Anonymous: Tehran Report 2, 14th June 2009

What follows is the second of a series of reports from Tehran, Iran. The author wishes to remain anonymous. First report here.

June 14th 2009 8:45 PM

It‟s still less than ten days before the official beginning of summer. Although the weather may be warm and the blossoms are gone, it is, according to the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun, spring. Tehran Spring.

A period of political liberalization under a Reformist government, backed by popular approval against the Soviet-backed Socialist system in Czechoslovakia in 1968 has come to be known as the Prague Spring. Infamous for the brutality of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rolling into the city of Prague eight months after President Alexander Dubcek loosened restrictions on speech, the media and travel, millions of demonstrators were crushed within seconds, although they remained peaceful the entire time. Czechoslovakia remained occupied by Soviet military forces until 1990, when the Socialist system collapsed. The Prague Spring may have not been successful from a populist, anti-authoritarian perspective, but it indicated a trend, rising in Europe and the world at the time, that unrest existed on many levels: cultural, economic, social, and, most importantly, ideological. The demonstrations in Prague temporarily shadowed the International Marxist movement, popular amongst intellectuals in Western Europe, as the USSR proved once again that the utopian yearning for revolution had seceded to authority hungry for control. During the early months of the Prague Spring, inspired by the Socialist reformist experiment in Czechoslovakia, students in Paris and other Western European cities set the university ablaze, workers went on strike, and the bureaucracy collapsed. A glimmer of hope, only temporary, until the moment of the Grand Compromise between the „68ers and De Gaulle‟s government occurred one month later, effectively paralyzing Leftism in the West until even today. This paralysis was confirmed by the multilateral Soviet crushing of the reformist movement later that summer.

Anonymous: Tehran Report 1, 13th June 2009

What follows is the first of a series of reports from Tehran, Iran. The author wishes to remain anonymous. Second report.

June 13, 2009
9:05 PM

The satellite signal for BBC Farsi just turned off. I had spoken a few minutes earlier with my father and forgot where I was and that probably my phone call was being monitored. In fact, about 5 minutes into my phone conversation, I heard a faint click on the phone and my father‟s voice all of a sudden sounded very far away, muffled, as if he were on conference call. I was reminded by my friends in the other room that I should be a bit more prudent about what I say and how I say it – maybe it wasn‟t such a good idea to start off my conversation with “There‟s been a revolution”.

We‟ve been camping out at home for the past 48 hours. Last night we were awake, in front of the television until 6AM. Slept in until noon and since then, we‟ve been on high alert, full of testosterone, exchanging our disappointment, confusion, worries, nervousness interspersed with information, hear say, opinions and the occasional, very necessary, joke. The house has turned into a news room, all of our computers open and connected to the internet. A few of us are writing about the previous day‟s events as they develop; one of us is uploading video footage from today and posting it online; another is sifting through the continuous updates on Facebook profiles, delivering news-from-the-ground to us as it takes place through picture albums and wall posts. I‟ve been looking through a variety of newspapers‟ online versions: New York Times, LA Times, Guardian, Al-Jazeera, Washington Post. I‟m trying to see how what has been so unreal today on the streets here is being covered by the international media, and, as if it should be a surprise, it is quite disappointing for me. All reports cover basic facts, speculate about the future of Iran, and provide a selection of photographs from the demonstrations today. All reports maintain their professional distance, attempting to mediate between the passionate debates that have been taking place here not only today, but in the past two weeks as these elections drew nearer. I don‟t believe these opinions can be mediated, though. That‟s where the confusion lies.

Antonin Artaud’s theatre

Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène
How does it happen that in the theater, at least in the theater as we know it in Europe, or better in the Occident, everything specifically theatrical, i.e. everything that cannot be expressed in speech, in words, or, if you prefer, everything that is not contained as a function of the exigencies of this sonorisation) is left in the background?
/…/
Dialogue – a thing written and spoken – does not belong specifically to the stage, it belongs to books
/…/
I say that the stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak.
/…/
I have noticed that in our theater which lives under the exclusive dictatorship of speech, /…/ everything I consider specifically theatrical in the theater, all these elements when they exist apart from text are generally considered the minor part of theater; they are negligently referred to as “craft”, and identified with what is understood by staging or “production”, /…/ a way which seems to me entirely Occidental or rather Latin, i.e. pigheaded /…/
What is Latin is this need to use words to express ideas that are obvious.
/…/
I believe, however, that our present social state is iniquitous and should be destroyed. If this is a fact for the theater to be preoccupied with, it is even more a matter for machine guns.
/…/
The contemporary theater is decadent because it has lost the feeling on the one hand for seiousness and on the other for laughter; because it has broken away from gravity, from effects that are immediate and painful – in a word, from Danger.
/…/
I expect many will be tempted to tell me that if there is one inhuman idea in the world, one ineffectual and dead idea which conveys little enough even to the mind, it is indeed the idea of metaphysics.
This is due, as René Guénon says, “to our purely Occidental way, our antipoetic and truncated way of considering principles (apart from the massice and energetic spiritual state which corresponds to them).”
In the Oriental theater of metaphysical tendencies, as opposed to the Occidental theater of psychological tendencies, this whole complex of gestures, signs, postures, and sonorities /…/ induces thought to adopt profound attitudes which could be called metaphysics-in-action.
/…/
Everything in this active poetic mode of envisaging expression on the stage leads us to abandon the modern humanistic and psychological meaning of the theater, in order to recover the religious and mystic preference of which our theater has completely lost the sense.

The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)
/…/ instead of continuing to rely upon texts considered definitive and sacred, it is essential to put an end to the subjugation of the theater to the text, and to recover the notion of a kind of unique language half-way between gesture and thought.
/…/
Once aware of this language in space, language of sounds, cries, lights, onomatopoeia, the theater must organize it into veritable hieroglyphs /…/
The question, then, for the theater, is to create a metaphysics of speech, gesture, and expression, in order torescue it from its servitude to psychology and “human interest”.
/…/
this naked language of the theater (not a virtual but a real language) must permit, by its use of man’s nervous magnetism, the transgression of the ordinary limits of art and speech, in order to realize actively, that is to say magically, in real terms, a kind of total creation in which man must reassume his place between dream and events.
/…/
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS: They will be treated as objects and as part of the set.
Also, the need to act directly and profoundly upon the sensibility through the organs invites research, from the point of view of sound, into qualities and vibrations of absolutely new sounds, qualities which present-day musical instruments do not possess and which require the revival of ancient and forgotten instruments or the invention of new ones.
/…/
THE STAGE – THE AUDITORIUM: We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theater of the action.
/…/
WORKS: We shall not act a written play, but we shall make attempts at direct staging, around themes, facts, or known works. The very nature and disposition of the room suggest this treatment, and there is no theme, however vast, that can be denied us.
/…/
THE CINEMA: To the crude visualization of what is, the theater through poetry opposes images of what is not. However, from the point of view of action, one cannot compare a cinematic image which, however poetic it may be, is limited by the film, to a theatrical image which obeys all the exigencies of life.
CRUELTY: Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible.
/…/
THE PUBLIC: First of all this theater must exist.

