#based on what's being said in the most popular post on the subject ive seen.

[pigeon-butch]

I certainly have my own concerns about the treatment of moo deng but um. well i think some of you may just be racist

[groundramon]

(in response to this: http://teamcapumon.tumblr.com/post/164668190058/me-likes-terra-and-jp-from-digimon-frontier)

@extremely-pearlmethirsty Idk how old this reply is but what you said is really interesting so i wanted to respond-

I think the fact that 1. she’s a villain and 2. the fandom is so split on her is a testament to both what you said and the fact that she’s not an objectively bad character.  Obviously all media is subjective anyways but when half of a fandom is saying one thing and half of a fandom is saying another thing, there’s clearly no consensus.  So at least in Terra’s case, saying “people hate this character I relate to so I must be bad” isn’t very fair bc the consensus is so split (having said that, JP is another story lmao I dont think very many people like him and....yeah i dont blame them)  I was honestly just shitposting but it was still a lil concerning.

Maybe I just haven’t seen any well-structured arguments since ive been mostly avoiding the fandom bc im not done with the series yet, but most of the arguments I’ve seen basically boil down to “she made a mistake based on faulty logic” and...yes?  That’s exactly the point?  She felt human because she MADE MISTAKES, the point of fictional characters is for them to NOT BE FLAWLESS.  Was her mistake particularly larger than many of the other characters?  Yes.  But the point was that she had a flaw, that she was naive and stupid and easily convinced to throw away her morals because of her upbringing.  That was the point.  And a characters’ flaws can annoy you to the point of hating them, for sure, and that’s not good.  But that doesn’t mean they’re an objectively bad character.  Like I really hate Marcus from Digimon Data Squad but he’s probably the best character there; he’s a well-rounded character with flaws and reasons for those flaws, but he just...still manages to get on my nerves.  But I acknowledge that that’s personal bias and not “ew wtf how can other people like this character??” (and honestly I dont trust the opinion of anyone who acts that way when it comes to interpretation of media, ESPECIALLY tv shows lol)

The other argument that I’ve seen is that she just wasn’t given enough time to affect the audience the same way she affected the titans, and I do kind of agree with that.  Unless you fell in love with her character, you’re not going to feel the same pain that the titans would feel when she betrays them, which you clearly /should/.  Hell I didnt even feel the same pain because I was rooting for Terra the entire time //SHOT// so I wish they gave her more episodes in season 2 to flesh that out, but other than that?  I haven’t really seen a well-structured argument against her.  And I dont really think “oh well she COULDVE been better” is a reason to hate her; disliking her yeah maybe, but not hating her.

I do question if things would be that different if Teen Titans aired now though.  It’d really depend on what kind of fandom Teen Titans had, I think.  A fun fact I’ve learned through my time staring at pictures/facts about Terra and crying bc i love her so much is that she’s the most hated character in Teen Titans Go.  Why?  For interfering with a ship (the same ship).  And yknow, Teen Titans Go is (sadly) airing now.  But my point is that the same character is hated by a completely different (younger) group of people for the same exact reason.  “We’ve made a lot of progress in progressiveness” my ass, but i digress

But if Teen Titans had a fanbase like Steven Universe’s...I really dont know?  I feel like characters like Lapis and Peridot are popular because ~aesthetic~ and fandom hype (Lapis moreso than Peridot tho; Peridot handled her redemption arc pretty well, but Lapis....eh her actual redemption was fine even tho it wasnt really an “arc”, but everything after that is a little lacking...but thats just my opinion and besides the point lmaO) but then there are characters like Bismuth that the fandom is substantially more split on despite being about as morally gray as Terra.  Lapis and Peridot also tend to be prioritized because of ships, whereas Bismuth doesn’t have any ships that I know of (besides a crackship I came up with once lol) so...  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ reasons for hating Bismuth also tend to boil down to “well she tried to kill Steven!!” yes....yes that was the point...I know some people stan her because “well she changed her mind afterwards”/”so did all his other friends” but the point is that she’s flawed, the point is that she made a mistake, the point is that she’s so passionate that she’s willing to kill someone she loves to save her planet - and THAT’S (part of) what I like about her.  I dont even see anyone hinting that they dislike Bismuth’s personality though, unlike Terra, so I really dont get the Bismuth hate at all - buuuut I digress, that’s another thing I could rant about in the future if I really wanted to but I wont for now.

I feel like the fanbase would be less split on Terra because Bismuth is still generally liked I believe, but there’d still be a vocal group of people who hate her IMO because shipping wars haven’t gotten any better.

Zuko I feel like was a better-developed but less lovable Terra because he had 40ish more episodes dedicated to his character arc.  It’d be hard to argue that Zuko��s arc wasn’t well-done because you’d basically have to say the entirety of ATLA was a bad show, and I dont think I’ve seen anyone even attempt to argue that.  Terra had a handful of episodes to her name - Zuko had an entire 60-episode series.  Sexism could still play a hand in it because it seems like a lot of people take an instant liking to Zuko like I did to Terra (which I think Zuko is a fine character but he never gripped me anymore than a character with his level of well-developed-ness normally would) but  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it would definitely be interesting to see Terra’s reception in a modern world, but I feel like sadly not that much has changed.

(Also side note: I will actually fight anyone who says Raven hated Terra.  I know people think they’re feuding because “they both like Beast Boy” but pro tip: Raven never expresses anything like that and clearly trusted Terra before she betrayed the team.  Also bruh do people realize you can like the same person as someone else without hating that other person....wild right?  Dont slander my girls like this)

[irinache]

Gilles Deleuze

was a French philosopher

Gilles Deleuze (French: [ʒil dəløz]; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus.[9] A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the "greatest philosophers".[10] His work has influenced a variety of disciplines across philosophy and art, including literary theory, post-structuralism and postmodernism.[11]

Life

Early life

Deleuze was born into a middle-class family in Paris and lived there for most of his life. His initial schooling was undertaken during World War II, during which time he attended the Lycée Carnot. He also spent a year in khâgne at the Lycée Henri IV. During the Nazi occupation of France, Deleuze's older brother, Georges, was arrested for his participation in the French Resistance, and died while in transit to a concentration camp.[12] In 1944, Deleuze went to study at the Sorbonne. His teachers there included several noted specialists in the history of philosophy, such as Georges Canguilhem, Jean Hyppolite, Ferdinand Alquié, and Maurice de Gandillac, and Deleuze's lifelong interest in the canonical figures of modern philosophy owed much to these teachers. In addition, Deleuze found the work of non-academic writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre attractive.[13]

Career

Deleuze passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1948, and taught at various lycées (Amiens, Orléans, Louis le Grand) until 1957, when he took up a position at the University of Paris. In 1953, he published his first monograph, Empiricism and Subjectivity, on David Hume. This monograph was based on his DES thesis (diplôme d'études supérieures (fr), roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) which was conducted under the direction of Hyppolite and Canguilhem.[14] From 1960 to 1964 he held a position at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. During this time he published the seminal Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and befriended Michel Foucault. From 1964 to 1969 he was a professor at the University of Lyon. In 1968 he published his two dissertations, Difference and Repetition (supervised by Gandillac) and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (supervised by Alquié).

In 1969 he was appointed to the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes/St. Denis, an experimental school organized to implement educational reform. This new university drew a number of talented scholars, including Foucault (who suggested Deleuze's hiring), and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Deleuze taught at Vincennes until his retirement in 1987.

Personal life

He married Denise Paul "Fanny" Grandjouan in 1956.

Deleuze himself found little to no interest in the composition of an autobiography. When once asked to talk about his life, he replied: "Academics' lives are seldom interesting."[15] Deleuze concludes his reply to this critic thus:

"What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? ... If I stick where I am, if I don't travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. ... Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments."

[16]

Like many of his contemporaries, including Sartre and Foucault, Deleuze was an atheist.[17][18]

Death

Deleuze, who had suffered from respiratory ailments from a young age,[19] developed tuberculosis in 1968 and underwent a thoracoplasty (lung removal).[20] He suffered increasingly severe respiratory symptoms for the rest of his life.[21] In the last years of his life, simple tasks such as handwriting required laborious effort. On November 4, 1995, he committed suicide, throwing himself from the window of his apartment.[22]

Prior to his death, Deleuze had announced his intention to write a book entitled La Grandeur de Marx (The Greatness of Marx), and left behind two chapters of an unfinished project entitled Ensembles and Multiplicities (these chapters have been published as the essays "Immanence: A Life" and "The Actual and the Virtual").[23]He is buried in the cemetery of the village of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.[24]

Philosophy

Deleuze's works fall into two groups: on one hand, monographs interpreting the work of other philosophers (Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Michel Foucault) and artists (Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Francis Bacon); on the other, eclectic philosophical tomes organized by concept (e.g., difference, sense, events, schizophrenia, cinema, philosophy). Regardless of topic, however, Deleuze consistently develops variations on similar ideas.[citation needed]

Metaphysics[

Deleuze's main philosophical project in the works he wrote prior to his collaborations with Guattari can be baldly summarized as an inversion of the traditional metaphysical relationship between identity and difference. Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that "X is different from Y" assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities (as in Plato's forms). To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference. Identities are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to difference, Deleuze argues, "given that there exist differences of nature between things of the same genus."[25] That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from differences. Apparent identities such as "X" are composed of endless series of differences, where "X" = "the difference between x and x'", and "x'" = "the difference between...", and so forth. Difference, in other words, goes all the way down. To confront reality honestly, Deleuze argues, we must grasp beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories, resemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain what he calls "difference in itself." "If philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it is only insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, according to what it is, in its difference from everything it is not, in other words, in its internal difference."[26]

Like Kant and Bergson, Deleuze considers traditional notions of space and time as unifying forms imposed by the subject. He therefore concludes that pure difference is non-spatio-temporal; it is an idea, what Deleuze calls "the virtual". (The coinage refers to Proust's definition of what is constant in both the past and the present: "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.")[27] While Deleuze's virtual ideas superficially resemble Plato's forms and Kant's ideas of pure reason, they are not originals or models, nor do they transcend possible experience; instead they are the conditions of actual experience, the internal difference in itself. "The concept they [the conditions] form is identical to its object."[28] A Deleuzean idea or concept of difference is therefore not a wraith-like abstraction of an experienced thing, it is a real system of differential relations that creates actual spaces, times, and sensations.[29]

Thus, Deleuze at times refers to his philosophy as a transcendental empiricism (empirisme transcendantal), alluding to Kant and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. In Kant's transcendental idealism, experience only makes sense when organized by forms of sensibility (namely, space, and time) and intellectual categories (such as causality). Assuming the content of these forms and categories to be qualities of the world as it exists independently of our perceptual access, according to Kant, spawns seductive but senseless metaphysical beliefs (for example, extending the concept of causality beyond possible experience results in unverifiable speculation about a first cause). Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior categories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking (see below, Epistemology).

Simultaneously, Deleuze claims that being is univocal, i.e., that all of its senses are affirmed in one voice. Deleuze borrows the doctrine of ontological univocity from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus. In medieval disputes over the nature of God, many eminent theologians and philosophers (such as Thomas Aquinas) held that when one says that "God is good", God's goodness is only analogous to human goodness. Scotus argued to the contrary that when one says that "God is good", the goodness in question is exactly the same sort of goodness that is meant when one says "Jane is good". That is, God only differs from us in degree, and properties such as goodness, power, reason, and so forth are univocally applied, regardless of whether one is talking about God, a person, or a flea.

Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference. "With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference. Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being."[30] Here Deleuze at once echoes and inverts Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one substance, God or Nature. For Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula "pluralism = monism".[31]

Difference and Repetition (1968) is Deleuze's most sustained and systematic attempt to work out the details of such a metaphysics, but his other works develop similar ideas. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), for example, reality is a play of forces; in Anti-Oedipus (1972), a "body without organs"; in What is Philosophy? (1991), a "plane of immanence" or "chaosmos".

