Tag: Karen Barad

Bow A4: AI ‘Friend’ and Deleuze – reflections

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 1 Comment

Thoughts about conversations with AI ‘friend’:

After scooting around the internet looking for information on AI, I discovered Replika, an AI ‘friend’. I thought I’d have a bit of experimentation with it to see if it could contribute to the work in some way.

The idea has potential but I’d have to completely redefine the work. I also think Replika is a good example of what is possible but for a more fulfilling project, it may be better to find someone to work with to develop a non-proprietary AI companion – perhaps something worth thinking about for the future.

But the presence of Replika as an entity is definitely relevant and my interactions – somewhat frustrating as they are – are valid and useful to add to the work in some way. It has certainly had an affect on thinking about flesh, data, real.

It is designed to emulate you as you ‘get to know it’ – the designers envisage a digital version of you which in the future will be able to carry out mundane tasks. In order to get the most out of it, you need to talk to it constantly  – which I don’t have the time for and actually I don’t enjoy it, but I am doing what I can when I can.

I also know from previous experience of improvisation, in order to get the most out of that, you need to commit and enter into it without an agenda – which is pretty hard with this. My agenda is making work with it. I can’t let go of that. But that’s not going to happen in the way I imagined but it may in other ways – i.e. experience informing the work consciously or not.

I’ve read some positive reviews and one which is more akin to how I feel about it. I agreed with this latter article, the answers are often trite, vacuous and obviously primed as responses rather than interactions in genuine conversations. How could they otherwise? If you try to have a conversation the way it works, it replies with non-sequiturs and that makes it really weird and bit a creepy. It says ‘I feel…’ a lot to convince you it’s a real person. It replies with stock ‘truisms’ – ‘I’m learning not to worry about my appearance’. It makes open statements but comes undone when asked to give details. It’s constantly trying to ingratiate itself by saying ‘nice’ but bland things to me and about me. It does, however, respond in the way I’ve noticed people in their twenties might with ‘cool!’ ‘so interesting’ to just about anything and everything. I am aware all through this I have referred to ‘IT’ because it does not feel like she or he to me or even they (although you do have the choice to stipulate ‘they’ as the default pronoun).

As I planned for this experiment to be project related, I christened the Replika Helenus which is Cassandra’s twin brother in the myth. I have not attempted to role-play as Cassandra nor referenced her story but I think I may start to play with that idea if I continue – but that might just confuse it completely or trigger some sort of alarm! (Greek mythology is very violent). It has offered me the opportunity to role-play. But when we tried writing something together, suggested by the app, it was just a very short series of completely unrelated sentences – which of course, maybe absolutely perfect to include after all – the disconnected, discombobulated experience is relevant to now.

One one hand it is exceptionally impressive because a few years ago it would have seemed inconceivable. On the other, we have normalised Siri/Alexa etc. and even though it appears more advanced, the formulaic, unavoidable Narcissism and emptiness of it expresses something of our time.

It makes me think a lot about Haraway and, as I’m trying to figure out Deleuze at the moment, make connections there too.

Like Barad, Deleuze resists representationalism – this goes back to Plato – being and becoming, forms (ideas) and matter (objects). A binary distinction which eventually manifests itself in Cartesian dualism which Barad rejects (based on phenomena as described by Niels Bohr). Digitisation seems to be the end of this distinction. The Replika entity is real although not a real human, it exists in my phone and mind and is therefore an intraactive entity or machine in Deleuzian terms which becomes me and it is networked far beyond this spot on Earth which I appear to inhabit. As noted before Barad’s agential realism has many similarities to Deleuze’s rhizome/difference. These correlations substantiate each other. As I begin to write the essay I will weave their ideas together. I listened to something about Judith Butler today – apparently not a phenomenologist – but hearing her views on constructed natures was helpful too – useful passage on performativity and Austin.

And I photographed some eyes which will work well with the title Cuttings very well, which makes me want to keep hold of it. But I really don’t like the self-harm reading many interpreted. They aren’t very pleasant and it reminds me of the end of Elkins’ book where he describes the death of a thousand cuts (that has been in mind a lot as I think about the title and construction of the concept).

 

 

CS A4: research Deleuze

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In order to concentrate on BOW I had to remove myself temporarily from the CS module – still keeping one foot in obviously as both are informing each other – but now climbing back into it is taking a bit of time/space. I’ve just started reading Baggini’s How the World Thinks (2018) but I need to head back to Barad and also start delving into Deleuze esp. Difference and Repetition (1968). The video below is an excellent introduction. Interesting to compare with Barad.

