positive processes of sublimation.

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Latour – The whole is always smaller than its parts

In 2012 Latour gave a version of the paper “The Whole is Always Smaller than its Parts: A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads“, published in the British Journal of Sociology, for MOMA, a joint research group from the Paris IdF Complex Systems Institute and the Center for Research in Applied Epistemology (CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique). The video of the talk is quite entertaining, as usual Latour is a witty speaker…

The paper makes the argument that digital systems have realised a model for testing Tarde’s theorisation of the monad: ‘not a part of a whole but a point of view on all the other entities taken severally and not as a totality’ (Latour et al. 2012, 598) – the sense of which, in ANT language, is that all actors are simultaneously networks and vice versa. In this way, if we consider the ways in which coded entities are arrayed and structured in digital systems we can trace out the relationships between different kinds of entities through digital systems in something like a ‘scale-free’ manner. The example Latour gives is that, if you search for a particular academic you will find various kinds of information about them on a digital profile (on their web page, on academia.edu or ResearchGate): so you find that they work at a particular university, in a particular discipline and have written particular papers and so on. Thus, from one entity ‘academic’ you extrapolate others, ‘university’, ‘department’, ‘paper’ and so on. Likewise, this is a uni-directional relation – collapsing scale. (You can sort of see why Graham Harman identifies Latour as a metaphysician here.)

If you do not begin either from the micro or the macro but instead focus on ‘the practice of slowly learning about what an entity ‘is’ by adding more and more items to its profile’ (Latour et al. 2012, 598-99) then we do not begin with substitutable individual entities but instead individualise an entity by tracing its attributes. Latour argues ‘the farther the list of items extends, the more precise becomes the viewpoint of the individual monad’ (ibid, 599). In this way, we might see the practice of tracing intersecting attributes as the performance of what Bernard Stiegler (following Gilbert Simondon) has called ‘co-individuation’ through categorisation. As the tracings of attributes metastabilise in the sharing of meanings (i.e. entity x is understood as the intersection of attributes y and z) they become formalised as the ‘rules’ by which an entity is understood and somewhat concretised as recorded knowledge, and then reinterpreted – constituting what Stiegler has called transindividuation. This is a metastabilisation of co-constituted knowledge – the monad is only possible in the performance of its observation, that observation can be more or less concretised.

Now, Latour et al. highlight that it may not always be feasible to ‘move from particular to particular’  – the data to do this ind of tracing is often not available, or even possible: as Latour et al. argue, even the most sophisticated tracking devices cannot detect the differences between atoms in a large body of gas. What Latour et al. suggest is that ‘every time it is possible to use [entity] profiles, then the monological principle will obtain’ (600). Instead of being a structure more complex than its individual components (the idea of lots of ‘micro’ entities aggregated into a ‘macro’ whole) the monadological ‘whole’ becomes a simpler set of attributes whose inner composition is constantly changing according to the viewpoint – the tracing. ‘Wholes’ are ‘nothing more than several other ways of handling the interlocking of [attributes]’ (Latour et al. 2012, 609).

This theorisation, by Latour, of the monad (according to Tarde), as in some sense ‘smaller’ than the sum of its (observable) parts, leads on to another aspect of Tarde’s philosophy: imitation. For ‘imitation’ is not a psychological phenomenon, its not simply mimesis, it is (as Deleuze observes following Tarde) the difference in repetition.

Its worth reading the paper in full, its quite a rich version of Latour’s monad argument, which he has rolled out in a number of ways at various points in his career – this is of particular interest to me because of the resonances with Stiegler’s reading of Simondon and its relevance to the Contagion project I am working on with colleagues at Exeter.

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Reblog > Edinburgh University Press to publish critical edition of Whitehead’s works

Graham Harman recently shared on his blog the news that there will be a ‘critical edition’ of Alfred North Whitehead’s work. What is particularly notable here is that this will include previously unpublished work.

Great news just received in a circular email from Brian G. Henning. And what better city for a critical edition of Whitehead to be published in than Edinburgh, site of the Gifford Lectures that became Process and Reality.****

It is my great pleasure to announce that the editorial board of the Critical Edition of Whitehead has come to an agreement with Edinburgh University Press to publish the print edition of the published and unpublished works of Alfred North Whitehead. Moreover, through an agreement with Oxford University Press, it is anticipated that the Edition will also be available through Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.

