Concept Horror

Citing another case of the investigation of Horror. Check out the Collapse series at Urbanomic.


Collapse Vol. IV: Concept Horror

Editorial Introduction [pdf]
Robin Mackay

Surveying a century in which experience has taught us that man is capable of inventing ever more atrocious forms of violence and horror, is it necessary to remark that much of modern thought offers little to soothe, and much to exacerbate our disquiet? Nietzsche famously observed that the psychic well-being of the human organism is predicated, minimally, upon a drastically partial perspective, and ultimately upon untruth. Human cognitive defaults continue to cry out against the insights which modern physics, cosmology, genetics, neuroscience, psychoanalysis and the rest seem to require us to integrate into our worldview. As for philosophy, it has largely replaced wonder, awe, and the drive to certainty with dread, anxiety and finitude. Moreover, despite the diverse technological wonders they have made possible, the modern sciences offer little existential respite: There is no consolation in the claim that (for instance) I am the contingent product of evolution, or a chance formation of elementary particles, or that my ‘self’ is nothing but the correlate of the activation of neurobiological phase-spaces. Yet mundane thought, whether through obstinacy or inertia, maintains its stubborn course regardless, as if oblivious to their consequences, or at most allowing them to subsist at a safely delimited, solely theoretical level.

What if, prising the more disturbing elements of modern thought loose from their comfortable framing as part of an intellectual canon, we were to become fully attentive to their most harrowing consequences? What if, impatient with a consideration of their claims solely from the point of view of their explanatory power and formal consistency, we yielded to the (perhaps ‘unphilosophical’) temptation to experiment with their potentially corrosive effects upon lived experience? If the overriding affect connected with what we ‘know’ – but still do not really know – about the universe and our place in it, would be one of horror, then, inversely, how might the existing literature of horror inform a reading of these tendencies of contemporary thought?

via:wood s lot

Vampires and Zombies: Transnational Transformations

Saw this and just had to re-post for the sharper minds that walk among us.

A call for proposals for an exciting anthology has crossed our transom:

Vampires and Zombies: Transnational Transformations (working title)

Editors: Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (Heidelberg University, Germany), Timothy Fox (National Yilan University, Taiwan), and Monika Mueller (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

The undead are very much alive in the contemporary cultural imagination. Vampires and zombies have garnered a generous amount of attention in print media, cinema, and on television. The vampire, with its roots in medieval European folklore, and the zombie, with its origins in Afro-Caribbean voodoo mythology, find multiple transformations in global culture and continue to function as monstrous representatives of zeitgeist.

A publisher has expressed interest in a volume examining the phenomenon of vampires and zombies as transnational cultural icons. Contributors are invited to submit papers on aspects of zombies and vampires as they relate to texts and media across cultural boundaries. Approaches and topics that papers may address, but in no way are limited to:

• Readings of individual texts, authors, and media
• Histories and anthropologies of the zombie and the vampire
• Genre, gender and sexuality, class, and race/ethnic interpretations
• Comparative, transnational, and translingual analyses (traveling tropes, cultural diffusion, mapping translations)
• Globalizations and cultural contexts (economies of power, colonialism, post-colonialism)
• Terrorism, modern warfare
• Migrations, creolizations, hybridizations, the cyber-undead
• Xenophobia: the Other, the alien, the invader, the intruder
• Horror, fear, anxiety, paranoia
• Encounters with Thanatos
• Tainted blood, disease, pandemic, viruses and other biological agents of infection
• Formation of inhuman Communities
• The postmodern, the posthuman, apocalypse and post-apocalypse
• The pop culture industry and consumption (series and sequels, slapstick, satire, the “mockumentary”)
• Video gaming and clubbing
• Graphic novels and comic books
• Self-publishing technologies (digital books, print on demand), the Internet (YouTube, social networks, blogs, e-zines)
• Interviews with authors or filmmakers

Please submit a 500-word abstract and a CV, including contact information, to: (vampzomb at mesea.org)

Deadline: March 15, 2010.

To facilitate procedures, we request that in the Subject space of the email you write: Abstract-[contributor’s name].

The editors will select from among the submitted abstracts according to suitability for the project and contact submitters by April 1. Successful abstract submitters will be requested to submit a full paper (approx. 7,000 words) by August 1.

via: infocult

Bruce Sterling on Atemporality

Another great discussion regarding Atemporality and Network Culture. Strangely absent from the visual art discourse.