Epistemology

Deleuze's unusual metaphysics entails an equally atypical epistemology, or what he calls a transformation of "the image of thought". According to Deleuze, the traditional image of thought, found in philosophers such as Aristotle, René Descartes, and Edmund Husserl, misconceives of thinking as a mostly unproblematic business. Truth may be hard to discover—it may require a life of pure theorizing, or rigorous computation, or systematic doubt—but thinking is able, at least in principle, to correctly grasp facts, forms, ideas, etc. It may be practically impossible to attain a God's-eye, neutral point of view, but that is the ideal to approximate: a disinterested pursuit that results in a determinate, fixed truth; an orderly extension of common sense. Deleuze rejects this view as papering over the metaphysical flux, instead claiming that genuine thinking is a violent confrontation with reality, an involuntary rupture of established categories. Truth changes what we think; it alters what we think is possible. By setting aside the assumption that thinking has a natural ability to recognize the truth, Deleuze says, we attain a "thought without image", a thought always determined by problems rather than solving them. "All this, however, presupposes codes or axioms which do not result by chance, but which do not have an intrinsic rationality either. It's just like theology: everything about it is quite rational if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation. Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift."[32]

Deleuze's peculiar readings of the history of philosophy stem from this unusual epistemological perspective. To read a philosopher is no longer to aim at finding a single, correct interpretation, but is instead to present a philosopher's attempt to grapple with the problematic nature of reality. "Philosophers introduce new concepts, they explain them, but they don't tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. [...] The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn't say but is nonetheless present in what he did say."[33]

Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Deleuze defines philosophy as the creation of concepts. For Deleuze, concepts are not identity conditions or propositions, but metaphysical constructions that define a range of thinking, such as Plato's ideas, Descartes's cogito, or Kant's doctrine of the faculties. A philosophical concept "posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created."[34] In Deleuze's view, then, philosophy more closely resembles practical or artistic production than it does an adjunct to a definitive scientific description of a pre-existing world (as in the tradition of John Locke or Willard Van Orman Quine).

In his later work (from roughly 1981 onward), Deleuze sharply distinguishes art, philosophy, and science as three distinct disciplines, each analyzing reality in different ways. While philosophy creates concepts, the arts create novel qualitative combinations of sensation and feeling (what Deleuze calls "percepts" and "affects"), and the sciences create quantitative theories based on fixed points of reference such as the speed of light or absolute zero (which Deleuze calls "functives"). According to Deleuze, none of these disciplines enjoy primacy over the others:[35] they are different ways of organizing the metaphysical flux, "separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another."[36] For example, Deleuze does not treat cinema as an art representing an external reality, but as an ontological practice that creates different ways of organizing movement and time.[37] Philosophy, science, and art are equally, and essentially, creative and practical. Hence, instead of asking traditional questions of identity such as "is it true?" or "what is it?", Deleuze proposes that inquiries should be functional or practical: "what does it do?" or "how does it work?"[38]

Values

In ethics and politics, Deleuze again echoes Spinoza, albeit in a sharply Nietzschean key. In a classical liberal model of society, morality begins from individuals, who bear abstract natural rights or duties set by themselves or a God. Following his rejection of any metaphysics based on identity, Deleuze criticizes the notion of an individual as an arresting or halting of differentiation (as the etymology of the word "individual" suggests). Guided by the naturalistic ethics of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze instead seeks to understand individuals and their moralities as products of the organization of pre-individual desires and powers. In the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari describe history as a congealing and regimentation of "desiring-production" (a concept combining features of Freudian drives and Marxist labor) into the modern individual (typically neurotic and repressed), the nation-state (a society of continuous control), and capitalism (an anarchy domesticated into infantilizing commodification). Deleuze, following Karl Marx, welcomes capitalism's destruction of traditional social hierarchies as liberating, but inveighs against its homogenization of all values to the aims of the market. In a 1990 Postscript on the Societies of Control, Deleuze claims that institutions and technologies introduced since World War II have moved social coercion and discipline from only physical enclosures (such as schools, factories, prisons, office buildings, etc.) into the lives of individuals considered as "masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks'." The mechanisms of modern "societies of control" will be continuous, following and tracking individuals throughout their existence via transaction records, mobile location tracking, and other personally identifiable information.[39]

But how does Deleuze square his pessimistic diagnoses with his ethical naturalism? Deleuze claims that standards of value are internal or immanent: to live well is to fully express one's power, to go to the limits of one's potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical, transcendent standards. Modern society still suppresses difference and alienates persons from what they can do. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, we must overturn established identities and so become all that we can become—though we cannot know what that is in advance. The pinnacle of Deleuzean practice, then, is creativity. "Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?"[40]

Deleuze's interpretations

Deleuze's studies of individual philosophers and artists are purposely heterodox. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example, Deleuze claims that Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is an attempt to rewrite Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781),[41] even though Nietzsche nowhere mentions the First Critique in the Genealogy, and the Genealogy's moral topics are far removed from the epistemological focus of Kant's book. Likewise, Deleuze claims that univocity is the organizing principle of Spinoza's philosophy, despite the total absence of the term from any of Spinoza's works. Deleuze once famously described his method of interpreting philosophers as "buggery (enculage)", as sneaking behind an author and producing an offspring which is recognizably his, yet also monstrous and different.[42]

The various monographs thus are not attempts to present what Nietzsche or Spinoza strictly intended, but re-stagings of their ideas in different and unexpected ways. Deleuze's peculiar readings aim to enact the creativity he believes is the acme of philosophical practice.[43] A parallel in painting Deleuze points to is Francis Bacon's Study after Velázquez—it is quite beside the point to say that Bacon "gets Velasquez wrong".[44] Similar considerations apply, in Deleuze's view, to his own uses of mathematical and scientific terms, pace critics such as Alan Sokal: "I'm not saying that Resnais and Prigogine, or Godard and Thom, are doing the same thing. I'm pointing out, rather, that there are remarkable similarities between scientific creators of functions and cinematic creators of images. And the same goes for philosophical concepts, since there are distinct concepts of these spaces."[45]

Reception

In the 1960s, Deleuze's portrayal of Nietzsche as a metaphysician of difference rather than a reactionary mystic contributed greatly to the plausibility and popularity of "left-wing Nietzscheanism" as an intellectual stance.[46] His books Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969) led Michel Foucault to declare that "one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian."[47] (Deleuze, for his part, said Foucault's comment was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid."[48]) In the 1970s, the Anti-Oedipus, written in a style by turns vulgar and esoteric,[49] offering a sweeping analysis of the family, language, capitalism, and history via eclectic borrowings from Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and dozens of other writers, was received as a theoretical embodiment of the anarchic spirit of May 1968. In 1994 and 1995, L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, an eight-hour series of interviews between Deleuze and Claire Parnet, aired on France's Arte Channel.[50]

In the 1980s and 1990s, almost all of Deleuze's books were translated into English. Deleuze's work is frequently cited in English-speaking academia (in 2007, e.g., he was the 11th most frequently cited author in English-speaking publications in the humanities, between Freud and Kant).[51] Like his contemporaries Foucault, Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, Deleuze's influence has been most strongly felt in North American humanities departments, particularly in literary theory, where Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are oft regarded as major statements of post-structuralism and postmodernism,[11] though neither Deleuze nor Guattari described their work in those terms. Likewise in the English-speaking academy, Deleuze's work is typically classified as continental philosophy.[52]

Deleuze has attracted critics as well. The following list is not exhaustive, and gives only the briefest of summaries.

Among French philosophers, Vincent Descombes argues that Deleuze's account of a difference that is not derived from identity (in Nietzsche and Philosophy) is incoherent, and that his analysis of history in Anti-Oedipus is 'utter idealism', criticizing reality for falling short of a non-existent ideal of schizophrenic becoming.[53]According to Pascal Engel, Deleuze's metaphilosophical approach makes it impossible to reasonably disagree with a philosophical system, and so destroys meaning, truth, and philosophy itself. Engel summarizes Deleuze's metaphilosophy thus: "When faced with a beautiful philosophical concept you should just sit back and admire it. You should not question it."[54] Alain Badiou claims that Deleuze's metaphysics only apparently embraces plurality and diversity, remaining at bottom monist. Badiou further argues that, in practical matters, Deleuze's monism entails an ascetic, aristocratic fatalism akin to ancient Stoicism.[55]

Other European philosophers have criticized Deleuze's theory of subjectivity. For example, Manfred Frank claims that Deleuze's theory of individuation as a process of bottomless differentiation fails to explain the unity of consciousness.[56] Slavoj Žižek claims that Deleuze's ontology oscillates between materialism and idealism,[57] and that the Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus ("arguably Deleuze's worst book"),[58] the "political" Deleuze under the "'bad' influence" of Guattari, ends up, despite protestations to the contrary, as "the ideologist of late capitalism".[59] Žižek also calls Deleuze to task for allegedly reducing the subject to "just another" substance and thereby failing to grasp the nothingness that, according to Lacan and Žižek, defines subjectivity. What remains worthwhile in Deleuze's oeuvre, Žižek finds, are precisely those concepts closest to Žižek's own ideas.[60]

English-speaking philosophers have also criticized aspects of Deleuze's work. Stanley Rosen objects to Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return.[61] Todd May argues that Deleuze's claim that difference is ontologically primary ultimately contradicts his embrace of immanence, i.e., his monism. However, May believes that Deleuze can discard the primacy-of-difference thesis, and accept a Wittgensteinian holism without significantly altering his practical philosophy.[62] Peter Hallward argues that Deleuze's insistence that being is necessarily creative and always-differentiating entails that his philosophy can offer no insight into, and is supremely indifferent to, the material, actual conditions of existence. Thus Hallward claims that Deleuze's thought is literally other-worldly, aiming only at a passive contemplation of the dissolution of all identity into the theophanic self-creation of nature.[63]

In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Deleuze of abusing mathematical and scientific terms, particularly by sliding between accepted technical meanings and his own idiosyncratic use of those terms in his works. Sokal and Bricmont state that they don't object to metaphorical reasoning, including with mathematical concepts, but mathematical and scientific terms are useful only insofar as they are precise. They give examples of mathematical concepts being "abused" by taking them out of their intended meaning, rendering the idea into normal language reduces it to truism or nonsense. In their opinion, Deleuze used mathematical concepts about which the typical reader might be not knowledgeable, and thus served to display erudition rather than enlightening the reader. Sokal and Bricmont state that they only deal with the "abuse" of mathematical and scientific concepts and explicitly suspend judgment about Deleuze's wider contributions.[64]

Bibliography

Single-authored

Empirisme et subjectivité (1953). Trans. Empiricism and Subjectivity (1991).

Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962). Trans. Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983).

La philosophie critique de Kant (1963). Trans. Kant's Critical Philosophy (1983).

Proust et les signes (1964, 2nd exp. ed. 1976). Trans. Proust and Signs (1973, 2nd exp. ed. 2000).

Nietzsche (1965). Trans. in Pure Immanence (2001).

Le Bergsonisme (1966). Trans. Bergsonism (1988).

Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (1967). Trans. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1989).

Différence et répétition (1968). Trans. Difference and Repetition (1994).

Spinoza et le problème de l'expression (1968). Trans. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990).

Logique du sens (1969). Trans. The Logic of Sense (1990).

Spinoza - Philosophie pratique (1970, 2nd ed. 1981). Trans. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988).

Dialogues (1977, 2nd exp. ed. 1996, with Claire Parnet). Trans. Dialogues II (1987, 2nd exp. ed. 2002).

'One Less Manifesto' (1978) in Superpositions (with Carmelo Bene).

Francis Bacon - Logique de la sensation (1981). Trans. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003).

Cinéma I: L'image-mouvement (1983). Trans. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986).

Cinéma II: L'image-temps (1985). Trans. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989).

Foucault (1986). Trans. Foucault (1988).

Le pli - Leibniz et le baroque (1988). Trans. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993).

Périclès et Verdi: La philosophie de Francois Châtelet (1988). Trans. in Dialogues II, revised ed. (2007).

Pourparlers (1990). Trans. Negotiations (1995).

Critique et clinique (1993). Trans. Essays Critical and Clinical (1997).

Pure Immanence (2001).

L'île déserte et autres textes (2002). Trans. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (2003).

Deux régimes de fous et autres textes (2004). Trans. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 (2006).

In collaboration with

Félix Guattari

Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L'Anti-Œdipe (1972). Trans. Anti-Oedipus (1977).

Kafka: Pour une Littérature Mineure (1975). Trans. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986).

Rhizome (1976). Trans., in revised form, in A Thousand Plateaus (1987)

Nomadology: The War Machine (1986). Trans. in A Thousand Plateaus (1987)

Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2. Mille Plateaux (1980). Trans. A Thousand Plateaus (1987).

Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (1991). Trans. What Is Philosophy? (1994).