Bataille’s Peak. Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (introductory chapter)

Allan Stoekl: Bataille’s Peak. Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Introduction. On Shortage, Excess, and Expenditure
At the end of the twentieth century, we were regaled with arguments concerning history: it had ended, we were told. /…/
Barely a few years into the new century, may have concluded that that “posthistorical” ideal is radically insufficient. /…/
In short, energy has been rediscovered. In the 1970s and very early 1980s, first world society was made acutely aware of energy, its limited supplies, and the consequences of energy shortages. A U.S. president (Jimmy Carter) even based his central policies on the idea that energy sources (fossil fuels) were scarce and could only grow scarcer in the coming years. /…/ He was, of course, brusquely turned out of office and replaced by a president (Ronald Reagan) who cheerfully answered that “the free market” would take care of energy supplies forever. Luckily for him, the quantities of fossil fuels available shot up in the mid to late 1980s and throughout the 1990s /…/
As I write this, in 2006, even mainstream news sources have become aware that fuel supplies are fundamentally limited. /…/
The labor of construction of civilization is not over, in other words, history is not at an end, because labor itself is not autonomous: you can’t work or produce anything if you don’t have the fuels (the sources of energy) to do it. The great myth that Man “forms himself” by forming, and transforming, brute matter is over. The idea that Nature is dead is over because fossil fuels were not made by Man, they were only extracted by “him”. They are brutally natural, and their shortage too is a natural shortage (their lack is natural). And when a profound, irremediable shortage of those fuels supervenes, history opens back up. /…/ No one yet wants to think about how History should continue in the absence of an adequate supply of fossil fuels. It is too horrible to think about. Human die-off is quite natural, but it also constitutes an incontrovertible historical event. With the finitude of cheap energy, alas, the end of history is itself finite. But how do we think the end of the end of history?
Now along with a permanent energy crisis, or rather a permanent shortage of cheap fuel supplies, we face another crisis: a permanent religion crisis. It seems as if energy and religion are inseparable issues. /…/
Marxism was the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, because its decline was due to an energy crisis, the first to shock the world since the crises of the late 1970s. Marxism collapsed because its great, worldwide patron, the Soviet Union, collapsed, and the Soviet Union collapsed because it could no longer support itself by selling its oil profitably on the world markets. It was driven into the ground by Saudi Arabia, which in the late 1980s produced so much oil that the world markets became flooded. /…/
The great irony is that religion came to the fore in the very countries whose vast production of fossil fuels had made the Soviet system untenable. The Islamic countries of the Middle East were the producers of the fuels that the West needed to continue its individualist lifestyle. /…/
Many of the regions that provide these fuels have turned to a religion that is, in principle at least, indifferent to the fossil fuel lifestyle and to the cult of the human. /…/
As fuel reveals its finitude, we come to recognize our dependence on it and our dependence on others who affirm a religious culture that survived and flourished in the profound absence of fossil fuel. /…/

This book is about Bataille’s take on these issues and my version of what Bataille’s take would be if it were extrapolated to the twenty-first century. /…/

On the other hand, an ever more counterproductive orientation will assert itself in the years ahead. Such an orientation sees energy as an adjunct of, at best, a certain humanism: we spend to establish and maintain our independent, purpose-driven selves, our freedom as consumers, spenders of certain (rather lavish, given available reserves) quantities of refined energy. This model is doubly humanistic in that not only is the benificary the “free” self of Man; the human spirit itself is incessantly invoked to get us out of the jam. We are told over and over again that the human mind alone produces energy; when reserves are short, there is always a genius who comes along and devises some technology that turns things around, makes even more energy available, and so on. Technology transcends energy, in other words, and reflects the human mind’s infinite ability to derive energy from virtually nothing. /…/
One can argue that the religion that confronts the fossil fuel-driven civilization of Man is equally grounded in the demands of a human subjectivity. People demand salvation, an ultimate purpose for which they are consuming so much fuel: I spend, or waste, so that I will ultimately be saved. Conversely, energy inputs are available because God has blessed me with them; the faithful are rewarded with a healthy, fertile, and energy-rich environment. /…/
Against this energetico-theological model is arrayed an ecoreligion, one that would defy the “comfortable” or “free” (and nonnegotiable) lifestyle of consumerist humanism, not through a recognition of the literal truth of the divine Word but through a religiously inspired truth of austerity, simplicity, and personal virtue. Such a cult refuses certain basic human urges to consume or destroy, and in the process involves the affirmation of yet another humanism (the self as virtuous in its austerity) and, after consumer profligacy, yet another model of nature as a standing reserve to be protected largely for its value to Man.
Fossile fuel civilization, then, and its antitheses, or antidotes. Man and/or God as ultimate referent: a couple we can expect to hear more from in the coming years. Bataille poses a very different model of the interrelation of energy and religion. /…/ Bataille’s energy and religion are not an alternative; they promise nothing for the future, certainly no salvation, although their aftereffect may entail a future more livable — by whom? — than that promised under the signs of God or Man.
Bataille’s energy is inseparable from that which powers cars and raises elevators, but it is different as well. It is excess energy, and in that sense it is left over when a jo is done, when the limits of growth are reached, or, in the current situation, when fossil fuels themselves reveal their profound limitations. Bataille’s energy is a transgression of the limit; it is what is left over in excess of what can be used within a fundamentally limited human field. As such, it is quite different from what can be used: it is not just left over in the sense of not being consumed; it is fundamentally unusable. At the point at which quantification reveals its finitude, energy asserts itself as the movement that cannot be stockpiled or quantified. It is the energy that by definition does not do work, that is insubordinate, that plays now rather than contributing to some effort that may mean something at some later date and that is devoted to some transcendent goal or principle. /…/ Energy is expended in social ritual that is pointless, that is tied not to the adhesion of a group or the security of the individual but to the loss of group and individual identity — sacrifice.
Bataille’s religion is thus inseparable from Bataille’s energy. /…/ If there is community, it is the unplanned aftereffect and not the essential meaning of this energy, of this mobement of the death or void of God.
Thus ethics for Bataille, the community, and its meaning and survival are aftereffects of the expenditure of the sacred. Bataille’s theory is profoundly ethical but only in the sense that the instant of preservation, of meaning, of conservation, of knowledge, is the unforeseen offshoot of another movement, that of the drive to spend without counting, without attempting to anticipate return. To deny the ethical moment, the moment, the moment in which conservation and meaning are established only the better to affirm the destruction of expenditure, is to relegate that destrection to the the simple, homogeneous movement of the animal, unaware of limit, meaning, and purposive act. Expenditure, in other words, is not the denial of the human, its repression, but instead its affirmation to the point at which it falls: the sacrifical act, the recognition of an energy that does not do “work” for the maintenance of the human, is the affirmation of a God who is not the slave of the human. It is the impossible movement in which awareness doubles the unknowable loss of energy and the virulence of a God who disbelieves in himself.
The ethics of Bataille, then, entail a vision of the future in which the “left-hand sacred”, the sacred of impurity, of eroticism, of the radically unconditioned God, spins off a community in and through which expenditure can be furthered (a community of those with nothing in common). Not nuclear war, the channeling of excess in ways that ensure survival so that more excess can be thrown off. And (one can continue along these lines) not generalized ecocide, but an affirmation of another energy, another religion, another waste, entailing not so much a steady state sustaininability (with what stable referent? Man?) but instead a postsustainable state in which we labor in order to expend, not conserve. Hence the energy, and wealth, of the body — the energy of libidinous and divine recycling, not the stockpiled, exploited, and dissipated energy of easily measured and used fossil fuels.
This book has two goals: in the first part, to sketch out Bataille’s positions on energy expenditure, religion of and against the Book, and the city; in the second, to extrapolate from those positions and consider current questions of energy use and depletion, religious literalism and fervor, and urban “life”. /…/

