Slavoj Zizek - 'Schelling-in-itself: The Orgasm of Forces'
The reading ‘Schelling-in-itself: The Orgasm of Forces’ written by critical theorist Slavoj Zizek is from a book titled ‘The Invisible Remainder, An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters’. The essay addresses the idea of freedom, based upon German Idealism and looking more specifically at the philosophical contributions from Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling.
The material of the essay is dense however presents a logical sequence in the development of concepts of freedom. I have on a few of the key concepts helpful in relation to thinking about studio practice.
He discusses Schelling’s supposition that mans act of decision is not mans himself, but is actually a repetition of God’s act, of god willing, choosing himself. Zizek goes on to describe the primordial contraction by means of which God acquires being. ‘This contraction of/into being is necessarily followed by a counter stroke of expansion’ that is a tension between the will that wants something and the will that wants nothing. Zizek outlines here Schelling's definition of anxiety: to Schelling anxiety is caused by the simultaneous lack of the possibility to close, and the lack of the ability to open up, that he describes as a ‘vicious cycle of pulsation’. What is the significance of this cycle? Zizek emphasises Schelling's belief that this cycle underlies reality. Reality, he suggests, is ‘inherently fragile’ and is a result of a temporal occupation of the space between contraction and expansion which could, at any time, ‘run amok and explode into one of the extremes’.
How does one respond to this situation of anxiety? Zizek talks about the relief that arrives in the form of a preconceived conceptual schema, whereby if the rules of a given game are already defined, then one can devote creative or intellectual energy to the game itself. The relief is being freed from the burden of continuous decision and choice; the individual only needs to act. Zizek states ‘our intellectual creativity can be set free only within the confines of some imposed notional framework in which, precisely, we are able to ‘move freely’’.
Local art critic Jon Bywater suggests it is possible to locate an opening, a freedom, and individual agency by way of an investment in existing structures. The structures that he refers to are those of both artistic traditions and of capitalist economics. In the article ‘Work-Life Balance: Recent Exhibitions by Dan Arps’ Bywater draws parallels between modernist avant garde practise and capital market demand. Referencing theorists Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, Bywater raises the issue of why ‘newness’ is valued in both consumer capitalism and artistic modernism, and he considers Arps’ practise in relation to this question. He develops the idea that new developments in art garner an aesthetic effectiveness that is somehow bound to newness, and this coinciding with the consumer demand for novelty, begs the question as to whether ‘artistic invention is merely another symptom of a hegemonic capitalist mode of production’. This is no new news, as Bywater observes, the collective concern for ‘making it new’ has been noted by more than a few.
Bywater talks of how Arps, by engaging in these ‘cultural sets of conventions’ activates a set of rules, that in playing out, reveal themselves in both ‘their conventionality and their groundlessness’. What is the groundlessness that Bywater refers to? Bywater refers to Paolo Virno and his interest in cynicism as a redemptive tool. Virno discusses how rules will ultimately reveal themselves as naked and artificial and therefore one cannot participate in a predetermined game with true allegiance, but more a momentary alliegence for a specified purpose.
So what is the relationship between Zizek's ‘freedom’ and Bywater's ‘new’? I’m interested in this idea that newness, initially presenting itself as a type of freedom actually pertains to a distinct system of order –a kind of grinding new as driven by both market and modernist mechanisms - but that this is an order that can be redressed and politicized.
Bywater locates the new in the newness – suggesting that a practise can make newness something ‘relative to its own open-ended terms’ and can go beyond a mere reduction to a product, thereby creating some resistance to market assertion over art discourse. That it is possible to regain individual agency in the new in a way that bypasses the drive of the market, and whims of fashion. Bywater sees in Arps' work a rejection of capitalist pressures of production - through his barely handled but significantly repositioned readymades of consumer culture - generating a kind of disruption of our experience of a part of our culture that is usually sanitized, ordered and organized. This is done through a direct engagement and reconstitution of corporate order as opposed to a rejection of it.
Initially my sense was that Bywater and Zizek were talking about the same issue, that is, about ways to engage freedom from within systems of order. In the process of writing I wonder if there is more of a distinction in the areas they address. Is Zizek's freedom about how as an individual to conduct oneself, and Bywater's new more about the way to address the system that one conducts oneself within as an individual?
There seems to be a sense of unconscious engagement in Zizek's idea of habit and routine, whereas Bywater's research suggests that a conscious engagement (an agitated engagement that often generates cynicism) could awaken the real new within the destitute and systematized new. Zizek's freedom is hopeful and yet may propose a danger in it’s lack of critique of the system operated within. Bywater's new holds hope and possibility with a more tentative grip, but with potentially more political and social agency than Zizek's freedom allows for.
