Jacques Ranciere: The Emancipated Spectator

 

The Emancipated Spectator

Jacques Ranciere

 

I have called this talk “The Emancipated Spectator.”* As I understand it, a title is always a challenge. It sets forth the presupposition that an expression makes sense, that there is a link between separate terms, which also means between concepts, problems, and theories that seem at first sight to bear no direct relation to one another. In a sense, this title expresses the perplexity that was mine when Marten Spangberg invited me to deliver what is supposed to be the “keynote” lecture of this academy. He told me he wanted me to introduce this collective reflection on “spectatorship” because he had been impressed by my book The Ignorant Schoolmaster [Le Maitre ignorant (1987)]. I began to wonder what connection there could be between the cause and the effect. This is an academy that brings people involved in the worlds of art, theater, and performance together to consider the issue of spectatorship today. The Ignorant Schoolmaster was a meditation on the eccentric theory and the strange destiny of Joseph Jacotot, a French professor who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, unsettled the academic world by asserting that an ignorant person could teach another ignorant person what he did not know himself, proclaiming the equality of intelligences, and calling for intellectual emancipation against the received wisdom concerning the instruction of the lower classes. His theory sank into oblivion in the middle of the nineteenth century. I thought it necessary to revive it in the 1980s in order to stir up the debate about education and its political stakes. But what use can be made, in the contemporary artistic dialogue, of a man whose artistic universe could be epitomized by names such as Demosthenes, Racine, and Poussin?

“Resisting, Subverting and Destroying the Apparatus of Surveillance and Control”: An Interview with Mike Davis

 

“Resisting, Subverting and Destroying the Apparatus of Surveillance and Control”: An Interview with Mike Davis

Mike Davis is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of, amongst others, “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles” (1990), “Dead Cities, And Other Tales” (2003) and most recently, “Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb” (2007). Following is a short excerpt from the interview he kindly gave to Voices on the 23d of February in London.

 

You often draw lines of comparison between different tendencies of urban control across the globe. Could you compare the situation in Los Angeles, the repression and surveillance happening there when you were writing City of Quartz with the situation in London today?

There is nothing comparable at all in the U.S. to the apparatus of surveillance that exists in London. Even CCTV cameras are only recently becoming an issue in the U.S. Total surveillance of down town areas of American cities is something I wrote about in the early nineties but only applied to tiny areas, a few acres in down town Los Angeles for example. If Giuliani does become president we will get closer to the idea of having total surveillance and control in the city centre but London is at least one if not two generations ahead of the United States. Having said that, the foundations in the U.S. exist: the freeways now have surveillance systems that monitor gridlock. But I find London really shocking in many ways. I had no idea for instance until I came here about the fact that subway passes are used to monitor and accumulate data. In the United States things have gone in a different direction. Obviously, in every economic transaction you have and particularly on the internet, data is being transferred or sold for marketing purposes. I think the American political system might be the most advanced in the world in this sense – using marketing data to target people and pass political messages across to them. Also, there is a much larger budget and much bigger research effort going on in the U.S. To give you an example of how this works: The Bush Administration wants guest programmes to satisfy the labour needs of crucial industries like agribusiness. Alas it has been blindsided by a revolt in the republican grassroots against democrats. One of the things they are calling for is building a wall the entire length of the Mexican border and the Congress has actually authorised part of that, although people who actually work on border control and surveillance laugh at it since these walls would be totally ineffective: 12-foot high sheets of metal that anyone could climb. They are working on something completely different: a virtual border, more like the virtual control that now exists around the city of London. They had to feed red meat to the conservatives in the suburbs who wanted a Berlin-like physical wall since only that gives them the reassurance of border control. Real control over people’s movement however does not so much require these walls as it requires the technology. This is the one sphere where I think the U.S. is more advanced in creating a society of total surveillance. Perry, the Governor of Texas, has authorised putting cameras up on areas of the border that people commonly cross and plugged them in to the internet. So it has created virtual vigilantes. Anybody who wants can waste their time looking at a desert, and if you see a Mexican coming across it you can call a number to some department of the Texas state which will alert the border control.

