"Imagine Bob Heinlein wearing a box-fresh leather jacket at a smart-drinks concession, speed-reading Wired from behind a pair of dime-store mirrorshades, and you're in the right neck of the woods." Over at Los Angeles Review of Books, a very distinguished review of Paul Di Fillipo's Wikiworld by Paul Graham Raven, which is also a crow's eye view (AAAARGH I DID THE JOKE WRONG) of the SF field more generally.
Showing posts with label other. Show all posts
Showing posts with label other. Show all posts
Monday, December 2, 2013
Friday, December 21, 2012
From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière
As usual, my emphases / underlinings / paragraphs.
Democracy to come thus cannot be a community of substitutable persons. In other words, what the democracy to come can oppose to the practice of nation-states is not the action of political subjects playing the part of the anyone.
It is the commitment to an absolute other, an other that can never become the same as us, that cannot be substituted— or, we can add, an other that cannot stage his or her otherness, that cannot stage the relationship between his or her inclusion and his or her exclusion.
Democracy to come is a democracy without a demos, with no possibility for a subject to perform the kratos of the demos.
Such a democracy implies another status of the heteron: the heteron as the outside, the distant, the asymmetric, the nonsubstitutable. Derrida’s notion of hospitality implies much more than the obligation to overstep the borders of nation-states in order to deal with what he calls the “ten
plagues” of the International Order. What the hospes goes beyond is above all the border that allows reciprocity or substitutability.
In this sense, the hospes is the strict opposite of the demos. The character of the hospes opens up an irreconcilable gap between the stage of the possible or the calculable and the stage of the unconditional, the impossible, or the incalculable.
What this precludes is the aesthetic performance of the as if. The hospes erases the heterotopy of the demos as he creates a radical gap between the sphere of political compromise and the sphere of the unconditional, between the calculable of the law and the incalculable of justice.
What is dismissed by this opposition is the performance of those who play the part of the demos that they are not. When protesters say in the streets that “this is just” or “this is unjust,” their “is” is not the deployment of a determinant concept subsuming its object. It is the clash of two justices, the clash of two worlds. This is what a political dissensus or heterotopy means.
But it is the kind of justice that Derrida rules out. In his view there can only be either the normal, consensual application of the rule operating as a machine or the law of unconditional justice. This is what the “to come” means.
The ethical to come is the opposite of the aesthetic as if. It means that democracy cannot be presented, even in the dissensual figure of the demos, that is, of the subject that acts as if it were the demos.
There can be no substitution of the whole by the part, no subject performing the equivalence between sameness and otherness. The heterotopy of the demos is substituted by two forms of irreducible heterogeneity: the temporal heterogeneity of the to come and the spatial heterogeneity of the hospes.
These two forms are combined in the figure of the first-comer and the newcomer. The hospes or the newcomer is the other that cannot come to the place of the same, the other whose part cannot be played by an other.
This dissymmetry is clearly spelled out by Derrida in Rogues when he identifies the anyone that is at the heart of the democracy to come. This anyone is not the subject of a dissensus, the subject who affirms the capacity of those who have no capacity. It is the object of a concern. Derrida gives to the “first to happen by [le premier venu],” a term he borrows from Jean Paulhan, a quite significant meaning; it is, he says, “anyone, no matter who, at the permeable limit between ‘who’ and ‘what,’ the living being, the cadaver, and the ghost.”
The anyone thus becomes the exact contrary of what appeared first; it is the absolute singularity of the figure that Aristotle conjured up at the beginning of Politics, the being that is less or more than the human being—less insofar as it is the animal, the cadaver, or the ghost that is entrusted to our care (a` revoir). The other, in that sense, is whoever or whatever that requires that I answer for him, her, or it. This is what responsibility is: the commitment to an other that is entrusted to me, for whom or for which I must answer.
Democracy to come thus cannot be a community of substitutable persons. In other words, what the democracy to come can oppose to the practice of nation-states is not the action of political subjects playing the part of the anyone.
It is the commitment to an absolute other, an other that can never become the same as us, that cannot be substituted— or, we can add, an other that cannot stage his or her otherness, that cannot stage the relationship between his or her inclusion and his or her exclusion.
Democracy to come is a democracy without a demos, with no possibility for a subject to perform the kratos of the demos.
Such a democracy implies another status of the heteron: the heteron as the outside, the distant, the asymmetric, the nonsubstitutable. Derrida’s notion of hospitality implies much more than the obligation to overstep the borders of nation-states in order to deal with what he calls the “ten
plagues” of the International Order. What the hospes goes beyond is above all the border that allows reciprocity or substitutability.
In this sense, the hospes is the strict opposite of the demos. The character of the hospes opens up an irreconcilable gap between the stage of the possible or the calculable and the stage of the unconditional, the impossible, or the incalculable.