If progress is to go beyond the banal indulgences that give rise to a never-ending array of car shell designs then we need to analyse our present time with regard to its aesthetics and its media.

Watch Bruce Sterling's keynote on Atemporality at Berlin's Transmediale.

via: Core 77

Defending the Enlightenment

A good discussion via Eurozine between AC Grayling and Tzvetan Todorov.

How to defend the Enlightenment

"To say that reason is only desiccating and too dry is a dangerous caricature. No less dangerous is to eliminate the place for arts, for myth, which is a different kind of knowledge of the world. We have to be cautious about both dangers, both reductions." On the publication of his new book In Defence of the Enlightenment, Tzvetan Todorov tells British philosopher AC Grayling why the Enlightenment must be separated from scientism and cultural chauvinism.

image: Nicholas Hughes

the past decade as Horror

Weeks into 2010, the final year of our first decade into the new century, and I’m just now getting around to assimilating all the year-end lists of 2009 and for that matter decade-end appraisals of the "aughts" floating about. There has been much to gleen, but a few commentaries have really stood out as being quite prescient for the strange time we now live. I assume that these lists are basically an attempt to model our contemporary world . For the most part we're handed consumer lists or within the arts another incrongruous helping of post-modernism for our reflection. So consider this post as the first of a series of attempts at highlighting some places that perhaps speak newly about our contemporary condition.

Our horribly distorted world...

Infocult, which at the close of 2009 pointed out the persistence of gothic rhetoric in current American culture. I knew the obsession with vampires had substance behind it! They’ve done a wonderful job of rounding up examples of commentators referencing horror for their political-historical meditations.

via Infocult:

The world in 2010 is a Gothic world, says Bruce Sterling. Monsters roam the scene:

People have stymied sense of denial about the situation. It's very neurotic, anxious, and repressed. It's feeding into a strongly Gothic political temperament where popular culture is haunted by vampires and zombies. The population *identifies* with vampires and zombies, wants to marry them, settle down with them.

There's an autumnal hush over the cultural landscape. People really hope they won't be hit between the eyes with the two-by-four again, but they also know that they are helpless to defend themselves against the sources of the blows.

RJ Eskow adds some horror movie tropes:

It's that final plot twist, the last horrifying revelation that wrings a final scream out of the exhausted audience. You've seen it a hundred times: The ambulance driver taking the battered victims to the hospital grins ... and he has fangs. A close-up shows that the shambling, good-natured GI taking the townsfolk to safety has the marks of alien spores on his neck...

all is not well in Happy Ending Land. The invaders of our civil liberties are being protected. A pointless war drags on. Health reform is being co-opted by cynical politicians and special interests. What else can it be but a Horror-Twist ending to a Horror-Movie Decade?

Jules Crittendon: "God Damn the Naughts,".

He starts off by describing Christmas in Armageddon - the town, that is. And has fun with strangers: “Look, it’s the Angel of Death,” I said. “Let’s go get him.”

image: Carl Dreyer's Vampyr

Meet the Wittgensteins

This is a fascinating read at the New Yorker. Cross posting from Phronesisaical:

In the New Yorker, a review of Alexander Waugh's new book on the Wittgenstein family. More Wittgenstein biography here.

[Karl Wittgenstein's] youngest child, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, once asked a pupil if he had ever had any tragedies in his life. The pupil, evidently well trained, inquired what he meant by “tragedy.” “I mean suicides, madness, or quarrels,” replied Ludwig, three of whose four brothers committed suicide, two of them (Rudi and Hans) in their early twenties, and the third (Kurt) at the age of forty. Ludwig often thought of doing so, as did his surviving brother, Paul. A budding concert pianist when he lost his right arm to a Russian bullet, in 1914, Paul was imprisoned for a time in the infamous Siberian fortress where Dostoyevsky had set his novel “The House of the Dead.” Ludwig later claimed to have first entertained thoughts of suicide at around the age of ten, before any of his brothers had died. There were three sisters: Gretl, Helene, and Hermine. Hermine, the eldest child (she was born in 1874; Ludwig, the youngest, arrived fifteen years later), and the guardian of her father’s flame, never married. Helene was highly neurotic, and had a husband who suffered from dementia. Gretl was regarded as irritating by most people, including her unpleasant husband, who committed suicide, as did his father and one of his aunts. Bad temper and extreme nervous tension were endemic in the family. One day, when Paul was practicing at one of the seven grand pianos in their winter home, the Palais Wittgenstein, he leaped up and shouted at his brother Ludwig in the room next door, “I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!”...