So the internet gets to threaten freedom because of the way in which we can all surveil, oppress and jail each other: we are all prison guards now, watching each others’ movements. This is a frightening idea and the right-wing loves it, having some role to play in the policing of immigration and society. Everyone wants to wear a badge in some sense.

Fucking Death

Katrina Pain Index – New Orleans Three Years Later

Katrina Pain Index – New Orleans Three Years Later 

By Bill Quigley

25 August, 2008
Countercurrents.org

0. Number of renters in Louisiana who have received financial assistance from the $10 billion federal post-Katrina rebuilding program Road Home Community Development Block Grant – compared to 116,708 homeowners.

0. Number of apartments currently being built to replace the 963 public housing apartments formerly occupied and now demolished at the St. Bernard Housing Development.

0. Amount of data available to evaluate performance of publicly financed privately run charter schools in New Orleans in 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 school years.

.008. Percentage of the rental homes that were supposed to be repaired and occupied by August 2008 which were actually completed and occupied – a total of 82 finished out of 10,000 projected.

1. Rank of New Orleans among U.S. cities in percentage of housing vacant or ruined.

1. Rank of New Orleans among U.S. cities in murders per capita for 2006 and 2007.

 

 

“I am lured by faraway distances, the immense void I project upon the world. A feeling of emptiness grows in me it infiltrates my body like a light and impalpable fluid. In its progress, like a dilation into infinity, I perceive the mysterious presence of the most contradictory feelings ever to inhabit a human soul. I am simultaneously happy and unhappy, exalted and depressed, overcome by both pleasure and despair in the most contradictory harmonies. I am so cheerful and yet so sad that my tears reflect at once both heaven and earth. If only for the joy of my sadness, I wish there were no death on this earth.” 

– E. M. Cioran

Elisee Reclus on the murder of animals

 

 

First printed in the HUMANE REVIEW, January, 1901.

Reprinted as pamphlet several times, most recently by CGH Services, c.1992 and Jura Media, 1996

MEN of such high standing in hygiene and biology having made a profound study of questions relating to normal food, I shall take good care not to display my incompetence by expressing an opinion as to animal and vegetable nourishment. Let the cobbler stick to his last. As I am neither chemist nor doctor, I shall not mention either azote or albumen, nor reproduce the formulas of analysts, but shall content myself simply with giving my own personal impressions, which, at all events, coincide with those of many vegetarians. I shall move within the circle of my own experiences, stopping here and there to set down some observation suggested by the petty incidents of life.

Mandala by Tom Sachs

Alain Badiou- The Uses of the word “Jew.”

 

 

For the last couple of decades, the intellectual situation in France has been marked by countless discussions about the status to be accorded to the word “Jew” within the divisions of thought.

Rimbaud “Democracy”

 

 

Democracy

 

   “The flag’s off to that filthy place, and our speech drowns the sound of

The drum.

   “In the metropolis we’ll feed the most cynical whoring.

We’ll smash all logical revolts.

   “On to the languid, scented lands!-in the service of the most gigantic

industrial or military exploitation.

   “Farewell here, anywhere. Conscripts of good intention, we’ll have

savage philosophy; knowing nothing of science,

depraved in our pleasures; to hell with the world around us…

This is the real advance. Forward… march!”

 

 

 

AR

LSD good for the terminally ill (and aren’t we all terminally ill?)

 

    First test of “psychedelic psychotherapy” since the 70’s. Researchers hope effects will improve quality of life.

    Scientists are exploring the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD to treat a range of ailments from depression to cluster headaches and obsessive compulsive disorder.

    The first clinical trial using LSD since the 1970s began in Switzerland in June. It aims to use “psychedelic psychotherapy” to help patients with terminal illnesses come to terms with their imminent mortality and so improve their quality of life.

The world sucks / it’s great to be alive.

The Delusion Revolution: We’re on the Road to Extinction and in Denial By Robert Jensen, AlterNet Posted on August 15, 2008, Printed on August 19, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/story/95126/ A version of this essay was delivered to the Interfaith Summer Institute for Justice, Peace, and Social Movements at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on Aug. 11, 2008. Audio files of the talk and discussion are available online from the Radio Ecoshock Show.   “The old future’s gone,” John Gorka sings. “We can’t get to there from here.”

