Section I

Sexuality

• Studying rules duties and prohibitions of sexuality
• Sexual interdictions require truth telling about ones self
• Objections:
  • Sin and confession is not just related to sexuality – but sexuality is most important
  • Sexuality is complex – hidings, decipherings, secrecy, modesty
• Mortification of the flesh
• Max Weber: “What is the ascetic price of reason?”
• Foucault: “How have certain kinds of interdiction required certain kinds of knowledge about oneself?”
• So Foucault’s question is not about what we repress, but what epistemic leaps we must make about ourselves in order to renounce or assert anything?
• “The hermeneutics of technologies of the self in pagan and early Christian practice” are difficult…
  • as Christianity is interested in history of belief, not practice
  • hermeneutics of practice were not organised as textual hermeneutics were
  • hermeneutics of the self are inside culture, so hard to study/isolate/separate

Context of Study

• How do humans develop knowledge about themselves?
• Four types of overlapping technology – each with a matrix of practical reason (as contrasted with theoretical reason)
  • Technologies of Production – manipulation of things (SCIENCE)
  • Technologies of Sign Systems – use of signs, meanings, symbols (LINGUISTICS)
  • Technologies of Power – conduct of individuals, domination (POLITICS)
  • Technologies of the Self – transformative operations on bodies, souls, thoughts, ways of being, in the pursuit of happiness, purity, wisdom, etc. (PSYCHOLOGY)
• Interaction of these technologies, e.g.: Marx’s Capital – where techniques of production requires modification of individual conduct
• Governmentality: describes the contract between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self (e.g.: ‘madness’ studied in terms of the management that these rhetorics allow of people inside and outside asylums)

The Development of Technologies of the Self

• Hermeneutics of the self in Greco-Roman and Christianity
• epimelesthai sautou
  • to take care of yourself
  • the concern with self
  • to be concerned, to take care of yourself
• Philosophic traditions have lost the ‘take care of thyself’ and only concentrate on ‘know thyself’ – Greeks and Romans were a maxim
• The Greco-Romans thought that you had to deal with yourself before you could know yourself (consult the oracle, etc.). Examples
  • Socrates (c. 469 BC – 399 BC): an invitation to occupy yourself with yourself, occupy yourself with the city (polis)
  • Plato (424 BC – 347 BC): “wisdom, truth and the perfection of the soul”
  • Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – c. 395):  taking care of oneself as taking care of the soul, renouncing the heart and body – the “drachma within” – Christian asceticism:  ”know thyself”
  • Epicurus:  Letter to Menoeceus – knowing yourself as a task to be carried through life, towards salvation
  • Philo of Alexandria (20 BC – 50 AD):  Therapeutae a philosopher-people, Jewish sect, concern for oneself

Summary

• “Know yourself” vs. “Take care of yourself”
• Why has the former overtaken the later? 
  • Christianity: care of ourselves is immoral – selfish, escapism.  Self-renunciation and knowledge of self are paradoxically/simultaneously linked to salvation
  • Philosophy: From Descartes to Husserl, knowledge of the self (subject) takes importance as the first step of epistemology
• Inversion has taken place – that in antiquity you had to take care of yourself before you could know yourself, whereas now we think we need to know ourselves before we can take care of ourselves

Section II

Plato’s Alcibiades I

• Considered arch (principle, the span which supports the load) by neoplatonists of 400 and 500 AD.
• Taking care of oneself is its first principle:
  • How is the question introduced? 
    • dialect between politics and erotics – transitioning to care of the self in order to enter into the both politics and love
    • Socrates makes a pact with Alcibiades – to submit to him in a spiritual way
    • Taking care of oneself: The intersection of political ambition and philosophical love
  • Why should Alcibiades be concerned with himself?
    • epimelesthai sautou – an active political and erotic state – tending, prendre soins
    • the concern for the self is directed towards a defective pedagogy (not knowing what the Spartan and Persian princes know)
  • What is the self?
    • What is the self of which one has to take care
      • Auto – the same – identity
      • What is the plateau on which I shall find my identity?
      • Your soul is the principle activity of caring for the self
      • How must we take care of the soul?
    • What does that care consist in?
      • The soul cannot be known unless we look at the divine – as it is a self-similar entity
      • Political and behavioural action comes out of this contemplation of the soul / divine element
      • Being occupied with oneself and political activites are linked
• The early text sets out eternal problems:
  • 1st – relationships between ‘one’ and political activity
  • 2nd – oneself and pedagogy (the duty of the young man, or the duty of a whole life)
  • 3rd – concern for oneself and the knowledge of oneself
  • 4th – care of the self and philosophical love
• “This theme of taking care of oneself was not abstract advice but a widespread activity, a network of obligations and services to the soul.” – MF
• Oral cultures – rhetoric of the self
• Written culture – writing of the self (e.g.: Augustine’s Confessions)
• The writing of a (blog like!) letter from Marcus Aurelius’s of 144-45 A.D. to Fronto (bathing, eating, etc. – taking care of one’s self)