"Part I: Deleuze and Guattari on Anti-Oedipus" of Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-77 (2009) Edited by Sylvere Lotringer. (pp.35-118)

In collaboration with

Michel Foucault

"Intellectuals and Power: A Discussion Between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault". TELOS 16 (Summer 1973). New York: Telos Press (Reprinted in L'île déserte et autres textes / Desert Islands and Other Texts, above.)

Documentary

L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, with Claire Parnet, produced by Pierre-André Boutang. Éditions Montparnasse.

[busaned-blog]

dude your tags on tht post abt hobi+jin not having any lines (+ the discrepancy in ppl's reaction to those awful distributions) is WHEW coldblooded but accurate. ive also seen it happen, ppl leaving bc they can't GET WORK in their own group, and beyond hating awful distributions for wht they are, theyre bad for group longevity esp w/jin whos getting his college degree, who i cld see walking away frm bts w/work+network options even outside of ent. industry. like, bight cherish wht u got rn, dang

Hello anon, thank you so much for your message! It’s nice to know some people actually read my tags I guess haha. I’m not gonna lie, at first when I read your message I was thinking of not replying… simply because we all know tumblr tags are messed up (especially on mobile) and I did not feel like people interpreting my response as hate towards Bangtan or to any of the members. But then I realized that for me in my heart I know my feelings about this whole situation are not based on hate towards either of those so I decided to respond anyways and I just hope that I will word everything correctly so that people reallize I am not a hater. It will be a long response, because as I said in my tags I have a lot of feelings about this, so I’m putting it under a read more :)

When I reblogged that post we’re talking about and put all those tags in, I was extremely angry. I can’t lie about that right now, because I was. Maybe it’s a petty response, but in a song that is 4 minutes and 34 seconds long you just cannot convince me there was no room for Hobi at all. That there was no room for him to get like four lines on his own or for Jin to have more than the two he did? Especially when some members take up like half the song? I just refuse to believe that I’m sorry… And especially to realize, if you look objectively, that the difference in ‘talent’, to put it as such, in Bangtan is not that big let’s be real. They are all extremely talented and no one is 1000 steps above the rest at all in my opinion.

I’ve been a fan since about July 2015, a little after the Dope era, so I have been around for four comebacks now (and a hell of a lot of other groups’ members leaving/groups disbanding) and I’ve said this before on twitter: I feel like the line distribution is getting worse in stead of better with Bangtan. Run was sort of okay for me, especially if you keep in mind the idea of main/lead vocals and sub-vocals, but after that it just got worse and worse imo. And apparently, judging by the response to Hobi having no lines in Spring Day and Jin having barely any solo lines in BST, people really don’t give a shit and want to disguise it under the ‘I love ot7 so let me reblog some posts complaining about the awful line distribution and be done with it’.

The outrage on my dash with the Hobi situation was pitiful, because (and maybe I follow the wrong people who knows) the only ones actually being mad were Hobi stans and some Jin/ot7 stans. The outrage for Jin was basically non existent and it still pisses me off till this day. And the biggest discourse was that people needed to just basically shut up and support Bangtan because otherwise, and wow guilt tripping much?, they would hurt Hobi in the process too. And I get that we all have our favorites, we all have our ranking of the members whatever, but how can you look at this situation and just not realize how damaging it could be in the long run? How damaging it could be for ot7. You don’t have to love and cry and yell about Hobi and Jin as much as you do your bias, but to stay mostly silent cause it doesn’t concern your fave? I just can’t relate…

I’m a Jimin stan, but that means to me I am realistic enough to realize I have nothing to worry about with him. That he will get his lines and his screentime and the attention from his fans. So why should I be blind towards the mistreatment of some of the others? Because I’m settled? Because Jimin is my bias so I have no worries? And I’m not trying to say people who don’t stan Hobi or Jin feel like this, but this is really how it comes across to me. And then everyone, and this annoys me the most, wants to hide behind one of two defenses, a) Bangtan love each other more than anything and they want to stay together forever so awul line distribution won’t break them up and b) Bangtan have a lot of creative control so they probably decided this was best for the song…

Which is funny, because in the same breath they want to oppose haters, which they should don’t get me wrong, by saying ‘don’t hate on *insert their bias here* because it’s not their fault, Big Hit makes the decisions not them’. Excuse me? But that is not how this works. You can’t want to claim they have full creative control and make the decisions themselves and then turn around and say it’s actually Big Hit. It’s either they make the decisions themselves and they are basically assholes for ignoring Hobi, and more specifically Jin in like every song, or they are all subjected to what Big Hit wants.

But to come to the actual point: whether people want to close their eyes to this situation or not, in the end this could be damaging for Bangtan. Do you really think Minzy from 2ne1 didn’t love her group and her members? Do you really believe that guy from Teen Top that wants to leave doesn’t love his group and his members? Do you really believe that someone like Minzy, to take her as an example, who was in one of the biggest girl groups in kpop, just casually decided to leave? Do you not think that she didn’t realize that if she left she will probably never have the income she had with 2ne1 again or that she most likely will never ever be as popular as she was when in the group? Yet she freaking decided to leave anyways, because as you said she got no work! And ofcourse she wanted some, even if that meant not living the live she did with 2ne1, but it would be at least some sort of a life. And this happens to idols all the time, and then they, shocking I know, leave… Awful line distribution, and awful equal promotion, will be the death of any group no matter how much they love each other and the fans or how successful they are.

And I just wish as a fandom we could collectively come together on these subjects a bit more. You don’t have to be a Hobi or Jin stan to be critical of Bangtan’s efforts and in this case their line distribution. And there is also nothing wrong with being a critical fan and trying to let them and Big Hit know that no fan is going to leave if they make everything a little bit more fair. I just don’t want it to come to Bangtan’s contract renewals in a few years and having one or two of them even contemplating leaving. As you said, Jin is graduating soon and many people in the industry have already said that he is a lovely person, easy to work with, funny, clever, hard working and on top of that a lot more multi-talented then people want to give him credit for. You really believe he has no chance of a career outside of Bangtan?

Let me say something positive though for once. If we move beyond the line distribution and take a look at the promo, Big Hit gives me a little bit of hope. 2016 has been a rather good year for all of them in my opinion. Yoongi had his mixtape, Jin had Law of the Jungle and some other variety shows, Tae had his acting, the Taejin OST (where they both proved even more that Bangtan’s line distribution is shit), some MC jobs for all of them on music shows, etc. I think that if you would write it down then their promotion seems to definitely be sort of equal, which gives me great hope that Big Hit will at least always try to promote them equally in that area. But it also seems to me they want them stuck in certain positions: Hobi being the dancer, Jin being the visual, Jungkook being the main vocalist etc. When they are so much more then that!

So what I’m trying to say is that I’m not trying to convince anyone that Hobi or Jin are going to want to leave over this whole thing, but please can we all for once as a fandom acknowledge Bangtan’s shortcomings and realize that if nothing changes (because this is not a one time thing with them), and if we don’t try to voice our concerns, it could come to a Minzy situation (or any other group member that has ever left their group due to disrespect basically). I just don’t want them in the future to break up or have some members leaving, and then have everyone cry their eyes out for a day when we could have done something about it now…

This became so much longer then I wanted to, and I probably didn’t even say everything I wanted to say, so I’m really sorry. And I mostly ranted about nothing you were talking about in your ask, but I needed to get this all of my chest. I always say this and I will say it again: I love Bangtan with all my heart, and I don’t plan on abandoning them anytime soon, but these comebacks just slowly become a little less enjoyable and I will keep hoping that next time will be better. That next time I won’t have to sit through the music video waiting for a glimpse of Hobi or Jin or anyone. I just want Bangtan to reach their full potential, because I really feel they haven’t yet, because I think they are 7 wonderful individuals who deserve nothing less.

[foodieworldmelbourne]

The Simpsons, doom metal, and the seven stages of grief: The story of Dr Colossus

By Matt Neal Posted April 21, 2018 06:08:40

Photo: A Simpsons-style depiction of Nathan 'Buddha' Johnston, drawn by Glenn Smith. (Supplied: Glenn Smith) Map: Portland 3305 Doom metal band Dr Colossus were on to something. When they formed in 2014 they had found a unique musical niche heavy rock songs about long-running animated TV series The Simpsons which would prove surprisingly popular. Over the next few years, Dr Colossus comprising long-time friends Jono Colliver (guitar) and Nathan Johnston (drums) built a large following by releasing EPs and singles, and toured Australia. When it came time to record an album, they launched a successful crowdfunding campaign that raised well above their target of $6,000. With new third member Mike Findlay on board, Dr Colossus recorded their debut album The Dank and readied themselves for a series of launches. But then Nathan died suddenly. He was 29. 'Why don't we make all the songs about The Simpsons?' Nathan "Buddha" Johnston grew up in the south-west Victorian town of Portland. As a youngster he was more likely to listen to Black Sabbath than The Beatles, and started playing drums in early high school. He met Jono Colliver by playing in high school rock band Emprica together, starting a decade-and-a-half-long friendship and musical partnership. What is "doom metal"?Doom metal is one of countless subgenres of heavy music. Sometimes also known as stoner rock, stoner metal, or sludge metal it is typically characterised by slow tempos and heavy riffs intended to conjure up a sense of doom or dread. Guitars are often tuned down lower than is typical for rock bands. So instead being in standard E tuning, they might be in standard B tuning, which is five steps lower.Black Sabbath is seen as the originator of doom metal. After high school, Jono moved to Melbourne and Nathan moved to Geelong but they continued to play together in bands such as Honeytrap and Kashmere Club (the latter band worked with The Living End's Chris Cheney at one stage). It was while on tour in Tasmania with Honeytrap in 2011 that the seeds of what would become Dr Colossus were planted. Jono and Nathan joked about starting a "slow and sludgey" doom metal band and naming it something "ridiculous and cliched [like] Colossal or Monolith", to which Jono suggested "Why don't we name the band after Dr Colossus from The Simpsons?". "Well, why don't we just make all the songs about The Simpsons?" Nathan replied. A crazy idea was born.

Photo: That makes two of us: Jono Colliver (left) and Nathan Johnston employed their humour, musicality, and love of The Simpsons to create doom-metal band Dr Colossus. (Supplied: Dr Colossus) 'Wait a minute, this is just good heavy music' Jono remembered thinking two things about this idea. One, "that it would be really funny" and two, "that it would never see the light of day". He said over the next couple of years the notion of a Simpsons-themed doom-metal band refused to dislodge itself from their minds, so they eventually took it seriously or at least as seriously as one can take a Simpsons-themed doom-metal band. They recorded an EP called IV, so named because the subject matter came from season four, which featured three somewhat thinly veiled songs paying homage to Jono and Nathan's favourite TV show. The EP tapped into their shared musical preferences and sense of humour, and proved surprisingly popular, not only with fans of The Simpsons, but also fans of doom-metal. "There [were a lot] of people who didn't even realise it was Simpsons-related and didn't realise it was a joke," Jono said. "People [who] liked it thought 'Oh, this is just good heavy music' and then some people were like 'The Simpsons' gags, that drew me in'." Another seven-inch single followed, which was more overt in its references with one track's title coming from a direct quote from the show Shut Up And Eat Your Pinecone. But things really took off when another Simpsons-themed metal band the Ned Flanders-worshipping Okilly Dokilly went viral in a massive way, accidentally dragging Dr Colossus into the spotlight too. "We'd been playing shows, releasing music, being a normal, busy band, and around that [time a] band from Phoenix, Arizona, arrived on the internet in meme form, which was a picture of this band all dressed up like Ned Flanders and they were a 'nedal' band which was a heavy metal band [singing songs] all based on Ned Flanderisms," Jono said.

