Hegel – The substance must become subject

Every being is an entire universe

Do not talk what cannot be talked about

• Clandestine ethics

Active indifference – the affirmation must thought – there is a lot of affirmation in active indifference

What is an I in homo generator – and what are the others…

• The other is important – but do not put importance on it – searching for it is pointless
• The other is homo generator

Homos

• Evolutionarily – developing the sweat
• Homo generators – its generation is its only purpose

Second Life

• Self generated – self generation – in a system

The problem of ‘ism’

• Messiah with out messianism
• Communism with out the ‘ism’ – Commune – Marx tainted by political

Einstein

• Sitting in a cafe in zurich – grabbing from different theories – trans-cross-disciplinary – no experimental science
• The apparatus

Transcendence – Immenance (Sublimation)

Media Aesthetics

• Aisthesis – perception – you are a blank page and then you
• Maurice Merleau Ponty – Phenomenology of Perception

Artificial Life

• Artificial life – Homo Generator – we have always been the same
  • Technology brought this out into the open
• Machine man is not another man 
  • Machine – will
• Poverty / Injustice – everything inhumane will go away
  • The machine man is the only man who should be taxed
• Artful life 
  • Even our past comes to us from our future
  • Lyotard – Just Gaming
  • JUST / JUSTICE
  • Homo Generator
• Existential – bad word / Science – good word
• Sartre – We are sentenced to freedom – sequence of your deeds
• Spinoza – Don’t regret anything you have done as it prevents you from seeing what you did wrong
• Drives – psychoanlysis – these drives 
  • Calvin and Hobbes
• Derrida’s reading of Heidegger 
  • He was logo centric
  • For Heidegger – the origin of language is silence
• Sollipsistic 
  • I’m not different from anyone else – but there’s no reason to prove this
  • Its not necessary to prove the existence of the other
• Looking away from a topic in order to understand it more clearly

Just / Justice

• Living a good life – Ardorno – living a good life – writing his criticism from the belly of the beast – getting paid to do nothing in Hollywood
• How was something constituted – constitution
• Law –
• Levinas – God is the weakest of all… No philosophy of nature… He believes in the Law.  The Law is very Jewish in this respect
• Schirmacher – Masters Thesis – contra-versy
• Just living – nothing you can escape – you’re dying is a form of living 
  • No proof / no reason
  • Derrida – Alive
• Workshop next years in NYC: Spinoza / Hegel / Schopenhauer / Heidegger
• Baudrillard – an existential openness – when he died in the arms of his wife he was smiling… His wife asks why, he says, “What else can I do?”
• In the damaged life the niche of the good life
• Heidegger: Letter On Ethics

Techne and the Greeks

• Letter to the Philosophers of Technology (Chicago) 
  • Be careful with the word logos
  • Logos – bundles, meanings, collect, collection
  • The word was never one – it did not come together into one – so you can get out of it
• Techne has a kind of understanding but no logos
  • As long as you are walking you are in techne – every step is different from every other one
  • If you think about states / goals you are in logos
• Techne is that which we overlook because we think it’s going to be there anyway
• Briging back the appreciation of that what will be there anyway
• You appreciate living by just living

• Hegel – Master Slave 
  • Master is the poor one – they only have to use up what they already have – there is no progress
  • The importance of forgetting – “I am blank and I trust that it will come… “
• Master make with their participation – history make itself but they need our participation.  Take part, fight – but don’t believe in it…
• The numbers of captialism are what rule – the numbers which now bring down people – will in the future bring down robots
  • This may be a great power – hope – that numbers are in control of humanity
• Marx – pointed at something non-personal – he did not know of the automation of the world

Gebrauch – Use

• What you do makes a difference
• You use what you are doing – the life of the body precedes the mind?  How can this precede the mind… 
  • You have a mind in the womb
• Auto-biographical – W.S.’s mother didn’t kill herself and his brother – because of his birth…
• Peter Singer – human rights animal rights – beastial – letting
• Homo Sacer – potentialities and capabilities