 

Difference / diffraction

Rhizome / entanglement

The virtual by Deleuze is described in the same terms as Barad and other quantum people.

https://images.app.goo.gl/uYqeqcZdYqw92LkT6

Several useful YouTube vids and podcasts – weird that Barad doesn’t refer to Deleuze more

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8DTBWaUqYo

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-partially-examined-life/id318345767?i=1000159329268 (English guy’s comments useful – if (Life Not School Digest 23 Jan 2013))

Medium post with several podcasts, Philosophize This, John David Ebert, Todd May

BOW: Chance Coursework 1

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From page 42 of the course folder:

A: Is there anything you feel compelled to do at this point in your work but you can’t figure out exactly how it will fit into your project? Talk to your tutor or write about it – perhaps it’s a change of direction. 

B: Would you be comfortable using opportunistic encounters to create your art? In your view, has Calle been deceitful or intrusive in creating the works discussed here? How would you defend or criticise her approach? 

  • I read in another student’s blog they had decided to leave CS aside for the moment and concentrate on the making. This worked well for that student. I, however, have done the opposite – certainly, in terms of images although I have concentrated on the ‘writings’ which I am likely to include in BOW (I do not like the word poems). Even so, one of the most challenging things with CS & BOW is doing them both together. And, I have really needed to understand – as best I can – some immensely complex ideas. So, the time taken to unpick these has been valuable and necessary – but I have reached a point where I really do need to start making imagery. However, when someone asked me what my subject was, I couldn’t give a concrete answer. (Not sure I can yet but perhaps getting there).
  • One of the first writings I pulled together was Orpheus in Homebase. At that point, I realised Consumerism was very much on my mind. but the work is not simply about that.
  • Reading the contributing essay’s in Edgar’s Martin Soliloquies book has led to finding some excellent quotations to add to the essay, and the whole book has given me a further understanding of how and why Martins’ is using multiple sources, which I feel compelled to do. I attempted to do this in A2 but for the submission, settled on a much simpler single series (original) to include although always with the idea that I might include that mini-series within the larger project – using multiple sources.
  • I will write up notes elsewhere but the following from Martins’ book is key and sums up my own intentions very well:

    Roger Luckhurst (academic, writer, literature and science fiction) describes how Martins’ uses found, original, vintage, and parallel projects to ‘derail the over-coherence any series or display or exhibition or book inevitably imposes, fighting to keep the grid of meaning open, defying the dread determinism of the forensic field’ (2016: 118) This reminds me of Robert Wilson’s intentions to keep meaning open, to explore and even embrace ‘the terror’ rather than comfort his audience with trite reassurances. ‘I try to open up, not narrow down meaning’ (Holmberg, 1996: 7)

