Nausea? What nausea?

In Levinas, Law, and Politics (2007) Marinos Diamantides describes a curious situation that almost seems like the normative condition of an 'idiot':

Speaking -- as if one had voice -- feels like ventriloquism. Can the sensibility of such nausea be transformed into enjoyment and play? In fact the post-modern subject still has pretensions of innocent playfulness -- it does 'spend time' playing those mindless computer games but, at the end of each satisfying game the 'player' is reduced to an extension of the game and the time of 'playing the game' is indistinguishable from the monotonous, synchronic, time of the inauthentic, pseudo-work of performing one's functions. Nausea returns. Caught between being a cyborg and the persistent feeling that one has to be a cyborg, the Beckettian post-modern being seems, therefore, neither individual nor (yet?) a fully desubjectified existence, but an existent who still suffers alone the nausea attached to having to perform its abstract functions within the impersonal processes of our technological universe.

The problem with theorising a situation like this is that it entails an ontology of the subject, a certain psychical disposition that allows the specific social link entailed to function within a symbolic economy of desires, meanings, etc. Clearly though, what Diamantides is elaborating here is not a social relation but a naïvely mystical experience, searching for some Good at one remove which structurally entails the running together of 'meaning' and 'nonsense' such that nonsense itself becomes meaningful. The problem with evoking Beckett is that you are always going to be between mysticism and psychoses when you present a human subject. And this is a lesson that commits a delicate, but nonetheless important, revision of Diamantides' position: the exteriorisation of my 'inner states' (subjectivity) so that the discourse of technology can articulate my 'self' for all to see is my subjectivisation -- the subjectification of a subject relies on this subjectivisation to first 'dot the I' of the subject, but because this introduces a minimum of symbolic content the disintegration of discursive relations (the conflation of in/authentic time) necessarily entails a mystical experience. Were there no symbolic content, then the 'subject' would not exist (by the rules of the discourse) and technically stands outside being. When one has a claim to some minimum of symbolic structure that defines them, e.g. identification, then the abstraction of 'technology' rely just seems like an inability to cope with being actively engaged with oneself.

Streetwise

This Google Street View thingy is getting more and more Gibsonian by the minute. And by 'Gibsonian' I don't mean that protean novel Neuromancer either. It's much more of an Idoru, Pattern Recognition, and Spook Country sort of an affair; an unseemly artificiality that seems like a natural technological innovation. But what are we seeing on 'street view' exactly? I'm not sure. It makes me think of the way the top-down satellite imagery is always out of sync with the present in which you view it. This means, for example, that the dead can walk again!

What I find curious about this are the parallel events, like the guy who got arrested for using a free wi-fi network because a self-absorbed hairdresser suspected him of stalking her when he parked outside the café across the street offering free wi-fi and pulled out his laptop. So on the one hand we have a weird nexus of surveillance culture 'innocently' parading under Google's banners where at the same time we have people becoming suspicious of those who are not equally nervous of surveillance.

Obviously we are simply not alienated enough from each other... Bring back that polite edifice of congenial civility!

Empires in World History

CPCI Public Lecture on EMPIRES IN WORLD HISTORY
Queensland College of Art
Griffith Graduate Centre Lecture Theatre (S07 Bldg, Room 1.23)
South Bank Campus
Tuesday 5 June
5.00 Drinks for 5.30 - 7.00 pm Lecture
RSVP: By 29 May to j.jones@griffith.edu.au or (07) 373 57338


Frederick Cooper, Professor of History, and
Jane Burbank, Professor of History and Russian and Slavic Studies,
New York University


EMPIRE, RIGHTS, and CITIZENSHIP


Abstract

This paper explores the idea of citizenship and rights in empires, looking beyond the conventional linkage of citizenship to the nation-state and of rights to popular sovereignty. We look at two different kinds of imperial regimes – the Russian and the French. Russian rulers explicitly recognized that the polity consisted of different people who would be governed differently, while in "Greater France," especially under the republics, the supposedly republican idea of a unitary state with a single, homogeneous, national citizenship was in fact unstable and contested. The notion of "imperial citizenship" surfaced repeatedly, notably during the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 and again after World War II, when leaders from African colonies as well as European France debated ways of conjugating difference and equality. Reading across these two histories, we investigate both the possibilities and the limits of ways in which citizenship and rights could be conceptualized within the context of empire.