Section III

Themes:

• first, the relation between care for oneself and care for the political life
• second, the relation between taking care of the self and defective education
• third, the relation between taking care of oneself and knowing oneself

Listening as a method of self-care:

• On the Contemplative Life, Philo of Alexandria describes banquets of silence

For Plato – looking and listening to the self for the truth within.  The disappearance of the dialectical structure – when listening to others and listening to the self are juxtaposed.

For Seneca – through De Ira (On anger) – A study on the consequences and the control of anger.  ”For Seneca it isn’t a question of discovering truth in the subject but of remembering truth, recovering a truth which has been forgotten.”  This is an administrative care of the self.

Section IV

Stoic techniques of the self:

• Letters to friends and disclosure of self (external, outward)
• Examination of self and conscience (internal)
• There is also “askesis,” a disclosure of the secret:
  • Logoi is where the truth lies for the stoics – memorisation, conduct
  • subjectivisation of truth is the aim
  • we assimilate truth, we do not master it
  • “It is a set of practices by which one can acquire, assimilate, and transform truth into a permanent principle of action”
  • Exercises through medete (meditiation on problems that may arise so you are prepared, ready) and gymnasia (physical exercise to prepare you for battle, etc.)
• medete
  • premeditatio mallorum – an imaginary experience – akin to Murphy’s law or a risk assessment!   The Worst That Can Happen
• gymnasia
  • presenting yourself with a real experience – a practical challenge (e.g.: sexual abstinence, temptation)

Section V

Eras of time and space

• 19th obsessed with history – its essential mythological resources in the 2nd Principle of Thermodynamics (that over time, differences in temperature, pressure, and chemical potential equilibrate in an isolated physical system?  that nature is irreversible?)
• Now is the time of simultaneity – juxtaposition
• Structuralism tries to establish relations between instead of timelines connecting

• “Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.”
• Middle Ages – hierarchical and cosmological – supercelestial places / celestial / terrestial – Medieval space: The space of emplacement
• Galileo – constituted an infinite, open space where things were defined by their extension, a point in their infinitely possible set of trajectories
• Today – the ‘site’ – relations of proximity between points or elements (e.g.: data in computers, traffic, telephone lines, demography)

Desanctification of space (depriving it of its sacred character)

• Contemporary space has not been desanctified
• Galileo signaled a theoretical desanctification, but it is not a practical one
• The hidden presence of the sacred is at work, still delineating the spaces of public/private, leasure/work, private/public, family/social, etc.

Heterogenous Space

• Bachelard
  • psychological factors in the development of sciences
  • history of science as epistemological obstacle (unconscious structures and principles) and epistemological break (made famout through Althusser)
  • Koyre
• Space is no homogenous – we do not live inside a void populated by things
• We live inside a set of relations – one could describe via these relations, the sites of relaxation, rest, etc.
• Certain sites have the property of being in relation in a way that they impose doubt, make neutral or invert the relations that they designate.  There are two types of these:

Utopias and Heterotopias (sites that designate, mirror, or reflects its relations)

• Utopia: Unreal spaces
• Heterotopias:  Places where the other real sites are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted
• Define a spectrum between real spaces that cannot exist as concept (heterotopia), and conceptual spaces that cannot exist as real (utopia)
• A mirror is a joint experience – a placeless place (the real where it is not) and a real place, connected with all the space that surrounds it

Heterotopology – the systematic description or ‘reading’ of these heterotopic spaces

• 1st Principle – Cultures are all heterotopias
  • Crisis Heterotopias - primitive societies – places for adolescents, mensturating women, pregnant women
  • Deviation Heterotopias – replacing the primitive, crisis heterotopias are spaces where individuals who’s behavior is deviant are placed (prison, old age home)
• 2nd Principle – Heterotopias can shift functions
  • The Cemetery
    • connected to everyone
    • 18th Century – in the centre of the city – charnel house which were not individualised
    • when the secularisation came into being – more people wanted individual plots, to mark their attention
    • End of 18th Century – death as illness – the dead bring illness
    • 19th Century the dead move out to the suburbs, from the heart of the city to its edges
• 3rd Principle – these spaces can juxtapose in a single real place several places, normally incompatible
  • Theatres, stages, gardens, carpets – happy, universalizing heterotopia
• 4th Principle – Slices in time – heterochronies 
  • infinitely accumulating time – museums and libraries
    • 17th Century – museums and libraries were personal choice based
    • Contemporary museums and libraries – time never stops building up and topping its own summit
    • “the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.”
  • Time as festival – flowing opening
    • not eternal – absolutely temporal, chronicles, etc.
    • fairgrounds, markets, vacation villages
    • discovery of life (abolishes time) vs experience (rediscovery of time)
• 5th Principle – heterotopias are isolated and penetrable 
  • Not freely open – not “public”, but compulsory (prison) or subject to rites and rituals (church)
  • Motels – sex happens in a space that is absolutely sheltered, hidden but open to all
• 6th Principle – function to create illusion that exposes or creates real space
  • Unreal spaces that human life is partitioned (brothel)
  • An absolutely real space that is perfected (Jesuit colonies in S. America)