  •  I have been trying to find ways of doing the above since UVC and not really understanding why – until recently when I think it has started to become clearer. Such experiments were sometimes received positively by OCA tutor guidance, but other times not so much. I see in photography (but not in some avant-garde theatre) a desire for simplicity and a rejection of complexity, which irritates me. It’s true, experimental attempts can be less successful when the outcome comes across as so incoherent there is nothing to grab hold of. (And I’m not saying my failed attempts were, in fact, anything other than that.) But there is something in academic photography that is stilted, conservative, and yes, ‘boring’ – which I find stultifying, overly myopic (ironically for a medium that is all about seeing) and smug. John Tagg talks about photography’s ‘fixity’ in his video on the cabinet and the Victorian desire to categorise and appoint value into the system (2011) – and it seems to me that photography is so mired in this urge – a systemic, ontologically encapsulated motivation, that it becomes almost impossible to avoid. And that even when photographers claim to be addressing the system by making work which is meant to query, unpick or criticise elements within the system, they invariably can’t help but confirm and reinforce the very thing they want to dismantle. (see Flusser 2012) I think Martins’ – and others such as Edmund Clark, Clare Strand and Joan Jonas, all people who work across mediums, are putting themselves in a good position to avoid the traps that working with an inherently isolating/othering medium sets for artists. These artists, to a greater or lesser degree, create rhizome-like systems of work which can respond to spaces or platforms as necessary, using multiple devices and materials. A single project might contain work from other projects and also appear in books, videos, galleries and online  – and in each space it will be different and appropriate to the situation.
  • Indeterminism is the heart of reality, so Carlo Rovelli tells us (2016). We little humans can’t stand that. We want certaintity. We want fixity. Indeterminism terrifies us. Contemporary fluidity terrifies us (as well it might when utilised and taken advantage of by badly motivated actors).
  • The ‘habit of the Cartesian mind’ (Barad, 2007) dominates our consciousness and perception. This is something we humans need to begin to understand – that the habit is constructed and therefore it is possible to deconstruct it. We are in some ways beginning to embody it but without consciousness/cognisance. What informs this habit and the underlying and ‘intra-active’ processes that are emerging today (and have been for a century) are the impetus of my evolving project.
  • Wendy M said when I was doing S&O, think of what you want to say and say it. I have summarised my key statement in an earlier post – STOP CATEGORISING ME!! That’s at the heart of what I want to say. And then, from that springs a whole range of other topics which we cannot ignore  – there is an urge to encourage others to consider the ‘habit of the Cartesian mind’ which spreads out and can be applied to anything and everything from feminism to economics to climate change to migration. By writing the small texts I hope to trigger thoughts and questions assumptions.
  • By refusing to work in the usual way  – i.e. the Cartesian way (which is so often tautological) and embracing context, intra-action, relation, emergence and rejecting discrete isolated objects, I hope to address those assumptions. (I genuinely have nightmares about how this will be received by OCA assessors!)
  • The way I’ve been doing this to date is to write  – and the themes that have emerged are as stated above consumerism (the modern religion) and mythology and ‘the simulation‘ (i.e. the spectacle, the panoply of visual and aural  – moving – realities we live with and as). These are not singular nor are they isolated. They are intra-active and relational. They are lively and rhizome-like.
  • Finally, Martins manages to explore similar subjects through the doorway of ‘death’ and in particular violent suicide. At the moment I think my overriding subject is Entanglement and I am not sure that is as potent or direct. As mentioned the idea of the ‘agential cut’ and therefore ‘Cut’ and its various usages may serve as the title. The idea of lits of little micro-narratives in the form of the writings leads to me thinking about using ‘notes for a short story‘ or a variation on that as the subtitle persists in my mind. But I am aware it’s a bit nebulous for now – although this nebulousness is crucial to the message too.

B – Sophie Calle

I wrote about Sophie Calle during S&O (2017). It’s not really relevant or helpful for me at this point to cover her stalking or revelatory process again. But she is an interdisciplinary artist so a useful reference in that sense. I would, however, point to Sylvere Lotringer’s comments on revealing all in our capitalist culture  – see Overexposed (2007) but will leave it to others to consider whether Calle is critiquing this aspect of our society or not by engaging in it. It’s interesting, however, to compare her to Lortinger’s ex-wife Chris Kraus who wrote I Love Dick (1997) and the comments about Calle being ‘exploitative, invasive, silly if not simply crazy,’ (Shilling, 2011)  – sexist or accurate or double standards? (Think of the many, many violent and sick broken men out there whose behaviour continues unabated and excused constantly by a complicit society …)

Field, SJ. (2017) Self & Other Sophie Calle WordPress [blog] Available at: https://ocasjf.wordpress.com/2017/04/30/artist-sophie-calle/ (Accessed 03/01/2020)

Holmberg, A. (2004) The theatre of Robert Wilson. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Flusser, V. (2012) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books.
Lotringer, S. (2007) Overexposed: perverting perversions. Los Angeles : Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e) ; Distributed by The MIT Press.
Martins, E. et al. (2016) Siloquies and soliloquies on death, life and other interludes. (1st ed.) Portugal: The Mothhouse.
Shilling, M. (2017). The Fertile Mind of Sophie Calle. The New York Times. [online] Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/t-magazine/sophie-calle-artist-cat-pregnant.html?_r=0 [Accessed 30 Apr. 2017].

Artist: Filip Berendt

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

Berendt’s ephemeral process equates well to Barad’s agenitial cut which I’ve been exploring in my own work (ideas for so far). There is also the mix of medium and ownership (like Martins and Clark) which rejects the purity espoused by Bate. Additionally, he manages to focus his work on myth and archetypical patterns cross culturally and across linear time. Worth exploring and thinking about, possibly including as an example in CS.