Homos

• Homo Generator – birth of W.S.’s son
• Homo Sacer is generated by Homo Generator
  • You always have something more to give – something more to lose
  • Killing yourself is always an option
  • Never let nature let you die – you die yourself
  • Jews in the holocaust – why didn’t they fight… 12 hours of Shoa
  • Lanzman – Auschwitz – victims and victimisers
• “I want to understand what human beings are capable of…”
• W.S. article on Net Culture
• Without polemic there is no philosophy - a strong verbal or written attack on someone or something
• Agamben with full hair – Passolini
• Artists with too much power
  • Stalin – poets
  • Hitler – painter

The artist animal 
Giving back potentialities to man 
The philosopher of imminence  
McLuhan extensions of man is a way to describe the situation of technology – but it is not the extent of the change wrought through technology
Zizek the ticklish subject – “become what you dare” 
Manumit – release from slavery
Baudrillard – hyperreal – the return of the real – there was never a reality to lose – “reality is not everything – in truth it is the least of all things”
ARTificial – not on the artifacts
Making peace with tools – the new generation – the artificial nature of humanity is nothing there
Necessary and unnecessary suffering 
Homo Generator cannot be defined as anything but primary living itself – it is not necessary to disaffirm any one thing in order to affirm any other thing
The essential one comes out of theory and practice
Does art still exist as a form – or has it become
Time in terms of timing – time kairos
Is a body a technology – the reason of the body – Avital’ four forms of interaction that are not fixing you

lui bec

An Archeology of the Command and Will

• Arcum – the one who begins – the name of the highest authority
• Arche – the first and being the chief
• Commandment and beginning – greek translation of the bible – Alexandrian rabbi 
  • An arche – in the beginnign – god created heaven and earth
  • through a commandment - Genect
  • The word can only be a commandment
• “In the commandment was the word” – in the place of the commandment 
  • if this  had been the originl translation – things in theology and politics would be more clear
• The beginning is a pricniple of commandment – it rules
• In Greek - 
  • arcos: means chief and ‘anus’
  • the foundationis also hte commandmnet
• Origin is also commandment – the beginning is the growing (the history) of that is which the origin
  • The oriigin never ceases to govern and command the thing it originates
  • Theology – creation is continuous – God is in continuous creation
• Heidegger 
  • the enfant – the beginning – can never be a past
  • historical epoch must be conceived as something that is concealed in its origin
  • the meaning of command and origin coincide
• The Principle of Anarchy
  • The separation of origin and commandment
• Derrida neutralised the origin
  • The origins are deconstructed

A decision between anarchy and democracy

There has been no work on the commandment – only on obeying – e.g.: why do men obey:  Discour de la servitude volontaire

Power is defined by its ability to give commands -

What is the commandment from the poitn of view of language:  The Imperative

• The reason there is nothing in the philosophical tradition there is nothing on the commadment 
  • The interpretation – Aristotle 
    • He excludes the commandment through forms of language
      • Apophetic – the logos apophanticos
        • The discourse in which true and falseness are present
        • The prayer is a discourse – it cannot be true or false
        • Philosophy ignores it – because it cannot be true or false
      • Cataphetic
    • What is a command, player, threat, narration – this does not concern Aristotle (in his own account)
    • The logic – the philosophy which only reflects on logic – all this other discourse is excluded because it is not apophantic
  • THe commandment was left to the discussion of “will” –
  • In the 20th C – the discourse is analysied through the “presciptive logic” – they try to restate the commandment into an indicative

How to understand the command: “Walk”

