Heidegger_ Private experience as a step towards Nihilism

Direct Quote from The Essay by Hubert L Drafus – “Heidegger on the connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics” published in the book Cambridge Companion to Heidegger.

“When everything that is material and social has become completely flat and drab,  people retreat into their private experiences as the only remaining place to find significance. Heiddeger sees this move to private experience as characteristic of the modern age. Art, Religion, Sex, Education all become varieties of experience when all of our concerns have been reduced to the common denominator of experience we will have reached the age of Nihilism.”

Guignon. C (editor), 1993,  the Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge University Press.

Pg 292

Abandoned Essay – Expressionist interfaces.

Here are is some work I did for an essay, which I have put on the back burner for a while. Figured I might as well post it on my blog as evidence of work or a thought process that did not take flight.

How dysfunction can evoke emotion within digital art?

Abstract
This study firstly attempts to identify some key features within the historical movement of German Expressionism which reached it’s peak during the 1920s.
I will consider expressionism within the mediums of Painting, Theatre, Literature, Architecture, Dance and Sculpture in order to establish a rudimentary overview of this wide branching art movement.
I will start to push Expressionist Cinema into the main focus of this study by analyzing the role of editing, set design, and movement within the early silent films of Fritz Lang, F.W Murnau and G.W Pabst.
I will look at some of the philosophy that was contemporary and influential to that era of art history, notably the works of Fredrick Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger while briefly discussing some metaphysical ideas about perception, and of ways in which time defines space and location, in relation to theories of Timelessness, and nowhere.
I will illustrate some ways in which these great expressionist filmmakers where concerned with such metaphysical ideas.
I believe certain artworks are at war with their own interface because of the way they disrupt time and place, while sharing a desire to absorb empty space and dysfunction within themselves. I see this as a prominent feature of artwork from the expressionist era and also much art work from the digital era.
I will look at Lev Manovich’s Soft Cinema project, Mike Figgis’s Timecode, the Work of Raphael Lozano Hemmer, David Em and Dave McKean, while I explain how and why a new kind of expressionism is achieved when artists from a contemporary, digital culture, express soul and feeling through a decoration or exaggeration of the interfaces they employ.
I will conclude by suggesting some answers to my initial question and I will explain how the expressionist interface might be seen as a prominent feature among much Digital, or/and New Media Artworks
Key Words: Expressionism, Interface, Dysfunction, Subjectivity, Negative Space, Digital Art.

Difference and Repetition, Introduction, Deleuze

“The subject dealt with here is manifestly in the air. The signs may be noted: Heidegger’s more and more pronounced orientation towards a philosophy of ontological Difference; the structuralist project, based upon a distribution of differential characters within a space of coexistence; the contemporary novelist’s art which revolves around difference and repetition, not only in its most abstract reflections but also in its effective techniques; the discovery in a variety of fields of a power peculiar to repetition, a power which also inhabits the unconscious, language and art. All these signs may be attributed to a generalized anti-Hegelianism: difference and repetition have taken the place of the identical and the negative, of identity and contradiction. For difference implies the negative, and allows itself to lead to contradiction, only to the extent that its subordination to the identical is maintained. The primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery of all the forces that act under the representation of the identical. The modern world is one of simulacra. Man did not survive God, nor did the identity of the subject survive that of substance. All identities are only simulated, produced as an optical ‘effect’ by the more profound game of difference and repetition. We propose to think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same, and the relation of different to different independently of those forms which make them pass through the negative.”

Gilles Deleuze
Difference and Repetition
Translated by Paul Patton

Columbia University Press
New York, 1994

Pg 5 “Preface to the Original Edition”

Section from Moby Dick with some thoughts about perception and being.

Introduction

I found this section of the book interesting, so have uploaded it to my blog, What interests me; is the idea of being able to perceive two images simultaniously. It is fascinating how Herman Melville supposes that whales can have no co-ordination between their two eyes, due to the eyes being located on opposite sides of the whale’s head. What this means is that the whale must be able to see two distinct pictures at the same time (or perhaps two distinct scenes would be a better way of describing it?), as opposed to the human who perceives only one picture or scene at a time, a single scene that is rendered by two eyes working together co-operatively. Anyway he explains the idea much better than I could which is why I have uploaded this section.