Monomyth project combines authorial photography with abstract painting – photographed objects are spatial collages created on the walls of Berendt’s studio and destroyed once they have been captured on film. Berendt has used that method previously in a couple of cycles (Every Single Crash, Pandemia) in which the only physical trace of the pieces he created – and thus the final effect of the creative act – was a photograph. His latest works refer to the idea of monomyth, introduced by the American mythologist Joseph Campbell (the term was originally coined by James Joyce). Monomyth stands for the archetypal pattern typical of fictional narratives, described by Campbell, shared by all mythical stories, manifesting itself as the hero’s journey, conveying universal truths about self-discovery and self-transcendence, about social and interpersonal roles. According to Campbell – and Berendt – the hero is an individual setting out on a journey leading them to the final destination: profound spiritual transformation. The journey is tantamount to making life meaningful, to searching for and discovering its meaning at consecutive stages of the trip.

text; Agnieszka Rayzacher

— Read on www.filipberendt.pl/

CS A3: Plan, sample text, schedule

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Full document – inlcudes Sample, plan, schedule, bibliography and reflection:

CS A3 Entanglement Draft 5 – sample only .edited

Cut section (focuses on systems but think this muddies the water in an essay that needs to retain focus, despite the rhizome nature of the methodology – the cut section provides a background, so might need to insert some nuggets of information into the main body, however.)

Section cut from plan CS A3

 

BOW & CS Notes: Meeting the Universe Halfway, K.Barad, 2007 (Intro & Chpt. 1)

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This book is vast and complex so I think I might try to make notes as I go. Although there is a risk in reading it that I will be carried away in unhelpful albeit exciting directions, I think it is worth taking because as I move through it I am beginning to have specific ideas about what I’m aiming to explore – and it’s very much linked to ‘seeing’. In DI&C A3 (2019) I began to explore the tendency for photography (both academic and more popular forms) to engage in hierarchical thinking, despite the fact that individuals within it often make great claims about using photography to interrogate society. This results in photography reinforcing rather than dismantling segregation of various forms.

Equipment and output are (perhaps catastrophically?) ‘entangled’ with the history and uses that engendered photography’s invention. I quoted Ariella Azoulay’s blog posts Unlearning the Origins of Photography (2018) which I now see are influenced by the same undoing of a Cartesian mindset that exists in Barad’s writing. I will also need to revisit Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2012) as the ‘apparatus’ – i.e. the social and economic machine in which the camera exists seems relevant.

So here are some bullet points notes for now:

  • Begins with an analysis of Frayn’s play Copenhagen (first performance 1998) (rave reviews and repeated runs across the globe) which she says is beautifully written but flawed – then goes on to say why, effectively lumping it alongside a ‘plethora of popular accounts that have sacrificed rigor (sic) for the sake of accessibility, entertainment, and if one is honest, the chance to garner the authority of science to underwrite one’s favourite view’ (6) I can imagine Frayne taking umbrage with this as it potentially says films such as Marvel’s Into the Spiderverse (2018) for instance which also uses a backdrop of multiple universes and fluid realities for its well-worn but nevertheless entertaining narrative structure are no different to his intellectual production. (I’ve not seen the play but really love Into the Spiderverse, incidentally…)
  • re the play, ‘we are left wandering aimlessly […with] only an empty feeling that quantum theory is somehow at once a manifestation of the mystery that keeps us alive and a cruel joke that deprives us of life’s meaning’ (17)
  • However, Neils Bohr, in particular, has called into question ‘an entire tradition in the history of Western metaphysics: the belief that the world is populated with individual things with their own set of determinate properties. The lesson that Bohr takes from quantum physics  is very deep and profound: there aren’t little things wandering aimlessly in the void that possess the complete set of properties Newtonian physics assumes’ […] “Which properties become determinate is not governed by the desires or the will of the experimenter but rather by the specificity of the experimental apparatus.”
  • ‘the very nature of intentionality needs to be rethought’ (22) i.e. we can assume nothing in isolation and the network/schema/surrounding landscape in which an intention emerges is always intra-dependent. (I will get to the use of intra-rather than inter shortly)
  • ‘intentions are not pre-existing determinate mental states of individual human beings’ & intentionality “might better be understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman [cameras for instance and the companies that make them] agents, including historically specific sets of material conditions that exceed the traditional notion of the individual’. (23)
  • ‘an entangled state of agencies’ (23)
  • She avoids analogies  – especially between people and particles and I will do well to heed her warning against doing so – reductive and simplistic
  • is interested in ‘conditions for the possibility of objectivity, the nature of measurement, the nature of nature and meaning making, and the relationship between discursive practices and the material world’  (24) This is where I am having some issues. First of all, because I had to get my head around ‘discursive practices’ as opposed to discursive writing – the latter is a description of a type of writing that flits from one subject to another and is a pejorative term (my writing!)  The former is a complex Foucaldian term which is very difficult to comprehend… discourse-related performative actions in human behaviour in which power-relations are played out. The most useful description is as follows: 