REFERENCES
Zizek, Slavoj, ‘Schelling-in-itself: The Orgasm of Forces’ The Indivisible Remainder An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters, Verso, 1996.
Bywater, Jon, ‘Work-Life Balance: Recent Exhibitions by Dan Arps’ ....
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
BLOG 2
DR E M R Critchley 'Synaesthesia'
Sensory experience and the occurrence of inter-sensory crossovers are examined by DR E M R Critchley in the Chapter ‘Synaesthesia’ from ‘Hallucinations and their Impact on Art’. He discusses the varying notions of synaesthesia as ranging from its consideration as a special talent, to looking at it as a physiological mechanism, and further to a psychological occurance.
Critchley describes synaesthesia as being the ability to receive one sensory impression and ‘translate it into another sensory percept within the same sensory modality’ and in the process of extracting sensation from it invoking ‘other sensory percepts’ that draw upon apparently unrelated ‘modalities of sensation’. The most common example, he suggests, would be the instance of colour-hearing.
Critchely covers different perceptions from several authors about the origin and function of synaesthesia. The five key examples include; base cognitive mechanism, a facility for linking the different realms of sensation only present in some adults. A second theory is that it could be considered a mental disease, the overshadowing of one sensation upon another resulting from childhood experiences and repressed associations. Another proposition is synaesthesia as a confusion of sensations at a conceptual level – that the experience or perception of intersensory distinctions are learned, but some encounters may contradict usual patterns as conceptually understood. In the fourth example Critchely presents the theory of looking at synaesthesia as creative cultural metaphors, As evident in the aims of the blue rider(check) painters who sought to evoke the sensation of sound through use of colour. And lastly is the idea that some individuals develop schematised patterns, and generate sensory associations (often visual associations) to assist in ordering abstract concepts, particularly into sequences.
I was interested to read about Fredric Jameson’s perceptual experience of treatments of architectural space at the Bonaventura hotel in ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. Jameson here presents a description of a destabilising inter-sensory experience that seems to be tie closely to Critchley’s explanation of conceptual synesthesia – that is, an encounter that confounds prior conceptual understanding of sensorial data.
As opposed to a modernist insertion of utopian structure disconnected from its context, (in the style of who) Jameson describes how the Bonaventura engages a post modern eclecticism by assimilating the language of its surrounding city and the existing structural signifiers belonging to it. An example Jameson uses is the mirror exterior shell of the building which functions to reflect the shape of the surrounding landscape rather than the shape of the building itself. The most interesting description in relation to the perceptual experience of the space itself would be Jameson’s account of the lobby of the building whereby a central column surrounded by a miniature lake is situated between four residential towers each with exterior elevators and rising balconies, topped with a greenhouse roof - a complex interrelation of forms further suffused by hanging streamers. Jameson describes how ‘emptiness here is absolutely packed, …. it is an element within which you yourself are immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume.’ Jameson goes on to note how the spectator is in a hyperspace that extends right up to the body and eyes. The layered and discontinuous space generates a suppression of depth. Textural saturation produces what Jameson terms as a ‘bewildering immersion’, a sensorial experience that confounds cognition.
So what kind of perceptual experience is this? Jamesons description links with what phenomenologist Maurice Merleau Ponty in ‘Eye and Mind’ has similarly described in the body’s attempt to absorb the ‘voluminosity’ of the world through vision. Merleau Ponty states how
‘This voracious vision, reaching beyond the visual givens opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house’ pg 166.
There seems to be in this statement a view of sensations that are parts of a larger experiential whole, and a condensing of the physical world as it is experienced and the visual world as it is seen. How do you separate one from the other? For Merleau Ponty this is not possible. The physical world being ‘out there’ and the visual world being ‘in here’ become the singular, they become an integrated encounter of the body.
From this I would say that what we normally experience as a stable and continuous relationship between sight and physicality, in Jameson’s account however becomes unhinged by a confusion not only of the physical space but of the representational space. The eye cannot sort, based on prior conceptual knowledge, the perceptual experience of space as it presents itself in the Bonaventura hotel. My suggestion is that Jameson’s encounter is an example of the conceptual synesthesia that Critchley touches upon. To return to the lobby once more, Jameson recounts the sensation experienced in the dramatic descent in one of the glass elevators, where one is ‘plummeting back down through the roof to splash down in the lake’. Up-down, inside-outside, wet-dry. A dizzying mish-mash of structures, signifiers and sensations indeed.