This book is a small effort that tries to suggest that there are other ways of thinking about how we power our lifes, with energy and with religion: these ways, these directions have been there all along. These other ways are not so much opposed to sustainability (as it is conventionally conceived) as they logically precede it and spin it off not as a goal but as an aftereffect. /…/ In a future (and imminent) era of scarcity we rethink what it means to be happy — thereby recognizing that happiness is tied not to the mere consumption and disposal of materials, but to their wise use — we will perhaps also realize that happiness means something more, or other, than a meager conservation or a placid contentment grounded in a placid sociability.

Philip Auslander on “rock ideology” and authenticity

Auslander, Philip (1999): Liveness. Performance in a mediatized culture
Routledge, London/New York

70: “The concept of rock authenticity is linked with the romantic bent of rock culture, in which rock music is imagined to be truly expressive of the artists’ souls and psyches, and as necessarily politically and culturally oppositional. /…/
the fact that the criteria for rock authenticity are imaginary has never prevented them from functioning in a very real way for rock fans.”

95: “As I have argued, rock authenticity resides in a dialectical relationship between recording and live performance.”
83: “rock ideology, itself a product of the age of mechanical reproduction, is a form of contemporary perception that allows its adherents to experience mass-produced objects as auratic through the process of authentication.”
76-77: “Live performance contributes to the process of authentication in two crucial ways. First, to be considered an authentic rocker, a musician must have a history as a live performer, as someone who has paid those dues and whose current visibility is the result of earlier popularity with a local following. Pursuing rock’s traditional career path, musicians must first establish themselves and find an audience through live performance; musicians are chosen to record by industry scouts on the basis of live performances.”
82: “Listeners steeped in rock ideology are tolerant of studio manipulation only to the extent that they know or believe that the resulting sound can be reproduced on stage by the same performers.”

71: “rock ideology is conservative: authenticity is often located in current music’s relationship to an earlier, ‘purer’ moment in a mythic history of the music.”
67-68: “The name most frequently used for rock’s Other is ‘pop’.”

84-85: “In the case of rock ideology, the aura must be seen as existing between the recording and the live performance. The aura is located in a dialectical relation between two cultural objects – the recording and the live performance – rather than perceived as a property inherent in a single object, and it is from this relation of mutuality that both objects derive their authenticity.”

72: “Synthesizers, once seen not as musical instruments but as machines that had no place in rock, have come to be seen as just another form of keyboard instrument. The computer keyboard has yet to be assimilated in quite the same way, though that process has begun.”

Bataille and dialectics

Asger Sørensen (Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School):
“The inner experience of living matter: Bataille and dialectics”
Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 33 no. 5, pp. 597-615

Like Marx, Bataille states that his thought is the ‘opposite’ of Hegel’s, but he immediately afterwards adds: ‘I only found myself there dialectically, if I may say so, Hegelically’. /…/

though initially arguing for the now common position reserving dialectics only for the praxis of the changeable human world, Bataille keeps the possibility open for reintroducing nature into the realm of dialectics /…/

Bataille thinks of his dialectics as the result of a determinate negation of Hegel’s, which of course maintains the Hegelian dialectic in the dialectics of Bataille as Moment. /…/

Desire is necessary for the fusion of sexual reproduction and therefore for the growth of life, when first it has become sexualized; but desire is also a negation of life, creating contradictions within life at various levels. /…/ The necessity of choosing between the objects of desire introduces a pause, a temporal discontinuity that inhibits the continuous process of life /…/
As a contradiction conscious life appears within life itself, not as something anti-thetic coming from outside life, but exactly as the determinate negation of life by life itself. /…/

Bataille opposes Hegel’s undifferentiated and ahistorical concept of life and introduces a development, both within the process of life’s reproduction of it-self and in the evolution from asexual to sexual reproduction. /…/ Bataille conceives of the dialectics of nature as constituting ‘a sort of natural history’ already in his early writings. /…/ In contrast to Hegel, Bataille thinks of life as historical, although this history has neither a beginning nor any end /…/

To Bataille what is prohibited in the taboo is the ‘violence’ of nature, and the human attitude is precisely the ‘refusal’ of such a violence. /…/ The human ‘no’ to natural violence, however, is never definitive. According to Bataille it is only a pause, ‘a momentary suspension, ot a final standstill’. The basic non-logical difference does not disappear, it just reaches a temporary unity, and this unity makes life’s activity human, i.e. makes activity conscious and reasonable as poiesis and praxis. /…/

If the conflict between the reasonable order of civilization and the subversive, violent pleasure of nature is understood theoretically as a logical contradiction it must be resolved /…/ A non-conflicting, i.e. a non-dialectical solution can only consist in siding with one or the other, idealizing either a self-defeating critique of civilization as such, or a pure and therefore senseless negation of nature as a whole. Hegel chose the last solution, accepting in the end only being uplifted to reason, spirit and absolute knowledge.
This is what Horkheimer termed the dogmatic aspect of Hegel’s philosophy. /…/

Instead, inspired by the dialectics of Bataille, one could understand the basic contradiction in and of human life as just a conflict, a tension inherent in humn and social eing as such, and as such an ontological condition that is dealt with – and thus solved – practically every day. The point to discuss politically is therefore not whether we can dissolve what the dialectical tradition would call the contradictions of the existing solution and reach the truth of the social being in question. The contradictions are always already solved practically, and the question is only how to make these practical solutions better.
No society is completely homogeneous, since any human being takes part in more than one social being, e.g. families, classes, subcultures, associations, etc. /…/

Bataille’s materialist dialectics /…/ risk becoming a mystifying ideology for a world organized only by the market, since no long-term political action, no persistent use of force, seems legitimate in Bataille’s perspective. /…/
Bataille describe the processes of nature and human culture dialectically, without comforting himself with dreams and hopes of ideals of a harmony that history or experience will realize in the end. /…/
In short, with an epistemology and an ontology like Bataille’s, it is very difficult to believe in anything worth dying for. And that is a shame.

Adam Arvidsson – Creative Class or Administrative Class. On Advertising and the Underground.

(forthcoming in Ephemera, 1/2007- download Arvidsson.finaleditmarch07-1)

[...]