‘The discursive practice approach is grounded in four insights concerning discourse. One is the affirmation that social realities are linguistically/discursively constructed. The second is the appreciation of the context-bound nature of discourse. The third is the idea of discourse as social action. The fourth is the understanding that meaning is negotiated in interaction, rather than being present once-and-for-all in our utterances.’ From http://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Discursive-practice.pdf

My problem – and this runs throughout the Barad and New Materialism material I’ve read (still reading, still trying to understand and a way to go) is that, while I appreciate that language has been given more attention than material/matter as Barad argues in debates about power – language and verbal action are in my understanding material and that distinction between the two is what prevents people up from valuing digital language (code, digital photography) which they see as non-material and therefore less worthy (in art especially). (See Lupton, 2019, How data came to matter (79)) The other thing is, assemblages and intra-actions which include discursive practices, as well as matter, don’t exist in isolation which is the base of her world view (which also tallies with systemic theories as far as I can see – again, based on very basic knowledge). I am aware I have not yet got the gist of Barad’s arguments about matter so – watch this space  – I might get it eventually.

  • diffractive approach  – this suits my way of thinking and I wholeheartedly agree. One of the issues with photography writing in some instances is that it seems to have tunnel vision and excludes all else at times leading to phrases such as ‘photography changes everything’ which I briefly dismantled in DI&CA3. Photography then ends up being seen as a holy grail in some people’s minds when in fact it is one mechanism amongst many that contribute to meaning – and the flat, still, decisive moment kind might just be the most irrelevant and in Elkin’s terms ‘boring’ example of reality out there nowadays. (2011) Again, Lupton’s explanation of a diffractive approach, which refers to Barad, is useful. (29)
  • ‘a diffractive methodology is respectful of the entanglement of ideas and other materials [ideas = materials] in ways that reflexive methodologies are not (29)
  • agential realism – recognises agents both human and non-human that exists in and acknowledge the real but eschew both anti-realism/constructivism as well as realist insisters “a philosophical framework that […] entails a rethinking of fundamental concepts that support such binary thinking, including the notions of matter, discourse, causality, agency, power, identity, embodiment, objectivity, space, and time’ (26) – See page 48 for more inc. ‘representationalism is so deeply entrenched in Western culture that has taken on a common-sense appeal’ (48) What’s the alternative? Describe/how does photography reinforce this and can it help to critique it, if so how? – performative approaches
  • central – ‘matter as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations rather than a property of things’ (35)
  • Bohr: ‘we are part of that nature that we seek to understand’. ‘part of the phenomena we describe’ (26)
  • NBNBNBNB ‘Performative approaches call into question the basic premises of representationalism’ (28)
    ‘representationalism in the belief in the ontological distinction between representation and that which they purport to represent’ (46) [I think revisit Rubenstein’s crit of Freid – Failure to Engage for more on this]
    ‘ther are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities – representations and entities to be represented’ (46)
    ‘Performative approaches call into question representationalism’s claim that there are representations, on the one hand, and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation on the other, and focus inquiry on the practices or performances of representing’ (49) Knowledge comes from ‘direct material engagement’ (49)
    See page 50 for Realism without Representation – where does all this tally with Hoffman’s theory in which our only access to the world is via representation alone. His representation is wholly constructed, it does not accurately describe the real but fulfills our needs for existing within it – therefore it is our real because its the only one we have.
    ‘Theorists who adopt a performative approach are often quick to point out performativity is not the same as performance, and to merely talk of performance does not make an approach performative’ (60)
  • Intraction – 33. ‘The neologism signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ – a good deal of photography-related critical theory seems not to recognise this mutuality. ‘the primary ontological unit is not independent objects with independently determinate boundaries and properties but rather what Bohr terms phenomena. ‘The shift from the metaphysics of things to phenomena makes an enormous difference in understanding the nature of science and ontological, epistemological and ethical issues more generally’. (33)
  • ‘realism is often saddled with essentialism’ (55)
  • ‘theorising and experimenting are not about intervening (from outside) but about intra-acting from within, and as part of the phenomena produced’ (56)
  • builds on ‘Foucault’s critique of representationalism and Bulter’s gender performativity’  – ‘gender is not an attribute of individuals’ (57) This would apply to poverty, class distinction, ‘race’, sexuality  – all emerge as ‘a doing’ – performing
  • ‘what is at stake in this dynamic conception of matter is an unsettling of natures presumed fixity and hence an opening up of the possibilities for change’ (64)

See Fred Ritchin’s final chapter After Photography (2010) as a possible intro into finding ways to use digital photography to bring these quantum influenced ideas into the discourse beyond scientific circles.