REFERENCES TO COME
Sensory experience and the occurrence of inter-sensory crossovers are examined by DR E M R Critchley in the Chapter ‘Synaesthesia’ from ‘Hallucinations and their Impact on Art’. He discusses the varying notions of synaesthesia as ranging from its consideration as a special talent, to looking at it as a physiological mechanism, and further to a psychological occurance.
Critchley describes synaesthesia as being the ability to receive one sensory impression and ‘translate it into another sensory percept within the same sensory modality’ and in the process of extracting sensation from it invoking ‘other sensory percepts’ that draw upon apparently unrelated ‘modalities of sensation’. The most common example, he suggests, would be the instance of colour-hearing.
Critchely covers different perceptions from several authors about the origin and function of synaesthesia. The five key examples include; base cognitive mechanism, a facility for linking the different realms of sensation only present in some adults. A second theory is that it could be considered a mental disease, the overshadowing of one sensation upon another resulting from childhood experiences and repressed associations. Another proposition is synaesthesia as a confusion of sensations at a conceptual level – that the experience or perception of intersensory distinctions are learned, but some encounters may contradict usual patterns as conceptually understood. In the fourth example Critchely presents the theory of looking at synaesthesia as creative cultural metaphors, As evident in the aims of the blue rider(check) painters who sought to evoke the sensation of sound through use of colour. And lastly is the idea that some individuals develop schematised patterns, and generate sensory associations (often visual associations) to assist in ordering abstract concepts, particularly into sequences.
I was interested to read about Fredric Jameson’s perceptual experience of treatments of architectural space at the Bonaventura hotel in ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. Jameson here presents a description of a destabilising inter-sensory experience that seems to be tie closely to Critchley’s explanation of conceptual synesthesia – that is, an encounter that confounds prior conceptual understanding of sensorial data.
As opposed to a modernist insertion of utopian structure disconnected from its context, (in the style of who) Jameson describes how the Bonaventura engages a post modern eclecticism by assimilating the language of its surrounding city and the existing structural signifiers belonging to it. An example Jameson uses is the mirror exterior shell of the building which functions to reflect the shape of the surrounding landscape rather than the shape of the building itself. The most interesting description in relation to the perceptual experience of the space itself would be Jameson’s account of the lobby of the building whereby a central column surrounded by a miniature lake is situated between four residential towers each with exterior elevators and rising balconies, topped with a greenhouse roof - a complex interrelation of forms further suffused by hanging streamers. Jameson describes how ‘emptiness here is absolutely packed, …. it is an element within which you yourself are immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume.’ Jameson goes on to note how the spectator is in a hyperspace that extends right up to the body and eyes. The layered and discontinuous space generates a suppression of depth. Textural saturation produces what Jameson terms as a ‘bewildering immersion’, a sensorial experience that confounds cognition.
So what kind of perceptual experience is this? Jamesons description links with what phenomenologist Maurice Merleau Ponty in ‘Eye and Mind’ has similarly described in the body’s attempt to absorb the ‘voluminosity’ of the world through vision. Merleau Ponty states how
‘This voracious vision, reaching beyond the visual givens opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house’ pg 166.
There seems to be in this statement a view of sensations that are parts of a larger experiential whole, and a condensing of the physical world as it is experienced and the visual world as it is seen. How do you separate one from the other? For Merleau Ponty this is not possible. The physical world being ‘out there’ and the visual world being ‘in here’ become the singular, they become an integrated encounter of the body.
From this I would say that what we normally experience as a stable and continuous relationship between sight and physicality, in Jameson’s account however becomes unhinged by a confusion not only of the physical space but of the representational space. The eye cannot sort, based on prior conceptual knowledge, the perceptual experience of space as it presents itself in the Bonaventura hotel. My suggestion is that Jameson’s encounter is an example of the conceptual synesthesia that Critchley touches upon. To return to the lobby once more, Jameson recounts the sensation experienced in the dramatic descent in one of the glass elevators, where one is ‘plummeting back down through the roof to splash down in the lake’. Up-down, inside-outside, wet-dry. A dizzying mish-mash of structures, signifiers and sensations indeed.
REFERENCES TO COME
Sunday, April 11, 2010
BLOG 1
The Shiny Illusionism of Krauss and Judd - David Raskin
The contested ‘content’ of Donalds Judd’s minimalists work as critiqued by Rosalind Krauss and subsequently refuted by Judd himself, is the subject of David Raskins 2006 Article ‘The Shiny Illusionism of Krauss and Judd’. He discusses both the fourteen occasions on which Krauss wrote on the operations of Judd’s work across a 38 year period, as well as Judd’s opposing view, which was never an outright but as Raskin suggests an indirect rejection of her readings based on his descriptions (or indeed, ‘clarifications’) of his practise at various points in his career.