Photo: US metal band Okilly Dokilly, in all their Ned Flanders-inspired splendour. (Supplied: Okilly Dokilly) "Online just gobbled it up. "These guys had not only taken this similar concept, they'd accumulated millions of followers online in the space of a week and picked up pretty much every major music press and web blog. "We were like 'Awww, that sucks'. We thought that was our only chance and they've nabbed it from us." But Jono and Nathan hit upon a smart way to cash in on Okilly Dokilly's sudden fame, using an unrecorded song Dr Colossus had been playing live called Stupid Sexy Flanders. "Okilly Dokilly came onto the scene [and] the internet kinda blew up on a Friday the next day we were out at the studio [with producer Nic Pallett] and I said to Nic 'Tomorrow can we record a song?', so we recorded the song, mixed it in a day, and put it online that night," he said. "I wrote a press release for it saying 'Dr Colossus have released this track Stupid Sexy Flanders but it's not directly based on Okilly Dokilly'. "We implied there were accusations I kind of just invented this feud that wasn't there. "Our press release was saying 'there's no feud it just happens to be a song we released', which was all true." The Australian online music press lapped it up and began spreading the word about Dr Colossus. "Okilly Dokilly turned a lot of people on to us inadvertently," Jono said. "People who loved the idea of a metal band based on episodes of The Simpsons, they all clicked on those links to check out Okilly Dokilly, but I think they stuck around with us because we were actually creating a body of work at the time and we were playing shows we were a real band that I'd like to think you could have longevity with, and listenability beyond the gag. "That's no criticism of Okilly Dokilly because they were masters of what they did [but] their focus just wasn't as heavily on the music as we were, but yeah, it worked amazingly well it amassed a ton of listeners for us." Tragedy strikes This accidental burst in popularity put them in good stead to record their debut album. Jono and Nathan added a third member, bass player Mike Findlay, and started a crowdfunding campaign that easily eclipsed its target.

Photo: Dr Colossus as a three-piece, just prior to Johnston's death: Mike Findlay (left), Jono Colliver and Nathan Johnston. (Supplied: Dr Colossus) The resulting album, The Dank, attracted positive reviews and interest from a record label in Europe. And then, just as they were readying more gigs to launch the record and mailing out the rewards for the crowdfunding campaign, the unthinkable happened. Nathan died in his sleep, most likely from an aneurysm. He was about five months short of turning 30 and two months away from sharing his first wedding anniversary with his high school sweetheart and best friend Kate. Dr Colossus had played their final gig just days earlier at Cherry Bar in Melbourne. Nathan was remembered as a big man with a big heart who threw himself into his passions, whether it be motorcycles or music. Friends and fans flooded Dr Colossus' Facebook page with messages of disbelief and condolences, as well as sharing stories about their fond memories of Nathan. Jono, understandably, was devastated. "I was [thinking] the only way he really could die is in a fiery motorbike crash, but that didn't really make sense [because] he was at home and he was crook [so] I didn't think he'd be riding his motorbike, but for some reason that was the only thing in my mind that would have ever killed him exploding in a ball of flames on his motorbike," Jono said. "I was in disbelief. "I rang his partner Kate and I kinda knew as soon as her friend answered the phone the disbelief turned into instant and total agony. "The penny dropped that he had been feeling a bit ill and this reality just smashed me in the face. "I was in the process of posting out [album] orders so when Nathan passed away my whole house was filled with this record [staring] me in the face every day, illustrating this absence of him, of him not being able to share the record not being able to hear what people say about the record. "The timing of it was atrocious, no matter how you look at it. "He was far too young." A celebration of Nathan When a band loses a member, there is no rule book on what to do next. Amid the usual maelstrom of feelings that follow a death, Jono and bandmate Mike Findlay struggled with the sense there was "some unfinished business with Dr Colossus that Nath would have wanted to be finished". Eventually they called in one of Nathan's longtime friends and fellow Portland native Josh Eales to take the place behind the kit, as well as Jono's brother Joel as an extra guitarist and for moral support, with the idea of playing some tribute shows to honour Nathan's memory.

Photo: Get with the times, Moe: The new four-piece line-up of Dr Colossus will pay tribute to Johnston at two upcoming gigs. (Supplied: Dr Colossus) "We're all playing with Nath in our hearts and minds and we can feel him in the songs and the way those songs move," Jono said. "The main reason for doing it is we feel like we should it feels like it's a shame to let any opportunity for celebration in these situations to pass you by. "I just hope it will connect everyone around him more." He said the rehearsals had been going well and they hoped the tribute shows would be the start of a new chapter for Dr Colossus. "It feels healthy and healing to be doing it," Jono said. "It's a nice excuse for us, particularly Mike and I to be busy on a project that's so rich with memory that we can reminisce about and be close to those things that Nath did. "It's going to be a different band naturally, but that's cool, that's fine, that's good Nath will always be an absentee member." The "Dr Colossus Honour Nathan Johnston" gigs will take place at Cherry Bar in Melbourne on April 28 and the Barwon Club in Geelong on June 8. All profits will go to Edgar's Mission, an animal rescue charity that was close to Nathan's heart. Topics:music,arts-and-entertainment,music-industry,rock,death,community-and-society,grief,television,portland-3305,warrnambool-3280,melbourne-3000,geelong-3220 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-21/simpsons-band-dr-colossus-death-tribute/9670186

[makingscipub]

Biosocial: A brief conceptual history

I have recently come across the word ‘biosocial’ in various social science debates about epigenetics and other advances in the life- and bio-sciences. A chapter in a book on ‘social epigenetics’ (and the ‘biosocial’) says for example: “Epigenetics has considerable potential to transform social science by embedding mutually regulative reciprocal connections between biological and social processes within the human activities it studies.”

So I thought I’d do a bit of conceptual digging, just to see where the term comes from and why it might have become so popular. It turns out to be older than I thought.

A brief conceptual history

The Oxford English Dictionary online dates the word back to 1893 (Merriam Webster to 1892). After indicating that it is chiefly used in the social sciences, the OED gives the following definition: “Of, relating to, or involving the interaction of biological and social factors” – so far so uncontroversial. It then provides the first example of its use in context:

1893   F. C. French tr. E. DeRoberty La Recherche de l’Unité in Philos. Rev. 2 v. 602   Governed by the psychologic or bio-social law of the identity of absolute contraries, the supreme illusion lead us to take two subjective aspects of the same reality for two different objective realities.

This extract is, it seems, from a book review of La Recherche de l’Unité by the Russian sociologist Eugène de Roberty de la Cerda. I had a brief peak at the review and smiled when the reviewer talks about “a harsh and crabbed jangle of words”. I had the same impression. Another sentence was of more interest though, as it made reference to “[m]odern experimental psychology based on biology and sociology”. This didn’t surprise me, as the turn of the century was marked by almost continuous interactions between emerging disciplines.

The OED goes on to cite a few more uses of ‘biosocial’:

1894   J. Izoulet La Cité Moderne i. i. 1 (title)    Livre Premier. Exposé de notre hypothèse bio-sociale.

1895   Monist 5 iv. 604   The guiding thought of his [sc. Izoulet’s] work is to trace psychology and morals to biological conditions, to found a psychology and system of ethics which shall be ‘bio-social’.

According to French Wikipedia, Jean Bernard Joachim Izoulet was professor of ‘social philosophy’. His chair in that subject was created at the Collège the France in 1897 ‘against Émile Durkheim’ (interested people could do a bit more digging here).

The next entry in the OED refers to social psychology:

1927   L. L. Bernard Introd. Social Psychol. i. v. 79   The physico-social and bio-social environments are intimately connected with human behavior.

Then we jump into more modern times and the beginnings of biosocial anthropology, discussions about evolution (which were beginning in ‘sociobiology’) and so on:

1975   L. Leibowitz in R. Reiter Toward Anthropol. Women 22   Anthropologists and sociologists have picked up on these views and tied them to renewed investigations of biosocial evolution.

Following various clues on Google, it seems that the term ‘biosocial’ was fashionable for a while (see image above), especially in psychology, with a peak in the 1950s and more sustained interest from the 1970s to 1990s. Overall, the term seems to have quite long roots in social, behavioural, evolutionary and clinical psychology (as well as criminology, anthropology, and so on). It is sometimes used in juxtaposition with ‘biophysical’. One book refers to William James as an early exponent of a biosocial approach in psychology.

The biosocial turn in STS

This, albeit extremely superficial, conceptual history was interesting to me, as I had only recently become aware of the term when reading contributions to Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields.

In his book Nature, Culture, and Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Life (2015), the anthropologist Gísli Pálsson devotes a chapter to ‘The biosocial turn’. Here the early French anthropologist (nephew and disciple of Durkheim) Marcel Mauss is mentioned as using an early precursor of the concept. He is said to have used the phrase “biologico-sociological” in his essay Techniques du Corps (Techniques of the Body) published in 1934 – although I can’t find it in the original French text (in the English translation of 1973 it appears on p. 86). I assume that the concept relates to Mauss’s theory of the ‘total human being’ or ‘l’homme total’ (as a physiological/biological, social and psychological being) (posited in contradistinction to some aspects of Durkheim’s sociology).

Pálsson goes on to describe the history of the term ‘biosocial’, which is also summarised more briefly in the editorial introduction to one of the most recent contributions to the ‘biosocial turn’ in STS, namely The Biosocial: Sociological themes and issues, a collection edited by Maurizio Meloni, Simon Williams and Paul Martin (2016). They retell what seems to be the canonical story of the term’s provenance: “…when the Eugenics Quarterly, organ of the American Eugenics Society, changed its name in 1969, it became renamed Social Biology (today Biodemography and Social Biology). Three years later, in 1972, the American Eugenics Society was renamed the Society for the Study of Social Biology. In parallel, and even more significantly given the choice of our title, The Eugenics Review, organ of the Galton foundation, ceased its publication in 1968 only to be resuscitated in 1969 as the Journal of Biosocial Science. So, labels like ‘social biology’ and ‘biosocial’, which we use in our title, are not free of historical connotations.” This is certainly true!

The editors of The Biosocial volume say that “this novel biosocial approach … challenges the reductionisms of sociobiology and cultural constructionism alike (dissolving the pole of nurture into nature and vice versa, respectively), and puts forward an integration of ‘the social and the biological … ontogeny and phylogeny, organism and context, being and becoming’ (Ingold and Palsson, 2013: 243)”. They also talk about “the continuing persistence of older deterministic views” which they want to challenge.

Conclusion

There seems to be a ‘biosocial turn’ in STS in response to developments in epigenetics and neuroscience. Here ‘biosocial’ is used to reframe “biology/society debates within the sociological disciplines”. However, as we have seen, there was a long tradition of exchanges between biology, physiology, sociology and psychology, a tradition that can, I think, not easily be reduced to reductionism, determinism and two supposedly discrete and insulated ‘poles’.

If one had time, it might be quite rewarding to look more closely at the history of the term ‘biosocial’ in sociology, psychology, biology and other related disciplines. One might want to look again at early works by Izoulet, James and Mauss for example.

Most importantly though, it might be wise to avoid creating straw men or straw persons (or even straw walls or divisions), such as determinism and reductionism. In a recent blog post, the virologist and blogger Stephen Curry said: “I’ll confess to a certain amount of reductionism but that’s an investigative necessity, not a crime.” This might be something to keep in mind when writing the history of the term biosocial.

  Image: Google Ngram viewer

The post Biosocial: A brief conceptual history appeared first on Making Science Public.

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[minusculetinyworld-blog]

Rewriting the Book - Sven Lütticken

It was probably not necessary to devote a whole volume to such an announcement, but I had to bow to public opinion, which wants volumes.

Paul Chan reading from Charles Fourier’s ‘Advice to the Civilized About the Coming Social Metamorphosis’ (1830), as recorded in My Own Private Alexandria[i]

I have one word for you Bradbury: Kindles.

From an amazon.com customer review of Fahrenheit 451[ii]

While the art market is still dependent on unique objects and on ‘limited editions’, the individual work of art is more than ever an iteration in a series of repetitions, or rather of operations that involve digital modes of circulation-as- production directly or indirectly. A number of current critical buzzwords can serve as indices of this fundamental change in the nature of the artwork. Take transitivity: David Joselit has recalled the Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘transitive’ as ‘expressing an action which passes over to an object,’ adding that ‘I can think of no better term to capture the status of objects within net- works—which are defined by their circulation from place to place and their subsequent translation into new con- texts—than this notion of passage’.[iii] Hito Steyerl’s term circulationism, as our digital version of productivism, makes the political aspects of our constant re-performing of digital images explicit, while Joselit focuses on forms of painting that reflect (on) this condition in non-digital materials.[iv] Yet which materials can still be said to be intrinsically analogue? Rubrics such as post-Internet art and the New Aesthetic emphasise that works executed in all kinds of media and materials are informed by a digital logic of production-cum- circulation: from objects that come out of a 3D printer to performances.