It was Herman Melvile and he’s suppositions about the whale’s subjective experience, that made me start thinking about; what it would be like? being able to perceive multiple scenes at once, and  having a kind of mental duality.

I think this is an interesting subject with regards to my research into split screen cinema.I think the idea of being able to see more than one scene at a time is perhaps both a common and a sociological pre-occupation.

It is interesting to think about –  the desire to see two scenes at once; as being a fundamental ambition, motivating development of  the survallence culture that we now occupy

It is then interesting to start thinking about the desire to be in more that one place at a time, the idea of occupying two bodies, or maybe three or maybe four or maybe absolute formless ubiquity.

Supposing we as people do have a desire to acquire or to invent the power to perceive multiple scenes at the same time, some thought into the matter would suggest that a desire to  perceive multiple scenes at the same time, is in actuality the same thing as a desire to – ‘be’ in more than one place at the same time.

We have now stumbled across one of the most immediate and also perplexing and complicated concepts in all of philosophy; the phenomena of being.  What does it mean to be?  The root of ontology is just an effort to answer this simple yet infinitely perplexing question.

Yet few people would argue with the basic ascertain that a physical being (exclusive from the phenomena of imaginary/conceptual forms of being), is defined by it’s embodiment, a being in a physical sense is a being that occupies a location. Thus in order for a being to be, it must occupy some location, it must have a presence in some place at some time. It must be a thing,  it must manifest it self through what Heidegger describes as it’s ‘thinglyness’. I.e  it’s ability to define it’s itself as a distinct entity definable in separation from every other distinct entity. Thus we can perhaps shed some light on the question – What does it mean to be?  To be, is to embody a specific entity, in a specific location at a specific time.

Lets come back then to the topic of Man and his desire to ‘be’ in more than one place at the same time.

Hopefully I have started to expose the paradox that exists in this desire, the sense of identity that makes us what we are as conscious creatures, can only ever occur in one place at one time, to be in two places at once, would automatically mean a loss of the identity, the physical oneness that is the sole characteristic of the phenomenon that defines us, the phenomena of being.

After explaining the rational impossibility of our being in more than one place at a time, it is interesting to ask why then does man have this irrational desire to be in more than one place at the same time?

Maybe it is the first step towards a greater ambition, an ambition or a desire to be everywhere at the same time, to be ubiquitous.

But what does it mean to be ubiquitous? all dictionary definitions of the word ubiquitous define it as that which is everywhere at once.

‘Everywhere at once’ is paradoxical, the word ‘once’ denotes a oneness a singularity spread across time, yet the word ’every’ is by definition contradictory to any oneness outside of a unified collective of everyness, it might be possible to be everywhere at every time, but not possible to be everywhere at once.

Therefore, to be everywhere is really to be nowhere, actually to not be at all.

Based on this argument, it is possible to say that mans desire to be ubiquitous, to be every where at once is also a desire to be nowhere at no time, a desire to escape being, to escape physicality and embodiment.

Freud believes that we do have such a desire to escape physicality, though not exactly a desire something much deeper an instinct and he defined this as the death instinct.

Anyway this is the section from Moby Dick that made me start thinking along these lines in the beginning, all of these thoughts are relevant with regard to my research topic of split screen cinema, and also digital culture at large.

Section from Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Now from this peculiar sideways position of the whale’s eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one actually astern. In a word, the position of the whale’s eyes corresponds to that of a man’s ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears. You would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight;  and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you  from behind. In a word you would have two backs, so to speak; but at the same time also two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man – what indeed, but his eyes?

Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys, this of course must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts.

The Whale therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and one distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the word from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his windows. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale’s eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.

A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this visual matter, as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. So long as man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he can not then help mechanically seeing what ever objects are before him.