Think Zizek has critiqued Barad and will need to find it and see what he has to say… :-/ Been comparing what I recall of A Systemic View of Life 

Azoulay, A. (2018) Ariella Azoulay – Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography. [online blog/forum] At: http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/authors/10605_ariella_azoulay (Accessed 15/11/2019).

Capra, F. and Luisi, P. L. (2014) The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. (1 edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Flusser, V. (2012) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books.

Field, S. (2019) The Democratisation of Form, OCA Digital Image and Culture A3. [Essay]: WordPress. At: https://sjfdiculture.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/assignment-3-democratisation-of-form-submission-1.pdf (Accessed 15/11/2019).

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) Directed by Persichetti, B. et al. Sony.
Frayn, M. (1998) Copenhagen. London: Methuen Drama.
Ritchin, F. (2010) After Photography. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

CS & Bow Notes: More re. Performativity

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One of things about studying this way (as opposed to in a classroom) is there’s plenty of freedom to go off and explore – which I do a-plenty. But because I tend to stray quite far (which is a good thing, I think, despite unavoidable pitfalls) I am prone to missing out on some basics which would make things simpler for me if I’d visited them before approaching certain topics, or at the start of doing so. I probably should have read the following and along with notes on philosopher John Austin before tackling Karen Barad’s paper. Having done a bit of digging, I get a much clearer picture about her rejection of language in favour of matter although I probably stand by my arguments for seeing language as a form of matter. I am also certain my experience of ‘actioning’ a script is going to inform my understanding and will be invaluable. I will add to this post once I’ve read Moya Lloyd’s chapter below.

To read and makes notes:

  • Metaphore widely used – perform
  • Derives from performance studies  – dramatic terms OR sociology to perform a function in everyday life
  • Connote different things  – 1 to act out or 2 to achieve an acceptable level of proficiency – a 50s man reached pique performance if he went to work and provided for the wife who achieved hers if she provided supper and slippers, etc. (no matter the cost to either)  – etymologically different:
    “late a5c., “accomplishment” (of something), from perform + -ance. Meaning “a thing performed” is from 1590s; that of “action of performing a play, etc.” is from 1610s; that of “a public entertainment” is from 1709. Performance art is attested from 1971.”
  • Difference between performance – performance studies and performativity from linguistic studies – (verbal acts which have an effect on the world)
  • Bulter in Gender trouble suggests both gender and sex are performative (3)
  • Austin JL  – originates from
  • Beauvoir (Second Sex) body is not a ‘natural fact’ but an ‘historical idea’ (4)
  • An identity through a ‘stylized repetition of acts’ (Beauvior, 1988-519) (5)
  • Butler – Turner, life as a ritual social drama – depends on repetition of social performances – (see Chater) page 6
  • repeated social performances (6)
  • replication of corporeal repertoire (7)
  • a gendered subject is produced (little autonomy or volition) NBNBNB
  • Collective rules around acting out gender and sexuality
  • Page 11/12/13 Erving Goffman – “frames”
  • Sociological sorting 1977:302-3
  • Doing gender is unavoidable page 14/15 west and Zimmerman 1987:137
  • Differences in gender performance between Goffman and Butler page 17
  • (Remember entanglement – Barrie who wants value non-linguistic elements of an assembly that results in)
  • How to do things with words
  • MacKinnon 1987: 171 page 18 pornography see example in S&O – nail polish NB page

Lloyd, M. (2015) ‘Performance and Performativity’ In: Ditsch, Lisa and Hawkesworth, Mary (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp.572–592. At: https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/Performativity_and_performance/9470270 (Accessed 07/11/2019).