There appear to be ten significant points of tension that Raskin raises as the opposing polemics of Judd and Krauss. I am interested however to look at the last argument that Raskin discusses and how this seems to encapsulate the key difference in their standpoints, under which the prior divergences appear to fall.
In the latter part of his article Raskin compares and contrasts the differing ontological and epistemic views of Judd and Krauss. Raskin proposes that Krauss holds a subjective view of ontological knowledge, and that Judd has an objective ontology. However on epistemic terms their positions are reversed. Krauss had an objective view of epistemology, whereas Judd perceived epistemological ground as subjective.
In these definitions he seeks to clarify the difference in opinion over the nature of knowledge. For Judd the object was factual but its meanings and our knowledge of it was contingent, never bracketed off from uncertainty or from our questions about the world. Whereas for Krauss there is no factual object, it was only known under subjective terms – in a sense the object was socially constructed- and that ‘things’ as they surfaced through the ‘self’ were always, unarguably, subject to external determination.
Where Raskin supposes there are different places where objective and subjective positions can be applied, Peter Galison analysis of scientific methods suggests that perhaps objectivity and subjectivity are less oppositional than intimately bound.
Scientist Peter Galison in an article titled ‘Objectivity is Romantic’ looks at the case study of scientific pictorial atlases for an example of epistemic knowledge as compiled in visual form. By analysing different methods of data recording, Galison examines how evolving taxonomic systems propose quite differing versions of what objective values could be considered to be in a scientific realm, illustrating just how subjective scientific objectivity can be. He examines three different models for structuring these pictorial atlases as objective documents, and in doing so unveils how in each of the three models ‘the epistemic, procedural and moral are inextricably linked’.
In the 1820’s ‘Genial Depiction’ was employed as a method to select samples as representational types, for example: human body, plants, cloud formations, etc. As a procedure, genial depiction required substantial intervention and interpretation. An idealized type was sought to represent a group as a whole. These were frequently hand drawn, requiring the selection and depiction of an archetype, and often carried the tones of authorship. The 1830’s saw a complete inversion of this method with the advent of ‘Mechanical Objectivity’ - where personal interpretation is rejected for instead an automated system beyond the influence of the artist’s hand. (categories will still need to be determined?) This was in turn surpassed around the 1920’s in favour of ‘Judgemental Objectivity’ when it was admitted that the trained eye was actually more effective and efficient in sorting phenomena for useful application.
Each pictorial regime relies on the specific relationship between a practical method of recording, an ontological question and viewpoint, as well as the role of an author. In terms of the ontological questions, the ‘ideal’ can be seen as a moving target in relation to given concerns of the time. Galison also describes the shifting status of the author as moving from genius (Genial Descriptions), to detached supervisor (Mechanical Objectivity), to trained consultant (Judgemental Objectivity).
Galison’s article presents this historical analysis without substantial philosophical positioning, although there is a subtle suggestion of a kind of false opposition between objectivity and subjectivity. The suggestion seems to be whether it is possible to view methods of subjective judgement and structural systems as irreducible from one another? This could manifest itself both in the role of the author who always has a role in shaping the data no matter how passive or active that role might be, or how the judgement is applied. As well as this are the cultural preconditions determining the selection procedures and nature of the ontological enquiry. Although he doesn’t go so far as proposing a middle ground – I think this could be possible – in relation to the discussion of Derrida’s procedure of deconstruction, and Galisons attempts to loosen oppositional dichotomies.
In Raskin’s article he utilizes the diachotomies of objectivity and subjectivity, and how in alternating spheres they are applied differently in the positions of Judd and Krauss, which is helpful to a certain point. It aids in understanding the core of their disagreement. And on which terms they held concrete views. However it does make finding a middle ground difficult. It only seems possible to view them in opposite corners of the ring, and as a reader having to pick a certain side. Raskin’s leaning leads us closer to Judd than to Krauss which puts his opening quote about the ‘two faces of a fact’ into doubt. I think considerations of objectivity and subjectivity are extended further in Galison’s analysis of scientific pictorialism, where ideas of subjectivity and objectivity are more integrated and move in and out of one another. What resonates for me with Galison’s analysis is how for him objectivity in science is not paramount with the truth, or with accuracy. More it is culturally conditioned, morally bound and –most importantly - subjectively applied.
REFERENCES TO COME.