Nethertheless, any one’s experience will teach him, that though he can take in an indiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively and completely, to examine any two things – however large or however small – at once and the same instance of time; never mind if they lay side by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness, then in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be completely excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it then with the Whale? True both his eyes in themselves must simultaneously act; but in his brain so much more comprehensive, combining and subtle than man’s, that he can at the same time attentively examine two prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can then it is as marvelous a thing in him as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison.

It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whale when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to such queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all of this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them..

Pg 349 – 351

Moby Dick

Herman Melville

Everyman’s Library.

Introduction to me and my ideas at the beginning of the Course.

Was thinking about this blog and ways of approaching it, but not to sure what I want out of this, so I guess I will just start and see what happens.

I quite like the idea of being able to present things arbitrarily without having to think too critically about what I am doing, I guess I kind of work like that anyway, but the difference is that usually no one sees my work or hears my ideas unless I have spent a while considering and refining them first.

Probably best just to start blogging and not get too anxious about it, so what I would like to do with this is simply present things that I feel represent me and also to compile things that I enjoy for my own amusement.

One Blog I do visit sometimes is this one http://zombiepataphysics.blogspot.com/ it is by an artist called Brian Reffin Smith who’s work I discovered purely by chance while exploring Berlin.  He  invented a practice called Patapainting which I don’t really know how to define, but it is an offshoot of pataphysics which is the science of imaginary solutions, the exhibition I saw involved a process of layering digital images together and then painting the result and then scanning that back into the computer manipulating it more and then painting the result and scanning that and so on  backwards and forwards. The results were very interesting, actually not sure if interesting is the right word since the paintings were intentionally lifeless and vacant.

I have the press release from the exhibition actually so I will scan that, which is probably better than me trying to summarise from memory.

 

 

Actually from reading that press release again there is something in this process that is quite relevant to what I am interested in and wish to explore through my studies at Camberwell, I think there is a commentary I could articulate here about the art work in relation to the body, more specifically the art work as an extension of the body, an idea that I know has been explored by many anthropological theorists (though I can not reference any specific text right now, have to research this a little bit) and has informed the performance art/body art trend in the seventies, where efforts were made to unify the body and the art work.

One thing that I find interesting about this example of Patapainting is the sense of disengagement from the art work both in terms of the works themselves being antagonistically uninspired  (uninspiring?????) and in terms of the digital process itself not only alienating the artist from the work, but also consuming any form of entry/exit to and from the work other than via this process, it is also interesting to learn that ‘Smith became a Zombie in 1998′.

This is relevant to one idea that I find interesting and am begging to consider; which is an idea of conceptual art and also digital/dematerialised art in relation to ideas about ‘post human’ (am reading Manovich as suggested in my presentation on Thursday to get some more perspective on the idea of post human) I currently believe a good distinction of post human is in Baudrillard (another person to explore the practice of Pataphysics) and his theory of Metastasis, which is when a body is deprived of meaning, soul, and metaphor and is an organisation of excitable circuits, neurons and chromosomes.

The work by Baudrillard that has effected me most though (when I say effected what I really mean is depressed) was his book called  ‘The Conspiracy of Art’ in which he stated something to the effect that the efforts of the art world to deconstruct reality though abstraction, result rather in a decomposing of reality. And he presents the idea that contemporary art’s only function is to reference it’s own futility and it’s inability to signify anything beyond its own predetermined status as ‘art’.

I don’t agree with this but I think it is true for a lot of work, maybe even most of the work that I see.

The thing that made Brian Reffin Smith’s Patapainting exhibition stand out in my mind for so long was its honesty and it’s effective illustration of this situation described by Baudrillard.

It was my study of parody that lead to my interest in Body art, Pataphysics and Baudrillard, but I will talk more about parody later on. I have a conviction that I would like to address the feeling of vacancy that I have been attempting to contextual until now (all be it in roundabout kind of way).

I have always held the somewhat idealistic view that art is an essential part of what it means to be human, I have so far explored several ideas and theories that deny or question certain ideals and values namely those of ‘truth’, ‘humanity’ and ‘the soul’.