We propose to inaugurate the Critical Edition of Whitehead with several volumes of unpublished and largely unknown materials, including : (a) one volume of heretofore unpublished and largely un-interpreted correspondence between Whitehead and many of the leading figures in science, mathematics, and philosophy of his day (174 letters with 33 correspondents); (b) one volume of correspondence between Whitehead and Russell pertaining solely to the origins, composition, and interpretation of the Principia Mathematica; and (c) three volumes of edited lecture notes from the many participants in his key classes and seminars during his tenure at Harvard University (currently we possess some 40 sets of notes by 28 distinct note takers, with more frequently coming to light), focused on the substance and transformation of his own thought over that period in each of the several key areas of philosophy, including logic, the history and philosophy of science, and the metaphysical foundations of modern and contemporary science and cosmology.

The first of these volumes, edited by Paul Bogaard and Jason Bell, will feature a recently-discovered, heretofore unknown, methodical transcription of Whitehead’s original year-long course at Harvard, entitled “Process and Reality.”  Winthrop Pickard Bell, the young Canadian scholar and lecturer in philosophy at Harvard who transcribed these notes, was the first North American graduate student of Edmund Husserl at Göttingen, from whom he acquired the habit of thoroughness and attention to detail, making these notes an especially complete and revealing window into Whitehead’s first attempt at metaphysical synthesis and explication of what would become his complete system of thought.  The notes offer meticulous renderings of lectures, discussions, and perhaps, most importantly, diagrams and copious mathematical and physics equations designed to demonstrate or reinforce the main thrust of each lecture.

In general, the lectures notes taken by Bell, Hocking, and several of Whitehead’s students over the ensuing years (such as W. V. A. Quine) are particularly exciting because they allow us to see into the mind of Whitehead as he was developing his philosophy.  Of enormous significance, in addition, is that these lecture notes are unique in recording the philosophers own diagrams, illustrations, and mathematical equations that Whitehead drew on the board in an effort to elucidate the topics of these lectures. We have absolutely no other written record of these original and invaluable aids to understanding Whitehead’s original meaning and intent of key ideas and their relations, leaving generations of subsequent scholars (often without the requisite scientific or mathematical background) to attempt to reconstruct or surmise on their own material to which we now have direct, unmediated access.

Collectively, these initial six volumes of correspondence and notes that the Editors envision as the first phase of the Whitehead Edition will shed considerable light on the proper composition, necessary textual corrections, and overall interpretations of Whitehead’s major published works. Accordingly, following completion of the initial six volumes of unpublished Nachlass, we propose to turn toward the critical editing of the previously published materials, starting with the materials that are currently in the public domain (all those works published prior to 1923, excluding the Principia itself) and then moving to the remaining works upon expiration of copyright.

Digitizing, transcribing, and editing the materials is time consuming and resource-intensive. If you are able to support the Edition through a financial contribution, it would be most appreciated. (Donate here.)

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Placing computation: the informatics of anticipation

I wrote an outline for a paper/chapter for a proposed book and related conference edited/convened by F. Xavier Olleros and Majlinda Zhegu at Université de Québec à Montréal which they have kindly accepted. So, I will be fleshing out the following over the summer. Obviously, I owe an intellectual debt to Rob Kitchin here but I’d like to think that I am substantively developing some of the themes of his code/space work (with Martin Dodge) through my own reading of Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical project. In particular, I am developing some of my ideas about the politics of anticipation (from my PhD work) through Stiegler’s theorisation of the ‘industrialisation of memory‘ and the ‘eventisation‘ capacities of increasingly data-driven commercial industries.

This paper addresses the transformative sense in which computation has become an infrastructure upon which has been founded mechanisms to both support and intervene in how we live our everyday lives. The past two decades have witnessed a steady movement of the capacity of digital computation away from spaces dedicated to housing the apparatus of computing–such as the computer centre and the home office–towards a diffusion of that capacity into a variety of everyday places (in the global North). A number of authors have both predicted and described the ways in which computation has moved from dedicated places for bulky apparatus into a capacity available through interconnected devices and systems in an increasing number of contexts (Greenfield, 2006; Kitchin, 2011; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011; Mitchell, 1995, 2000, 2003; Shepard, 2011; Rheingold, 2002; Weiser, 1991). Large-scale computing apparatus have not been eliminated, in fact they have increased in number in the guise of data centres, server farms and so on, but the capacity for the interconnection of those resources through international telecommunications infrastructures to large numbers of portable and embedded devices has transformed the scope and reach of computation (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Graham, 2004, 2005). The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the ways in which this widespread infrastructure of computation is being used not only to both support and surveil increasing amounts of everyday activities, through the collection and retention of vast quantities of data, but also to anticipate and intervene into how we perform the everyday.