The interconnections between the advertising industry and the underground have been institutionalized to such an extent that advertising professionals, although they often identify as members of the ‘creative class’, often concede that real creative production tends to unfold elsewhere. As one event bureau professional told me:

There are, like, these two groups, on the one hand the ‘correctly creative’; the people that go to the right places, Barcelona, New York, Paris, and have the right bike, and the right glasses and live on the Islands Brygge or Vesterbro [Copenhagen neighborhoods in the process of gentrification] and dress in a certain way. They choose a role where they can confirm each other. Then there are the ‘true creatives’, like strange people: maybe they study at the university or make music, or underground theater, and they’re just born with it, and they’re crude and not well adapted, and they think untraditionally and alternatively, and these strange people are the ones that advertising agencies really want to get in touch with.

 

At the same time, the ‘underground’ has changed as well. It has become less political, more individualized and competitive, and more open to cooperate with the creative industries and with business in general. In this respect the Copenhagen underground scene has gone through changes similar to those described by Muggleton & Weinzeirl (2003) and McRobbie (2002) in the case of Britain, only about five years later. As in the UK, the transformation of the Copenhagen underground was linked to the establishment of the electronic music scene as the centre of underground culture. Electronic music accomplished two things: first, it expanded the size of the underground scene. With new technologies, PCs and music editing software, the capacity to engage in independent music production expanded to involve the kinds of people that did not embrace the political and existential ethos of an earlier generation of underground artists. In short, “the nerds now got involved as well”. Second, as the electronic music scene expanded outside the cultural and spatial boundaries of the older political underground, it came to create its own events. This involved using new venues and connecting to other emerging scenes, like video art, fashion and design, which further expanded the size and scope of underground culture. It also tended to introduce an entrepreneurial logic into independent cultural production. DJs and party organizers began to see themselves as cultural entrepreneurs, putting together music, artists and venues to create an event, marketing it to get the right kind of audience and charging money at the door to cover costs. In short, they invested time and money in order to cash in on respect (more than on money).

If underground cultural production in the 1980s had moved within ideologically coherent communities with strong internal solidarities and clear boundaries that set them off from the rest of the city (the Autonomen/Punk scene with its occupied buildings and frequent clashes with the police), it now began to look more like an ethical economy (with an emphasis on ‘economy’) marked instead by open-ended networks (Wittel, 1999). Cultural producers perceived themselves as enterprising individuals who invested their time and money and put their reputation at stake in producing events that might increase their credibility and standing within the peer group. This entrepreneurial turn tended to open up the underground to the creative industries and the rest of the city. First, because event producers now accepted and actively sought out sponsorships to help cover costs and to increase the attraction of their event by providing things like free beer. Second, because the frequency of these events led to the opening of a number of clubs which transformed the (former) underground into an important part of the urban nightlife scene, with the result that independent ‘underground’ cultural producers and creative industry employees began to frequent the same environments and ‘network’ with each other with greater ease than before.

 [...]

Indeed network entrepreneurs are optimistic about the future. On the one hand there is a continuing interest on the part of business to sponsor underground artists: “That’s how I see the future of the underground, that we can be used to speak for those who make a lot of money, because there is no money in selling records any more.” On the other hand, new information and communication technologies (like file sharing) that permit new ways of distributing and circulating music have enabled new forms of cooperation that in turn generate new forms of life. These can be successfully marketed to business:

So we won’t be unemployed just because music has become more openly accessible. It only means that people form new groups, with new things in common. And these become even harder to find and grasp for people on the outside. This makes it even more difficult for businesses to stay in touch.

To summarize: at least in case of the event bureaus, the ‘underground’ has become an integrated element to the economy of the culture industries. Underground artists and advertising professionals mutually utilize each other. For the underground artists, sponsorship provides resources to be mobilized in the drive to maximize one’s standing and respect. To the advertising professionals, the underground produces the authentic forms of life that have become increasingly valuable in contemporary viral or event marketing strategies. The cultural industry appropriates the creativity of the underground by hooking into its networks. The network entrepreneurs play a crucial part here. By means of their position at the top of the hierarchy of the underground they are endowed with the kinds of contacts, sub-cultural capital, respect and the general biopolitical capacity that enable them to recruit and mobilize desired forms of life and to guarantee their quality. The people who are recruited by network entrepreneurs, like DJs and artists, in turn make use of their networks, either to mobilize an attractive crowd of friends and acquaintances, or to develop their own artistic capital in terms of skills and up-to-date-ness. At yet a lower level there is the ‘deep underground’ where innovations are made that will slowly trickle upwards. All of these levels are also connected laterally to other environments and milieus (Berlin, New York, Barcelona), chiefly, but not exclusively through ICTs. It is as if the event bureau plants a root (or maybe a rhizome) in the productive multitude that dissipates almost ad infinitum, and allows it to establish a value stream.

David Wellbery – Post-Hermeneutic Criticism

Foreword to Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 S. xi-xvi

Kittler’s work cannot be classified as Derridean, Foucauldian, or Lacanian; rather, it grounds itself on what might be termed the joint achievement of the three. Perhaps this is the major methodological innovation of Kittler’s book. By eliciting from the divergent elaborations of post-structuralist thought a collective epistemological apparatus, Kittler establishes a positive research program for a post-hermeneutic criticism.

The first component of this program–the premise that determines its overall perspective–might be termed the “presupposition of exteriority.” The task of Kittler’s critical investigation, in other words, is not to reabsorb the scattered utterances and inscriptions of the past into an inwardness that would endow them with meaning, be this inwardness the reflexivity of the subject as in Romantic hermeneutics or the reflexivity of language itself as in Gadamer. Rather, he practices what Foucault, in an early essay on Maurice Blanchot, called the “thinking of the outside,” the thinking of language as a domain recalcitrant to internalization. Later in his career, Foucault named this domain “discourse” and set out to develop a lexicon of exteriority–series, event, discontinuity, materiality– with which to describe it. Kittler’s discourse analysis follows the Foucauldian lead in that it seeks to delineate the apparatuses of power, storage, transmission, training, reproduction, and so forth that make up the conditions of factual discursive occurrences. The object of study is not what is said or written but the fact – the brute and often brutal fact–that it is said, that this and not rather something else is inscribed.

Inscription, in its contingent facticity and exteriority, is the irreducible given of Kittler’s analysis, as the original German title of his book– Aufschreibesysteme–makes evident. That title, a neologism invented by Dr. Schreber, can be most literally translated as “systems of writing down” or “notation systems.” It refers to a level of material deployment that is prior to questions of meaning. At stake here are the constraints that select an array of marks from the noisy reservoir of all possible written constellations, paths and media of transmission, or mechanisms of memory. A notation system or, as we have chosen to translate, a discourse network has the exterior character–the outsideness–of a technology. In Kittler’s view, such technologies are not mere instruments with which “man” produces his meanings; they cannot be grounded in a philosophical anthropology. Rather, they set the framework within which something like “meaning,” indeed, something like “man,” become possible at all.