I think a big part of my studies over the next two years will be in philosophy and metaphysics, I know enough about these areas of investigation already to know that there are no satisfactory distinctions for any of these concepts, but I think it is important to present the contemporary ideas that I am exploring appropriately within the context of a history of deliberation, plus I find these metaphysical lines of enquiry interesting and inspiring, and it is also interesting to consider the social implications of a society that attempts to identify notions such as ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ for example in opposition to one which attempts to dismiss, subvert or deny them.

One person in particular who has inspired me a lot is Heidegger I particularly enjoy his writing on art and his work ‘The essence of art’ in which he defines the situation in which art unveils itself within the physical space that it occupies, he describes a situation invoked by art work in which the world and the earth meet. By the world he means the world of our physical immediate existence and by the earth he means the totality of everything within that world. Despite my rather crude efforts to summarise this idea it extends a lot further and the work is very perplexing I am reading it a lot and find new ways of interpreting it each time (or at least the translation of it) I think what I enjoy, is that the work is inspired and I believe it takes an inspired person to understand art, Heidegger uses logic to great effect, but the thing that makes him special is that he is able to use metaphor in the moments when logic fail. (I will type some excerpts from this work in my blog later on). After reading Baudrillard’s ‘The Conspiracy of Art’ I felt despondent and disillusioned with art and then my own creative efforts suffered a lot as well, reading Heidegger however taught me a new way to consider things and I started to look at art in a different way after that. Guess I am quite an impressionable person really. What I don’t like about Baudrillard is his cynicism, don’t think I care too much to spend a long time considering something that is so inherently cynical.

What I should probably do now is talk about my own studies and what I have been exploring until now, I hope this will give a clearer understanding of where I am at the moment and what has lead me to this point.

My undergraduate studies were focused on Ancient Parody the Carnivalesque, the ‘Body Shock’ cinematic trend (the Exorcist, Alien etc) and ‘Black Comedy’, with Freud’s ‘Jokes and their Relation to the Subconscious being a central point of reference.

What I learnt to understand from this study more than anything else were ways in which representations of the body can function as a political statement, and how our perception of the world and the articulation of ‘civilised’ society stems almost entirely from our own sense of anxiety towards our bodies, and our inability to find unison between our visceral, libidinal existence and our conscious intellectual one. This inherent conflict is (was?) what informed distinctions between High Culture and Low Culture, within a hierarchy defined by biological placement of the head and thus the mind above the body and the earth, and thus organic earthly life being held inferior to conscious elevated life.

It is obvious from Mythology and Theology that the closer to the earth you get the more despicable you become, (I guess the snake is good example here), and how through these kinds of ideals we have learnt to fear/hate our bodies.

I am oversimplify things here a bit, because I have not really discussed the significance of the fear of dying or of the sky (which until the invention of flight was a symbol of the absolute, something unfathomable and a constant source of inspiration)  it is interesting though to consider the icon of a tortured body elevated towards the sky. The crucifixion image I guess not only summarises what I have been trying describe until now, but is also interesting with regard to the history of the visual arts, and the relationship between art and the body, being as religious iconography is what first introduced art as a consumer entity (here is another big discussion, but maybe I will come back to this later on)

anyway, it was a tradition of parody that informed this icon, and it is because of parody and it’s exploration of the body as a vehicle for mobilizing political ideas that the crucifixion image became consumable as an icon to such a great extent.

I am getting a bit distracted I think, because what I want to talk about is how my considerations of parody have lead me to the subject of Digital Art.

During my undergraduate studies and the period after this, I was interested mostly in literature and also cinema, I spent a lot of time considering works by Aristophanes, Rabelais, the Marque de Sade, Jonathan Swift and then the Horror genre and the Gross Out tradition.

I somehow managed to bypass the subject of performance art which is obviously so relevant to this study of bodily representation.

It was my partner Anna Maria who introduced me to some of the principles of performance art, she was exploring body art and performance art through her own postgraduate studies, and while spending a lot of time talking with her and considering practitioners such as Carole Schneman, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy and Maria Abravomich, I started to think less about representing the body in an abstract way and how the body and art can be unified and how the process, the medium and the message can find unification in body and performance art.

