My review of McKenzie Wark’s General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century is available at this link.
Category Archives: Critical Theory
on elephant skin: critical data studies and political economy
Something I wrote for Virginia Tech’s Institute for Policy and Governance. It’s about why a computational definition of “data” is necessary to understand the relationship between new media/digital technology and political economy — drawing mostly from Wendy Chun, but also McKenzie Wark, Joanna Zylinska and Sarah Kember. Link here.
new publication
“Ordinary Doses” at Real Life Mag https://reallifemag.com/ordinary-doses/
opaque, fragile and performative selfhoods
Recently I’ve discovered some overlaps between various works of contemporary psychedelic scholarship. Over the summer I started reading Nicolas Langlitz’s book Neuropsychedelia and came across the work of Chris Letheby not long after (when he himself reached out to me after an introduction I made on a grad student listserv… +1 for email networking).
Letheby co-authored a philosophical paper where he argues that selfhood is a fiction vis-à-vis the well-documented psychedelic phenomenon of ego dissolution:
As Metzinger points out, our ‘phenomenal avatar’ (conscious selfmodel)
is ‘transparent’: one does not feel like an avatar encoded in a ‘biological data format’, one feels like a unitary, persisting substance, or entity. The prevalence of this Cartesian intuition in philosophical discussions of selfhood supports this psychosemantic claim. Some may find this claim introspectively dubitable. But it is precisely the ubiquity of this sense of ‘I’ that makes it difficult to isolate phenomenologically—and this is the reason why phenomena
such as ego dissolution are theoretically valuable.
As Savage says in his discussion of LSD phenomenology, ‘By and large the individual is not aware of the ego boundaries of his mind and body and becomes aware of them only when a change has occurred in them’. Psychedelics, by deconstructing the avatar, render it opaque and acquaint subjects directly with its representational nature (cf. Letheby 2015, 2016). Alterations in feelings of ‘mineness’ or ownership, the sense of bodily boundaries, and so forth put pressure on the predictive hypothesis of a unitary entity underlying and persisting throughout experiences. The subsequent diminution in the sense of solid selfhood shows subjects that this sense is ultimately just one more conscious experience, rather than a transcendental precondition of all such experiences. The transformative existential shock which often attends this discovery testifies to the fact that a mere avatar is not what we, in the ordinary and sober course of things, deeply feel and take ourselves to be.
Chris Letheby and Philip Gerrans, “Self Unbound: Ego Dissolution In Psychedelic Experience.” (I removed some citations for readability; the paper is freely available online here: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/3/1/nix016/3916730/Self-unbound-ego-dissolution-in-psychedelic)
Meanwhile, in Neuropsychedelia — which is an ethnography of psychedelic research since the 1990’s — Langlitz recounts the story of a man who, having just undergone an experimental ketamine treatment, was spooked by the theatrical tone he detected in the voice of a clinician:
Samotar’s voice, he said, had reminded him of the way the East German playwright and stage director Heiner Müller used to read texts, especially his own or those of Bertolt Brecht. Later on, Wetzel [the trial subject] provided a more detailed explanation:
…”if you described a speech as performative in Austin’s sense, then it would be a speech emphasizing its textuality. With every word, even with every syllable, it stressed the elaborateness, the official character marking the sentences from the questionnaire. Far off from any spontaneous communication. A certain gesture of abstraction, a depersonalized speech, which you could often hear in Müller’s productions in direct continuation of Brecht’s aesthetics and theory of theater. There, the text was supposed to become audible as a completely independent parameter, cut off from techniques of empathy and the actor’s desire for identification. For this purpose, it had to be depsychologized, formalized, and spoken on the basis of a structure contrary to the psychological (bourgeois) semantics. In the experiment, the researcher sounded similar to that, making an exaggerated effort to provide expressions for my state of mind (‘I had a religious feeling’) far beyond any empathy.”
By looking at the performative dimension of the experiment, Wetzel read one of the leitmotifs of modernist art, the break with representation, into the scientific setting. It was one of Heiner Müller’s credos that on stage the text had to be worked with, not as a mere representation of reality, but as a reality of its own. Any understanding had to be preceded by a sensual perception of the text’s materiality. In the attempt to objectify his subjective experience with the help of an itemized self-rating scale, Wetzel found a distant echo of the Brechtian alienation effects in twentieth-century theater that prevented the audience from losing itself in the character created by the actor. By calling attention to the theatrical practice of representation, Brecht had wanted to break its illusionism.
Neuropsychedelia, pp. 136-137 (boldface added for emphasis)
These writings are both concerned with selfhood as a phenomenological entity with no intrinsic reality. That is to say, our feeling of being the same person over time is a lived momentary experience, without the dignity (the ontological authority) we give to the “real.” There is no metaphysics of selfhood, no God-given reality of individual existence. Letheby and Gerrans use their analyses to argue that selfhood is a fiction. Bertolt Brecht — and the person who takes psychedelic drugs — may be inclined to agree.