In the Wittgenstein family, it was not the philosopher who was the unworldly one. Ever since childhood, the last-born Ludwig had had a passion and a facility for mechanical things. At the age of ten, he constructed a working model of a sewing machine out of bits of wood and wire; while serving in the Austrian Army, he demonstrated a more dangerous practicality by improvising his own mortar in the field. After leaving school, Ludwig studied engineering in Berlin, specializing in hot-air balloons, and then moved to Manchester to work on aeronautical engines; in 1910, he patented an improvement in propeller technology. It was then that he heard of Bertrand Russell’s work on logic and decided to study with him in Cambridge.

Russell found him to be a tormented soul, unsure of his own abilities and unsure whether to be an engineer or a philosopher. Russell soon decided that Ludwig was the most perfect example of genius he had ever known, and persuaded him not to continue with engineering. “We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother,” Russell told Hermine. But he feared that his new pupil was on the brink of suicide, as he explained in a letter to his mistress, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Ottoline wrote back that hot chocolate would calm Ludwig’s nerves, and enclosed a packet of cocoa tablets for Russell to give him....

Alain Badiou - tonight LES

Miguel Abreu Gallery presents:

ALAIN BADIOU
Is the word 'Communism' forever doomed?
Thursday, NOV.6 7PM
HENRY STREET SETTLEMENT
Harry de Jur Playhouse
466 Grand St.

For the launch of Lacanian Ink #32

Seating is first come, first served basis

idealogues and the philosophical pragmatist

We're heading into the final hours of this historic campaign and it seems as good a time as any to look at the nature of Obama the candidate. This entry over at Phronesisaical truly renders why there should be excitement and interest in Obama the President. It also reminds me what is sadly missing from not only the GOP but our national punditry at large. I highly recommend you spend the time to read the full post.

Here are some of the juicier bits from Helmut:

To put it simply, Obama seems to me an experimentalist problem-solver of a pragmatic stripe.

A pragmatist thinks in terms of problems and tools and experiments for solving them. A problem arises, which is such precisely because we don't have the conceptual or normative tools at hand to solve it. The pragmatist looks around for explanations, interpretations, analyses, arguments, and new understandings to try help us resolve the problem. If it's political, or a matter of policy, or a matter of ethics or legal interpretation, the pragmatist understands that we start from an irreducible pluralism of values that are crucial to even understanding the problem, let alone resolving it. In a pluralistic country such as the US, policy and political disputes are often disputes involving complex, competing values and ideas. They are problems of intelligent cooperation.

Ideological commitment of the sort that drives the US political system is problematic here - it may provide us with some useful interpretive tools, but it more than likely frames and constricts our understanding of the nature of the problem and the range of possible solutions a priori, prior to investigating the problem. This suggests that the truth of the matter comes prior to testing ideas and policies. The ideologist ends up, by default, resolving problems from a partial and usually self-interested perspective. Pragmatists think this has it all backwards.

continues-

The pragmatist seeks to suspend prior ideological commitments and focus rather on generating ongoing dialogue, attempting to build a community of public discussion, in order to gain the fullest possible view of the problem as well as in order to eventually engage the most democratic means for resolving it.

What does this mean for Obama the president? I'd like to hope that the office doesn't convert Obama into yet another pragmatist of the crass, non-philosophical version I mentioned above. I'm not worried about him being an ideologue. Despite the right's best efforts to paint him as such, there's little evidence that he's that sort of person. He's going to make a lot of people unhappy on both the left and the right when he doesn't follow the rules of prior ideological commitments. That unhappiness will unwittingly reflect something profoundly wrong with the older and hopefully dying form of polarized ideological politics in the US. But, unlike how many pundits put it, the problem is less "polarization" than it is the epistemological backwardness of ideology-driven politics.