This interests me a lot, but it also seems so far removed from my own practice within time based media and experimental filmmaking, but it does present a way to explore my academic interest and seems like a place where some of my existing preoccupations can meet and perhaps become resolved in some way.  So one of my central concerns at the moment are in the physical relationship between the art the artist and how the physical process of creating art brings the artist and the art appreciator into a closer proximity with nature, the physical world and our bodies and is useful in combating the anxiety that our bodies present to us.

I think generally think this anxiety towards our bodies can be expressed well in Freudian terms specifically the concept of ‘Separation Trauma’ (the shock we experience in infancy when we became aware that we are no longer unified with the mother and the womb, and become aware of our physical needs and our status of dependence on elements external from our own bodies) and the ‘Death Drive’ (an inherent desire to escape the anxiety that stems from our bodily dependence on the external world and to remove ourselves from the stresses of physical existence) I am oversimplifying things here again in my effort to summarise, but I think that what Freud really captures in his death drive theory is the desire to supersede the physical world and approach the totality of existence if terms of the absolute, to experience something not dissimilar to that which spiritualists would call Nirvana, or perhaps something similar to what Heidegger is suggesting in his way of looking at art as being a place where the world and the earth meet (an idea that can also find numeric representation through 1 and O, something that is maybe interesting with regard to digital. Did Derrida write something about this? where will I find it? I did already manage to battle my way though Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’ I found a lot of this work quite difficult to digest , but there were a few interesting ideas that I managed comprehend to some extent, maybe I will try re-reading it later).

So it does seem necessary to some extent to locate the ideas I have been discussing so far within the principles of existential philosophy and phenomenology, I am quite pleased that many of the other people on the digital arts course are interested in non-spaces and psycho geography, hopefully some of the other students can summarise some principles of existential/phenomenological thinking and help to guide me though these areas of inquiry, because I find a lot of this work a bit daunting, particularly in conjunction with everything else I am looking at.

The thing that struck me as interesting more than anything else in Sartre’s work though were his considerations of the temporal nature of consciousness, he seemed to kind of imply an inherent oneness in every phenomenon except the phenomenon of consciousness, in that everything ‘unveils’ (to borrow this term from Heidegger) itself in a way that exists equally throughout time in a state of constant oneness, a totality and a balance extending from within itself and then throughout everything else, however the phenomenon of consciousness constantly abstracts itself and our ability to locate our being within the suspended order of every other being is compromised because of the way our temporal awareness articulates itself, and past and future contradict and oppose the immediate.

That was probably a really poor attempt to describe this thinking, should read Being and Nothingness again I guess and try to understand it better, I guess I wanted to try and write something about it, just to see if I had managed to understand or retain anything from this book.

Anyway I am getting distracted again, what I wanted to say was that in existential and phenomenological philosophy there are also way of exploring the relationship between the art object and the artist and his or her body, but one thing that I need to address now, is that everything I have been speaking about so far except the ancient parody and Baudrillard, have occurred during the modernist era, interestingly enough performance art was one of the last big themes in art, before we started to become aware of being inside a post modern phase in social history.

The reason that I consider this to be significant is because as I have hopefully suggested already,  representations of the body worked well as a vehicle for political statement within a society that was founded and articulated through a hierarchy of high culture versus low culture, what has happened since then is that both of these distinctions have become consumed by mass culture, and mass culture will deny any form of subversion.

This is interesting, because Firstly; it explains a movement away from the body as a platform for artistic/political expression, and Secondly; it can perhaps explain a movement away from physical substance in general, if we consider the dematerialised art work, associated with digital and computer art. Here then, is a question that I could perhaps articulate better and maybe explore in some way.

If performance/body art was concerned with blurring the boundaries between the artist and the art work, and through doing so was able to provide insight into the way society was founded and articulated and thus create a unison between Art, Body and Society for it’s practitioners.

To what extent can digital art (which represents a movement away from a physical creative processes in favour of a virtual environment), be seen as a resignation from the body due to an inability to find a relationship between the body, the creative process and a society within a mass culture which has no clear boundaries, or physical characteristics to define it?