Speakers

Frederick Cooper’s research and writing focuses on 20th-century African history, empires in world history, and colonization and decolonization. His books include Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (1996), Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (2002), and Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005). He is also co-author of Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation Societies (2000), and co-editor of Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997), of International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge (1997), and of Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (2006).

Jane Burbank is the author of Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922 and Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917, and co-editor of Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, and Russian Empire: Space, People, Power 1700-1930, to be published in 2007. At present she is writing, with Frederick Cooper, a study of empires in world history. Her current research addresses the intersections of empire, law and political practices in Eurasia.

They landed, and the next generation looked very similar to the last one...

I have had a few occasions to play with the new console systems from Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. At the outset I was excited. There seemed to be some promise of improvement here. But what was it exciting me exactly? It was not the material conditions, technology is technology does. In an age of convergence being moved by the integration of technology is down right silly, you just end up getting anxious when something isn't connected. On the other hand, was it really as simple as my own expectations? The promises being made around the next-gen systems seemed to suggest a consistent improvement. The Wii innovated control design, the XBox 360 improved its various markets and online interaction, and the PS3 seemed to offer itself as a very powerful media center. Yet for all these promises, only the Wii still interests me. Why? Because when you look at the graphics on the PS3 and the 360 you are still getting jagged digital rendering. In the case of the PS3 this is generated by you actually taking advantage of its HDMI capability. In the case of the 360 this is caused by your inability to use HDMI but wish to push things further on flat panel screens. The Wii works for me, because you did not have to expect excessive leaps forward in the presentation. The PS3 and the 360 promised greater appearances, but to my eye they have failed.

A few reasons might be supposed for this. Perhaps developers have not had time to come to grips with the hardware. Maybe the timing of release should have been delayed. But in the end, all these next-gen systems seem to do is make their smaller cousins more attractive: the Playstation Portable, the Nintendo DS, and even the runt of the next-generation, the Wii.

Having a lot of promise does not give us the material satisfaction. Schopenhauer identifies this quite neatly in his critique of Kant's idealism, "Sex knows how to slip its love notes into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts." (from On The Basis of Morality) Perhaps then we need to return to the perplexing state that we are at once objectivised beings, human beings, and at the same moment SUBJECTS. How strange it is to be a subject in a world full of objects. When a promise is made it relies on there being some commensurability of subjectivity and objectivity. Alas, we will always be disappointed by this. In abstraction, even if one engages in a promised objective act subjective countenance need not be realised until we subjectivise the objective act, transform its objective status into a meaning.

iTALK or, more precisely, I commune

This video is from filmmaker Christopher DeSantis and profiles the new Apple iTalk. If you watch the video through you will see the point of convergence. The curious way converging multiple media formats has meant the loss of touch. With the loss of touch, we are again at the specular, the ocular, the eye. iTalk with my eyes. In Lacanian Ink 23, Gérard Wajcman theorises the emergence of modern subjectivity as that particular moment where the subject places their gaze outside themselves, in the field of the Other, to see themselves seeing. To take a page from Durkheim, the story of Santa Clause persists because it fulfills the function of recognising our vital illusion: "What is elided in the visible, outside of the gaze and with the gaze, is that nothing in truth looks at the spectator, except himself, his own gaze in the field of the Other. His own gaze ex qua, placed outside. But it seems to me that this should be added: that one can do nothing with such a truth except to know it. It would be better for the health of a subject if he had nothing to do with this truth in the real, if he never encountered it, if he never came up against the unveiling of the gaze which would that be that of his phantasm." (64) What Wajcman hints at here is the very danger of the iTALK. The more a technology comes to rely on the gaze for its operation, the more it resembles Epicurius' maxim "You want to live happily? Live hidden." But within the preconditions set by our late capitalist epoch of reflexive consumption this maxim goes awry. The hidden position of modern subjectivity is self-consciousness. Thus the danger of the iTALK is where it might offer communication and commune with products of culture it also threatens to further obscure the seat of subjectivity in modernity. So let us tarry with this danger, because the vital illusion the iTALK embodies is not what deprives the subject of selfhood. It is rather that in the absence of the vital illusion (seeing oneself seeing, in the field of the Other) the subject is helpless to stem the tide of alienation. We need this. We are human, all too human, and we need this.