• Compate to “Wolfgang walks” – can be true or false – apophantic
• The imperative commandment – this says nothing of none – does not describe a state of thing – does not refer to anyone or anything
• If any officer gives a command to a soldier – the command is always valid – even if it is not obeyed
• Not zein but zolden
• is and ought
• Hans Kelsen – philospher of law:
  • When a man utters the will that another man behave in a certain way -the science of this act cannot be described save that the other man will behave in that way, but only say that he ‘ought’ to behave in this way
• Émile Benveniste
  • Hypothesis that the imperative is the primitive form of the verb
  • Austen – How to Do Things With Words –
    • Speech act – a performative – a linguistic utterance that in the act of the utterance it realises what it says
• Hypothesis
  • Two ontologies
    • Assertion – expressees itself in the indicative mode – est – “is”
      • est gar eine – there is indeed being
    • Commandment – expresses itself in the imeprative – esto – “be”
      • let there be being
  • Sometimes opposed – always distinguished
• Religion is an attempt to build a world on the ground of a command 
  • When man address God and when God address man – always in the imperative
  • “Give us our daily bread”
• The growth of the speech act as a performance
  • The centrality of this performance – corresponds to the fact that in our contemporary societies the ontology of the commandment is slowly replacing the ontology of assertion
• The return of the repressed (magic, religion…) is now governing the so-called modern secularised society
  • In the form of suggestion – suggest, plead, advertise
  • Obediance takes the form of a kind of cooperation

The concept of will

• This is an act of will, and act of bridge
• Neitschze –
  • Will is no other than a commandment
• To will is always somehow grafted on the verb ‘can’
• The problem of will is linked to the problem of potential
• You can say  ”to will” but you can’t say “to can”
• I can / I will – need another verb to complete them
  • I can ‘write’
  • I will ‘walk’
• Philosophy is a discipline which works with these empty verbs – an attempt to understand the meaning of these empty verbs
  • YOU MUST CAN WILL
  • somehow defines modernity

How the notion of will grounds on the notion of potentiality and possibility

• To ‘can’ is a dagnerous thing
• ‘Will’ is employed to control what you ‘can’
• Christian
  • Omnipotent!
  • Embarassing, dangerous repurcussions – e.g.: He could have chosen a dog, or a whore – not a man – to return God
  • He could have chosent to damn Peter and save Judas
  • 11th-14th Century – this scandalous question was analysed
    • An example of omnipotence:  He good give back virginity to a raped woman
    • The solution: 
      • Potentia absoluta – God can do anything (He could do anything)
      • Potentia ordinata – God can only do what he willed to do, what he decides to do (He only does what he choose to do)
• Same is for man – what he commands to is potentiality

Bartleby the Scrivener

• You mean that you will not?

Questions

THe Body – the body cannot will

Art – perhaps between the apephanic and the cataphetic

Can the refusal of will be joyous

William Henry Fox Talbot - A Cascade of Spruce Needles” (1839)

Academie der Kunst

1968 – Cage – Notations

Darmstadt – Cologne – determinacy and indeterminacy

Nelson Goodman – John Cage – “what is determinacy and inter

Umberto Eco – The Open Work of Art

Boulez – Cage – Xanakis

• Boulez – ‘guided freedom’
• Cage –
• Xenakis –
• Stochausen

Un Coup de Des

Adorno – music time determinacy – Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction

Benjamin -

• Translator
• The work of art
• The concept of art criticism

Morris Graves

Xanakis – flees persucution in Greece – 1948 – works with LeCurbusier – Brussels world pavilion (1958)

• Metastasis / Glissandi
• Varese – Poeme Electronique

Cy Twombly – studio taken over by Robert Indiana

Peter Kubelka

Jules Marey (FRANCE vs. Muybridge (US)

• different intentions, different styles

Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2

• Fume

Laban notation

Alvin Langdon Coburn – The Voticists

Brancusi – photography

Paul Kley – Bauhaus lectures – on the grammars of form and color

Boulez & Xenakis

Mel Bochner

Anthony McCall – Line Describing A Cone

• First Media Art show – Malmo – 1975
• Showing of line describing a cone
• You and I horizontal
• Tate article

Ligeti – Volume (towards a completely interpreted score)