Increasing amounts of information about ourselves and others is harvested and stored using electronic devices and we volunteer even more information to email providers, search engines and social networking systems. Many aspects of our everyday lives are now gathered in a range of contexts and recorded (via CCTV, cellphone networks and so on) and retained in databases (Agre, 1994; Graham, 2002; Haggerty and Ericson, 2000; Murakami Wood, 2008), as a growing system of memory of life otherwise forgotten or unthought. These systems are increasingly involved in the ways in which we convene and perform a sense of place. If places are spatial contexts that we convene and give meaning through particular kinds of activities or arrangements of various people and things, then the ways in which we perform that sense of place can be understood to be increasingly mediated by digital technologies. We use mobile devices to search commercial systems for information about and navigate to locations, relying upon travel instructions and databases of past experiences of those places. We allow those systems to use data about ourselves to recommend the ways in which we might act in those locations, where we might eat, shop or socialise. Furthermore, especially in urban environments, we are subject to the regulation of particular locations through real-time analytics based upon infrastructures that gather data for city governments. Infrastructures of software and hardware thus have a growing agency in how we collectively communicate, remember and conduct ourselves socially.

The gathering and recording of data and volunteered information through the expanding computational infrastructure facilitates the ordering of time both as forms of history, and thus the sharing of knowledge and culture, and as the means of anticipating, planning for, and perhaps preventing, futures. The logic of retained knowledge is thus ‘programmatic’ and has arguably become more so with the advent of software programmes, which have augmented our capacities to remember, process and act upon information. Furthermore, these infrastructures increasingly anticipate, in real-time, the ways in which we will behave in order to inform how commercial and governmental organisations intervene in and regulate how a variety of urban environments function. The production and performance of cities, then, increasingly ‘takes place’ in concert with a host of quasi-autonomous computational agents, regardless of whether or not we are aware of it.

To investigate the transformative nature of the anticipatory capacities of a growing number of computational infrastructures embedded within our everyday lives this paper proceeds in three parts. In the following, second, section several technology case studies are explored as means of capturing & retaining and anticipating & operating upon our everyday activities in ‘industrial’ scale systems. Particular attention is paid to the quasi-autonomous agency of these systems, that appear to operate at a scale and speed that exceeds a human capacity of oversight. In the third section the mnemonic and prognostic capabilities of networked infrastructures are brought into focus to be examined, through the work of the philosopher Bernard Stiegler (1998, 2009, 2010b, 2010a), as ‘mnemotechnologies’, technologies and technical supports that both support and reterritorialise what we collectively understand about our everyday lives. The conclusion of this article addresses the ways in which the informatics of an ‘industrialisation of memory’ that operates at a scale and speed that bleeds into apparatuses of anticipatory intervention both challenges and transforms the ways in which we negotiate what are private and public activities and spaces.

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Stiegler on “The Pre-individual Eye”

From a really interesting essay in which Stiegler offers an engagement with aesthetics:

[p. 231]V. The Pre-individual Eye

Manet, facing the rejection of his painting by the academicism of the Sec- ond Empire, said one day: “Their eye will yield” [se fera]. This phrase came back to me one day when I visited the Prado Museum in Madrid–in that great collection of Western painting wherein one of its major traits is brought to view: we see Spanish painting develop between Islamic culture and what would become Flemish painting. At the Prado, we see the eye yield through space and time; we see it open, constitute itself, and deploy itself: we realize that the eye is a milieu.

We see through a milieu. Aristotle called the milieu of vision the di- aphanous. But the diaphanous of the noetic eye is symbolic: over-saturated by history–by a History of the eye–it constitutes what Simondon calls a pre-individual milieu, the pre-individual foundation of vision, which is to say, of the eye that is not in the eye socket, but rather like that which consti- tutes the symbolic process of transindividuation giving us to see the visible as it has never been seen. This trans-formation of the eye–always already projected outside the eye socket just as the tongue in the mouth projects itself between the ears–is called the history of art. And this transformation occurs under organological conditions.