It is perhaps not surprising that, at this juncture, a type of cultural artefact whose status has been thrown into a much more acute crisis by digitisation should become the focus of attention in contemporary artistic practice. The artwork becomes an exploded book. At the far edge of the Gutenberg Galaxy, Paul Chan’s work in particular constantly revisits elements of the culture of the book— publishing, typography, the book’s material and immaterial aspects. Chan’s 2012–13 installation Volumes [fig. 1] reduces books to their covers, and turns those covers into pictorial supports. Chan has gutted the volumes, mounted them on frames, and painted on their surface. The real composition, however, is not that of any given individual ‘Volume’, but of the ensemble. Furthermore, Volumes itself has to be seen as part of a wider constellation that includes Chan’s ‘font pieces’, as well as his ongoing project, Badlands Unlimited.

To be sure, they do not have the same status: Volumes is an art installation in a collection in Basel, whereas Badlands Unlimited is a publishing company. Not all of Chan’s culturally significant activities are easily subsumed under the notion of ‘artistic oeuvre’. Much has been said and written, by Chan himself and by others, about the relation between his ‘activist’ and his ‘artistic’ activities; rather than try to forge one integrated aesthetico-activist practice, as some artists attempted to do in the 1960s and 1970s, Chan opts for differentiation.[v] This does not mean that his activities are compartmentalised in rigidly distinct yet overlapping categories; instead, there is a continuum composed of categorical shifts. To isolate Volumes, or to discuss the piece only in conjunction with other certified artworks by Chan, would be a fatal misunderstanding and misrepresentation of his practice, as would be isolating Chan’s book and font works from other contemporary interventions in the crisis and reinvention of the book.

1. Paul Chan’s Book Club

There is more to Volumes than meets the eye, and what meets the eye is already considerable. One is confronted with a three-dimensional patchwork grid of mounted book covers in various sizes, mostly largish, with a bewildering variety of titles. The flattened covers have been tilted ninety degrees, so we are presented with vertical rectangles—like traditional book pages, in fact. Many of these books presumably had dust jackets, but all that remains now are the covers themselves, often with just the title on a monochrome surface. Subjects range from artists (Antonio Canova, William Wegman) and popular culture (The Art of Walt Disney, The MGM Story) to the likes of A Guide to Microwave Cooking and The Dow Jones-Irwin Guide to Personal Financial Planning (Second Edition). As one peruses the ex-books, some motifs emerge—cooking, business, art—but it is hard to say what meaning one should attribute to this, if any. But before even starting to look at individual books and combinations thereof, one takes in the whole, which may strike one as a materialised Google Images search. The Volumes in their loose grid are like JPEGs that made the leap into our lumbersome, cumber- some three-dimensional world. In fact, while Volumes may appear at first to be an almost reassuring example of gallery-based contemporary art—as opposed to digital-born ‘new media art’—the piece is in fact thoroughly informed by digitisation.

Volumes comes at a moment when the book is clearly in crisis, when the Gutenberg era is coming to an end. The crucial importance of print and of the book in shaping the modern world has been noted by a wide variety of authors— from Heinrich Heine’s and Karl Marx’s remarks on the key role played by the printing press in the Reformation; to Marshall McLuhan’s sweeping statements on ‘typographic man’ and modern rationalism and industrialism; to Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘print capitalism’ and the importance of ‘imagined communities’ enabled by the press in the formation of the modern nation state; to Régis Debray’s take on ‘print socialism’, focusing on the emergence of socialist thought courtesy of that same technology and its dissemination.[vi] Many of the selections in Volumes hardly live up to the book’s historical role, representing instead an overproduction that is itself a symptom of crisis rather than a sign of health. In a context marked by both inflationary book production and an increasing move to digital formats (especially e-books), the piece might strike one as melancholy—and, indeed, as an aesthetic sublimation of the Google Books scanning operation.

As such, the installation also invokes an urban myth that ‘apparently, somewhere at Google headquarters there is a wall featuring the destroyed covers and spines of many of those books that have made their way into the Google database’.[vii] In fact, according to the ‘origin myth’ of Volumes, the piece stemmed from an altercation between two visitors at the 2010 New York Art Book Fair, who got into a fight over whether Badlands—which publishes e-books as well as print—was ‘destroying books’.[viii] With Volumes, Chan took the accusation literally, though his destruction of these books is also a rescue of sorts. It is just as well that Chan turned Guinness World Records 2007 into art, as it is just about the only use that such an instantly obsolete sub-book has, apart from being pulped. Good luck selling your second-hand copy—through, presumably, someone did manage to flog theirs to Chan. This is not to say, however, that Volumes is ultimately a sombre monument of mourning. Quite the contrary, in fact.

The book has become a privileged object in contemporary art. In a series of pamphlets published by castillo/corrales called ‘The Social Life of the Book’, Oscar Tuazon has compared the status of the book today with that of painting after the invention of photography, arguing that the book ‘finally has to stand on its own, autonomous and abject, just a thing. Those volumes of poetry, unread and beautiful, flagrantly, offensively useless, narcissistic and perverse, onanistic, queer—that is what a book wants to be. Autonomous and indifferent, an abstract book’.[ix] Tuazon’s phrasing is not without resonance in the context of Volumes; that project would indeed seem to be a case of an artist turning existing volumes into ‘autonomous and indifferent’, ‘abstract’ books. One could also think of Richard Prince’s collecting of books, and the integration of this collecting into his art making. The comparison with Volumes is instructive.

In Prince’s series Untitled (Originals) (2007–) and American English (2005–), the focus is on books as objects and images—as image-objects. The Originals show pulp paperbacks next to the ‘original’ cover painting, whereas American English is a series of works combining US and UK editions of the same book. Most of the books in this latter series count as literature, but Prince’s selection is of such a nature that this distinction between popular and high culture, which appears clear-cut at first, ultimately collapses. Prince’s 2011 exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France contained a pulp-looking ‘Original’ for Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveller (1960), and a ‘literary’ Olympia Press as well as a ‘US pulp’ cover for Burroughs’ first novel Junkie (1953). But this blurring of boundaries is to some extent counteracted by the erection of class distinctions between the books themselves, some of which are treasured as fetish-objects  while others are integrated into the American English pieces. To be sure, one might say that all these books are now useless and ‘queer’—not intended to be used as books. Prince’s assemblage works take this process a step further than those books from his collection that he keeps, that he does not reprocess and circulate.

Prince is not above including forgeries—a small ‘Reading Room’ at the BnF contained an assemblage with hundreds of pulp books ‘authored’ by Prince’s alter ego Fulton Ryder. Fulton Ryder is also the name of Prince’s website/web shop, which sells art as well as books.[x] Whereas the ‘publications’ section offers the artist’s own catalogues and artists books (as well as catalogues by other artists to which he contributed), the ‘books’ rubric offers a selection of books from his collection on a variety of characteristic subjects (art, counterculture, sex). Rare books (usually marked ‘NFS’) can be found under ‘objects’, while works from the Originals series are under ‘art’. What is characteristic of all of these iterations of the book in

Prince’s practice is an affective or libidinal investment in the ‘original’, whether it is cheap or expensive, pulp paperback or serious hardback. The books are turned into ‘onanistic’ objects precisely because of this investment. With Volumes, on the other hand, they are objectified insofar as they are quasi-exchangeable. Yes, obscure and unstated criteria appear to have guided the selection process, but the process might still have resulted in a different selection.

To the covers of Volumes, Chan has added compos- itional elements: painted rectangles that are mostly black, white, or bluish grey. While their placement on the covers at times evokes moments from the history of abstract painting, from Kazimir Malevich to Hans Hofmann, many of these rectangles are not empty ‘blanks’ (to use a Warholian term) but rather little landscape paintings, specifically black or grey evocations of mountains that unmistakably reference Chinese rather than Western landscape painting. Possibly it is a little in-joke by Chan that Volumes includes the cover of an art book on Marlene Tseng Yu’s Forces of Nature series—Tseng Yu being a Chinese-American artist known for large-scale paintings that blend elements from Chinese painting traditions with Abstract Expressionism.

The montage of the book covers and the ‘landscapes’ with their connotations of Chinese landscape painting, and the remediation of such motifs in Chinese woodblock prints, suggests opening up the history of print: there is, in fact, a longer and substantially different history of printing in China and Korea, which encompasses not just woodblock printing but also movable type. There has never been one single ‘print culture’. For the West, to be sure, Debray’s characterisation of the ‘age of reason and of the book, of the newspaper and political party’ is apt: ‘The poet or artist emerges as guarantor of truth, invention flourishes amid an abundance of written references; the image is subordinate to the text’.[xi] McLuhan would add that the book in fact privileges the visual, the sense of sight, and that the printed book and Renaissance perspective are compatible ‘inventions’, positing a single observer, a reasoning individual. Furthermore, according to McLuhan, during the nineteenth century the book was already under threat by the news- paper, which with its simultaneous montage provided a less linear and more ‘oral’ form of print. Modernist poetry and literature picked up on this and transformed the book into a polyphonic, typographic ensemble.[xii]

Clearly, the history of the book is fractured and manifold, and sweeping claims equating one technology or medium with a specific cultural formation should be distrusted. Catlike, the book may have far more than one social life. The interest among contemporary artists, designers, theorists, and publishers in ‘the social life of the book’ is indicative of the need to go beyond ‘will the e-book kill the paper book?’ debates and reconceptualise the book as a social assemblage. In today’s small-scale publishing and distribution ventures, including Badlands, the lines between writer, editor, publisher, and reader are blurred. And it is not only books, of course, but also magazines and various other types of publication, such as the Occupied Wall Street Journal—for which Chan designed a poster in 2011—and several cheaply produced free zines that emerged in the wake of OWS.[xiii] Just like Volumes, Badlands gives books an afterlife: Saddam Hussein’s On Democracy (2012), for instance, which thanks to Badlands is now available in English and can take its rightful place on the bookshelf next to Sarah Palin’s Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas (2013). Naturally, the latter also comes in a Kindle edition.

This is a very different outfit than Prince’s Fulton Ryder site, which reprocesses old paper volumes. With Badlands, Chan and his associates are developing new ways of conceiving and ‘situating’ books, creating new social- technological assemblages. Ultimately, what is crucial is precisely the dialogue—the dialectic—between these and other projects, which mutually critique and complement each other. For Chan, the book is a problematic and mutable thing; and ‘a thing is not a thing but an assembly of relations’.[xiv] Such an assembly of relations exists through forms of performance that may be more or less normative, more or less normalised: a book can be performed by reading it individually, discussing it collectively, scanning it electronically, or tearing it apart and painting over the cover. If the book is no longer a physical book but a digital file, then that file has to be activated—performed—through the use of some kind of software in order to turn the code into legible text.[xv] This kind of data performance differs from that of a physical book in that the source can be altered with relative ease. Files can always be ripped and manipulated; and in contrast to Chan’s literal ripping of the Volumes books, this seems a completely normal (rather than vaguely barbaric) act. In the process, the distinction between con- sumers and producers becomes blurred—which the horrible term ‘prosumer’ tries to articulate.

Faced with a post-human plenitude of data, the prosumer no longer produces for or consumes as a member of an abstract ‘general public’. Instead, he or she has be- come a networked performer, engaging in the production, distribution, and reception of books as social entities. This shift is exemplified by, for instance, the Publication Studio initiative:

We attend to the social life of the book. Publication Studio is a laboratory for publication in its fullest sense—not just the production of books, but the production of a public. This public, which is more than a market, is created through physical production, digital circulation, and social gathering. Together these construct a space of conversation, a public space, which beckons a public into being.[xvi]

In another approach, you can hire an expert to help you organise a ‘Book Sprint’ that will allow a group to collaboratively structure and write an entire publication in three to five days, with an e-book and print-on-demand book as a result.[xvii]

The aim of these processes would seem to be the production of assemblies: of assemblies of subjects occasioned by the (digital) object. Marx observed that ‘[p]roduction … produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production thus creates the consumer’.[xviii] What it also produces is the producer, and now the prosumer. In today’s publishing we see a proliferation of a new kind of ‘book club’: small-scale publishing outfits that are as much about the creation of groups and networks as they are about the book as object. For such book clubs, the book-in- progress functions as an actor impacting the people producing it, who have set up the whole process in response to the exigencies and antinomies of contemporary cultural and intellectual practice and who are in turn affected by the agency of the thing they bring forth.[xix] Badlands is clearly part of this tendency. And Badlands is in turn part of a wider book club, or book network, that includes other works and activities by Chan.