Writing (or arche-writing) as the condition of possibility of metaphysical conceptuality: this, of course, is a major tenet of Derrida’s work. In Lacan, the cognate notion is that our existence is a function of our relation to the signifier. Kittler concretizes this post-structuralist theme by situating his analysis not at the level of writing or the signifier in general, but rather at the level of the historically specific machineries–scriptural and otherwise–that in their various arrangements organize information processing. His post-hermeneutic criticism, in other words, renders explicit and productive the tendency toward a radical historicism that is in fact immanent to the work of all the post-structuralist thinkers. To be sure, this historicism is no longer the narrative of a subject–a hero of knowledge, labor, or liberty–in the manner of the master plots of modernity; nor is it a particularist anamnesis of the lived past such as the socalled new historicism pursues. Like Foucault’s, Kittler’s historiography has a systematic thrust, tends toward the delineation of types. These types, denoted simply by the dates 1800 and 1900, are the discourse networks – the linkages of power, technologies, signifying marks, and bodies–that have orchestrated European culture for the past two hundred years.

The presupposition of exteriority, I claimed, determines the overall perspective of Kittler’s post-hermeneutic criticism. The field within which that criticism operates, its domain of inquiry, is carved out by a second major premise, which I shall call the “presupposition of mediality.” Here too Kittler develops insights that emerged within post-structuralism, for instance, in the investigations of the cinematic apparatus carried out by Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry, investigations themselves strongly influenced by the Lacanian notion of the unconscious as a machine. Of course, the studies of Metz and Baudry are concerned with the medium of film alone, and it is principally in the area of film studies that, in both Europe and the United States, the concept of medium is broadly employed. The decisive methodological step undertaken by Kittler is to generalize the concept of medium, to apply it to all domains of cultural exchange. Whatever the historical field we are dealing with, in Kittler’s view, we are dealing with media as determined by the technological possibilities of the epoch in question. Mediality is the general condition within which, under specific circumstances, something like “poetry” or “literature” can take shape. Post-hermeneutic literary history (or criticism), therefore, becomes a sub-branch of media studies.

This reclassification of literary criticism necessarily elicits a rethinking of its object of study. First and most obviously, if literature is medially constituted–that is, if it is a means for the processing, storage, and transmission of data–then its character will change historically according to the material and technical resources at its disposal. And it will likewise change historically according to the alternative medial possibilities with which it competes. In this regard, too, Kittler’s work leads to a radical historicism that finally dissolves the universality of the concept of literature. Moreover, this dissolution does not bear merely on distant epochs such as the medieval period, where the question of orality versus literacy has long been a focus of research. It operates in our own historical backyard, severing, as Kittler shows, Romantic “poetry” (produced under the monopoly of print and universal alphabetization) from modern “literature” (where writing enters into competition with the technical media of phonograph and film). From this perspective, the typewriter, still a component of our historical a priori, can be seen to initiate a fundamental mutation in the mode of existence of language.

But the notion of mediality recasts our notion of literature in another sense. As soon as we conceive of literature as medially instantiated, then we must view its meaning as the product of a selection and rarefaction. All media of transmission require a material channel, and the characteristic of every material channel is that, beyond – and, as it were, against – the information it carries, it produces noise and nonsense. What we call literature, in other words, stands in an essential (and again, historically variable) relation to a non-meaning, which it must exclude. It is defined not by what it means, but by the difference between meaning and nonmeaning, information and noise, that its medial possibilities set into place. This difference, obviously, is inaccessible to hermeneutics. It is the privileged locus, however, of post-hermeneutic thought.

A criticism oriented by the presuppositions of exteriority and mediality has no place for creative human subjects, allows no room to psychology and its internalizations, refuses to anchor itself in a notion of universal human being. This non-anthropological bent of Kittler’s work will seem disturbing to many readers of the book, who will rightly ask: What is the interest that motivates this critical enterprise? Where are its bonds of solidarity? An answer to these questions, I believe, is implied by the third premise of post-hermeneutic criticism, the premise that defines not its analytical perspective (exteriority), nor its domain of study (mediality), but rather its point of reference and focus of concern. I call this premise the “presupposition of corporeality.”

The reason that the concept of corporeality defines the point of reference for post-hermeneutic criticism is clear. The body is the site upon which the various technologies of our culture inscribe themselves, the connecting link to which and from which our medial means of processing, storage, and transmission run. Indeed, in its nervous system, the body itself is a medial apparatus and an elaborate technology. But it is also radically historical in the sense that it is shaped and reshaped by the networks to which it is conjoined. The forerunner of this thinking in terms of corporeality, of course, is Nietzsche, whose philosophy follows, as he put it, the body’s guiding thread and whose aesthetics, as he often insisted, is a physiology. Among the post-structuralists, Foucault cleaves most closely to this aspect of the Nietzschean program, especially in his work on the history of punishment and on sexuality. But in Lacan, too, for whom subject formation takes place at the intersection of the body and the sign)fier, and in Derrida, whose reading of Freud focuses on the question of intra-psychic inscription, the theme of corporeality is insistent. One widespread reading of post- structuralism claims that it eliminates the concept of the subject. It would be more accurate to say that it replaces that concept with that of the body, a transformation which disperses (bodies are multiple), complexifies (bodies are layered systems), and historicizes (bodies are finite and contingent products) subjectivity rather than exchanging it for a simple absence.

The presupposition of corporeality has two major methodological consequences for post-hermeneutic criticism. The first is that the question of agency recedes into the background. The body is not first and foremost an agent or actor, and in order to become one it must suffer a restriction of its possibilities: the attribution of agency is a reduction of complexity. As a result, culture is no longer viewed as a drama in which actors carry out their various projects. Rather, the focus of analysis shifts to the processes that make that drama possible: to the writing of the script, the rehearsals and memorizations, the orders that emanate from the directorial authority. This (in my view) important conceptual shift can be formulated somewhat less metaphorically as follows: post-hermeneutic criticism replaces the foundational notion of praxis (the materialist version of subjective agency) with that of training. Culture is just that: the regimen that bodies pass through; the reduction of randomness, impulse, forgetfulness; the domestication of an animal, as Nietzsche claimed, to the point where it can make, and hold to, a promise.

The second methodological consequence of the presupposition of corporeality is that the sufferance of the body, its essential pathos, becomes a privileged locus for the analysis of discourse networks in terms of both their systematic character and their effectivity. In other words, the point at which discourse networks reveal most sharply their specific impress is in the pathologies they produce. Just as post-hermeneutic criticism focuses on the difference between information and noise, sense and nonsense, that defines every medium, so too it attends to the difference between normal behavior and aberrance (including madness) that lends every cultural formation its identity. The victims who people Kittler’s book–the Bettinas, the Gunderodes, the Nietzsches, the Schrebers–speak the truth of the culture they suffer. Whoever would look for the bonds of solidarity that orient Kittler’s investigation will find them here: in its unmistakable compassion for the pathos of the body in pain. Hermeneutics would appropriate this corporeal singularity in the construction of a meaning. Post-hermeneutic criticism, however, draws its responsibility precisely from the unassimilable otherness of the singular and mortal body. This is the ethical reason it stops making sense.