Xenakis- Achorripsis -notes

Frederick John Kiesler – Endless House – article

Greg Lynn – Embryological House

• Volvo – the serial production of a car – each one singular

Peter Eisenman - eisenmanarchitects.com - Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Cedric Price – generator house which moves cubes based on exclusive activities

Mauricio Kagel

Hanne Darboven

Scherer – Le Livre

Roman Opalka

Vorticism – Ezra Pound – BLAST

Agnes Martin

Klaus Huber

Xenakis: “Terretektorh” - One and Two

Viking Eggeling - youtube

Henri Michaux

Hollis Frampton

Le Grand Classeur MécaniquePrague, ca. 1948

Pictures on Demand

• Is there a possibility of history
• Not only does history repeat itself as a farce… Marx
• Historical Education and the universal code (uniform) … Neitschze

• Photography After Photography
  
  • When Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand undertook a survey into the importance of photography as an aesthetic medium three quarters of a century ago, Marcel Duchamp was not short of a reply:
  • New York, May 22, 1922 Dear Stieglitz, Just a few words, which I do not really even want to write. You know well what I think of photography. I would like it to make people despise painting, that is, until something else makes photography unbearable. That’s how far we have come. (1)
• Simulation and dissimulation 
  • Responsibility is the ability to respond – The Cage
• Andreas Gorsky – Thomas Demand 
  • Late capitalist kitch – lacking completely in substance / criticality
• Siegfried Kvacauer
  • Purity in technicity of film… no retouching no ‘special effects’
• Thomas Demand
  • Truth and lies in photography – “by saying nothing about the lie we do not therefore tell the truth” (Adorno’s advice to hollywood)
• Gursky
  • The Beckers – the Becker Class which was a commodification of the art market
  • Gursky first student – $1,000,000 mark in photography
  • Pyongyang
• Gerhard Richter
• Jacques Ranciere
• Thomas Demand
• Alexander Kluger & Thomas Demand
  • The process radiates onto the original photo
• Dictionary of places
  • Demand –
  • The Nouveau Roman – emerging world in pure description
  • Schlegel 
    • [...] the original work is considered neither self-contained nor self-sufficient; it acquires significance only through what comes after it in order to become what alone it can never be. What is this “being” that requires the subsequent intervention of something else, something other – whether criticism, translation, or technical reproduction – in order to become ‘itself’? (Weber, 2008, pp.62 – 63)
  • The scholarly had to hide the 
    • 1864 Manet – The painter passing of the history painting
    • Picasso’s Guernica
    • Painterly autonomy and photographic reference
  • Gerhard Richter
    • Stuttgart prison murders(?) - Baader-Meinhof Gang
    • Photographs, made into painting, photographed the

• Siezing the historic moment
  • Barshel in a bathtub
  • Thomas Demand, Bathroom (Badezimmer), 1997
  • Uwe Barschel at the Hotel Beau-Rivage, Geneva, 11th of October, 1987
• Neitschze 
  • As long as the past must be something worthy of immitation – the past is in danger of being distorted… reinterpreted according to asthetic criteria.”  ”That art can be beaten to death by art”
  • “Let the dead bury the living”
  • Art flees if you immediate spread your historical
  • On the use and abuse of history for life – Neitschze
    • How can we sieze ourselves in which historical moment
• Baudrillard – the filmic repetition of the holocaust
• Greenberg – ‘kitsch’

• “The content has no form – it is form”
• Brian O’Doherty
• Demand – Serpentine Gallery 2007 – wallpaper – book
• Demand at the National Gallery – at the National Gallery
  • politically reactionary, utmost expression of historicism
  • outrage at the recuperate the work of Mies Van de Rohe and Thomas Demand
    • Neue National Gallery – to consider “world art”
    • Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
    • Nation-related exhibition
• “For each work in the exhibition Botho Strauss wrote a text that does explain the pictures, nor concretise its dimension…”
• Large heaving curtains – for floor to ceiling – homage to Van de Rohe – creating theatricality