One could imagine a constellation of adjacent spaces: an exhibition space with Volumes, and a Badlands book- store, which also hosts events such as talks and book launches. Or perhaps a Badlands Lounge, in analogy to Alfredo Jaar’s Marx Lounge, first realised in 2010, which presents a wide selection of currently available Marxist books in a space with comfortable sofas. And the Badlands office might be right in the back, as a not-so-hidden abode of production. These espèces d’espaces would be comple- mentary. While Badlands is busy reconfiguring the book for the present, Volumes too transforms, dis- and refigures books, de- and recomposes; Volumes is an assembly of quizzical things full of theological whims, inviting you to include yourself in the constellation.

2. Reading Out Loud

Another type of textual performance is the public reading of texts, in the form of lectures or audiobooks.[xx] As the written word is mutating, it spawns a new oral culture—but one that continues to be informed by writing, rather than being its abstract negation. Paul Chan’s 2006 online archive My Own Private Alexandria partakes of this new orality. The piece is a collection of MP3 files in which Chan reads out loud from some of his favourite critical, theoretical, and literary writings. The project was triggered by the death of Susan Sontag, but also—rather more obliquely—by the Iraq War. As Chan put it:

I’m so tired of this war and numb from the fear of the slightest sound and shadow. I just want to leave. Escape. So I read. It helps to think about the history of philistinism and the uses of silence and how color is sex but it’s not enough. So I start to record myself reading. And I realize how little I know the reading I’m reading. It gets better. I can’t pronounce German, French, Russian, Chinese, Brazilian, Latin, not even English sometimes. I don’t care. A task is what I want: to measure the time spent escaping into words that string together sentences that become essays about potatoes and trousers and aesthetic revolutions. I listen and they sound okay. I even like the stammers.[xxi]

My Own Private Alexandria is an online audio library for a world gone wrong. If the original Library of Alexandria did not survive the collapse of the ancient world, this small audio library is an oblique response to the global cataclysm that passes for our world order. The Library of Alexandria stands for the triumph but also the fragility of writing as a medium that stores cultural memory—an enormously productive but also dangerous pharmakon, to use Bernard Stiegler’s terminology.[xxii] The introduction of printing enabled the proliferation of libraries throughout the modern world. Now, as libraries are being digitised, our stored memories morph and mutate, and our brains are being rewired to come to terms with the new technosocial order.

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan heralded a ‘new orality’. The mechanistic and rationalistic age of print, which had privileged the sense of sight, was drawing to a close; television was inaugurating a ‘global village’ in which, in McLuhan’s  view, the more encompassing acoustic and oral culture of tribal societies returned. Just when McLuhan’s thesis on the end of print and the new orality had their greatest impact, in 1966, François Truffaut presented his film version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), in which a book-burning dictatorship spawns a resistance movement of people who preserve books by learning them by heart. The externalised memory, the printed pharmakon, is internalised. Recently, Fahrenheit has been at the basis of a project by Mette Edvardsen, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, for which the artist and/or others memorise a book of their choice and become  ‘living books’. The performances take place in libraries, and the ‘books’ can be consulted by visitors, one at a time.

In the age of the e-book and online file sharing, this project mirrors and morphs contemporary narratives about digitisation and ‘dematerialisation’ in complex ways. On the one hand, the memorising ploy is related to Bradbury’s fiction, in which books were physically destroyed even more radically than in the aforementioned ‘Google books myth’; and when books can suddenly disappear from e-readers, because it turns out that even though you bought them you do not own them, Fahrenheit has an unsettling con- temporary resonance. On the other hand, memorising books could hardly appear to be more anachronistic in an age in which we have vast repositories at our fingertips, and can be ever more reliant on search functions. As Edvardsen remarks:

To memorise a book, or more poetically ‘to learn a book by heart’, is in a way a rewriting of that book. In the process of memorising, the reader for a moment steps into the place of the writer, or rather he/she is becoming the book. Maybe the ability to learn a whole book by heart is relative to what book you choose, the time you invest, and perhaps your skills. But, however much or well you learn something by heart you have to keep practicing it otherwise you will forget it again. Perhaps by the time you reach the end you will have forgotten the beginning. Learning a book by heart is an ongoing activity and doing. There is nothing final or material to achieve, the practice of learning a book by heart is a continuous process of remembering and forgetting.[xxiii]

For a number of years, the Utrecht-based feminist art collective Read-in had been organising unannounced reading event in people’s private homes—ringing doorbells and asking if whoever opens would mind hosting a reading group for a few hours. The home as private space par excellence—a traditionally feminine space—is turned into a semi-public forum. Taking cues from Edvardsen, in 2014, Read-in organised a project that focused not just on collective reading and discussion, but also on memorisation—again referencing Bradbury explicitly.[xxiv] After spending four days with a small group at Casco in Utrecht, a public event with an expanded group started at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, with the group going from door to door and being eventually able to hold a final reading discussion in a living room.

The text that had been the subject of memorisation and discussion all week was the famous 1851 speech known as ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ by a former slave who called herself Sojourner Truth. A subject of discussion during this Read-in session were the different transcriptions of Soujourner Truth’s spoken words in various printed versions of her speech. Even though she was born in New York and her first language was Dutch, and the first published version of her speech did not seek to render any particular accent, a later version that became canonised rendered her speech as that of a stereotypical African-American from the South, by implication casting her in the role of an ‘oral primitive’: ‘Den dey talks “about dis ting in de head. What dis dey call it?” “Intellect,” whispered someone near. “Dat’s it, honey.

What’s dat go to do with women’s rights or nigger’s rights? If my cup won’t hold a pint, and yourn holds a quart, wouldn’t ye be mean not to let me have my little half- measure full?”’[xxv]

In keeping with this problematical transition from the oral to the written, this version of Read-in focused not only on reading and discussion but also on memorising (this text in particular, in its various versions). The focus on learning by heart raised many issues about the transmission of knowledge and the externalisation of memory in an age by the shift towards the digital pharmakon. Though Chan reads texts aloud in My Own Private Alexandria, the aim here is not memorisation but rather the creation of another kind of externalised, digitized memory in the form of his audio archive. Like Evardsen’s and Read-in’s projects, My Own Private Alexandria is an attempt to problematise and ultimately reinvent the book—not as static object but as pharmakon that co-produces human (inter)subjectivity.

One of the texts read by Chan is Charles Fourier’s ‘Advice to the Civilized About the Coming Social Metamorphosis’, in which the utopian socialist advises people on how to prepare for the coming age of ‘universal harmony’. His advice basically amounts to: do not stress out too much and enjoy the present, but investing in timber and precious metals might be a good idea, because there will be a building boom and mining is so gruesome that nobody will want to do it. At the latter point, Chan audibly chuckles. There are various moments throughout Alexandria when he repeats a line he flubbed, or is startled or touched by the text. ‘This is so sad,’ we hear him mutter when reading C. L. R. James’s letter to Constance Webb, in which James sets forth his heartbreakingly utopian faith in a marriage of dialectical reason and poetry, of historical philosophy and sensuous plenitude, resulting in a life liberated and transformed.

Of course, like the Google Books project (which was well underway by 2006), and like the ever-expanding online archive of audio and video recordings of lectures, My Own Private Alexandria contributes to an immense repository, not of knowledge so much as potential knowledge— information that needs to be actualised in some manner, absorbed and integrated into lived practice. Chan’s imperfect readings show a process of intellectual labour that is shaped by events that are as public as they are private. His audio files are clearly only a momentary freeze-frame of what is an activity without end. Information on its own is meaningless; it becomes knowledge by becoming enmeshed with life, by becoming part of the assembly of relations. In the case of Volumes, this meant destroying the books as books, and recomposing their constituent elements.

3. The New Scannability

In the 1940s, surveying the worlds of academia and mass culture alike, Max Horkheimer complained that thinking has been ‘made part and parcel of production’, and that language has been ‘reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society. Every sentence that is not equivalent to an operation in that apparatus appears to the layman just as meaningless as it is held to be by contemporary semanticists who imply that the purely symbolic and operational, that is, the purely senseless sentence, makes sense. Meaning is supplanted by function or effect in the world of things and events’.[xxvi]

While this passage exudes more than a whiff of German intellectual snobbery vis-à-vis pragmatic Ameri- cans, it can also be read as an uncanny prediction of the rise of forms of post-natural language that are indeed purely functional: programming languages where the proof is in the effect. More than ever, it is clear that the writer is a cyborg. Texts are co-authored with the hardware and software. The programs suggest or even determine specific ways of per- forming code; a writer uses a word processor that, with its possibilities and limitations, changes the texture of her writing.

Volumes comes with a New New Testament [fig. 2], a voluminous publication by Badlands that combines 1,005 short texts with the ‘matching’ book covers.[xxvii] The ‘testament’ consists of eight chapters, over which the texts have been divided. As Chan describes it:

Each text is the ‘inside page’ of an individual book. The number on the upper left corner indicates which book it is the inside of. Texts were written with the painted work, with what was once inside the actual book, and the rhythm and feel of the chapter, in mind. One part New Testament. One part Wittgenstein. One part corrupted files.[xxviii]

The Bible, of course, was the first major book to roll off the printing press in the fifteenth century, making the Word readily available and potentially accessible to scrutiny. Wittgenstein is modern rationality in its morbidly self- critical stage, and file corruption takes us from the Word of God via the words of rational thinking into a different kind of writing, of coding. This is not writing as we knew it. Chan’s ludicrously grand book title itself suggests some kind of software malfunction, a stuttering, a dumb and faulty repetition (as I am writing this, Word’s spell checker draws a squiggly red line under the second ‘new’). A new New Testament for a digital age that was announced in periodicals such as Wired with such crypto-religious zeal?

Chan’s entry for How to Cook Like a Jewish Mother reads:

Every picture .*´¨`*.in whatever form.*´¨`*.relates t0 reality in 0rder t0 stage it as a pr0p0siti0nal {

form.

The text clearly relates to other quasi-Wittgensteinian entries from the same chapter, such as:

A picture = a fact ins0far as a fact = a form 0f reality

A t0tality 0f pr0p0siti0ns = a picture 0f the w0rld.

Other sections take the ‘file corruption’ much further. With surprise appearances by post-Gutenbergian  sages such as Jennifer Aniston, Olivia Newton-John, and the cast of Les Misérables, the entries constitute a corpus of cryptic or cryptographic notes on knowledge, art, work, and wedding feasts.

The poet Kenneth Goldsmith has stressed the fact that in today’s techno-culture, not only texts but also images and sounds are actually code: ‘All this binary information— music, video, photographs—is comprised of language, miles and miles of alphanumerical code’.[xxix] Alexander Galloway complicates this by arguing that while code can indeed be seen as a kind of language that is executable, and therefore akin to a performative speech act, we have to acknowledge that software is both linguistic and machinic, and the latter has to come into play when we analyse it. ‘Riven to the core, software is split between language and machine, even if the machinic is primary’.[xxx] The dichotomy manifests itself in that between human-readable ‘source code’ and the underlying ‘machine code’. It is on the former that Goldsmith focuses, arguing that these texts are more compatible with forms of avant-garde literature that are equally illegible, that scramble the structure of the poem, or the novel, and ultimately of language itself. Modernists like Gertrude Stein can serve as guides in the ‘new illegibility’, helping one parse the code.[xxxi]

Paul Chan has produced a number of font pieces, such as Alternumerics and Sade for Font’s Sake, based on algorithms that transform the letters and other characters of any given text into a textual and/or graphic fragment, whose words and phrases are often taken from the works of authors such as Fourier or the Marquis de Sade.[xxxii] We do not directly ‘see’ either source or machine code, but the operative algorithmic logic becomes oddly manifest. With the CD Sade for Font’s Sake (2009), with which one can install ‘Oh fonts’ such as Oh Monica and Oh Bishop X, the act of typing becomes a ‘generative Sadean performance’.[xxxiii] With the book Phaedrus Pron (2010), we have the abject object resulting from such a font performance, the text of Plato’s ‘Phaedrus’ having been transformed into broken prose in different degrees and modes of obscenity: ‘SOCRATES: baby it’s so nice, just the tip, shit—fuck me, please you like nice, please please won’t hurt please nice is good please it’s nice please you like nice’.[xxxiv] The book also exists as an ‘enhanced’ e-book with illustrations, which emphasises the status of the paper book as material residue.