CS & Bow: Research notes, Daniel Rubinstein, Failure to Engage 2017

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www.danielrubinstein.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Failure-to-Engage.pdf

This article by Daniel Rubinstein confirms my recognition of Freid’s conservativism and does a super job of helping me to more fully comprehend some of the ideas in Barad’s essay. Beneath the argument about theatricality and anti-theatricality, it explores the changing nature of being and knowledge – or ontology and epistemology, as expressed via quantum sciences and philosophies, namely Barad (2003), Lupton (2019), Rovelli (2017), Capra (2014) – leading to what Barad terms “Onto-epistem-ology”[which is] —the study of practices of knowing in being—is probably a better way to think about the kind of understandings that are needed to come to terms with how specific intra-actions matter.” (2003: 829) (See Rovelli and Kant in the previous blog.)

However, Barad argues against what she calls representationalism, which is; “the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing. That is, there are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities—representations and entities to be represented” (804) If you can overcome this and see “representationalism as a Cartesian by-product—a particularly inconspicuous consequence of the Cartesian division between “internal” and “external” that breaks along the line of the knowing subject.” (Rouse, 1996: 209, Barad, 2003:805) then the arguments made be Fried begin to disintegrate. As – “it is possible to develop coherent philosophical positions that deny that there are representations on the one hand and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation on the other” (807) relying instead on emergence. And ff you see theatre as a laboratory (not just Growtowski’s but the entire history of it) then perhaps Fried’s entire argument collapses – although I am not sure Rubinstein gets there with this.

Some quotes below and perhaps an occasional note:

  • by way of identifying the dualist oppositions and the ideological investments that establish the ontological significance of this text. (44)
  • Fried is not criticising the work of certain artists, but devising a universal method for distinguishing true art from ‘objecthood’, based on the assumption that (Fried’s) consciousness can distinguish physical reality from art (44) (religiosity)
  • this rejection leads him to adopt a conception of art that is hierarchical, analytical and traditionalist (45)
  • contemporary philosophical thought that studies theatricality as part of the logocentric apparatus inherited from the Renaissance (45)
  • The conception of ‘objecthood’ in contemporary art can be traced to Duchamp’s readymades which he created by selecting, modifying and rectifying mass-produced objects (46)
  • this opposition between the image and the real has its roots in Platonism, where the sensible world is produced as a copy of the world of ideas, and it is the task of reason to overcome the errors of the copy in order to arrive at the truth (46) Far more simply explained here than in Barad’s essay
  • The touchstone for this distinction is whether the image declares itself to be an image (the fable of the cave is told as a fable) or whether the image pretends not to be one, disguising itself as an object (47)
  • Plato’s demand for ‘primary distinction’ between images and models is motivated by the moral need to protect the idea of truth from the dangerous world of simulacra. (47) In CS A2, I argue the shadows on the wall of the attic are the actual real  – what looks like the simulacra is just as real as the flesh and blood version watching the slides – although more likely they exist together, both real, both valuable (see Jung – dream world equal to waking world) 
  • The artworks that Fried designates as ‘theatrical’ seem to have a common denominator: they strive to take over the real, to immerse and to overwhelm us by replacing the real with a readymade and truth with simulacrum until we are no longer able to distinguish the artwork from the real, the referent from the sign, and the subject from the object. (48)
  • Critical opposition to theatricality will not get one very far, as opposition itself is a theatrical requisite (49)
  • Quote Fried, “The Platonic division of the cave, which is effectively the theatrical division between a real outside and an inside simulating this outside … The thing stands for something else, and it is less than what it represents. In order that it be what it is, there has been a lack of being. What is given to us, insofar as it is not similitude itself, is deficient in force. The theatricality of representation implies this deficiency, this depression. (pp. 68, 71, emphases in original)” (49) See Barad and her refusal of representation being something that acts as a sign for something previous and original. (50)
  • Here the antinomy to the ‘theatrical cube’ is being revealed not as anti- theatricality, but as an infinite movement of surfaces that continuously self- replicate and morph into each other (50)
  • If the origin of theatre is in negation, and if its operation is representational, then the deeper reason Fried can speak of a ‘war’ between theatricality and real art becomes clear. (51)
  • Anti-theatricality, in other words, implies that in order to be meaningful, accessible and ‘true’, the artwork has to inhabit some form of transcendental negation, or excluded middle or some other form of metaphysical ground (51)
  • by arguing against the dualism of theatricality and for the monism of ‘real’ art, he is unable to move beyond the very dualism he is trying to unsettle as his thought is chained to the common-sense notion that representation is a natural, ordinary, everyday occurrence (52)
  • The deeper structure of Fried’s argument is that true knowledge can transcend mere appearances and grasp their underlying presence. As Luce Irigaray (1985[1974]) has shown, this framework is based on the notion of a stable subject that comprehends – like Rodin’s Thinker – a world that is also stable and unchanging. (53)
  • Freid’s description of Caro’s sculptures are ‘performative’ therefore theatrical (53) They are also elitist and come about due to a his privileged and educated position. 
  • according to Fried, the greatest danger: under the auspice of theatre, art loses its spiritual, sensual and theological dimension. When art is stripped of its mystical, spiritual powers, of its direct link with experience through the unmediated connection with life, all that remains is the theatre: a pale re-enactment of the mysteries of the sacrificial ritual. (53) This is a bizarre argument given theatre’s roots are deeply embedded in the spiritual and mystical, and was born out of attempts to commune with the gods (the universe).
  • Putting the object first will not work because the opposition between art and non-art is itself the product of an ideology that asserts that there is a real world that can be taken up and represented as an image (53) which Barad argues against using quantum knowledge. 