Anna-Lena Carlsson about Nietzsche and creativity

Anna-Lena Carlsson: “…Is it hunger or superabundance that has become creative?” Nietzsche on creativity in art & life
(Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in aesthetics,
presented at Uppsala University, 2005)

246: “If we were to talk about Nietzsche’s aesthetics, it is aesthetics from the perspective of the creator. /…/
According to Nietzsche, human beings are fundamentally artistic, down to the level of the creation of language and the truths. He thereby uses the terms ‘art’ and ‘artistic’ both in a narrow and in a broader sense.”

71: “In ‘On Truth and Lying’, Nietzsche speaks of a broader sense of the artistic. He argues that human beings are artistically creative ['künstlerisch schaffend'] and regards an impulse to image-making as being fundamental to language and our existence in the world.”
73: “Nietzsche writes of a ‘mysterious x and indicates how we act as if we have access to the thing-in-itself when we designate objects. /…/ The thing-in-itself is incomprenhensible to human beings, according to Nietzsche. He has turned away from his early artistic metaphysics and he no longer argues in favour of a possibility of gaining access to the sphere of things-in-themselves.”
76: “To sustain a certain society, existence is ordered into a forgetfulness of our fundamental artistic creativity. /…/ this creativity is forgotten – and thereby denied – according to Nietzsche /…/ Nietzsche thereby expresses an order of rank among human creations in the essay; everything is not equally valued as artistically creative.”

83-84n55: “He continues [in Human, all too human] ‘for he who does not have two thirds of his day to himself is a slave, let him be what he may otherwise: statesman, businessman, official, scholar’. This is a defence of a certain kind of idleness [Müssiggehen] /…/ that means being true to oneself in a more profound way, not just in a simple suspension from external demands. /…/ Nietzsche’s notion of a ‘higher culture’ is related to ‘true leisure’. This is seen, for instance, when he writes that a higher culture can only come into existence where there are two different castes in society: The cast compelled to work and the cast that works if it wants to work. /…/ The notion of work and leisure is moreover related to the capacity of suffering and being sensible. /…/ Nietzsche writes: ‘In a better ordering of society the heavy work and exigencies of life will be apportioned to him who suffers least as a consequence of them, that is to say to the most insensible, and thus step by step up to him who is most sensitive to the most highly sublimated species of suffering and who therefore suffers even when life is alleviated to the greatest degree possible.’”

86: “To ‘create a comfortable life for as many as possible’ is then to be regarded as life-negating, because it does not affirm existence in its whole.”

85: “Morality is a means to preserve society; it wards off a destruction. To be moral is to act according to custom. /…/ We only suffer from new chains, Nietzsche writes, /…/ the fettered spirit does not take its position on grounds of reasons, but out of habit.”

87: “The fettered spirits and their culture are nevertheless triumphant, according to Nietzsche, and they hold out four things to be right: 1) that which possesses duration; 2) things that are not inconvenient; 3) everything that brings them advantage; 4) and all things for which they have made a sacrifice.”

105: “It is important to note that there is no fundamental distinction between the master and the slave of morality. Although Nietzsche writes of these two types as being two different historical types of existence; their powers are not opposites but are considered as being a difference in degree. Both want to increase their power, but the slave is hindered in his activity by a stronger force, and turns his attempt at increasing in power elsewhere.”

98: “The advocates of old values or those who destroy old values without creating new values belong to forms of lives that ought to be overcome.”
118-119: “To affirm life as the will to power is to affirm one’s own increase in strength. It is self-mastery, a creation of one’s own rules, one’s own path and existence in the world. /…/
A strong will excludes, selects and orders a multitude of forces into rank. /…/ It is in association with the will to power and life-affirmation that we must also consider the question of the eternal recurrence ['die ewige Wiederkehr'].”
121: “I interpret the eternal recurrence as Nietzsche’s attempt to express the pathos od a future type of existence; to express the pathos of the being that has overcome contemporary man and nihilism – the pathos of the overman.”

109: “When Nietzsche writes favourably about morals, he focuses on the individual and associates morals with an affirmation of life as hierarchical. There is an order of rank, he writes, between moralities and between human beings.”
246: “To affirm life is to affirm existence as creative, but also as destructive and hierarchical. /…/ In his early writings, this is described in metaphysical terms whereas in his later writings it is described in physiological terms.”
117: “If existence is affirmed as destructive and creative, one also affirms that equality is not the fundamental principle of society. /…/ Life itself is ‘essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppresion, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, explosion’. The order of the world and life is hierarchical, because life (as the will to power) is hierarchical.”
192: “Nietzsche asks: ‘Is living not valuating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different?’ To want to live according to nature is to be an actor and self-deceiver.”

124: “Nietzsche writes of an active and a passive nihilism: ‘Nihilism. It is ambiguous: A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and ecession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.”
125: “Vattimo underlines this difference between passive and active nihilism, where passive nihilism becomes a reactive response in its refusal to accept chaos and annihilation, while active nihilism remains open and affirmative concerning new values. Affirmation, however, is not a creation of active nihilism. Vattime writes:
‘/…/ this [reactive] nihilism has always taken an affirmative appearance since its very purpose is to conceal tha nothingness which lies at the base of all that which is believed to be true, to have value and to subsist as an objective structure.’”
125-126: “Nietzsche writes in a note from Nachlass dated 1887 that it is an exhausted nihilism which no longer fights – the most famous form is Buddhism.”

189: “Nietzsche writes that the overestimation of consciousness is absurd /…/ One can neither capture the qualities of great art by transforming the will to a form of consciousness, nor set out from consciousness and get a grip on the art. Consciousness and language are always related to a Yes-saying or No-saying to existence. /…/ Aesthetic judgements are then to be considered as a mode of existence. When a life-affirming event is given significance, the judgement made is not separated from the ‘judge’ /…/ There is nothing outside the self justifying this Yes-saying. The ’strong’ will affirms itself.”
190: “If a life-affirming utterance about art has an effect, it is not brought about by arguments or rules. It rather imposes itself on the other, if the other affirms life. /…/
To follow one’s own path is not to be confused with a desire to have one’s own path. A striving for originality has nothing to do with this privileged uniqueness. /…/ Magistrates in matters of a life-negating taste also utter their ‘Great art!, ‘Art!’ and ‘Non-art!’, but alienate themselves from their judgements. These ‘judges’ do not walk on their own paths, but rely on something external (arguments, rules, authority, desire for power et cetera) in forming their judgements. /…/ According to Nietzsche, great works of art have more in common with other life-affirming creations (in a broader sense), than with life-negating art, such as the creation of oneself.”

242: “Nietzsche thinks of life-negation as a beautification of life and the world that makes the life-negating type of lives bearable and attractive. This beautification keeps humans within bounds. The construction of an ego, the ‘I’ of thinking, is also taken as an example of a life-prohibiting image.”