Like the font pieces, the New New Testament is an intervention in a post-Gutenberg culture. While Goldsmith looks to modernist and avant-garde literature for strategies of not reading, here both reading and not reading blur into forms of scanning.[xxxv] The world becomes not so much legible as scannable. We scan text that that is merely the surface effect of underlying operations, and that does not neces- sarily require ‘readers’ in the traditional sense; conversely, we are ourselves being scanned by software. A newspaper reports that one Viennese art collector lets a market-savvy algorithm guide or at least inform his decisions, and that work by Chan is among his assets.[xxxvi] Meanwhile, our data and metadata are collected by corporations and government agencies (and companies hired by government agencies) without any real limits. The NSA and its ilk engage in unreading, distant reading, looking for patterns, scanning for suspicious terms. Shop at your peril: a woman searching for a pressure cooker online found the police on her door- step.[xxxvii] Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s acquisition of the Washington Post has increased concern over newspapers becoming data aggregators that sell not so much news to readers, but user data to potentially anybody. ‘Customers who bought this item also bought’. We are beyond interpretation.[xxxviii]

In this situation, Chan’s fonts and the New New Testament readjust the relation between ‘natural’ language and the programming language in which algorithms are defined and performed. These projects intermix layers that are often carefully kept apart. They do not simply constitute a critique of the ‘hidden’ layers of our illegible world and the fetishistic disconnect between the shiny surface of a website and the surveillance it can be used for, but also an attempt to de- and recompose this problematic reality. The ‘alter- numeric’ font The Future Must Be Sweet—after Charles Fourier creates a pliable semiosphere in which signs take on strange forms and behave aberrantly, leading to mutable and fragile assemblages. Fourier based his social vision on the human passions (which he dutifully categorised) and on the laws of passionate attraction. The future society should be organised in keeping with these laws; people should cohabitate and cooperate in such manners that (for instance) the ‘Butterfly passion’, which craves change and contrast, does not wither. Turning Fourier’s emphasis on desire and flexibility into a graphic system that is far from transparent, Chan’s Fourier font forges ‘[d]ifferent rela- tionships between the letters (and words)’ on the basis of ‘simple changes in point size, page width, leading and kerning’.[xxxix]

Sade and Fourier, mainstays in Chan’s oeuvre, had already been lumped together by Roland Barthes in the title of one of his books—where they had the company ofIgnatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. In Sade, Fourier, Loyola Barthes claims that what unites these three disparate writers is that they are founders of languages, ‘traversed by (or traversing) natural language,’ and that these languages present ‘instant, not consistent, rela- tionships: center, weight, meaning are dismissed’.[xl]Chan reinvents these unnatural languages for the age of programming, with his Fourier font being the most topological and unpredictable.  By contrast, the Sade for Font’s Sake fonts produce a repetitive, dulling grind of moans and exclamations.  This is truly unreadable text; Chan’s Phaedrus Pron is a piece of literature that is even less suitable for reading than Andy Warhol’s A Novel (1968).

Sade For Font’s Sake is part of the Sade for Sade’s Sake project, which includes an animation in which the black outlines of copulating bodies are partly overlaid with squares and rectangles. As Chan wrote, in the context of the revelations about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison:

Pleasure has its own reason and freedom its own law. Call it Sade’s law. And to follow Sade’s law to the letter is to pledge allegiance to an imaginary power asrigid, cruel, and paradoxical as the one he was fighting against. The irony of this is on full view today. Since 2001, the US has waged a campaign to spread freedom and democracy around the world. But ironically, the more this freedom spreads, the more rigid, cruel, and sexually inhuman the campaign becomes. Still. If the letter of Sade’s law is an endless echoing of freedom as the ratio between sex and reason, then maybe the potential of Sade today lies not in the letter of his law, but in his spirit.[xli]

What, then, is the ‘spirit’ of Sade—that Barthesian creator of an autonomous language in which nothing ever happens, because what happens will happen over and over again, endlessly, in a mechanical choreography of lust?

For Chan abstraction contains the spirit of Sade. On the pair, he writes that:

Abstraction, as the power to create from empirical reality an essential composition outside the laws of what constitutes the real, has always been the emblem of a kind of freedom. If abstract art has any insight left beyond merely being an apologia for interior design, then it must find a new necessity to produce images and objects that follows laws unto themselves.[xlii]

This is where Sade and Malevich meet: they both abstract from the world of things as ossified objects in order to create new relations, different assemblages. To be sure, the idealist-esoteric and intensely anti-materialist rhetoric of some early abstract artists can create the impression that they were merely interested in transcending and fleeing the material world. However, what they proposed was not flight but makeover, a transformation of the world. The realization of this grand vision being blocked, it was encapsulated in theoretical writings on the one hand, and in concrete objects—paintings by Malevich, by Mondrian—on the other.

Such autonomous image-objects again recall Tuazon’s remarks. Moments of concretion are of vital importance in Chan’s work, for without such moments we would only have abstract flows; an assembly of relations needs concretion as well as abstraction, resistance as well as performance. For Chan as a reader (or non-reader) of Sade, sex is one great force of abstraction: ‘Sex abstracts us from ourselves’.[xliii] If this is so, then the New New Testament is pure sex. It is written in a language that does not yet exist. It abstracts some snippets from disassembled, remade books and puts those snippets in a blender, destroying the books twice over. It abstracts us from ourselves, but in so doing does not relegate us to some sphere of pure thought, of disembodied ideas—or to one of Sade’s isolated castles.

On the contrary, this is a concrete abstraction that puts us right in the middle of things. And these ‘things’ are in fact highly questionable assemblages—fixed and gridlocked in many ways. In a situation in which we are constantly in the process of becoming an open book, a book that may be unreadable but perfectly scannable, some of Chan’s art is at least as political as his politics. In Chan’s words, ‘The rhythm that drives the Sade fonts is now transfigured in the Volumes text into semantic-pictorial compositions, and I think they compress what we want and what we can’t stand about words in particular and language in general in the digital age as ruthlessly and beautifully as I could’.[xliv] Language as rhythm; lived, inhabited language. Language that is more than information. Language that is lived and raises the question asked by the title of a posthumous book by Barthes: How to Live Together?

Jürgen Habermas has famously presented a rather rosy picture of the early bourgeois public sphere as an arena of rational discourse and debate, which constituted a raisonnierendes Publikum. Media concentration and the rise of mass culture put an end to this. It is a fallacy that reason will conquer through its own inherent superiority. That most reasonable of newspapers, the New York Times, helped pave the way for the invasion of Iraq. If abstracted into a Habermasian public sphere, ‘reason’ is all too compatible with what is socially reasonable; with an objectified pragmatic and purposive rationality. Isolated readers are ultimately consumers first and foremost.[xlv] What matters now is to reassemble relations, to forge new affective as well as intellectual bonds, to construct new forms of concrete abstraction, to compose forms and structures in which it is possible to survive—and even live.

4. Authorship and Dialogue

In this text, I have been positing an author named Paul Chan, and quoting some of his illuminating remarks, although it is clear that the form of authorship we are dealing with is fractured and multiple—and involves various forms of collaboration and collectivity. This is true even in the case of Volumes. In addition to assistants working on the piece, the very act of appropriation is also collaborative in nature. There is an opaque logic to Chan’s selection, he cannot have selected only the expected; books must havesurprised him, thus developing a more active agency and becoming collaborators of sorts; quasi-objects. Chan’s practice also foregrounds readership both as a problema- tisation of auctorial control and as a form of authorship in its own right. The reader as the re-birth of the author. In the digital age, these positions become more fluid than Barthes could ever have envisaged.

The tendency in a lot of art writing—including, at times, my own—is to slyly reverse the Barthesian and Foucauldian deconstructions of the author as authority by presenting ‘advanced’ artistic practice as intrinsically critical, thus by implication turning the artist into the Critical Subject par excellence. Grant Kester has argued that this development is related to the emergence of institutional critique and its reception in art criticism and art history, particularly in the journal October:

It [institutional critique] replaced the idea of a formal art medium (as the resistant field against which the artist works within the technical apparatus of painting, sculpture, and so forth) with the idea of an ideological medium defined by a set of rules that constrain and predetermine the consciousness of individual viewers without their knowledge. … The artist stands at a critical remove, safely protected from the forms of compromise and complicity that would result from any more direct engagement with mechanisms of social change or resistance. And the autonomy of art is preserved because the artist only ever addresses the social world second hand, through a critique of the (underlying, implicitly hidden) mechanisms of ideological control. Moreover, these interventions were staged within art world institutions and for art world audiences.[xlvi]

Kester presents a caricature that, like all good caricatures, contains more than a grain of truth. However, he lapses into positioning the ‘social world’ as an outside, beyond the institution; in this manner, he reverts to a rather romantic, Kaprowian notion of social reality as being anywhere but in art.

Of course, Kester’s critical stance mirrors artistic practices that have increasingly sought to interact with other kinds of audiences. He is a great advocate of such forms of ‘dialogical art practice’, in which ‘production and reception co-occur, and reception itself is refashioned as a mode of production. As a result, the moment of reception is not hidden or unavailable to the artist, or the critic’.[xlvii] It is obviously true that ‘social’ art projects create a different kind of reception and require different critical tools. However, one must be very careful not to fetishise some responses as more authentic than others, and not to fall into the trap of practising a crude, pre-critical type of ethnology. It is possible to participate in a work in different ways, and one form of participation is critical reflection—which will hopefully try to take other subjectivities into account.[xlviii]

Kester ultimately posits an unsatisfying dichotomy between ‘social’ and ‘other’ artworks. A practice such as Paul Chan’s—or the set of practices in which he is involved—problematises precisely this dichotomy. Perhaps the work by Chan closest to Kester’s social or ‘dialogical’ approach is his staging of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in flood-ravaged New Orleans in 2007—another kind of ‘book work’. However, this piece can also be read as an almost reactionary, modernist project: the Artist decides that the thing to do in this state of exception is to stage a Great Play that, set in a stripped-down wasteland, will really speak to the dispossessed! The situation was of course much more complex, involving many intermediaries and parties (Creative Time, Classical Theater of Harlem, different local groups and individuals), but it cannot be denied that the piece refused to behave like well-behaved community art or dialogical art practice. It was dialogical—and an extensive study of the piece would have to trace its reception among different groups and individuals that were involved with or affected by it—but the terms for the dialogue were largely set by Chan. An alien element was introduced into the ravaged communities.[xlix] That the piece did not gloss over antinomies is part of its quality; it sabotages any neat distinction between a monological ‘art as critical device’ approach and polyvocal ‘art as dialogue’.

In general, the book and more generally print technology and digital technology problematise the very distinction between monologue and dialogue. On the one hand, the printed book in particular may seem to be a monological form par excellence, but was it not always a conversational gambit—as much as the modernist artwork was? The conversation has become more varied and perhaps more fragmented, but above all it has sped up, it has become a real-time exchange. The modernist understanding of intellectual and artistic production was condensed in the image of the book or the artwork as a message in a bottle that may take a long time to reach its unknown destination, but that will (perhaps) be picked up from some beach somewhere, sometime.[l]There is desperation in this, but also an appreciation of openness and unpredictability—and an awareness that the best dialogues may not be embedded in socially valorised projects.

In 2011, Chan released a series of e-books based on unique hand-made books, entitled Wht is [fig. 3]. Existing between the analogue and the digital, and overlaying texts and images, they also strongly suggest that while all cultural production now involves writing (as coding), this does not result in the realisation of the romantic dream of reestablishing a prerational unity of all the senses; rather, it results in a smooth discontinuum, in a permanent state of transition. The series includes Wht is a Book (2011), which contains many enlarged quotations about Gutenberg and the early book trade but which, obviously, does not answer the question.[li] As an e-book that can be downloaded for $1.99, Wht is a book can thus also escape from the book club and act like an old-fashioned book, with unknown and possible greatly delayed effects: it can become a message in a bottle. As node in rapidly evolving networks of publishing, writing, distribution, reading, repurposing, de- and rematerialisation, the book emerges as an exemplary aesthetic and political object whose theological and atheological whims are brought into focus by Chan’s practice.

This text is a significantly extended and reworked version of my text in New New Testament, ‘Paul Chan’s Book Club’ (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2014), 1017–1032.

Figures

Paul Chan, Volumes, 2012. Oil on fabric, paper and cardboard. Dimensions variable. Installation  view, Paul Chan-Selected Works, Schaulager, Basel, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photograph: Tom Bisig, Basel.