“The boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.”

“The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.”

Objects, places, and people have typically “messy” biographies that offer points of attachment for a wide range of sensory engagement. Archaeology’s two strengths, materiality and context, can productively expose significant ruptures in master narratives through archaeologies of archive that ask how objects come to be collected and displayed (or not) and at what cost.”

Imagine a beautifully designed museum where light, airy galleries enter into contrapuntal conversation with darker, more atmospheric niches. Imagine further that these spaces frame and give texture to thousands of objects1 collected from near and far, from long ago and yesterday. Now imagine that, intermingling with beautiful and intact, text-accompanied objects, there are hidden display cases, empty or half- filled with tragic and disintegrating objects, some smelly. The visible manifestation of declining funding? The aftermath of “looting” such as recently occurred at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad? No. The future of museums and archaeology? Hopefully.

Fred Wilson – artist who has used museum collections, juxtaposed in a certain way, to point out colonialist attitude and tropes.

Critique of ‘sight’ as dominant form of knowing – the “sense of reason”

[Aside: Tanizaki - a restaurant famous for its dining rooms illuminated by candlelight - electric lighting as a Westernising force that changing relations to custom and tradition.  "only in dim half-light is the true beauty of Japanese lacquerware revealed" - the things deprived of their agency through too much (Western) light.]

Georg Simmel writes powerfully on the politics of numbers: a “3,” for example, suggests the possibility of an interlocutor and exponentially more connective and disjunctive possibilities than does a binary

Seeing from below (instead of the militarised gaze of seeing from above): “But how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the “highest” techno- scientific visualizations (Haraway 1981:191)”

Object Logic

What do objects want from us?  Fetish, beauty, authenticity

Object rights

Acknowledges the mutuality of “nature” and “culture.”

Specific example of human remains as ‘object.’  What if we called “human remains” simply “humans.”

The right to a life history, agency, and home.

Life history: Example of the drum ancestor – a zoomorphised drum that sometimes contains the bones of ancestors.  Works of art accumulate scars and marks – part of their character and ‘multiple lives’ and biographies

Agency: “bored stone” – technology of multiple uses that is argued over – these objects select us to display them, not the other way around (i.e.: we don’t know what they are, but there is just something about them)

Home: the object’s right to integrate or reject its current surroundings.  Absences of objects is often as important as presence – e.g.: Elgin Marbles

• clockwork as a dominant metaphor for Leibniz / Newton – the big argument was not wether or not the universe was a clockwork, but whether or not god needed to intervene (Newton – yes; Leibniz – no)
• Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
  • The Earth says, “I spin beneath my pyramid of night, Which points into the heavens, dreaming delight, Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep; As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing, Under the shadow of his beauty lying, Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.”
  • Could only be written by someone with (Whitehead) ‘a definite geometrical diagram before his inward eye’
• Dostoevsky’s influence on Einstein – ‘experimental’ heroes willing to risk everything for knowledge
• Creativity, intution and chance:
  • William Blake – thought he was an antenna to god
  • Nealcles and the horse foam – throws his painter sponge on the painting and gets the right effect
  • Soto – valued what he found by pure chance
  • Cezanne – movement of the eye – “I could keep myself busy for months, without moving from one spot, just be leaning now to the right , now to the left”
  • Do we find the sculpture in the stone?
  • Babbage and the story of coming up with mechanical tables of calculation in a daze
• Dante’s disease – “The chief symptom is a presumptuousness which makes the patient suppose that he knows everything and so he affirms uncertain thingsas certain; what he approves is true and everything else is false. The result is that he cannot questinos, and insists that others should ask questions of him, but before a quation is well out he gives the wrong answer”
• Schiller’s rotting apples – the smell allowed him to write
• The input output myticism of creativity: We admire most that which brings much from nothing – i.e.: with fewer inputs we ascribe more to the individual. “The smaller the part played by the input and the bigger the part played by the individual as transducer, the more creative we regard the output. In the limit – when the input is zero, achieved only by the gods – we have creatio ex nihilo“

the most open organ the ear

spiegel interview

heideggers call from the SS

technology as having nothing to do with tools – the earth pulled out of its socket (seeing the earth from space)

accounting for heidegger’s guilt in taking the SA phone call: “He takes the phone in hand and, covering the mouthpiece, says to Speigel: the essential thing about technology is that man of himself cannot control it.”