• Warhol – Disaster photos
• Kosuth – The Chair
• Sherrie Levine – Dorothy Laine – reappropriate
• Breatice Komonina – in the Demand 
  • architectonic models – “here is a modern architect – buildings become images and images become a kind of building”
  • Demand works with architects like a TV anchorman – “the architects help me to go ‘on air’… the roles are clearly assigned… there would be no television without Teletubies”
• Mogadishu - Lufthansa Flight 181

• Nobokov – the personal history of an exhile called in to vouch for the work of Demand

• Emile Cioran – Precis de Decomposition
  • Eric Rondepierre – Exit – filmic stills

Questions

• The Tunnel – Demand (1999)
• Richter Atlas – ongoing archive of images – domeciliation (Derrida)

Crypt (on Burgin)

• Benjamin’s Children’s plays - recordings on UBU
• The anihilation of the city – of pompei – for people today is was a preservation (and event of preservation in the event of destruction)
  • The impressions and imprints left behind by people
• Geothe – 1787 –
• Gradiva – Yensen - 
  • Burgin – retelling
  • In just the right light…
  • Retrospective chimera
• In the panorama – what is now perishes hopelessly into what is to come
• Elective Affinities (2001)
• A search for traces – impression / imprint
• Archive Fever – a Freudian Impression

Other Notes

• Laura Mulvey
• Barthes
• The Museum of Innocence
• Henry Fox Talbot
• Uwe Barschel
• Camera Lucida
• Raymond Russel
• W.G Sibald
• Magritte

Inclidic

• Blanchot
  • L’entretien a l’infini – The step not beyond
  • The Inifnite Conversation (early 1960s)
  • Exhilic movement in Blacnchot’s
  • Hebrew for desert is also the word for speech
• Heidegger 
  • Conversations on a Country Path

On the Way to Fragmentation

• Eirignis
• Le Pas au De La – cheminement – wasteland – city of fear
• Neutral relation to language gives way to gelasenheit
• Bringing language to language
• An avoidance of Heidegger – an experience of language 
  • The relation to language as fundamentally disruptive
• “The neutral the neutral how strangely this sounds for me…”
• Conversation on a Country Path
  • The willful character of representational thinking – ‘regions’ – geigen
  • “Truth needs man” –
  • Humankind for itself has no power over truth – and the later remains independent to it…
  • Truth according to these words can only come about as an independence from human kind – human kind lends itself to truth in its very powerlessness.
• Blanchot 
  • two people – guest and the host
  • wearyness of two people fearing that they may not be able to express themselves
• Fatigue
  • power of speech is interrupted – what is at work
    • fatigue / pain / affliction (neutral)
    • which experience does it belong to…?
  • the subject in the hold of the fatigue (host) 
    • supposition – Essays on Language – ferbrutung (daring supposition for which need heart courage)
    • suppposition for dialogue in blanchot – there should be an event that fragments the transcendental horizon
  • “let him admit this trace in chalk… only through writing – entering as in a circle through weariness”
  • deferral – for the last conversation – they are too tired to go on
  • one asks the other – how can the other disappear
    • “i don’t know what is to become of me…” – the host
    • the second expression of the guest – “what happened” – “something that does not concern me”
  • Not one or the other – ni l’in ni l’autre
  • Entretien – coming to language –
• A word has been spoken that forgets the other of the conversation
  • Addressing a third – the neutral / neutre of language
  • “Il” – the neutre / neutral in language
  • A third comes in – the conversation breaks between the two (a non-conversation)
  • The host is no longer prepared to ‘engage’ (engagement)
    • the one cannot assume, will not assume that the other will attend to a speaking in the neutral
  • Friendship
    • Can one become attached to a weary man only by reason of his weariness?
  • One seperates from the other – as an assumed act
    • The speech of eternity saying now now now
    • What he had wanted – a cold interruption – the eternal speaking drive stopping
  • Interruption – a pain a weariness – the cold force of interruption asset itself
    • The passage to a thought without a will
    • The infinite conversation
• The interruption – Levinas – the neutral presence of autri 
  • The occurence of writing from the neutral – Il – it is a matter of renouncing the force of discourse
  • A speech without reference to unity
• The non-concerning - 
  • As once in the sadness of a knowing night – now he is himself invoked by a simple change in the play of words…
  • Presentment / Releasement
• “A relation without relation that would be given to though without language” 
  • prelinguistic thought?
• The only law – is the law of discourse