Tech's Booty Call

When does technology stop being technology? Why, through an aesthetic procedure of course! Art!

When you get burnt by the sun coming out of the cave you've been in for your whole life and enjoy the burning sensation you are thoroughly Modern. Modern art hurts. It hurts like nothing else. It hurts like pleasure in pain. It hurts way out, beyond the pleasure principle.

But what of those periods when art doesn't hurt? When technology is understood as technical it is because it does something external to the activity of the human subject. It retains something of itself. But when we recognise technology within the field of human activities a misrecognition occurs. Objects independent of our intentions are misidentified as consitutents of human activities. To draw a particularly quotidian example, a telephone becomes a conversation.

And what then of all the discarded objects? The technology that loses its use-value withdraws from view. It doesn't call. It fails to notice you, and you ignore it. But all the while there is a certain unease about the whole situation. Like something that has been discarded gave something to human activity which we have forgotten.

Metronome: the metrognomes

Metronome is a promising title in development for the Playstation 3. The game is said to rely on sounds, combinations of which help you progress through the world of Metronome and defeat various enemies. What really sparks my interest in this is the 'micro-scoring' that might be involved, a la Troels Folmann's efforts in Tomb Raider: Legend. I got in touch with Troels to ask about his connection with the Metronome project. Posting the entire email correspondence seems more like an invasion of privacy than anything else, so I'll keep things to a few brief lines -- that way things will stay consistent with my usual motto of conversation, "Anything we discuss is strictly between you, me, and anyone else I tell."

Micro-scoring is something I invented for Tomb Raider and some of our next-games. It is essentially about breaking a musical score into tiny components, which is a delicate and time consuming effort. The end-result is similar to the experience you have in a motion picture, where the score compliments action and/or interaction.

I recall the quip about mixtapes back in the heyday of the walkman, "People are creating soundtracks for their lives," and micro-scoring doesn't seem that great a departure from this. That said, it is a delightful innovation for digital entertainment because it means the sound can be integrated into the very digital 'bits' of the media. Presenting sound effects and music in this way makes the soundtrack more haunting. Given that the sound of wind blowing leaves from a tree doesn't materialise in quite the same way as the visage of leaves falling from a tree, it seems reasonable to suppose that the integration of sound into the minutiae of digital media reduces the distance between the activity of consumption (ie playing the game) and the appearance the media. Rather than the mise-en-scene having an atmosphere, micro-scoring seems to deliver a cinématique to the mise-en-scene by drawing a tight association between place, movement, and purpose (ie where in the level you have progressed to, what you are having your ingame persona do, and why you are doing anything at all with the ingame persona).

Unfortunately the project is stil in a somehow frozen condition

It would be a pity if Metronome didn't appear on the PS3 or another next-gen system because the idea of playing through sound and sonority promises a future development in the structure of interactive narrative design: the formula for a 3rd-person rpg based on sense data that moves away from the optical bias common to almost all videogames. I remember the most terrifying moment I experienced when I started playing games on my home PC was when I finished Doom. Suddenly I was stuck in a pitch black room suffering damage and unable to escape. Even when you used some invincibility code and managed to slaughter your attackers, there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. In short, Doom revealed its ceiling to me and the only thing I could understand as signifying movement was sound. Sound presented me with the nightmarish situation.

I think Schopenhauer would have liked this integration of soundtrack and media. Especially because in his theory of art, it is music that has the most direct access to the will (of man) because it is an objectification of the Will (of existence) through the meager perceptions of humankind.