The contested ‘content’ of Donalds Judd’s minimalists work as critiqued by Rosalind Krauss and subsequently refuted by Judd himself, is the subject of David Raskins 2006 Article ‘The Shiny Illusionism of Krauss and Judd’. He discusses both the fourteen occasions on which Krauss wrote on the operations of Judd’s work across a 38 year period, as well as Judd’s opposing view, which was never an outright but as Raskin suggests an indirect rejection of her readings based on his descriptions (or indeed, ‘clarifications’) of his practise at various points in his career.
There appear to be ten significant points of tension that Raskin raises as the opposing polemics of Judd and Krauss. I am interested however to look at the last argument that Raskin discusses and how this seems to encapsulate the key difference in their standpoints, under which the prior divergences appear to fall.
In the latter part of his article Raskin compares and contrasts the differing ontological and epistemic views of Judd and Krauss. Raskin proposes that Krauss holds a subjective view of ontological knowledge, and that Judd has an objective ontology. However on epistemic terms their positions are reversed. Krauss had an objective view of epistemology, whereas Judd perceived epistemological ground as subjective.
In these definitions he seeks to clarify the difference in opinion over the nature of knowledge. For Judd the object was factual but its meanings and our knowledge of it was contingent, never bracketed off from uncertainty or from our questions about the world. Whereas for Krauss there is no factual object, it was only known under subjective terms – in a sense the object was socially constructed- and that ‘things’ as they surfaced through the ‘self’ were always, unarguably, subject to external determination.
Where Raskin supposes there are different places where objective and subjective positions can be applied, Peter Galison analysis of scientific methods suggests that perhaps objectivity and subjectivity are less oppositional than intimately bound.
Scientist Peter Galison in an article titled ‘Objectivity is Romantic’ looks at the case study of scientific pictorial atlases for an example of epistemic knowledge as compiled in visual form. By analysing different methods of data recording, Galison examines how evolving taxonomic systems propose quite differing versions of what objective values could be considered to be in a scientific realm, illustrating just how subjective scientific objectivity can be. He examines three different models for structuring these pictorial atlases as objective documents, and in doing so unveils how in each of the three models ‘the epistemic, procedural and moral are inextricably linked’.
In the 1820’s ‘Genial Depiction’ was employed as a method to select samples as representational types, for example: human body, plants, cloud formations, etc. As a procedure, genial depiction required substantial intervention and interpretation. An idealized type was sought to represent a group as a whole. These were frequently hand drawn, requiring the selection and depiction of an archetype, and often carried the tones of authorship. The 1830’s saw a complete inversion of this method with the advent of ‘Mechanical Objectivity’ - where personal interpretation is rejected for instead an automated system beyond the influence of the artist’s hand. (categories will still need to be determined?) This was in turn surpassed around the 1920’s in favour of ‘Judgemental Objectivity’ when it was admitted that the trained eye was actually more effective and efficient in sorting phenomena for useful application.
Each pictorial regime relies on the specific relationship between a practical method of recording, an ontological question and viewpoint, as well as the role of an author. In terms of the ontological questions, the ‘ideal’ can be seen as a moving target in relation to given concerns of the time. Galison also describes the shifting status of the author as moving from genius (Genial Descriptions), to detached supervisor (Mechanical Objectivity), to trained consultant (Judgemental Objectivity).
Galison’s article presents this historical analysis without substantial philosophical positioning, although there is a subtle suggestion of a kind of false opposition between objectivity and subjectivity. The suggestion seems to be whether it is possible to view methods of subjective judgement and structural systems as irreducible from one another? This could manifest itself both in the role of the author who always has a role in shaping the data no matter how passive or active that role might be, or how the judgement is applied. As well as this are the cultural preconditions determining the selection procedures and nature of the ontological enquiry. Although he doesn’t go so far as proposing a middle ground – I think this could be possible – in relation to the discussion of Derrida’s procedure of deconstruction, and Galisons attempts to loosen oppositional dichotomies.
In Raskin’s article he utilizes the diachotomies of objectivity and subjectivity, and how in alternating spheres they are applied differently in the positions of Judd and Krauss, which is helpful to a certain point. It aids in understanding the core of their disagreement. And on which terms they held concrete views. However it does make finding a middle ground difficult. It only seems possible to view them in opposite corners of the ring, and as a reader having to pick a certain side. Raskin’s leaning leads us closer to Judd than to Krauss which puts his opening quote about the ‘two faces of a fact’ into doubt. I think considerations of objectivity and subjectivity are extended further in Galison’s analysis of scientific pictorialism, where ideas of subjectivity and objectivity are more integrated and move in and out of one another. What resonates for me with Galison’s analysis is how for him objectivity in science is not paramount with the truth, or with accuracy. More it is culturally conditioned, morally bound and –most importantly - subjectively applied.
REFERENCES TO COME.
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