What this precludes is the aesthetic performance of the as if. The hospes erases the heterotopy of the demos as he creates a radical gap between the sphere of political compromise and the sphere of the unconditional, between the calculable of the law and the incalculable of justice.
What is dismissed by this opposition is the performance of those who play the part of the demos that they are not. When protesters say in the streets that “this is just” or “this is unjust,” their “is” is not the deployment of a determinant concept subsuming its object. It is the clash of two justices, the clash of two worlds. This is what a political dissensus or heterotopy means.
But it is the kind of justice that Derrida rules out. In his view there can only be either the normal, consensual application of the rule operating as a machine or the law of unconditional justice. This is what the “to come” means.
The ethical to come is the opposite of the aesthetic as if. It means that democracy cannot be presented, even in the dissensual figure of the demos, that is, of the subject that acts as if it were the demos.
There can be no substitution of the whole by the part, no subject performing the equivalence between sameness and otherness. The heterotopy of the demos is substituted by two forms of irreducible heterogeneity: the temporal heterogeneity of the to come and the spatial heterogeneity of the hospes.
These two forms are combined in the figure of the first-comer and the newcomer. The hospes or the newcomer is the other that cannot come to the place of the same, the other whose part cannot be played by an other.
This dissymmetry is clearly spelled out by Derrida in Rogues when he identifies the anyone that is at the heart of the democracy to come. This anyone is not the subject of a dissensus, the subject who affirms the capacity of those who have no capacity. It is the object of a concern. Derrida gives to the “first to happen by [le premier venu],” a term he borrows from Jean Paulhan, a quite significant meaning; it is, he says, “anyone, no matter who, at the permeable limit between ‘who’ and ‘what,’ the living being, the cadaver, and the ghost.”
The anyone thus becomes the exact contrary of what appeared first; it is the absolute singularity of the figure that Aristotle conjured up at the beginning of Politics, the being that is less or more than the human being—less insofar as it is the animal, the cadaver, or the ghost that is entrusted to our care (a` revoir). The other, in that sense, is whoever or whatever that requires that I answer for him, her, or it. This is what responsibility is: the commitment to an other that is entrusted to me, for whom or for which I must answer.
Monday, December 17, 2012
From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière
There are two ways of interpreting matters of consensus and dissensus, an ethical one and an aesthetic one. The ethical must be understood from the original sense of ethos. Ethos first meant abode before it meant the way of being that suits an abode. The ethical law first is the law that is predicated on a location.
An ethical relation itself can be understood in two different ways, depending on whether you consider the inner determination of the location or its relation to its outside.
[...]
But the law of the ethos can also be set up as the law of the outside. After Aristotle’s analysis of the basic human community and before his statement on the political animal in Politics, he briefly conjures up and dismisses the figure of a subject that is without polis; this is a being that is inferior or superior to man—a monster or a divinity perhaps—a being that is azux, that cannot be in relation with any being like it, which is necessary in war.
But what Aristotle briefly describes as the figure of an outsider can be turned around as the figure of the immeasurable or the unsubstitutable from which all that is measurable or substitutable, connected
according to a law of distribution, has to take its law at the risk of being cancelled by it.
As we know, such a figure has been revived over the last few decades in different forms: the law of the Other, the Thing, the sublime, and so on.
This is what I call the ethical interpretation of the matters of consensus and dissensus, the ethical interpretation of the common and its supplement.
The aesthetic dimension is another interpretation of this, an interpretation that dismisses both the inner law of distribution and the law of an immeasurable outside. The aesthetic dimension brings about a dismantling of ethical legality, that is, a dismantling of the ethical complementarity of the three terms: the rule of the common ethos, the rule of the distribution of the alternative parts, and the power of the monster that is outside of the rule.
It could also be described as the ethical distribution of the same, the different, and the Other. In opposition to that distribution, the general form of the aesthetic configuration could be described that is not the Other, the immeasurable, but rather the redistribution of the same and the different, the division of the same and the dismissal of difference.
The aesthetic configuration replays the terms of the difference in such a way as to neutralize them and to make that neutralization the staging of a conflict that is in excess of consensual distribution. Such an excess cannot be counted according to the consensual rules of distribution but nevertheless does not obey the rule of an immeasurable otherness. The difference between these two excesses is the difference between ethical heteronomy and aesthetic heterotopy.
Let me try to illustrate these statements by describing what I have called the politics of aesthetics, the aesthetics of politics, and the aesthetics of knowledge. In each of these fields it is possible to differentiate the aesthetic approach from the two forms of an ethical approach.
Let us start from what I call the politics of aesthetics, which means the way in which the aesthetic experience—as a refiguration of the forms of visibility and intelligibility of artistic practice and reception—intervenes in the distribution of the sensible. In order to understand this, let us return to my starting point, that is, to Kant’s analysis of the beautiful as the expression of a neither/nor. The object of aesthetic judgment is neither an object of knowledge nor an object of desire. In the political translation made by Schiller this neither/nor was interpreted as the dismissal of the ethical opposition between the class of those who know and the class of those who desire. This way of framing a politics of aesthetics has been contested by two forms of ethical criticism.