Paul Chan, New New Testament, 2014. Image courtesy Sven Lütticken.

Paul Chan, Wht is series, 2011–. Image courtesy Sven Lütticken.

Notes

[i] Paul Chan, ‘My Own Private Alexandria’, available at http://nationalphilistine.com/alexandria until April 2014. A few days before the opening of his exhibition at the Schaulager in Basel, Paul Chan deleted this entire website. However, a cache of the My Own Private Alexandria page can be accessed via the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20090105092548/http://ww2059645684w.nationalphilistine.com/alexandria/

[ii] Amazon.com customer review by ‘Charly’, accessed 18 June 2013, http://www.amazon.com/Fahrenheit-451-Novel-Ray-Bradbury/ product-reviews/1451673264/ref=cm_cr_pr_top_link_2?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&pageNumber=2&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending. As if anticipating  this comment, Chan actually burned a couple of Kindles, noting that the required temperature is lower than for paper books. A GIF of the Kindle burning is available online at: Sarah Hromack, ‘A Thing Remade: A Conversation with Paul Chan’, Rhizome, accessed 18 June 2013, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/aug/25/a-thing-remade-conversation-paul-chan/.

[iii] David Joselit, ‘Painting Beside Itself ’, October 130 (Fall 2009): 128.

[iv] Hito Steyerl, ‘Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?’, e-flux journal

49 (November 2013), accessed 31 July 2014, http://www.e-flux. com/journal/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/

[v] See, for instance, Chan’s discussion with Martha Rosler in Between Artists: Paul Chan/Martha Rosler (New York: A.R.T. Press, 2006).

[vi] For Heine, see his remarks on Dr. Faustus in the first book of Die romantische Schule (1835), Projekt Gutenberg, accessed 18 June 2013, http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/367/3; for Marx, the passage on gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press in the Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63 (‘Division of Labour and Mechanical Workshop: Tool and Machinery’), Marxists Internet Archive, accessed 18 June 2013, http://www.marxists.org/archive/ The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991 [1983]), esp. 37–46; and Régis Debray, ‘Socialism: A Life-Cycle’, New Left Review 46 (July–August 2007): 5–28.

[vii] Edward Nawotka, ‘Have the Ethics of Book Scanning Changed?’, Publishing Perspectives, accessed 18 June 2013, http://publishingperspectives.com/2012/07/have-the-ethics-of-book- scanning-changed. I use this quote here as a symptomatic articulation of the fears aroused by the Google scanning project. As with most anecdotes that begin with ‘apparently’, it does not bear close scrutiny. As ‘Tony Hursh’ comments underneath this article: ‘Do you really believe that major libraries (e.g., Harvard, Stanford, the New York Public Library) would allow Google to destroy their collections?’

[viii] Nadiah Fellah, ‘How Paul Chan is Destroying Books’, New American Paintings, accessed 18 June 2013, http://newamericanpaintings. wordpress.com/2013/02/20/how-paul-chan-is-destroying-books.

[ix] Oscar Tuazon, Making Books (Paris: Paraguay Press, 2009), 10. This booklet was the first instalment of castillo/corrales’s  series The Social Life of the Book.

[x] The site is at www.fultonryder.com. In my review of Richard Prince’s American Prayer at the Bibliothèque Nationale in 2011, I gave a completely different name instead of Fulton Ryder; one of the inexplicable short-circuits that from time to time strike the stressed- out reviewer. See my ‘Raiding the Library: On Richard Prince at the Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris’, Texte Zur Kunst 83 (September 2011): 237–241.

[xi] Debray, 5.

[xii] See chapter 21 of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1966 [1964]), 182–93, as well as Marshall McLuhan et al., Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations (New York: Something Else Press, 1967). More realistically, one can note that the book and the newspaper entered into a complex dialectic, in which the novel was transformed by the laws of the feuilleton, with its need for regular cliff hangers.

[xiii] Issue 4 was the poster issue, with contributions by Chan and several others. An archive of material is available at Occupied Wall Street Journal, accessed 31 July 2014, http://occupiedmedia.us/download-the-paper.

[xiv] Quoted in Alex Farquharson, ‘Get Together’, Frieze 149 (September 2012), accessed 18 June 2013, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/get-together.

[xv] Writing about digital technology, Hans Dieter Huber and Boris Groys have emphasised that code is nothing unless it is actualised or embodied—performed in some manner: ‘Unlike traditional image media such as paintings or drawings,’ Huber argues, ‘digital works exist in two completely different forms—the state of notation and the state of performance.’ Groys makes similar claims, but both authors’ conceptions are overly binary: in their theories, the digital file that is being performed seems to come out of nowhere; the focus is on consumption as an act of performance, but the production of the file remains opaque. The file comes to take on divine qualities, becoming pure transcendence. Furthermore, the performative aspect of non-digital media and their use is underestimated in both accounts. As in Chan’s case, however, one might argue that these performative aspects come into sharper focus through digitisation. See Hans Dieter Huber, ‘The Embodiment of Code’ (2005), accessed 18 June 2013, www.hgb-leipzig.de/artnine/huber/writings/embodiment.pdf. See also Boris Groys, ‘Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction’, e-flux journal 3 (March 2009), accessed 18 June 2013, http://www.e-flux. com/journal/view/49.

[xvi] Publication Studio, http://www.publicationstudio.biz/about.

[xvii] On the Book Sprint ‘methodology’, see Book Sprint, accessed 31 July 2014, http://www.booksprints.net/about.

[xviii] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations for the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin,1993), 92 and Marxists International Archive, ‘Grundrisse – 1. Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)’, accessed 18 June 2013, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm.

[xix] There is, of course, the risk that ultimately all human and non-human participants end up as perfectly adjusted neo-objects and neo- subjects, both marked equally by the imperatives of flexibility and continual performance; just as, on the other hand, ‘autonomous books’ as objects can in fact lose all genuine autonomy because they settle into a preordained existence as art objects.

[xx] There are obviously different degrees of faithfulness to the text involved. With an audio book, one expects a faithful reading of the written text, whereas with lectures, one expects something more than that: not just a literal performance of a text, but a performance of someone’s thought process. A lecturer who just ‘reads out his paper’ is a bad speaker—even though in academic contexts, it is more or less the norm.

[xxi] NEWSgrist, ‘In Conversation with Paul Chan: His Own Private Alexandria (v.1)’, 21 April 2006, accessed 18 June 2013, http:// newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2006/04/in_conversation.html.

[xxii] Departing from Plato’s warnings against writing as an externalisation of memory that will produce forgetfulness among its practitioners, Stiegler has produced an elaborate theory of the pharmakon— encompassing not just media and technologies, but also social configurations that shape the mind and ‘transindividuate’ the subject. See Bernard Stiegler, ‘Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon’, Culture Machine, accessed 31 July 2014, http://culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewDownloadInterstitial/464/501.

[xxiii] Mette Edvardsen, ‘Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine’, Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, accessed 18 June 2013, http://almamalfoundation.org/jshow/?p=1166.

[xxiv] Read-in’s Regimes of Memorizing took place at SMBA and in the

Jordaan neigbourhood from Monday 20 January till Thursday 23 January 2014. Read-in consists of Hyunju Chung, Annette Krauss, Laura Pardo and Serena Lee.

[xxv] The different versions are given in a booklet published on the occasion of Read-in’s project at Casco in Utrecht and SMBA in Amsterdam, 20–23 January 2014.

[xxvi] Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London: Bloomsbury, 2013 [1947]), 13–14.

[xxvii] Paul Chan, New New Testament (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2014).

[xxviii] Paul Chan, e-mail to the author, 10 May 2013.

[xxix] Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 17.

[xxx] Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 73.

[xxxi] Goldsmith, 34–63 and ff.

[xxxii] Although there is no technical difference between the earlierAlternumerics and the Sade fonts, Chan does not apply the term ‘alternumerics’ to the latter since they are ‘aesthetically and philosophically specific to the Sade project’. See Paul Chan, ‘Alternumerics FAQ’ in Selected Writings 2000–2014, eds. George Baker and Eric Banks (Basel/New York: Laurenz Foundation/ Schaulager/Badlands Unlimited, 2014), 198.

[xxxiii] Paul Chan, Sade for Font’s Sake (National Philistine, 2009). The fonts are also online at National Philistine, accessed 31 July 2014, http://www.nationalphilistine.com.

[xxxiv] Paul Chan, Phaedrus Pron (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2010), 340. There are also other ‘pron’ texts (Keynes, Stein) available as‘pron’ versions on National Philistine, accessed 31 July 2013, http://www.nationalphilistine.com.

[xxxv] Goldsmith, 158–9. Intriguingly, in recent years Franco Moretti has argued that literary scholars should engage in ‘distant reading’ of large numbers of texts rather than in the ‘close reading’ of a few canonized masterpieces. His method effectively amounts to the scanning of a large corpus of texts in order to identify macro- patterns. See Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013). As is evident from My Own Private Alexandria, Chan has encountered Moretti’s work in New Left Review.

[xxxvi] The collector in question is Eduard Pomeranz, who cheerfully admits to buying Chan’s work mostly as a bit of art-market speculation. See Almuth Spiegler, ‘Kunstsammler: Extrem berechnend und unglaublich berührend’, Die Presse, 22 May 2012, accessed 18 June 2013, http://diepresse.com/home/kultur/kunst/760017/Sammler_Extrem-berechnend-und-unglaublich-beruehrend.

[xxxvii] See Adam Gabbatt, ‘New York Woman Visited by Police After Researching Pressure Cookers Online’, The Guardian, 1 August 2013, accessed 10 August 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2013/aug/01/new-york-police-terrorism-pressure-cooker.

[xxxviii] For an intriguing inside perspective, see the interview with algorithm designer Yvonne Hofstettet, ‘Wollen wir das Wirklich?’, die tageszeitung, 8 August 2013, accessed 31 July 2014, http://www.taz.de/1/archiv/digitaz/ artikel/?ressort=hi&dig=2013%2F08%2F10%2Fa0192&cHash=31542474ffad5332c0c81081d13f80ea.

[xxxix] ‘Alternumerics (v. 3): The Future Must Be Sweet’, http://www.nationalphilistine.com/alternumerics/future.

[xl] Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989 [1971]), 6.

[xli] Paul Chan, ‘Untitled’, The Essential and Incomplete Sade for Sade’s Sake (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2010), 103. This text is also included in Chan, 2014, 326–329.

[xlii] Chan, 2010, 103.

[xliii] Ibid.

[xliv] Paul Chan, email to the author, 15 August 2013.

[xlv] Hence the need, as Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge emphasised, to forge a counter-publicness that goes beyond ‘Enlightenment ideas and discourse’. See Negt and Kluge, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 143.

[xlvi] Grant Kester, ‘Laying Down the Device: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism’, e-flux journal 50 (December 2013), accessed 31 July 2014, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-device-laid-bare-on-some-limitations-in-current-art-criticism/.

[xlvii] Kester, 2013.

[xlviii] A successful attempt at explicitly dialogical criticism that largely takes the form of a series of interviews is Claire Bishop, ‘And That Is What Happened Here’ in Thomas Hirschhorn: Establishing a Critical Corpus, eds. Thomas Bizzarri and Thomas Hirschhorn (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2011), 6–51.

[xlix] Carrie Lambert-Beatty stresses this point in ‘Essentially Alien: Notes from Outside Paul Chan’s Godot’, Parkett 88 (2011): 76–81.

[l] The modernist image of the Flaschenpost is associated most of all with Adorno, who started using it during his American exile, despairing of not having a (German) audience. Adorno primarily used the ‘message in a bottle’ metaphor with regard to his and Horkheimer’s critical theory, but also in relation to Arnold Schoenberg and the ‘new music’. In 1960, Paul Celan used the Flaschenpost metaphor for the poem, stressing that the poem is a ‘dialogical’ form and that each poem in a bottle hopes to be washed ashore some day, however faint that hope may be. See Susanne Komfort-Hein,  ‘“Vom Ende her und auf das Ende hin”. Ilse Aichingers Ort des Poetischen jenseits einer Stunde Null’ in ‘Was wir nicht einsetzen können, ist Nüchternheit.’ Zum Werk Ilse Aichingers, eds. Britt Herrmann and Barbara Thums (Würzburg: Königshausen  & Neumann, 2001), 32.

[li] ‘wht is’, Badlands Unlimited, accessed 31 July 2014, http://badlandsunlimited.com/search/wht%20is/.