But can Obama function as a genuine philosophical pragmatist? I think so. Given the serious nature of the problems he'll be dealing with as president - from the wars to climate change to poverty and economic collapse to education and healthcare - we really do need someone who's not blinkered by prior ideological commitments and hackneyed policy ideas and tools. We need a philosophical pragmatist with a rich understanding of the complex diversity of the US and the world, a morally reflective person who's willing to listen, to experiment, to involve and engage, and to lead when it is time to lead. Everything in his background says this is precisely who Obama is.

Now vote Obama!


Via: Phronesisaical

sports as the model world

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk comments on the Tour de France in an interview with Spiegel.

SPIEGEL: The best-looking breasts, in general, are artificial. The strongest sexual performance is fueled by Viagra. Why are we getting so worked up about athletes doing the same thing?

Sloterdijk: There is an obvious reason: The relationship between sports and everyday life is like that between the holy and the mundane. It forms a model world, in which everything we know from the average world is intensified. The same values apply there as anywhere else, but in a more concentrated form. This is why the idea of pure performance is more important there than anywhere else. Fraud is normal in the gray zone of the normal, but in the model world it must be proscribed. This special world, framed by clear rules, is inherently designed as an artificial sphere of pure performance, which gives it a special mission. Our meritocratic society celebrates its contradictions within sports. For this reason it is, if you will, an innately transient zone. Athletes cannot be saints or priest, but they must at least live up to their reputation as heroes, and when they no longer can or want to, they become like everyone else -- and we can put them on welfare.

via Phronesisaical

the love/hate of French theory

This book was pointed out at Larval Subjects. I'm not certain many camps within the art world care anymore (for some reason) but this could be a useful read for many laboring in the trenches of continental thought.

The must-read exposé of America’s love/hate affair with French theory.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock ‘n’ roll invasion, the arrival of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation.

Outside the academy, “French theory” had a profound impact on the era’s emerging identity politics while also becoming, in the 1980s, the target of right-wing propagandists. At the same time in academic departments across the country, their post-structuralist form of radical suspicion transformed disciplines from literature to anthropology to architecture. By the 1990s, French theory was woven deeply into America’s cultural and intellectual fabric.

French Theory is the first comprehensive account of the American fortunes of these unlikely philosophical celebrities. François Cusset looks at why America proved to be such fertile ground for French theory, how such demanding writings could become so widely influential, and the peculiarly American readings of these works. Reveling in the gossipy history, Cusset also provides a lively exploration of the many provocative critical practices inspired by French theory. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today—showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life.

moving round

we used to ask what might become after the orgy - mourning or melancholia? Doubtless neither, but an interminable clean-up of all the vicissitudes of modern history and its process of liberation (of peoples, sex, dreams, art and the unconscious - in short, of all that makes up the orgy of our times), in an atmosphere dominated by the apocalyptic presentiment that all this is coming to an end. - Baudrillard

image whiting tennis

Rorty

The other thing I missed - Richard Rorty's passing last week. Another controversial iconoclast we've lost this year. From the NY Times:

His views were attacked by critics on the left and the right. The failure to recognize science’s particular powers to depict reality, Daniel Dennett wrote, shows “flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power.”

Simon Blackburn, a philosopher at Cambridge University, has written of Mr. Rorty’s “extraordinary gift for ducking and weaving and laying smoke.”

Mr. Rorty was engaged with and amused by his critics. In a 1992 autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” he wrote that he was considered to be one of the “smirking intellectuals whose writings are weakening the moral fiber of the young”; “cynical and nihilistic”; “complacent”; and “irresponsible.”

Yet he confounded critics as well, by speaking up for patriotism, an academic canon and the idea that one can make meaningful moral judgments.

Nietzche Family Circus

He who lives as children live -- who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance -- remains childlike.

Not sure how many of us remember "Family Circus" but I'm pretty inspired by the randomized pairing of the carton with randomized quotes by Nietzche. Really fun to read through these - check out The Nietzche Family Circus.


Great tip from Steven LaRose and Jacques de Beaufort

...more Baudrillard

It's been a hectic week and I'm exhausted by it or perhaps I'm feeling sentimental (at Baudrillard's death - if that has any logic). Here's a couple good discussions on the late philosopher.

from Ghost in the Wire:

Baudrillard and Heidegger, 1

Baudrillard and Heidegger, 2



Long Sunday has a pdf of selected writings here.

Jean Baudrillard Dead at 77

Baudrillard has passed into the eternal simulacra. The last generation of influencial philosophy is shrinking in number.