the death of philosophy coincides with the ‘arrival’ of technology: “The prevalence of Ge-Stell assures that man is placed, gestellt, assigned tasks, and called to order by a power which is revealved in the nature of technoology and which he himself does not control”

local call

SuZ  = Sein und Zeit, 1927 = Being and Time

dial b for being

Heidegger as mega tool - Die Frage nach der Technik – The question after technology – presupposes the enframing of technology, Speigel’s ‘retooling’ of thought

phony – phone

The Conference Call

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

Samuel Webber – The Debts of Deconstruction – Culture Machine discussion

Derrida – The Post Card -

Discussion here in preparation for the taking up of the technologized call of the “call of the Other” and the call of the self (Dasein) in Heidegger

The deaf as posing a problem to Heideggarian orality of the call (in language, the word). Alexander Graham Bell struggling with the metaphysics of primary orality (his mother and wife were both deaf).

Guilt and the call of conscience – “Ecoute” – Heidegger and Freud.  Finitude – ‘you’ never measure up to your finitude.

“The Public School is developing a mode of collective self-education that could become very significant as the institutions freeze up in the security panic and the budget collapse. Building up this form of careful collaborative discourse, we can also start changing the other, looser or more formalized contexts in which we work. Although it is rather threatening and in no way easy to face, I see the economic crisis as a chance to spark changes that our society has been putting off for decades. We will try to measure both the depth of that inertia and the possibilities of the present, in a way that respects everybody’s real situation and their voice, while hopefully opening up new territories for alternative and oppositional practice.”

• Museums and Identity in History and Contemporaneity
• Geography and environmental psychology
• What is the significance of museum representations of place for expressions of cultural identity in european museums.  
  • Staying, moving, not-moving, not-staying
  • What are the teleological repercussions
• Objectives 
  • Interpellation – routes and roots
• Producers and consumers – curators / audience
• Lewis Chess Men: museum touch points – text (tone of pronouns, us/we), person profiles, videos
• Literature review: place, nationalisms, mabliities, identities
• Primary case studies – particular museum contexts: 3 clusters
• Secondary case studies – geographical areas
• Textual versus experiential analysis of exhibitions…
  • Media studies and user experience methodologies
  • Think Aloud Protocol
• Transitive experiences – in the video…

Ian Chambers

• How does art intervene in the contestation of normalized views of difference and domestication
• Changing forms of particiaption in the museum experience
• Art modify existing barriers and thresholds?
• Durham / Taussig
• Danilo Capasso: The MAC Museum at Erolano and the metro station-museum Stazione Municipio, Naples
• Postcolonial museums – ‘imperialism’ and the situatedness of museums within a postcolonial ‘mutlple modernities’
• Manifesta – a sort of ‘anti-museum’ – Manifesta 7 ironic installation “Museum of European Normality“
• Naming – Kunstaller, museums, galleries, curator (visual arts administrator), exhibition

Perla Innocenti

• European policy level
• Collaborations between libraries and museums
• Europeana / IFLA
• Think tank – April / May 2012

Mark Nash

• Artistic and curatorial reflection
• Migration – contemporary art
  • Isaac Julien Western Union Series
  • MateiBejenaru, Travelling Guide, 2005
  • Huang Yong Ping, Frolic, Barbican Art Gallery, 2007
  • Roman Vasseur, 500 Pounds of Common Earth
• The Roma – Call The Witness - ”the great and the good talking about – instead of the creative empowerment”
• Think Tank – 23rd of March
• Bergen Biennial – “A told work of art versus and executed work of art” – conceptual art + radio play + sound art.  Narration, sound art, archival materials.  Works that remain unrealised…

Other notes

• Interest in the ways that ‘user contributed’ exhibitions function vis a vis the materials available to them…
  • I.e.: There are user contributed shows that develop through an assumption about ‘user needs’ or ‘user awareness’ but what tools are they given to develop language, relations, etc.
• The online exhibition
  • Distributed / parallel exhibitions

- Wulf Herzogenrath, Hayward Gallery 1988 exhibition catalogue “Nam June Paik Video Works 1963-88″