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Category: looping

Ethics is the Esthetics of the Few-ture

Published February 1, 2009 by cgerrish

Laurie Anderson Tape Bow Violin

The tape bow violin was created by Laurie Anderson and Bob Bielecki. The horse hair of the violin bow is replaced with recording tape, and the bridge of the violin is replaced with a tape head. Early experiments included working with palindromes. My favorite piece is called ‘Ethics is the Esthetics of the Few-ture.’ The tape bow violin is similar to the loop in that its range of sound is limited to a short sample. The difference is it never loops, it moves backward and foward at varying speeds.

MP3 Two Songs for Tape Bow Violin

It took me a while to track down the phrase. And as you begin to roll it around in your mind, it reveals surprising depth and a few sharp corners. Its origin is either with Lenin, Gorky or Godard, but most certainly in Godard’s film Le Petit Soldat.

For Godard, yes, his life is film; “everything is cinema,” he says. Godard asserts that “it may be true that one has to choose between ethics and aesthetics, but it is no less true that whichever one chooses, one will always find the other at the end of the road. For the very definition of the human condition should be in the mise-en-scene itself.” Lenin (actually Gorky, according to Godard) is approvingly quoted by the protagonist of Godard’s second feature film, Le petit soldat (1960), as saying: “Ethics are the aesthetics of the future.” This character, photographer and right-wing government agent Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), falls in love with Veronica Dreyer (Anna Karina) just as Godard fell in love with Karina during the filming.

It’s the tangle of political thought that ties ethics and aesthetics into a gordian knot. In her performance, Anderson puts the emphasis on the “few,” and so our thoughts naturally turn to Brecht. The two phrases contained in this piece “ethics is the esthetics of the few” and “ethics is the esthetics of the future” reveal a movement from scarcity to abundance. And so, from one kind of politics to its opposite. Truth and beauty have long been aligned, here we align the Good and the Beautiful. It’s a pairing that on the surface seems natural, but at its depths can strike some dissonant chords.

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White Lily

Published January 28, 2009 by cgerrish

It seems as though we’re always on the verge of being able to think about this particular moment as it unfolds and pulls us to the next…

White Lily
Laurie Anderson

What Fassbinder film is it?
The one-armed man walks into a flower shop
And says: What flower expresses
Days go by
And they just keep going by endlessly
Pulling you Into the future
Days go by
Endlessly
Endlessly pulling you
Into the future?
And the florist says: White Lily.

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Spitting Images & Systems of Difference

Published January 19, 2009 by cgerrish

Marx Brothers Mirror Image

“I’d swear he was the same guy. He was the spitting image.” It’s a saying that speaks of two being as one, and yet being fundamentally different. An apt phrase for the messy business of representing identity. These thoughts are provisional, but have been triggered by pondering the ideas of Internet Identity and the Semantic Web. Any discussion of representation taps into a long historical dialog.

We look to the photograph to clarify, to lift the fog of ambiguity, to testify. Muybridge’s photos settled a bet by revealing the manner in which a horse truly runs. Speaking of the power of photography to capture the image, Susan Sontag said:

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a foot print or a death mask.

Visual evidence is highly convincing– we say seeing is believing. The voice can testify to the facts of the case. The written word, except for the wet ink signature, is open to many interpretations. But both seem to rely on conveying what is physically seen with the eyes.

On the Network, we try to create a tapestry of unique numerical endpoints– and we assign names to the space so that we may become conversant with it. It’s a supergluing of a signifier to the signified. It’s a kind of attachment that doesn’t happen in natural language. It’s like saying “I mean what I say, and I say what I mean.” It’s the ambiguity in language that lets the future in. A simple way to understand this is to consider a chart in Sean Hall’s book on Semiotics: This Means This, This Means That:

Signifier Signified
Apple means Temptation
Apple means Beatles
Apple means Healthy
Apple means Fruit
Apple means Computer
Apple means Gwyneth’s kid
Signifier Signified
Apple means Apple
Pomme means Apple
Apfel means Apple
Manzana means Apple

The truth value of the table? True in every case, and the size of the table is unlimited. There’s a slipperiness to language that allows a play of meaning across a field of usage.

A namespace relies on coordinates in space as opposed names and language. We claim a name in a particular space to take it out of circulation. We preserve its uniqueness with technology and the law. As we apply Occam’s Razor across the technology of the Network, we might think about where we can allow the signifier to play freely.

For instance what if your display name (not your login name or your opaque database key) on a social network didn’t have to be unique or even singular? What if it was identifiable through its relationships, connections, geography, avatar, and activity streams? Allow the messiness of the world to be  mirrored in the messiness of the Network. In the wild, Identity isn’t created through unique identifiers, but rather through the intersection of different lines of activity flows through time– the collection of differences. Or as Saussure calls them a system of difference. Laclau explores the idea a bit more:

We know, from Saussure, that language (and by extension, all signifying systems) is a system of differences, that linguistic identities, -values – are purely relational and that, as a result, the totality of language is involved in each single act of signification. Now, in that sense, it is clear that the totality is essentially required – if the differences did not constitute a system, no signification at all would be possible. The problem, however, is that the very possibility of signification is the system, and the very possibility of the system is the possibility of its limits. But if what we are talking about are the limits of a signifying system, it is clear that those limits cannot be themselves signified, but have to show themselves as the interruption or breakdown of the process of signification. Thus we are left with the paradoxical situation that what constitutes the condition of possibility of a signifying system – its limits – is also what constitutes its condition of impossibility – a blockage of the continuous expansion of the process of signification.

In the technology of language and the language of technology, we imagine a kind of systematic extensibility that can capture meaning and the play of signification in real time. But can it?

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Forgiveness and Reconciliation

Published December 22, 2008 by cgerrish

The discussion of Rick Warren’s participation in the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States has stirred up a number of thoughts. These ideas were given more focus by listening to an episode of Philosophy Bites on Derrida’s idea of forgiveness:

While Derrida says that national reconciliation is a separate matter, forgiveness itself, is worth some serious thought. In short, Derrida’s thoughts of forgiveness run as follows. A forgiveness that has no cost, is not worth much. It is forgiving the unforgivable that is the essence of the act. And also seemingly impossible to accomplish; it asks us to do the undoable.

This is a very disturbing idea because it seems to run counter to the idea of justice, or at least a rough form of justice. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – these practices can lead to an infinite negative feedback loop. For a change to occur, one side must do the impossible.

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