Fragmentation and Return

• Interrupts these
• Radical hospitality
• Vivre cela qui ne concerne pas – To live what does not concern

• Difference in ethos between Heidegger / Blanchot
  • friendship – community of the others – les gens – community of the question (Derrida) – essay on Levinas.  the child inside of man…
  • a fairlure of the completion of the conversation earthly – usage.  a dissaster for a child..

Different relation (Blanchot) – the Other Language (Heidegger)

• J’ai peur – a fear that accumulates in language – Pas au Dela
• Think from language imposing questions about language 
  • Blanchot – cheminement
  • Heidegger –

Questions

• Question of Heidegger are call and response
• Questions for Blanchot are more insistent – Le Pas Au Dela - 
  • Am I with the ones with whom I will die?
  • Here is the voice of community
  • That Derrida should have been more careful

Toward a Philosophy of Technology

• Differentiations between ‘modern’ and ‘non-modern’ technology
• Traits of Modern Technology 
  • technology seems to develop
  • spread of modern technology is not impeded – we reach out to new techniques
  • the relationship between means and ends is circular
  • progress is a technological eros
• The wheel between the villages of the Chin dynasty
  • Tracks
  • Franco – Hitler – rail standards
• Kondratiev wave
  • The settling of the landscape

Two different approaches to history

• Linear (Whig) History – progressivist history
• Non-linear – fits and starts – cultural pessimism

Philosophers of Technology

• Albert Borgmann
• Nick Bostrom
• Bernhard Stiegler
• Bernhard Irrgang
• Hans Jonas 
  • advancement with watchdogs

Engineering Ethics Codes

• Canons (obligations) – first one is always company loyalty – as engineers were first military positions
• Civil engineering – demilitarised engineering
• ACM – national databank – Linden Johnson

Illich

• went underground Northern Italy to escape the Germans
• Chemist – PhD in Theology and Philosophy
• was being groomed to be secretary of state for the vatican
• Rector Catholic university in puerto rico - Illich on Puerto Rican migrants
• Birth control – Puerto Rican women – estrogen progesteron – Illich speaks out
• Walks up the spine of the Andes
  • discovers there’s a set of writings and communications created by latin american priests and parish scholars (spanish, portugese)
  • CIDOC - documentation center for publishing these documents
• Jerry Brown – current governor of california – went to the CIDOC center
• Paul VI gets pissed – tells Illich that he was an embarassment to the church
• Illich leaves and publically renounces priesthood
• Wolfgang Sachs
• Books
  • Illich in Conversation
  • Rivers North of the Future
  • In the vineyard of the text
• System – cybernetics – a comprehensive metaphor for the age of instrumentality 
  • hammer - sword – the tools – epoch
  • tools are gendered in vernacular culture 
    • the man cuts the bread on the forward stroke – the woman cuts the bread on the pull stroke
  • tools are already embedded in culture
  • dispality
• The good samaritan - 
  • The key moment for the person responding to the person in the ditch… it’s not that he’s following a command – that he’s moved in his innards… physical, somatic response to help others
  • Illich says we’ve lost the sensory somatic embededness of the teaching of the gospel

Jean Robert - Energy and the Mystery of Iniquity

• Auto-mobility – cars do not make us automobile – transit / transport (movement by mechanical means)
• “Speed” of transport
  • The speed of the car should include all the time you spend working to afford
  • If you include all these in your calculations – you should be
• Socialism on a bicycle – Chile
• Energy and the Mystery of Iniquity
• White bicycle program
• “arts of suffering instead of therapies”
• corruptio optimi pessima