Catastrophic Global Warming Provides Amazing New Design Challenges For Architects …Or… Wingnut Makes Drawings Of Floating Concentration Camps

 

   

 A Floating Ecopolis for Ecological Refugees    

 

Jun 13, 2008

It’s common knowledge that the planet is warming, ice caps are melting, and water levels are rising. The international scientific community predicts that a temperature elevation of 1°C will lead to a water rise of 1 meter, resulting in massive land loss and the displacement of millions of people world wide. Vincent Callebaut, a visionary Belgian architect, is responding to this inevitability with his proposal LILYPAD, A Floating Ecopolis for Ecological Refugees.

Coming soon: Capitalism Part 2- The Reckoning!

The Ambiguous Legacy of ‘68

Forty years ago, what was revolutionized — the world or capitalism?

Slavoj Zizek

 

In 1968 Paris, one of the best-known graffiti messages on the city’s walls was “Structures do not walk on the streets!” In other words, the massive student and workers demonstrations of ‘68 could not be explained in the terms of structuralism, as determined by the structural changes in society, as in Saussurean structuralism. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s response was that this, precisely, is what happened in ‘68: structures did descend onto the streets. The visible explosive events on the streets were, ultimately, the result of a structural imbalance.

There are good reasons for Lacan’s skeptical view. As French scholars Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello noted in 1999’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, from the ’70s onward, a new form of capitalism emerged.

Navigating Movements: an interview with Brian Massumi, Delueze scholar and expert in forms of social control

NAVIGATING MOVEMENTS 

When you walk, each step is the body’s movement against falling — each 

movement is felt in our potential for freedom as we move with the earth’s 

gravitational pull. When we navigate our way through the world, there are 

different pulls, constraints and freedoms that move us forward and propel us 

into life. But in the changing face of capitalism, media information and 

technologies — which circulate the globe in more virtual and less obvious ways 

— how do the constraints on freedom involve our affective and embodied 

dimensions of experience? That is, how do we come to feel and respond to 

life and reality itself when new virtualised forms of power mark our every 

step, when the media and political activity continually feed on our 

insecurities — for instance, when a political leader can deploy overseas troops 

to make a country feel safe and secure in the face of ‘terror’. Our beliefs and 

hopes can be galvanised for this ‘good’, and as a tool for orchestrating attacks 

on ‘evil’ and threats to national security. Against this framework of despair 

that enact our relations to the world — violence, terror and the virtual lines 

of capital flow — what are the hopes for political intervention? 

Philosopher Brian Massumi explores the hopes that lie across these fields of 

movement; the potentials for freedom, and the power relations that operate 

in the new ‘societies of control’. These are all ethical issues — about the 

reality of living, the faith and belief in the world that makes us care for our 

belonging to it. Massumi’s diverse writings and philosophical perspectives 

radicalise ideas of affect — the experiences and dimensions of living — that 

are the force of individual and political reality. His writings are concerned 

with the practice of everyday life, and the relations of experience that 

engage us in the world, and our ethical practices. He is based in Montreal. 

Movements — hope, feeling, affect

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent

Visionary Urban Planning For The Future Of Humanity

“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.” – Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe 

The cities will be part of the country; I shall live thirty miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live thirty miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car.

We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work…

enough for all.

                  -Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (1967)

 

 

Future wars ‘to be fought with mind drugs’

Future wars could see opponents attacking each other’s minds, according to a report for the US military. (?)!

Some Arthur Schopenhauer – The Architect of Gloom.

Compared to the bleakness of scientists stealing brains from rat fetuses and placing them in robots, I felt that Schopenhauer’s grim musings would be gleeful.

“There are only pessimists and liars”-Paul Virilio 

“The truth is ugly.” – Friedrich Nietzsche 

Arthur Schopenhauer

Studies in Pessimism

---

ON THE SUFFERINGS OF THE WORLD.

Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.

Baby Rat Brains Removed… Put Into Robots.

 

	A ‘Frankenrobot’ with a biological brain   Aug 13 03:25 PM US/Eastern Meet Gordon, probably the world’s first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue.Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon’s primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.    Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.

Job Stealing Robots

Which one is the robot?