211: “Both the ego and the self are creations, but the willing of the self is an affirmation of the whole of our physiological existence. The body, Nietzsche writes, possesses a greater reason than the ‘I’.”
205: “The truth gained through the ‘I’, excluding other forms of reason is only one part of the body. Behind the ‘I’ there is a ’self’ [das Selbst]. As we have also seen, there is a gap between the ‘I’ and the self. According to Nietzsche, we find that human beings should affirm a self, not their thinking. To affirm one’s self, is to affirm one’s own will: ‘Will a self‘, Nietzsche stresses”
206: “When Nietzsche speaks of an affirmation of the self, rather than the affirmation of the ‘I’, our physiological body is consequently also emphasised. The body, he writes, is a greater reason than the reason of the ‘I’. /…/
Zarathustra values that which human beings produce in an affirmation of their whole existence, not that which humans produce only with their thinking.
To emphasise being as becoming, the affirmation of one’s self is a state that threatens binary oppositions, such as that between a real and an apparent world. Along with the abolition of the subject, the real world is also abolished.”
207: “To create one’s own self is to become wiser than artists, Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, because artists stop where art ends while ‘we want to be the poets of our life’. /…/ In this state of being, the need for traditional works of art passes away. If one has enough tragedy and comedy in one’s own company, one keeps away from the theatre.”
208: “Nietzsche’s emphasis on the perspective of creation and organisation also emphasise the possibility of works of art without an artist. /…/ about art as organisation /…/ A work of art without an artist represents a change in Nietzsche’s attitude from the metaphysical artist of the world, in The Birth if Tragedy, to the world as organisation and as a work of art giving birth to itself”

194: “Artistic creativity is crucial for both the life-negating and life-affirming type of existence. /…/ To stress human existence in the world as fundamentally creative, as Nietzsche does, is to stress the repudiations of all values, nihilism.”

176: “one of the beliefs protexting the life-negating artist and his art is that the artist has access to a ‘true truth’, a ‘real reality’ which is expressed in art. This is one of the consequences of elevating the artist as genious. In a life-negating culture, one believes that the work of art is able to convey such truths.”
177-178: “There is, however, also a positive aspect to art in Nietzsche’s time. Firstly, Nietzsche seems to mean that this art is better than no art at all. In Human, all too Human he says that we do not have leisure enough for art. /…/
‘Let us be grateful to it that is has consented to live as it does rather than flee away; but let us also admit to ourselves that an age which shall one day bring back true festivals of joy and freedom will have no use for our art.’
/…/ Art can restore these faded ideas and make different ages and old spirits return. Old emotions are, for a moment, aroused. This is a useful function of art, Nietzsche argues /…/ Without his knowledge, the artist’s task becomes that of making mankind ‘childlike’ and this is regarded both as a glory and a limitation.”

196: “The beautiful does not exist. /…/ That which is regarded as beautiful in a community, depends on what type of existence is triumphant in the world.”

2: “Some commentators associate current aestheticization processes with Nietzsche’s broadened sense of art and the artistic.”
3: “I soon came to believe, however, that the processes of aestheticisation spoken of today originated in an aesthetic paradigm that Nietzsche opposes. This is a paradigm that has come to associate aesthetics with the perspective of the receiver of art, while Nietzsche emphasizes the perspective of the creator.”

191: “In the aestheticism of Wilde, life itself becomes a work of art.
Nietzsche indeed also links art and life, although he does not link life to an already established notion of art. Instead, he criticises the aesthetic paradigm and emphasises artistic creativity in and outside the realm of art. This artistry is far from being disinterested and its prime concern is not beauty. Our aesthetics up to now, he writes, has been an aesthetics of the receivers of art; ‘the receivers of art have formulated their experience of “what is beautiful?” In all philosophy hitherto the artist is lacking.’ The last sentence is important: the artist is lacking in all philosophy so far.”
210: “Nietzsche’s suggestion of humans’ self-creation and the future overman has little to do with the aesthetic paradigm taken to its extreme in aestheticism, of the disinterestedness and beautification of life according to Oscar Wilde.”

243: “I believe that the processes of aestheticization spoken of today have their roots in an aesthetic paradigm that Nietzsche opposes. This is a paradigm that has come to associate aesthetics with sensory perception and the receiver of art (in a broader sense), while Nietzsche emphasises the perspective of the creator.”

4n: “Hegel writes that aesthetics ["Ästhetik"] designates the science of the senses [des Sinnes], of perception [des Empfindens]“

5: “My thesis is that there is a two-fold type of art and the artistic in Nietzsche’s writing. Nietzsche emphasises the perspective of production and asks: Has hunger or superabundance ["der Überfluss"] become creative? That is: Has life-affirmation or life-negation become creative?”
241: “Life-affirming art is made out of the artist’s own abundance; it is the result of an overflowing into a new creation. This art does not originate from the conscious intentions of the artist or from conformity to pre-established standards. /…/ The beholder of this art is physiologically stimulated; he is strengthened in his life.”

180: “Great art should be what we give away in an overflow, not something that is created and received because of a need for relief, security, and beauty. A conscious desire to create art is not favoured by Nietzsche, because the existence of great art does not have its origin in this desire. In Human, all too Human he writes: ‘I intend never again to read an author of whom it is apparent that he wanted to produce a book: but only those whose thoughts unintentionally became a book.’ /…/
Nietzsche says that creativity consists in the artists’ (or thinkers’) highly sharpened and practised power of judgement which rejects, selects and joins together.”
181: “The artist has practised and sharpened his power of judgement into a sharpness of the senses and a feeling of enhanced power when he chooses, discards, and creates new constellations. His art does not represent anything, it adds to the world of phenomena. In this creation he too, by necessity, destroys established images. /…/ Concerning art, Nietzsche emphasises the creative, organising process. This approach is in itself a critique of the existing aesthetic paradigm, of the emphasis on the receiver of art.”
185: “Great art in Nietzsche’s thinking, as we have seen, cannot serve as a standard for someone else to follow. What we can learn from the artist, he writes in The Gay Science, is their kind of creativity.”

11: “The concept ‘artist’ is sometimes used as a word of abuse, regarding someone who negates life. Sometimes it is the highest praise of someone who lives in life-affirmation. Another concept Nietzsche uses in a two-fold sense is ‘philosopher’.”
185-186: “Nietzsche argues [in HH]: ‘One man wants to enjoy his own nature by means of art, another wants with its aid to get above from his nature for a time. In accordance with both needs there exists a two-fold species of art and artist.’”
186: “there are two kinds of sufferers, those who suffer from an abundance of life and those who suffer from an impoverishment of life. The former kind wants Dionysian art, the latter seeks redemption from themselves through art. Life-denying art appeals to life-denying lives and liffe-affirming art corresponds to life-affirming beings. /…/
Art is created out of a surplus of life and it is only experienced by another ‘Yes-sayer’ to existence.”
35: “Life-affirmation is now regarded as an immanent justification of existence, in no need of any kind of external justification. Life-negation depends on something external for its justification of existence – such as God.”

187: “The superabundance of creativity is involved in both the perception and creation of an object. There are certain beings incapable of producing and responding to great art. /…/
judgements have nothing to do with understanding /…/
What happens when a life-denying existence is confronted with life-affirming art? Nietzsche answers that they ‘would interpret their own value feelings into it’.
In the correspondence between art and life, Nietzsche opposes the strict division between the artist, the beholder of art, and the work of art.”
188: “The physiological correspondence between the artist, the work, and the beholder of art levels out a hierarchy among them, which can be regarded as a critique of the cult of the geniusm of the autonomy of the work of art, and of the disinterested contemplative beholder of art. /…/ The beholder is therefore /…/ active in the participation of both the creative process and the work of art.”