On the one hand, there is the sociological criticism that saw an ignorance of the social law of the ethos. Pierre Bourdieu’s work epitomizes this type of criticism, namely, arguing that the view of aesthetic judgment as a judgment independent of all interest amounts to an illusion or a mystification. The disinterested aesthetic judgment is the privilege of only those who can abstract themselves—or who believe that they can abstract themselves—from the sociological law that accords to each class of society the judgments of taste corresponding to their ethos, that is, to the manner of being and of feeling that their condition imposes upon them. Disinterested judgment of the formal beauty of the palace is in fact reserved for those who are neither the owners of the palace nor its builders. It is the judgment of the petit-bourgeois intellectual who, free from the worries of work or capital, indulges him- or herself by adopting the position of universal thought and disinterested taste. Their exception
therefore confirms the rule according to which judgments of taste are in fact incorporated social judgments that translate a socially determined ethos. Such judgments are also part of the mystification that hides the reality of social determinism and helps prevent victims of the system from
gaining access to the knowledge that could liberate them.
An ethical relation itself can be understood in two different ways, depending on whether you consider the inner determination of the location or its relation to its outside.
[...]
But the law of the ethos can also be set up as the law of the outside. After Aristotle’s analysis of the basic human community and before his statement on the political animal in Politics, he briefly conjures up and dismisses the figure of a subject that is without polis; this is a being that is inferior or superior to man—a monster or a divinity perhaps—a being that is azux, that cannot be in relation with any being like it, which is necessary in war.
But what Aristotle briefly describes as the figure of an outsider can be turned around as the figure of the immeasurable or the unsubstitutable from which all that is measurable or substitutable, connected
according to a law of distribution, has to take its law at the risk of being cancelled by it.
As we know, such a figure has been revived over the last few decades in different forms: the law of the Other, the Thing, the sublime, and so on.
This is what I call the ethical interpretation of the matters of consensus and dissensus, the ethical interpretation of the common and its supplement.
The aesthetic dimension is another interpretation of this, an interpretation that dismisses both the inner law of distribution and the law of an immeasurable outside. The aesthetic dimension brings about a dismantling of ethical legality, that is, a dismantling of the ethical complementarity of the three terms: the rule of the common ethos, the rule of the distribution of the alternative parts, and the power of the monster that is outside of the rule.
It could also be described as the ethical distribution of the same, the different, and the Other. In opposition to that distribution, the general form of the aesthetic configuration could be described that is not the Other, the immeasurable, but rather the redistribution of the same and the different, the division of the same and the dismissal of difference.
The aesthetic configuration replays the terms of the difference in such a way as to neutralize them and to make that neutralization the staging of a conflict that is in excess of consensual distribution. Such an excess cannot be counted according to the consensual rules of distribution but nevertheless does not obey the rule of an immeasurable otherness. The difference between these two excesses is the difference between ethical heteronomy and aesthetic heterotopy.
Let me try to illustrate these statements by describing what I have called the politics of aesthetics, the aesthetics of politics, and the aesthetics of knowledge. In each of these fields it is possible to differentiate the aesthetic approach from the two forms of an ethical approach.
Let us start from what I call the politics of aesthetics, which means the way in which the aesthetic experience—as a refiguration of the forms of visibility and intelligibility of artistic practice and reception—intervenes in the distribution of the sensible. In order to understand this, let us return to my starting point, that is, to Kant’s analysis of the beautiful as the expression of a neither/nor. The object of aesthetic judgment is neither an object of knowledge nor an object of desire. In the political translation made by Schiller this neither/nor was interpreted as the dismissal of the ethical opposition between the class of those who know and the class of those who desire. This way of framing a politics of aesthetics has been contested by two forms of ethical criticism.
On the one hand, there is the sociological criticism that saw an ignorance of the social law of the ethos. Pierre Bourdieu’s work epitomizes this type of criticism, namely, arguing that the view of aesthetic judgment as a judgment independent of all interest amounts to an illusion or a mystification. The disinterested aesthetic judgment is the privilege of only those who can abstract themselves—or who believe that they can abstract themselves—from the sociological law that accords to each class of society the judgments of taste corresponding to their ethos, that is, to the manner of being and of feeling that their condition imposes upon them. Disinterested judgment of the formal beauty of the palace is in fact reserved for those who are neither the owners of the palace nor its builders. It is the judgment of the petit-bourgeois intellectual who, free from the worries of work or capital, indulges him- or herself by adopting the position of universal thought and disinterested taste. Their exception
therefore confirms the rule according to which judgments of taste are in fact incorporated social judgments that translate a socially determined ethos. Such judgments are also part of the mystification that hides the reality of social determinism and helps prevent victims of the system from
gaining access to the knowledge that could liberate them.
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