 

Thank heavens somebody finally came up with an entertaining and modern replacement for those boring old priests that used to preside over these crazy, antique, performance art spectacles. You know, the ones where couples legalize their love with a contract from the state. Look at the expressiveness of the red emoter lights hovering in the midst of its shiny, black plastic, empathy displacement screen.

I wonder what other tricks it can perform? 

A High Quality David Graeber Essay

 

 

 

Beyond Power/Knowledge 

an exploration of the relation of 

power, ignorance and stupidity 

 

Professor David Graeber 

LSE 

Thursday 25 May 2006

Adolescent Sex Dolls

Here are some images of the latest models from Japanese sex doll manufacturer Honey Dolls. Warning these images are not for the easily offended, further evidence that humans are in trouble…

Youthful Kaze…so lifelike…so cute…

The Banality of Evil

What a way to start the day…the screeching of your Dalek-ian alarm clock accompanied by the smell of sizzling pig corpse, just roll over and shove that scrap of roasted flesh into your crusty morning-breath maw. It only makes sense that such an infernal and stupid device should crafted with a complete lack of artistry by some half-assed carnivore dimwits being ironic.

 

Pre-bacon existence

 

This is a really great book.       Pleasurable Kingdom | by Jonathan Balcombe

An Excerpt Also read a Sample Chapter PDF (MacMillan Science) A group of hippopotamuses rests motionless in the cool of an African freshwater spring. Schools of tiny fish have gathered round their flanks and feet, nibbling at parasites and sloughing skin. The hippos, far from passive participants, splay their toes, gape open their mouths and spread their legs to assist the fish in their cleaning services. Five thousand miles away, in a Montreal lab, an iguana ventures away from her warm perch to retrieve a gourmet tidbit from a frigid corner of her terrarium, ignoring the dull, processed reptile chow just beneath her perch. It’s a reptilian version of shunning the fruit bowl and dashing out for doughnuts on a wintry night. And in Bowling Green, Ohio, a pair of young rats utter ultrasonic squeaks as they chase a hand to be tickled. Rats accustomed to being petted also approach a hand, but not nearly so quickly, nor with as many squeaks as rats trained to expect a tickle.

Caring for our elders…the new fashioned way!

 

“Here comes a robot called uBOT-5 developed by a group of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to take care of the elderly people, in place of a human medical care giver. This robot has been designed similar to the human anatomy with the sense of vision and touch. This robot can intimate the Baby Boomers, the time for taking medicines and when to do grocery shopping.

uBOT-5 has the ability to track the movement of the elders, sense and intimate the remote medical technician if they fall down or if no movement is recognized from the old people. The robot has also been designed to converse with the elders so that they would not feel lonely.

The uBOT-5 also has the ability to recognize outsiders or parcels blocking its path. In fact, it can lift about 2.2 pounds and carry to another place, the researchers say. The uBOT-5 carries a Web cam, a microphone, and a touch-sensitive LCD display so that it acts as interface for communicating with the outside world.”

 

“Boy, how awesome is it going to be when I am being touched, watched, and reminded to take drugs by this charmer!”

“Who needs people when you have this adorable automaton for interfacing with the outside world.”

“I can’t wait until I am old and can no longer take care of myself so I can have a 24/7 surveillance drone buzzing around my domicile keeping an eye on me so nothing unexpected (death?) disrupts my expensive prescription drug regiment…”

 

“what could possibly go wrong?”

 

 

From the nation that has brought us the butter pen, umbrella tube, and eye-drop funnels comes a lovely old person washing machine, just throw your dirty and troublesome wrinkle-bag in this gizmo, set the appropriate wash cycle and hit the start button, in just a jiffy you have one sparkling clean elder. The future looks bright and clean for these technophile old farts.

 

The folks around here are eagerly looking forward to a future with absolutely no human contact. Here is an image of woman sexually interfacing with a lover (client?) using communications technology and remotely  controlled, robotic, sex-machines… With those flexible lighting solutions and the variety of camera angles provided by the documentary film crew, it is just like being there and operating the machines in person… now that is hot.

Jane Jetson eroticized… a womp bomma a lu mop, balomp bam boom!