Symbolic milieus must be analyzed along three organological levels. What makes possible the transformation of the retinal eye into a noetic eye is the possibility for the body of the sensitive soul to organize itself and to reach noetic activity by assembling its organs (including its memory and therefore its brain) through inanimate beings such as carved flints, pigments of paint, earth, ash, which thus become organic (I have called this, else- where, the organized inorganic) and form the organs for the transindividuation of the eye as milieu, whose history is also that of art.

[p. 232]

How did the men of Lascaux paint? They transformed matter that they sublimated, and this sublimation is the transindividuation of the eye as the milieu of the visible, of which the history of art is the diachronic display of sediments. Every museum gives us to see this condition of seeing, and at the same time a genealogy of the eye that regards and is regarded–like its paleontology–even while it teaches the eye to see that to which it has yet to open.

This transformation, which is the enlargening of the body by non-living organs that form a noetic and associated milieu, produces organa, artifices, works as well as tools and things (which are all, always, tools in some man- ner).4 These artifices hold together bodies and put them in relation (the first among them is the transitional object discovered by Winnicott) and form along with them, as a linkage pervaded by the energy of the circuits of transindividuation, the symbolic milieu, the milieu wherein appear those symbols constitutive of the human that are works, traces of a passage to action in the noetic world. In this mesotès, which is a symbolic system– to once again appropriate and divert one of Aristotle’s terms–thus appear three organological levels:

the natural organs of the body,
the organs that are artifices (materials, tools, things, works),
the social organizations that give access, by forming social rules that enable the transmission and writing of the history of psychic and collective individuation and transindividuation.

Aesthetics is then the constitution of a milieu, or as James Ash has it an atmosphere, which Stiegler argues is constituted organologically, that is to say it is formulated in forms of technicity which are the mutually constituting ‘extensions’ of the human/technical, in three veins, described above. Furthermore, aesthetics is (per)formed in the actualisation of the potentials that are present in the eye (in combination with what the eye sees), as always already projected beyond the eye socket: the gaze of the artist is contemplative but that contemplation is enabled and nurtured by that which is contemplated and then shared in the medium of expression (oil on canvas and so on):

Our eye does not spontaneously see the noetic [ which is to say intellectual, spiritual, contemplative –sk] milieu it weaves when, seeing by that noetic act that is “to see” for, say, a painter, it brings to sight what it has seen, making visible the very motifs of seeing. [p. 228-229]

In this way, we can read Steigler as arguing that aesthetics fundamentally consists in our processes of being-with, of becoming together – of transindividuation.

Worth a read if you can get a copy”¦ (happy to help 😉

Full reference:

Stiegler, Bernard, 2011 “The Tongue of the Eye: What ‘Art History’ Means”. trans. Arthur, T., in: Khalip, J., Mitchell, R. (Eds.) Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, pp. 222-236.

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“Crossovers” – performance dialogues

I stumbled across the Performance Matters ‘Crossovers‘ series of films through Twitter a little while ago and wanted to post something about what looks like a really interesting set of films that stem from productive practice-based research projects. Performance Matters, as an umbrella for a number of projects, is led by Gavin Butt (Goldsmiths), Adrian Heathfield (Roehampton) and Lois Keidan (Live Art Development Agency).

‘Crossovers’ is a series of films/dialogues that attempt to reflect”the potential of marginal artforms and intense ideas within popular media.” In particular, the series of film/dialogues between Adrain Heathfield and a number of interesting contemporary philosophers/theorists look really good:

Writing Not Yet Thought, Hélène Cixous with Adrian Heathfield.The acclaimed author discusses the practice of writing alongside its relation to painting, music and philosophy. See here for details of the Writing Not Yet Thought DVD.

Transfigured Night, A Conversation with Alphonso Lingis.  An exchange between the celebrated American philosopher Alphonso Lingis and Adrian Heathfield. See here for details of the Transfigured Night film and DVD.

No Such Thing As Rest, A Walk with Brian Massumi. Setting thoughts and conversation in constant motion, Adrian Heathfield encounters the philosopher and cultural theorist while walking the streets of Montreal. See here for details of the No Such Thing As Rest DVD.

A nice trailer for the film/dialogue with Massumi is available on vimeo, which I wanted to share here:

No Such Thing as Rest: a walk with Brian Massumi [Trailer] from Adrian Heathfield on Vimeo.

Apparently there is also a film/dialogue with Bernard Stiegler, which would be interesting to see.