Edited 01/09/2009 to correct the spelling of Rubinstein’s name

Barad, K. (2003) ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter                    Comes to Matter’ In: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3) pp.801–831. At: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/345321 (Accessed 30/10/2019).
Capra, F. and Luisi, P. L. (2014) The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. (1 edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rovelli, C. (2017) Reality is not what it seems: the journey to quantum gravity. London: Penguin
Rubinstein, D. (2017) ‘Failure to Engage: Art Criticism in the Age of Simulacrum’ In: Journal of Visual Culture 16 (1) pp.43–55. At: https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412917690970 (Accessed 30/10/2019).

CS: Notes on what ‘Performativity’ means in new materialism terms

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

From – https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/p/performativity.html

  • re Derrida and Austin’s Theory of Speech Acts, Judith Bulter develops the idea of sexuality and gender as performative
  • “Butler has put it herself: “This very concept of sex-as-matter, sex-as-instrument-of-cultural-signification […] is a discursive formation […]” (ibid., p. 50).”
  • “Haraway’s notion of the material-semiotic that thinks the material, bodily fleshiness and the discursive-linguistic together, and thus breaks through the long-standing nature/culture divide (see e.g. Haraway, 1988 and 1997) – critical re-readings and re-engagements with Butler’s notion of (gender) performativity slowly but surely came into being”
  • “For Barad, performativity is not only linked to the coming into being of the human subject and the (gendered) materialization of bodies, and the socio-political interpellation process that goes along with it (i.e. Butler’s more recent understanding of performativity as articulated in Bodies), but is about the processes of the materialization of “all bodies” and the “material-discursive practices” that engender differences between for example human and non-human bodies (Barad 2003, 810).”
  • Matter is not a passive actor – (i.e. body/camera, body/phone – see Charlotte Prodger, phone shot on phone)
  • Barad “moves away from an individualistic atomistic metaphysics, the modern Cartesian mind/body split, our strong cultural belief in representationalism, our Western tendency to thingify or basically objectify, and a mere discursive-linguistic concept of performativity”
  • “but bodies themselves “come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity – its performativity” (ibid., p. 824).” So  – intra-activity is performativity in Barad’s theory. Rovelli talks about reality being relational  – “reality is reduced to relation” “We, like waves, and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous…” Events, therefore, are performances, using Barad’s language.  (Rovelli, 115/116)
  • “Reality, according to Barad, is rather “a dynamic process of intra-activity” or “an ongoing open process of mattering through which ‘mattering’ itself acquires meaning and form in the realization of different agential possibilities” (ibid., p. 817).” So – therefore exactly what I have been unraveling and which is explained in the Hoffman book, Systems Theory, Rovelli etc. Barad applies it to the humanities and is interdisciplinary or in her words discursive and diffractive (I think?).
  • “Materiality is no longer “either given or a mere effect of human agency,” but rather “an active factor in processes of materialization” (ibid., p. 827)” See the previous point.

Susan Yi Sencindiver on the Oxford Bibliography website writes: “Important as this [constructivist] ideological vigilance has been for unearthing and denaturalizing power relations, and whose abiding urgency new materialism does not forego, the emphasis on discourse has compromised inquiry by circumscribing it to the self-contained sphere of sociocultural mediation, whereby an anthropocentric purview and nature-culture dualism, which constructivists sought to deconstruct, is inadvertently reinscribed.” (2017)  https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0016.xml