The text below is a collection of thoughts and notes on the art of the "Stealing of Souls" which I wrote a few weeks ago for the manifesta7 catalog. At the same time it acts as the initial statement for the launch of the "Museum of the Stealing of Souls" which in a first version has opened on July 19th in Trento (Italy) hosted by manifesta7 curated by Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg.
1.
"We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. [...] A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss." This is not some abstract, mystical notion of life but a life, a specific yet impersonal, indefinite life discovered in the real singularity of events and virtuality of moments. A life is subjectless, neutral, and preceding all individuation and stratification, is present in all things, and thus always immanent to itself.
"The ‘possessive spectator’ [Laura Mulvey] describes is a fetishist who ‘wounds the film object in the process of love and fascination’ but also ‘reinvent(s) its relations of desire and discovery’ (p. 178). This is a ‘penetration’ and even an ‘emasculation’ of the film, producing ‘a fragmented, even feminized, aesthetic of cinema’ (pp. 179–80)." (Mary Ann Doane)
"My self and my own" is Etienne Balibar’s exploration of the conceptions of "my self" and "my own" in John Locke’s "Essay on Human Understanding". In a review for "Political Theory" Chris Pierson writes: "In a brilliant essay that ranges effortlessly over the poetry of Robert Browning, the Confessionsof St. Augustine, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Balibar identifies and explores an ambiguity in Locke’s conception of my self and my own."
Balibar begins his text as follows: "I cannot say if the expression “possessive individualism” was invented by MacPherson in his 1962 book, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, or if he took it from another source. What is sure, however, is that from that moment onwards it became an extraordinarily successful instrument of historical analysis and ethical judgment which largely escaped the original intentions of the author.
In his presentation at RT3 on January 11, Nicolas Bourriaud has been referring to a series of texts by Louis Althusser that are introducing the concept of "aleatory materialism". Written between 1982 and 1986 and published posthumous these short texts seem widely unkown today - at least outside of the french and italian (post-)marxist circles. Here are a few links to interesting sources:
Wal Suchting: Althusser"s Late Thinking About Materialism
http://www.generation-online.org/p/suchting_althusser.pdf
From the sarai newsletter: Raqs Media Collective (based at the Sarai Media Lab) opened an exhibition curated by them called “Building Sight” at the Watermans Arts Centre, London on the 29th of June. The exhibition features variable size installations with 9 video projections, slide projections, sound and photo prints. ‘Building Sight’ will remain on show till the 10th of September, 2007.
War, in the broadest sense, is a battle about the power to define and definitions, that are not carried out at the center of words but at their very margins. But what can words do, as soon as the state of war has become a rule and a normality worldwide?
A TO Z: THE PRECARIOUS ALPHABET OF WAR
Dictionary of war, a two-day performance event featuring artists, scientists, activists and theorists February 23 and 24 2007, starting at 5 pm and 2 pm Sophiensaele Berlin, Sophienstrasse 18 http://dictionaryofwar.org
If one principle could be seen to inform the opaque surface of what in the 1990s was called a "new economy" -- the shifts and changes, the dynamics and blockades, the emergencies and habit formations taking place within the realm of immaterial production -- it would certainly be: "Work together".
Facing the challenges of digital technologies, global communications, and networking environments, as well as the inherant ignorance of traditional systems towards these, 'working together' has emerged as an unsystematic mode of collective learning processes.
Slowly and almost unnoticeably, a new word came into vogue. At first sight it might seem the least significant common denominator for describing new modes of working together, yet "collaboration" has become one of the leading terms of an emergent contemporary political sensibility.
Etienne Balibar is professor in Paris X Nanterre and University of California, Irvine. He was invited to participate in the first edition of the Dictionary of War but unfortunately could not make it to Frankfurt. Instead he has sent us as his contribution an essay entitled: "Politics As War, War As Politics - Post-Clausewitzian Variations". It is the text of a public lecture he gave at the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Northwestern University, Evanston, on May 8, 2006.
The new war, post-modern war, permanent war -- almost every major military operation over the past 15 years has evoked a new debate about the new character of war. After 9-11 state of war has turned into a normality. Five years of global war have turned the world upside down, in a way that the extent of the ongoing changes cannot be fully conceived yet.
Here is a slightly extended version of the text Brian Holmes read on Sunday night, at the Boell Foundation in Berlin, for an event connected to Jordan Crandall's Under Fire program. Grabbed from nettime: http://www.kein.org/node/60
Today courtrooms are capitulating to television cameras, a tendency not much impeded by legal prohibitions against it. Things were different in America in the 1950s, when the medium of television became popularized. Even though the medium of live broadcast seemed made for covering court trials, instead television concentrated on broadcasting tribunal-like proceedings. Courtroom trials were reserved for another medium, cinema.
The spanish daily newspaper El Pais has published a review of the Archipelago conference last thursday and friday in CCCB in Barcelona.
La arquitectura de los estados de excepción
El CCCB reúne a filósofos, arquitectos y escritores para analizar la relación entre el poder y el territorio
CATALINA SERRA - Barcelona
EL PAÍS - 11-11-2005
Anselm Franke made available the full program of the Archipelago of Exception symposium from november 10 to 11, 2005, in CCCB Barcelona. Video recordings from the conference will be available here right after the event.