If selfhood is a fiction, certainly it’s a useful fiction, a state of “epistemic innocence” (to borrow a concept developed by philosopher Lisa Bortolotti, used by Letheby in another paper) that can lead to positive outcomes. We’re supposed to believe that we really do, in fact, exist. If you don’t, you’re either Buddhist or insane.
Bertolt Brecht wanted to route attention to the fiction of representation, to cut short the audience identification with theatrical pathos and narrative. Meanwhile a psychedelic experience can reveal the fictive quality of selfhood, illuminating the fact that our sense of being comes from a theater of consciousness: an unreal stage that facilitates play, imagination and creativity as part of the way we experience ourselves.
And, indeed, exploring psychedelics or one’s creativity via theater can help individuals surprise themselves with insight into their own imaginative depth — the possibility that the source of this imagination is something other than themselves (if the self is an illusion, see…). And it’s possible that social norms built on the supposedly real and fixed nature of the self rely on denying these Brechtian / psychedelic inuitions.
not digging political art
The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values. All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction”
after life
“The invention of the Morse alphabet in 1837 was promptly followed by the tapping specters of spiritistic seances sending their messages from the realm of the dead. Promptly as well, photographic plates-even and especially those taken with the camera shutter closed-furnished reproductions of ghosts or specters, whose black-and-white fuzziness only served to underscore the promise of resemblance. Finally, one of the ten applications Edison envisioned for his newly invented phonograph in the North American Review ( 1878) was to record “the last words of dying persons.”
It was only a small step from such a “family record, “with its special consideration of revenants, to fantasies that had telephone cables linking the living and the dead. What Leopold Bloom in Ulysses could only wish for in his Dublin graveyard meditations had already been turned into science fiction by Walter Rathenau, the AEG chairman of the board and futurist writer. In Rathenau’s story “Resurrection Co.,” the cemetery administration of Necropolis, Dacota/USA, following a series of scandalous premature burials in 1898, founds a daughter company entitled ‘Dacota and Central Resurrection Telephone Bell Co.’ with a capital stock of $750,000. Its sole purpose is to make certain that the inhabitants of graves, too, are connected to the public telephone network. Whereupon the dead avail themselves of the opportunity to prove, long before McLuhan, that the content of one medium is always another medium-in this concrete case, a deformation professionelle.
These days, paranormal voices on tape or radio, the likes of which have been spiritistically researched since 1959 and preserved in rock music since Laurie Anderson’s 1982 release Big Science, inform their researchers of their preferred radio wavelength. This already occurred in 1898, in the case of Senate President Schreber: when a paranormal, beautifully autonomous ‘base or nerve language’ revealed its code as well as its channels, message and channel became one. ‘You just have to Introduction 13 choose a middle-, short-, or long-wave talk-show station, or the ‘white noise’ between two stations, or the ‘Jurgenson wave,’ which, depending on where you are, is located around 1450 to 1600 kHz between Vienna and Moscow. ‘ If you replay a tape that has been recorded off the radio, you will hear all kinds of ghost voices that do not originate from any known radio station, but that, like all official newscasters, indulge in radio self-advertisement. Indeed, the location and existence of that ‘Jürgenson wave’ was pinpointed by none other than ‘Friedrich Jürgenson, the Nestor of vocal research.’
The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture. As Klaus Theweleit noted, media are always flight apparatuses into the great beyond. If gravestones stood as symbols at the beginning of culture itself, our media technology can retrieve all gods. The old written laments about ephemerality, which measured no more than distance between writing and sensuality, suddenly fall silent. In our mediascape, immortals have come to exist again.”
—Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
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“I’ve invented nothing; I’ve simply been the secretary of my sensations” — Emil Cioran
2017 ASPECT Conference Call for Papers
My doctoral program has released the call for papers for its annual conference — see below:
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Across disciplinary boundaries, the 2017 ASPECT graduate conference seeks to address articulations of aesthetics, politics, and ethics within contested temporalities. Graduate students of any level and irrespective of disciplinary affiliation are encouraged to submit abstracts of approximately 300 words based on papers that engage topics related to artistic, aesthetic, social, political, philosophical, cultural, theoretical, ethical, and critical concerns. Trajectories of inquiry may include theoretical, critical, empirical, policy-oriented, and performative explorations of the conference theme. Particularly, we invite papers that engage issues of interdisciplinarity.
Possible paper topics may include but are not limited to: the body and politics; critical approaches to technology and aesthetics; ecological and environmental issues; gender and sexuality; geopolitics and international relations; identity politics; time and the city; marginalized knowledges; moral and political philosophy; new materialities; writing and history; postcolonialism; post-Marxism and ideology; race; religion and secularity; critical security studies; and violence and representation.
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Confirmed Plenary Speaker:
Dr. Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Abstracts of 300 words are due by Friday, December 2, 2016. We are using the OCS system which will require you to create an account and upload your abstract to this website.
For more information, email aspect@vt.edu.