224: “When [Wolfgang] Welsch writes that Nietzsche’s views on the aesthetic constitution of reality have become commonplace /…/ – he does not recognise the difference between a life-affirming and a life-negating structuring of reality. “
234: “Both Wolfgang Welsch and Richard Shusterman acknowledge an all-embracing notion of creativity, as did Nietzsche. Both of them refer to Nietzsche’s writings in their attempt to broaden the field of the aesthetic, but in contrast to Nietzsche they do not distinguish between a life-affirming and a life-negating type of artistic creativity. This is evident, for example, when Shusterman regards Oscar Wilde’s ‘life itself is an art’ as a ‘Nietzschean maxim’. /…/ Welsch and Shusterman do not acknowledge Nietzsche’s affirmation of an order of rank. Instead, they hold that this coexisting plurality of aesthetic phenomena is democratic.”
238: “An acknowledgement of the hierarchical character of life as the will to power, however, eliminates an interpretation of Nietzsche as a philosopher who affirms plurality without any order of rank.”

199: “Nietzsche asks: How does the subjective become an aesthetic phenomenon? He finds the answer in a certain ‘musical mood‘ which is prior to the actual act of creation. The ’subjective’ poet, as a Dionysian artist, first has to become united with the ‘primordial unity’, he then has to produce its image as music. /…/
Nietzsche writes that subject and object, as well as doer and deed, are constructions. This is expressed, for example, in a note from Nachlass dated 1888: ‘Subject, object, a doer added to the doing, the doing separated from that which it does: let us not forget that this is mere semiotics and nothing real.’”

40: “the Apollonian, this is characterised as an acknowledgment of human beings as artistically creative in their production of ‘beatutiful illusions’ /…/ a plastic energy forming a harmonious whole.”
41: “The Apollonian also forms individuality. /…/ Apollo is the image of principium individuationis“
43: “The Olympian world is produced through the Apollonian tendency, which made it possible for human beings to live with the terror and horror they knew from existence.”
45: “Apollonian culture indeed affirms life as artistically creative in its affirmation of illusions, but it attempts to exclude pain and contradictions within existence, inasmuch as pain and contradictions are hostile to individuality.”

46: “In the Dionysian emption, ‘everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness [Selbstvergessenheit]‘ This ’self-forgetfullness’ is to be understood in relation to the Apollonian ‘know thyself’.”
47: “Although Dionysian music touches the essence of things, it is significant to note that Nietzsche does not consider music as the will in itself. /…/ Music precedes other formations and creations – such as words and concepts – because it is more closely related to the universal ‘primal unity’ ['das Ur-Eine'].”

189: “a kind of music which has forgotten the world and speaks to itself, of itself, while disregarding the hearers’ and listeners’ effects and failures. He regards it as ‘innocent, as opposed to ‘guilty’ music in need of justification and explanation. Nietzsche generally dislikes verbal explanations of great art.”

62: “There is a difference between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche regarding their respective views on what constitutes the veil of illusion. Nietzsche makes a distinction between the artistic Apollonian and the inartistic theoretical, or Socratic, world of illusion. Nietzsche uses the word ‘artistic’ as an indication of something highly values and ‘inartistic’ as a sign of something of low value. The inartistic veil of illusion is indeed artistically produced, as we shall see later, although it denies itself as such a creation.”

49: “We may now say that the Dionysian brings a fuller view of existence into Apollonian culture and art. The Dionysian affirms the whole of existence. I regard this as an artistic life-affirming alternative in The Birth of Tragedy, in the sense that the Apollonian-formed Dionysian state affirms the whole of existence.
One might also say that the Apollonian relieves existence of the suffering associated with the Dionysian.”

53: “We have three types of culture: a dominant theoretical culture, an artistic one and a tragic culture. Although Nietzsche seems to distinguish between an Apollonian artistic culture and a Dionysian tragic one here, we must keep in mind that the Dionysian tragic culture must always be Apollonian formed and hence artistic as well as tragic.”

Complementarity and performance

Simon Jones, 2003: The Courage of Complementarity
(On the phase-transitional problems of the paradigm shift in performance studies provoked by Practice-as-research.)

performance itself re-minds us in the academy that objects, even those of study, do not really exist, what we call things being relatively slower events than what we call events, hence empiric reality is an illusion

…

an event in the world is that which is or is subsequently recognized as phrased. From the outside or before the event, performance is in this commonsense way recognized as separate from other known events in the world. However, during performance, that which most affects us about performance is precisely that which we do not recognize and cannot phrase, that which can only be felt uncannily.

…

After the performance, when we have returned to the everyday world of events, we can write it up as event by phrasing it. This incorporates the experience into discourse and allows that which was felt uncannily to be addressed indirectly. In effect, we write cannily about the uncanny. We come to know performance by way of not knowing. What remains un-phraseable of the performance is essentially a non-event and continues to work uncannily and can only be known by what it is not and only approached as if one were approaching a miracle.

…

As the product of the processes of research is both objectified and fetishized, so the academic performs or disappears. However, in effect, the practitioner-as-researcher has both to perform AND disappear. They have nothing to show for their work the morning after the performance. This disappearance of the research output, its co-called ephemerality, so beautifully described in the writings of Peggy Phelan, is compensated for by a perceived need to be constantly active, constantly performing. As memories are short, the practitioner-as-researcher must constantly perform their own disappearance within the academy.

…

Our greatest challenge is to find ways, and I stress here the plural, /…/ of housing the mix of performative and textual practices alongside each other.

…

We could think of the epistemological difficulties /…/ as analogous to those encountered by physicists in their own attempts to measure the world of quantum mechanics using the experimental machinery developed to demonstrate Classical or Newtonian mechanics. The apora between these realities – the everyday and the quantum – challenged the belief that systems could be finally known through measurement.

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So, whilst many academics find it acceptable to incorporate certain notions from quantum mechanics, such as the proposition that no observer can stand outside of the event they are observing, that they who only sit and watch affect what’s happening on stage; it is interesting to follow the implications of complementarity a little further. The wave-particle experiment demonstrated that light behaves either as a wave or as a particle depending on the kind of recording device the scientist chooses to use.
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according to the theories, light cannot behave as both a particle and a wave; the two realities, according to physicists who know, are mutually exclusive. Hence the phrasing of complementarity, that potentially light is both particle and wave, until the scientist, through his choice of measuring device, that is, a particular technology that couples a particular theory with a particular know-how, chooses which reality to materialize.

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“At the quantum level, the most general physical properties of any system must be expressed in terms of complementary pairs of variables [e.g. momentum & position; energy & time; continuity and discontinuity], each of which can be better defined only at the expense of a corresponding loss in the degree of definition of the other.”
[David BOHM, Quantum Theory, Prentice Hall, London, 1960, p.160]